by Mike Duff
We are now the La Bruguera Degrowth Living Lab! Here’s a little context and history, to explain what this means. Since we met, Michelle and I have been interested in (nay, concerned about) our impact on the planet, from my starting a career in urban sustainability in 2001, us doing an eco-renovation of our first house together in London’s East End in 2007-09, my doing a masters’ in sustainability in 2009, and then the project that occupies our everything now, La Bruguera de Púbol. In the last few years, we’ve both done Permaculture Design Certificate courses (as have a number of our staff and volunteer family), and begun practising and teaching many aspects of the Permaculture regenerative design system here at LaB. We’ve also had more time than usual to read, what with lockdowns and the pandemic.
Degrowth was a concept that floated into our house in mid 2019. Degrowth, the book by Giorgos Kallis followed it in a few months later, and I confess (🚨 nerd alert!) it was “unputdownable” for me. We got in touch with Giorgos, out of interest to see what we could do together, he and his family stayed here during Covid lockdown for a bit, and one thing led to another! We were invited to join the Research & Degrowth Association, as a “Living Lab”, and have since joined a few other member labs in developing the Living Labs remit and programme.
We’ll tell you more here:
What is Degrowth?
Degrowth is a critique of the predominant neoliberal capitalist system, which pursues and prioritises economic growth over human happiness and environmental health. This is a system that has led to unfair exploitation of large numbers of people to generate wealth for a few, and has wrought unrivalled carnage on our planet in only 150 years, with no method in place to redress this imbalance. Degrowth asks us to slow down, and re-organise ourselves into a system where we put social and ecological well-being ahead of profits. You can read more about it here: https://degrowth.info/degrowth
Why is this any different than other analytical frameworks about the current planetary crisis and mass extinction?
“Sustainability”, actually coined like half a century ago, starts from a human-centric position of trying to act in such a way, that we do not prejudice the ability of future generations to live on planet Earth with similar quality of life to that which current generations enjoy.
“Regeneration”, a more recent buzz-word and concept, starts from a planet-centric position, suggesting that we behave in a way that our actions produce planet-improving impacts, and assumes that future human generations will benefit from this (but this is not the end goal).
“Green growth” is the idea that the financing and fostering of fast-growing industries such as renewable energy (solar, wind, biomass, hydro) or zero emissions vehicles (electric, hydrogen), or natural-fibre clothing could mean our societies continue to be highly-shaped by neo-liberal globalised economics and big companies, but are somehow “greened” by dint of the products and services being exchanged being “green”.
There are issues with all of these systems – no strategy is perfect – and while Sustainability and Regeneration are bandied around by many companies who have no business using them, “green growth” is probably the most dangerous and insidious one. Kallis and the rest of the Degrowth economics academics and activists have published potent analysis on the ecological and material limits to resource extraction, and mapped this against the resource requirements of the kind of growth required by advocates of green growth to achieve global-scale replacement of “dirty” industries by their “green” equivalents. Put shortly, there simply isn’t enough resource, and no way to get at it in a clean way, for the green transformation of our planet’s industries to be complete without going waaaaaay past 1.5 degrees celsius of global warming, and crossing into planetary destruction.
But degrowthers aren’t the only ones talking about this, to be frank, you can even read that “we can be green, or we can have growth, but we can’t have both”, in the Financial Times. They’ll explain it better than I can too!
What is a Living Lab?
Here is how we recently defined it at the first R&D Association Assembly of 2022:
Degrowth Living Labs are places where degrowth experiments and practice take place. Research, in its practical form, can also take place, in a Living Lab
- a “lab”, a laboratory, is about experimentation and studied or assessed practice,
- by “living”, we mean that it relates to real life experimentation, we are not in the virtual or theoretical world, we do not restrict ourselves to the set-up of hypotheses
- by “degrowth” we limit ourselves to dealing with the specificity of this idea, especially the blind corners that are not dealt with in other disciplines.
What does this mean for La Bruguera?
A variety of things!
Master’s Project Supervision
Supervision of end-of-year projects for students of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona’s Master’s in Political Ecology, Degrowth and Environmental Justice. The R&D association is linked to the UAB, and therefore we will become available as a case study possibility for the master’s students, looking into topics like “how does being a business work in a degrowth transitional economy?” or “what does a degrowth business plan look like?”.
We have our first student already on board, who we will write about/with in a further blog post in the future, who is from Inner Mongolia, and is looking through our business practises, to see if there are any particularly impactful elements of our processes which could be swapped over for low-tech, or appropriate-tech techniques which come from her indigenous Mongolian roots. This is going to be suuuuper interesting.
Teaching content
We are going to start trying to turn the educational events and experiences which we provide here to our guests, into properly documented educational content. It would be wonderful one day to get this online, but in the meantime, we will begin to make this available in other ways, through the association.
R&D retreat hosts
We are excited to have been chosen as the location for the R&D retreat, which will bring together lots of the leading lights of the movement for a weekend of debate, team-building, brainstorming, chilling out, and getting to know each other in the Empordà forest, here.
Will La Bruguera teach Degrowth or host any events?
Totally!
We are excited to have been chosen as the location for the R&D retreat mentioned above, but we are also getting the content for a few degrowth short courses together, and getting the relevant experts to get time in the diary to provide these to our community and guests this year and next. We are working on a Calendar page for the website now, and will begin to advertise soon, as well as adding the short courses to the Services / Experiences page of the website where people can peruse the kind of stuff they can add to their holidays.
How can you get involved?
Get in touch! If this interests you, there are lots of ways to get involved. Volunteering, attending courses, learning ways to change your own behaviour to lower its impact, staying here and joining an event or learning from our Living Lab! If you want to talk about it, do get in touch.
Further viewing / reading
Websites
- The degrowth.info website is a good place to start.
- Check out Can Decreix, one of the other Living Labs, focussing on Low-Tech Low-Impact solutions to homesteading, on their website or here on the R&D website, run by François Schneider, who co-edited Housing for Degrowth, a good textbook looking at how housing and degrowth come together and strive to provide good urban design for all in the future.
Publications
- The Case for Degrowth, by Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa and Federico DeMaria, is available as an e-book for only €11 and is a great primer on all things Degrowth.
- Jason Hickel, a fellow member of the R&D Association, has written a great book, called “Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World”.
- Giacomo d’Alisa and Giorgos Kallis (fellow R&D members) along with Federico DeMaria have edited the tome “Degrowth: A New Vocabulary for a New Era”.
- Giorgos Kallis has also written this slimline quick-read called “Limits: Why Malthus was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care”, which is a great quick intro.
- Kate Raworth’s book “Doughnut Economics” is an often quoted volume on the subject too.
Video
- You can catch Kate’s TED Talk on the subject as well, here in English: https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_should_be_designed_to_thrive_not_grow?language=en
- And here, the same TED Talk subtitled in Spanish: https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_should_be_designed_to_thrive_not_grow?language=es
