by Andreas Paikert.
A Northern champion, full of audacity,
falls short to acknowledge his deficiency.
With manyfold roots, some forgotten, some new,
he hopes for his movement to finally come through.
Overlooking the strength in his ties and his framing,
part of him seeks the spotlight while others to tame him.
Much awaits and more is unclear,
not least the riddle of democracy.
And as the Pluriverse draws near
our champion chants “Degrowth!” self-consciously.
This poem was created as part of our Online Degrowth Master.
The author writes: In the poem I imagined degrowth as a champion or hero presented by the North as their answer to the socio-ecological crisis.
This confident champion imposes himself on the scene to some extent (verse one) and comes with many flaws: not centring anti-colonial, feminist and anti-imperialist thought enough (verse two), not properly recognising some of his roots in the Global South (verse three), and partly acting as a social movement in seeking to be centre stage in a transition (verses four and six). For the latter, I also wanted to highlight my adherence to the belief that degrowth is best positioned as an epistemic community and interpretative frame for other movements, instead of as a movement in and of itself (verses five and six).
In the last part I wanted to express how much alliance-building, direct action and research is left to be done in the realm of degrowth, while also taking up degrowth’s (yet to be fully explored) relationship with democracy (verses seven and eight).
Nevertheless, I also thought it fitting to show that degrowth is partly aware of its flaws and of its place in the pluriverse (verses nine and ten).
Finally, I decided to make the champion male, as degrowth’s male-heavy academia and founding fathers are a good reminder of the discipline’s risk of reproducing harmful and unjust realities.
Andreas Paikert shortly worked as a sustainability reporting consultant in the financial sector before deciding to study degrowth. Being from Belgium and Germany, he seeks to centre global justice in his Western European professional and political context.
Picture by Paula Hödt.
The opinions expressed in the text do not necessarily reflect those of R&D, but are those of the author.