Teaching and Learning Anthropology

Collectively, how can we work towards reducing human impacts on the environment to lessen the process of climate change and develop plans for climate change mitigation and adaptation? Current trends such as extreme climatic events and climate stress, food insecurity, declining natural resources, and inequitable access to food, health care, and education make it clear this is a time to act.  After teaching at a university for a few decades, I find students are overwhelmed with the increasing amount of negativity in their local and global worlds. By introducing the concept of degrowth into several classes, I found ways to empower students to use their own data collection to inform themselves of what they could do differently to lessen their impact on the environment. Degrowth is defined as a philosophy of life or a lifestyle that calls for a conscious effort to reduce, reuse, recycle, and repurpose. Degrowth is also a political and social movement based on ecological economics designed to lessen consumerism and production; in a word, it is anti-capitalism. Degrowth is a re-envisioned way of living that emphasizes quality of life and conviviality that serves as an economic strategy to respond to the limits-to-growth dilemma. This paper discusses an approach used to engage students in degrowth and create an opportunity to help them move from passive reading of assigned articles to taking action to globally heal Earth.