The Green New Deal is key to shifting away from our current neoliberal economic paradigm and towards one that is anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and emphasizes de-growth as a means of saving humanity—their own author agrees

In response to this central challenge – which is readable as yet another dimension of the deepening grip of advanced expulsive capitalism’s relentless extractivism – activists interviewed by the authors highlighted the need to develop a class-conscious environmentalism, an ‘anti-purity’ politics, and overt decolonization as core strategic elements of the degrowth agenda. Finally, the authors analyse the Green New Deal (GND) as a promising ‘non-reformist reform’ for the degrowth movement to pursue. The authors conclude that the GND, which rose to prominence after they had conducted their interviews, presents a possible route by which to combine class-conscious environmentalism, anti-purity politics and decolonial imperatives in one strategic programme. GND’s appeal to multi-racial working-class people (it prioritizes job creation), the authors suggest, might help to inoculate GND politics against fossil capitalist class interests – thus holding out hope of progress. And, while the GND is far from ‘pure’, the authors note that Indigenous activists and anti-colonial settlers within the GND movement are moving it into decolonial directions. Accordingly, the GND creates the possibility of meaningful political resistance to neoliberal imperatives. Whether or not – and the degree to which – the pervasive extractivism destroying human and more-than-human lives, beings and systems the world over can ultimately successfully be addressed by the strategies discussed in this edition, it is clear that these strategies are energetic signs and modes of active, prefigurative solution-seeking. The authors signal to the reader that there are hopeful signals of nascent shifts and developments moving law, politics and economics in a more life-generative direction, but also that there is clearly so much to struggle for (and against). There is such a profound need for scholars, practitioners, activists, communities and others to continue to reach for alternative ways of co-living, and to do so in imaginative, daring and paradigm-exceeding ways.