Activities for Principle#8

Level of complexity: Low / Medium

Estimated time: 2—3 hours

• Host a degrowth improvisation theatre where participants act out spontaneous degrowth scenarios.
• Set the scene and the situation where degrowth scenarios can be played out. 
• Add different twists (e.g., water scarcity, a political shift) as the stories progress and record different responses from participants.
• Debriefing questions
• What dynamics or conflicts emerged?
• Which ideas and responses came up?

Level of complexity: High

Estimated time: 3—4 hours

• Participants visualize systems to illustrate systems like food, education, or energy, and their impacts and implications (social, economic, ecological, political, etc.).
• They experiment with degrowth interventions (e.g., degrowth policies) at different points in the system and note down the impacts and implications.
• They explore diverse possibilities, challenges, opportunities, and weaknesses of these degrowth interventions, pointing out the interconnections that emerged and the leverage points.
• They may use creative mediums to illustrate these systems (e.g., magazines, drawings, printouts).

Level of complexity: Medium / High

Estimated time: 30—40 minutes

Disorienting dilemma for Degrowthers:

1. Waiting for collapse of the economy, or 
2. Start practicing a "well-being" post-growth economy?

Disorienting,  because neither alternative is satisfactory (the first alternative brings with it the risk of injustice and chaos; the second, the risk of being co-opted by capitalism), but most degrowthers end up choosing one or the other (sometimes for conformism with the bubble they belong to, sometimes lacking time to develop an alternative).

In the practice designed by MEG (Maria Emanuela Galanti) for IDN, degrowthers are asked to design and start practicing a third alternative to the two horns, refining, sharpening, and deepening what they are already doing “to stay with the trouble” without yielding to it.

Two people deepen their personal perspective by listening, through Carl Rogers' active listening method as exemplified in the Interactive Focusing Format by J. Klein, to another person who has chosen the other horn of the dilemma. This method involves paraphrasing the other person's words, receiving feedback on the paraphrase, and developing a symbol to give to the other person for both roles. 30-40 minutes is enough for one exercise, to be repeated as many times as one wishes.

The two participants choose their horn of the dilemma based on two possible alternatives:

a) a strong preference for one alternative;

b) a slight preference for one alternative but a strong opposition to the other.

Methodological note: The proposed method is an original interpretation of step 2 of "Thinking at the Edge" by the phenomenological philosopher and psychologist Eugene T. Gendlin, connecting this experiential method to Jack Mezirow's "disorienting dilemma."

MEG (Maria Emanuela Galanti) uses this method in her deep ecology course, which she has made free of charge for IDN members, and discusses it, among other things, in the September issue of the Journal Mother Pelican (external link).

Conversely, many more theoretical articles - which recover the young Marx's concept of alienation and point to the need to address the ecological crisis by breaking free from  systemic thinking and post-humanism - can be found on Maria Emanuela Galanti - Stultifera Navis (external link).