Degrowth, American Style: No Impact Man and Bourgeois Primitivism

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Notes

¹See http://events.it-sudparis.eu/degrowthconference/en/ for the conference proceedings including the declaration.

²Dirs. Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein. Perfs. Colin Beavan and Michelle Conlin. Shadowbox Films, 2009 noimpactman.typepad.com.

³The term was first used by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (Schmidheiny 1992) as a term to describe the green transformation of capitalist production in which the increased production of consumer goods could occur without increasing waste and pollution. Two books. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (McDonough and Braungart 2002) and Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution (Hawken, et al. 2000) took up the (magical and convenient) concepts of eco-efficient and eco-effective to develop an argument for sustainable capitalism.

⁴No Impact Man is on the vanguard of a largely urban environmental movement slowly redefining the contours of bourgeois environmental identity. Another example would be Justin Ladda, for example, who The New York Times profiled in January 2010. (Green 2010). Ladda eschews heat in winter in his Lower East Side loft because “Proper temperature control, you see, would require insulating his wooden ceiling, and ruining its fine acoustics.”

⁵ http://www.degrowth.org/Barcelona-2010-Declaration.119.0.html.

⁶Pierre Bourdieu (1984) is useful here as a guide to explain how expressions of taste and distinction serve to reinforce class divisions.

⁷Carbon markets would be an example of the opening of new green markets which first require new forms of privatization, in this case the privatization of the global carbon sink. Hybrid cars would be an example of a parallel green product line.