Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World | 
pickThis was a good and fairly easy read, more of an argumentative piece than a deep-dive into what degrowth would look like, with animism and reciprocity as its themes. Some academics struggle with writing for a general audience, but Jason Hickel (who is an economic anthropologist) is not one of them. I was upset by the story of enclosure and rise of dualism and really loved the last chapter‘s foray into how trees improve humans.
Prior to this, animism - viewing the world as alive and fragile, not something that you could exploit - was the widespread philosophical belief at the time. Basically the enlightenment philosophers transformed the living, fragile mother earth to a dead harlot so as to get to commodify and plunder it. I‘ve heard of primitive accumulation before but never saw it put it like this!
Basically - Hickel argues that philosophers created a new view of the world during the enlightenment - they started arguing that the animal world was basically dead and filled with non-thinking automatons - and that this was a way to philosophically justify exploiting the earths “resources” after feudalism. In fact, thinking of the earth as “resources” and not an ecosystem was a product of this.
I started reading this maybe 6 months ago so as to use as a source on an assignment on degrowth. I only skimmed the introduction and conclusion then and I‘m now reading it from chapter one, which is on the origins of capitalism. It‘s so interesting and I‘m having a bit of a mind blown moment about it (tho maybe it‘s anthropology 101 for others)...
