Original scientific paper

https://doi.org/10.15378/1848-9540.2014.37.01

We Need to Change. Ideas of Growth and Development in a Time of Crisis of Fossil Energy and Capitalism

Mladen Domazet orcid.org/0000-0002-9870-9485 ; Grupa 22, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Danijela Dolenec orcid.org/0000-0001-5974-3499 ; Grupa 22, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Vladimir Cvijanović orcid.org/0000-0003-4600-3103 ; Grupa 22, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Tomislav Tomašević orcid.org/0000-0003-0409-4174 ; Grupa 22, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Jeremy F. Walton ; Sveučilište Georg August, Gottingen, Njemačka
Karin Doolan orcid.org/0000-0002-6478-062X ; Grupa 22, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Mislav Žitko ; Odsjek za filozofiju, Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to lay the groundwork, and provoke others to dig it up, for the holistic
understanding of the economic hopes and geophysical drivers behind the themes of green economy and
degrowth. It first fights for the voice in which to frame the warning of global civilizational collapse, its
physical and historic drivers and experiential instantiations. The paper surveys the opinions of scholars
from environmental science, biology, history, leftist social theory and economics addressing the notion
that the global civilisation as we know it is facing a collapse of human societies and practices sustaining
it1. Whilst there are historical narratives that evoke hope for a technological overcoming of this
problem, in the text I endeavour to show how such a gamble is based on ontological confusion about the
fundamental elements of the modern developmental success. The paper elucidates how the key collapse-mitigating
model is not a matter of small life-style changes reliant on technological transcence of physical
constraints, but a matter of serious social restructuring that would replace the missing technological
fix. But for that to become democratically acceptable, the societies must renegotiate the indicators and
definitions of what wellbeing consists in, whilst humanity must redefine what its endurance is to consist
of, not hope for the miracle of green economy.

Keywords

development; political economy; climate change; nature; civilisation; capitalism

Hrčak ID:

130664

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/130664

Publication date:

15.12.2014.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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