NEC News

In the scholarly forum “Degrowth and Environmental History: Toward Critical Encounters”, published in the journal Environmental History, Matthias Schmelzer and Andy Bruno (Indiana University Bloomington) offer a systematic exploration of the intersections between degrowth debates and environmental history. Edited by Schmelzer and Bruno, the forum aims to bring growth-critical perspectives into closer dialogue with historical analyses of ecological crises, labor relations, and societal metabolic processes. It appears in the leading international journal of environmental history, published by the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society.

Alongside the introductory article by Andy Bruno and Matthias Schmelzer, the forum brings together international contributions that examine degrowth from diverse regional and thematic perspectives. These include essays by Venus Bivar (University of Rochester) on the political economy of growth, Joan Martínez-Alier (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) on degrowth practices in the Global South, and Julia Adeney Thomas (University of Notre Dame) on redundancy and planetary destabilization in Japan.

Further contributions analyze historical labor and production relations in the context of the Great Acceleration (Stefania Barca, Universidade de Coimbra), the growth imperative in Soviet socialism (Andy Bruno, Indiana University Bloomington), and repair, maintenance, and material care as historical alternatives to the growth paradigm (Carl Wennerlind and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Barnard College / Harvard University). Taken together, the forum makes an important contribution to the historically grounded development of growth-critical transformation research.

Here’s the publication.