Hello all. I am writing this on the New Year of 2024. This year I want to see a community form in Seattle. I want to help it form, so I am starting with this website. The community I want to see is one that lives with the environment and with nature and with the gifts our world has given us, together. It is welcoming. It is resilient. We can grow our own food without shipping it across oceans and continents. We can feed our community with the abundant water and well cared for soil, creatures and animals, and thoughtfulness.
What a beautiful place we live in! I have been in Oregon for the holidays and already the daffodils and hyacinths are pushing through the wet ground, promising to bring cheerfulness in early spring. Soon I must start to carefully bury little seeds in little compartments indoors, discovering skills to give them the best chance of germination and successful spring planting.
If you don’t know what degrowth is, I guess I should offer a bit of an explanation. What degrowth means to me is learning to live without destroying life. A grand quest for sustainability. Let me explain. Death is a part of life, of course. But only if life lives through it — regrowth — reshaping the dissolving nutrients back into complex and beautiful structures, intricate forms — swirling shells, veined leaves, galactic irises. The death we witness of the coral reefs in Australia, to pick an arbitrary example, is not sustainable. It is increasingly difficult for life to form in the conditions we have played a role in creating in those seas.
Here is the complication: we are born into and inserted within large, complex churning gears and machines — sputtering economic machines, steel cogs made of nations and national security concerns, metal meshes woven of transnational trade agreements and globalized corporations, rattling zinc-plated bolts of the promise of more growth, technological salvation, and forced consumption. It is clear this machine tears at the fabric of life, and neither escaping it, nor avoiding, nor changing it is a small feat.
Degrowth is the simple answer. It lifts us from our track rolled between the crushing gears and places us back on the soft ground, on our own feet. How can we escape a system that exploits people and the Earth? Become a community of people that does not exploit. We don’t need to use 18 wheel semi-trucks that haul a 40-ft container burning oil hydrocarbons extracted from deep beneath the crust of the Earth and transformed into a slow poisonous slurry of heat-trapping gases and pollution to the doorstep of a global engine of commerce and labor exploitation (let’s say Walmart, for sake of specificity) that operates in a financial fallacy that demands greater returns, greater consumption, and greater production for the infinite horizon, and resorts to neocolonial economic, technological, and literal warfare to achieve these goals. Woah. Deep breath. Look! We can just grow the apple. In our soil. In our yards! And we can share the harvest with our neighbors, strangers, our friends and family, and our community. Degrowth is the simple answer: grow sustainably, give back to the Earth, share.
There is more to degrowth than agriculture, of course. It is about recognizing our true needs and working to meet those sustainably, and then learning to live with less. To detach from the culture that teaches us to want infinitely, to never acknowledge gratitude, to never be content. Fast fashion and flying to foreign countries are not hobbies. Driving is not a hobby. Collecting items (hats, plates, shoes, games…), accruing cars, purchasing vacation homes, commodifying our favorite musician or artist, raking our lawns and sterilizing our environment, these symbols of status and social wealth are not wealth. They are poisonous distractions. We have been misled. It can be difficult to see all the ways we have been misled, to expect excess, luxury, and consumption and then to conflate it with wealth and give it status. Degrowth is relearning contentment, together.
So that’s it. We’re starting Degrowth Seattle. Join us! And never forget what a gift we’ve been given. Never forget how blessed we are to be alive.
Degrowth Seattle 
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