radical happiness moments of collective joy

Soper suggests that this association will endure as long as the left fails to articulate an alternative vision of the radical pleasures possible within “post-growth living.” Pointing to “the ugly, puritanical, and self denying aspects of the high-carbon lifestyle in the present,” Soper’s “alternative hedonism” is attentive to the richness of human pleasures, and accordingly “directed more against the limited and partial rein given to such appetites in our materialistic society than against the culture of desire as such.” In this way, she seeks to offer “a more expansive way of thinking about the complexities and potentialities of human pleasure, and how it might be made richer and stranger in a post-capitalist society.”

As the recent Republican attack line that the Green New Deal will “take away your hamburgers” illustrates, environmental policy is easily associated with austerity and privation, even when advocates do everything to avoid it. Even with a green grid, current levels of flying, personal car ownership, or meat consumption (to name just a few examples) are fundamentally incompatible with dramatic reductions in carbon emissions, and rely on patterns of land and resource use that irreparably destroy ecosystems and human communities on the extraction frontier across the Global South. Put simply, the contemporary model of the good life in rich countries is biophysically unsustainable-still less so if it continues to provide the template for growing middle classes across the developing world. Yet as the British philosopher Kate Soper argues in P ost-Growth Living: For An Alternative Hedonism, they largely skirt the politically sensitive issue of consumption.

The bulk of attention in these initiatives is devoted to the decarbonization of the energy sector, and the rapid deployment of renewable technologies like wind and solar.

In the United States, its main thrust has been the call for a Green New Deal, but similar policy responses are emerging across the world, from the European Union’s Green Deal framework to China’s recent pledge of carbon neutrality before 2060. The last four years have seen a tremendous surge in energy and unprecedented social movement mobilization around the threat of climate change. Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism

Radical happiness moments of collective joy