“Degrowth in the Suburbs” is among the best books I have read

Declaring something “the best” is fraught with trouble.

Any suggestion that something, or someone, cannot be bested is a proposal riddled with potential difficulties in that it ignores the subjectiveness applied to such terms as best, worst, biggest, smallest, fastest, or slowest.

However, conscious of those constraints and having been deep in the climate conversation for more than a decade, the book “Degrowth in the Suburbs” is among the best I have read.

Authors and University of Melbourne compatriots Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson have pooled their talents and copious environmental and social knowledge to give us a glimpse of how they see the future.

Both Alexander and Gleeson have individually put their names to several other books and both are linked to the university’s Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, the former as a research fellow and Gleeson as the director. Alexander is also a lecturer at the university’s Office of Environmental Programs.

The book, subtitled “A radical urban imaginary” first, considers turning the current energy-economic crisis around and, second, examines the opportunity of ‘degrowth in the suburbs’.

And what does all this mean for the readers of this newspaper, the people of the Goulburn Valley? 

Well, everything really. Alexander and Gleeson have outlined the challenges we face and yet equally skilfully avoided the apocalyptic doom and gloom messages of many counterparts, while all along making it clear that a safe a secure future rests with immediate and significant behavioural changes.

As good as the book is, it does not come cheap with the publishers Palgrave McMillan listing it at nearly $85, while Amazon sells their Kindle edition for $92.

Promotional material says: “This book addresses a central dilemma of the urban age: how to make the vast suburban landscapes that ring the globe, safe and sustainable in the face of planetary ecological crisis.”

It continues, “The authors argue that degrowth, a planned contraction of economic overshoot, is the only feasible principle for suburban renewal.

“This means dispensing with much contemporary green thinking, including blind faith in electric vehicles and high-density urbanism, and accepting the inevitability and the benefits of planned energy descent. A radical but necessary vision for the times.”

The authors argue that every generation has to accomplish democracy over again for itself and the idea was centre-of-mind, at least for me, during recent meet the candidates' events.

Was this about reinventing democracy, I thought as candidates for the recent State election articulated their views or was it simply the confirmation of the status quo?

It was pointedly the latter and, despite the rhetoric of the event’s organizers, those discussions contravened most everything Alexander and Gleeson wrote about in “Degrowth in the Suburbs” and illustrated that the essence of community has been hijacked by the idea of profit.

Most of us, it is obvious, are swathed in the modern ethos of profit regardless of the social and environmental costs.

Considering what I heard at the meet the candidates' events and what I know the reality to be, we need to pause, rethink our behaviours, consider the thoughts of the Melbourne authors and plot a course to a better life.