Zmiany klimatu

30
From Sustainable
Development to Degrowth:
Strategic Concepts in a Time of Downturn
Jakub Rok
Fot: Flickr.com by Carbon Visuals
When, in 1992, the first Earth Summit
in Rio de Janeiro (also known
as The United Nations Conference
on Environment and Development)
took place, I was a 5-yearold
boy enjoying a carefree life.
Only five years earlier the famous
Brundtland Report was released, a
document which coined the term
sustainable development and introduced
it to the public discourse.
As I imagine, the 172 delegates
who attended the first Rio summit,
as well as world public opinion,
were full of hope at that time.
For the first time in world history,
it became clear that we not only
should put an end to the exploitation
of natural resources, but that
we also need to come up with a
holistic alternative plan. There
must have already been a multitude
of disparate visions of the
future, but they were all united
by some sort of belief in a better
tomorrow, in the possibility of
taking a big step forward. Many
years later, one Polish environmental
activist would reveal to
me the details of a crazy idea devised
by his group. According to
their plan, Poland—which was a
country on the edge of a tremendous
transformation at the time—
was to become a ‘living lab’ for
sustainable development, a place
where activists from the whole
world would meet to turn theory
into practice. Unfeasible as those
plans seemed, the promise of
change was real.
So where have we come two decades
since then? Again, we find
ourselves preparing for another
important event—the 2015 Climate
Conference in Paris. Just
like in 1992, delegates from different
parts of the world will gather
around a conference room table to
address some important environmental
issues; their debates will
certainly attract some activists and
will grab the attention of world
opinion. However, the question
arises whether we still have this
hopeful feeling of standing at the
threshold of a better reality. Do we
still believe that in the future we
will see the emergence of a new
inspiring vision of humanity? After
all, the Paris conference will be
held against the background of a
global threat increasingly difficult
to contain—climate change. With
the extinction of many species and
the widespread collapse of entire
ecosystems, on the one hand, and
with wars, large-scale migrations
and an increasingly fiercer competition
for natural resources, on
the other hand, global warming
to date has had disastrous effects
both on wildlife and humans. It is
no wonder, then, that the upcoming
conference in Paris is accompanied
by a feeling of frustration.
We still have a vivid recollection
of some of the similar conferences
in the past; their futility and the
short-sightedness and hypocrisy
All the accessible fresh water in
the world
There is 4.3917 million cubic kilometres of
accessible fresh water. If you brought it all
together in a single drop, it would form a
sphere 203 km across.
There is 1,408.7 million cubic kilometres of
water on Earth, but 97.25% of it is sea water.
All the water in the world, including sea
water, would form a sphere 1,391 km across.
of their participants, especially
those from Poland, who have been
endlessly and hopelessly committed
to protecting fossil fuels while
at the same time blindly insisting
there is no other alternative.
We now live in a world where all
those lofty exhortations on the
need for sustainable development
have lost their force, despite the
fact that the term itself has enjoyed
wide currency in public discourse.
What holds strong instead
is an unswerving belief in the liberating
role of economic growth,
a term which, for the European
Union, has become synonymous
with sustainable growth. As citizens
of the Global North, we are
unable to admit that ‘we’ve accumulated
enough wealth.’ Even
worse, neither are our so-called
elites, who are invariably preoccupied
with entrapping us in a
whirl of excessive consumerism.
One promising response to this
impasse is degrowth (décroissance
in French, postwzrost in
Polish), an emerging political and
social movement which questions
the need for further growth and
which challenges the necessity of
our complete reliance on it. The
primary function of degrowth is
thus to shake the foundations of
an assumption so obvious and
widespread that it has been taken
for granted. Hence the name itself
(degrowth), which might serve as
There is 38.7 million cubic kilometres of
non-ocean water:
• Ice caps and glaciers: 74.93%
• Deep groundwater (750-4,000 metres):
13.69%
• Shallow groundwater (