Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts Quotes

“Both the Pollyannas and the Cassandras are wrong, and both stand in the way of social justice, the former by condemning us all to catastrophic climate change and the loss of other vital ecosystem services for the sake of profit; the latter by condemning us all to a hair-shirted existence and refusal of further human development due to a romantic, unscientific belief in a static, unchanging balance of nature.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“Hidden beneath localism’s DIY attitude is a deep pessimism: it assumes we can’t make large-scale, collective social change,” worries Sharzer.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“The flourishing of the whole local and foodie scene is dependent on a policy background of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“Walmart is, Jameson asserts cheekily but with sincere admiration, “the shape of a utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.”)”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“It is the market that drives planned obsolescence, not growth or consumerism.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“Mother Nature is not beneficent. She is not maleficent either of course. Merely augustly, majestically capricious.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“Why is this? What is the mechanism that drives this overproduction, this carry-on-regardless approach to resource use? The degrowthists will tell you that it is capitalism’s requirement for growth. But this is far too crude a description of what occurs. What is fundamental is not growth per se, but capital’s need for self-valorisation, or put another way, for self-expansion. A firm cannot receive back in value precisely what it has put in, otherwise it would go bankrupt. It must receive more value than it put in. Like a bicycle wheel, capital must keep on keepin’ on or it will fall over. Superficially, this appears to be the same thing as growth, but it is not. And the distinction is not a philosophical trick, but a difference of profound significance.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“Austerity and ‘degrowth’ are mathematically and socially identical. They are the same thing. What green degrowth partisans are actually calling for is eco-austerity.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“The campaign against economic growth and overconsumption should have no place on the left. While its current austerity-ecology incarnation appears to many progressives as a fresh, new argument fit for the Anthropocene, it is in fact the descendent of a very old, dark and Malthusian set of ideas that the left historically did battle with.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“The globalisation of food (or production of any commodity) is not the enemy per se, although it could and should certainly be more rationally planned.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“Even the Jonestown Peoples’ Temple Agricultural Project built community.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“Our skyscrapers are not separate from nature; they are nature, as much as a termite colony’s cathedral mound or a chaffinch nest or a bee hive. As are our iPhones and washing machines and bathyscaphe research submarines that take us to the depths of the Mariana Trench.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“One of the most important popular concepts that we do have to ditch is the idea that there is some natural balance that mankind is intruding upon as a result of our growth.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“Indeed, the long-standing establishment embrace of the Malthusian worry explodes any suggestion that anti-growth is a particularly radical position. But then elites have never really liked the vast bulk of humanity, believing us all to be lesser creatures, unlettered, unrefined.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“They built cities, terraced hillsides and irrigated fields, shaped the land with intentional fires, and cleared forests, all of which contributed directly to deforestation, soil depletion and erosion. In forgetting all these works, the myth of the Ecological Indian infantilises and denies agency to native peoples, erases civilisations and replaces them with imaginary wildernesses. It too is an act of conquest.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“People searching for a new relationship with nature and a set of spiritual values to counter the individualism, political economy and environmental impact of modern industrial society latched on to the image of the Ecological Indian.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff

“English humorist Alan Coren was surely wrong when he said that the only books guaranteed to sell well were those about cats, golf and the Third Reich. His book Golfing for Cats, adorned with a Swastika, could also have done with some Peak-Oil pie-charts and a centerfold pull-out of a topless Martin Heidegger.”
― Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff