Richard Heinberg: Life after Growth New Zealand tour

Richard Heinberg’s quest for a more resilient, sustainable, and healthy future comes to New Zealand thanks to the Post Carbon Institute, Grey Lynn 2030 and the Sustainable Business Network.

These are the kinds of issues Richard will be addressing on his tour down under:

• We all take economic growth for granted – until it falters. But what if the 2008 economic meltdown and the 2012 European debt crisis are not temporary interruptions in the story of continuous economic expansion, but the first signs of the end of growth as we know it?
• Will the convergence of financial instability, the end of cheap oil, and climate change usher in an era of contraction? In other words, do we have to adapt to a “new normal”? What will be the impacts to New Zealand when China’s juggernaut stalls?
• Traditional economic growth is not the best measure of human health and welfare. How might we pursue improvements in education, the arts, health, well-being, freedom, and happiness without depending upon ever-expanding consumption?  What can a new economy look like that doesn’t depend on a model of growth based on cheap energy, reckless consumption, and financial speculation

Richard is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels. With a wry, unflinching approach based on facts and realism, Richard exposes the tenuousness of our current way of life and offers a vision for a truly sustainable future.

This time the theme is: ” Life after Growth “Richard will bring his challenging and compelling message on resilience, sustainability and a healthy future. He will ask and answer some of the most challenging questions we face today.

Richard Heinberg last visited Aotearoa in 2007, at Ecoshow 2007 in Taupo. The concept of Transition Towns really took off after his visit. Here is a great opportunity to hear him again, or for the first time of you missed it! Highly recommended.

Follow his NZ tour on Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/richardheinbergnz2012

In The End of Growth, published in September 2011, Richard Heinberg, made the observation that world economic expansion, which has been barreling along for the past few decades, is now stalling. The book further claimed that this is not an outcome we can prevent; we can only choose whether and how to adapt. He argued that economic contraction is inevitable at some point since we are already overusing most of Earth’s important resources, and that limits to debt and to affordable oil supplies, along with worsening environmental disasters, are conspiring to bring about the reversal roughly now (i.e., this decade). Some countries will do better than others, and temporary partial recoveries are possible. But for the foreseeable future, contraction—not growth—will be the norm.
So, how are we doing just nine months later? Is the global economy mending or teetering on the brink? Is the book’s hypothesis confirmed or disproved?