A “show the way forward” project

Now that in-person events can be hosted again: Get a venue (it can even be just someone’s home) and schedule eight two-hour timeslots over a period of eight weeks. Each week screen one of the eight videos of the Toward an Ecological Civilization series. The videos average about 40 minutes. Provide light refreshments. Break after the video for ten minutes. Then lead a one-hour discussion about the day’s video and how it relates to the social change orientation of the Simplicity Institute.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGyDELJdHq36Pl6FtVu7V75OIF04SMW-5

Some of the defining perspectives that inform the work of the Simplicity Institute:

‘Degrowth’ (i.e., planned economic contraction) is necessary in the overdeveloped nations in order to move toward a just and sustainable economy that operates within safe biophysical limits.

A degrowth economy implies radically reducing energy and resource requirements compared to the standards of the current overdeveloped nations. Among other things, this means countering “affluenza” (over-consumptive lifestyles) and transitioning toward living more lightly, more locally, and more simply. We believe that “less stuff but more community” can result in a higher quality of life.

But it is not enough to personally live more simply within existing structures and systems. The challenge is to begin building new systems and structures that support and encourage sufficiency for all, rather than unsustainable affluence for a minority. We cannot wait for governments to do this for us. We must organize and network at the grassroots level and begin to build the new world within the shell of the old.