Thread by @matthewbach

👋That moment when you want to write down a quote from @ProfTimJackson, but end up taking down the entire speech... Here a 🧵with some snippets.
#BeyondGrowth2023

"The relentless pursuit of more blinds us to human nature. It prioritizes, it institutionalizes voracious greed, but it neglects our deepest needs [...]. It precipitates a casual swipe right consumerism that promises the world but leaves us ultimately endlessly unsatisfied."

"Characterizing prosperity as the relentless accumulation of wealth is nothing more than a denial of our humanity, a denial of the interdependent web of life on planet earth, a denial of death. It appears to offer us consolation, but cannot extinguish the anguish of our souls."

"“Our human and earthly limits properly understood”, said conservationist Wendell Berry, “are not confinements, but rather inducements to fullness of […] relationship and meaning. Beyond our material limits, [...] lies another world [...].

"If we are to replace the narrow definition of prosperity as wealth with something meaningful, I’d like to suggest there is a blindingly obvious starting point: the foundation for all our prosperity, the foundation for all our wealth is health."

"This idea of prosperity as health guides us away from growth, because health is not about having more and more. Health is about balance. [...] It positions itself directly counter to the myth of growth."

"[W]ithout care we are nothing. Our children would lead stunted lives, the sick would find no respite, the dying no solace. Our societies are nothing, our progress means nothing. Without care, there is no economy, not even at the most basic level."

"Capitalism externalises the burden of care in much the same way that it externalised nature by counting the wrong things, by valuing the wrong things, by focusing on narrow definitions of productivity [...], by rigging the rules of the game, and by refusing to change."

"The antidote to despair lies not in hope, but in action, in agency, in engaging with all our creative energy in the task ahead."