Rich Burkmar

An ecologist by instinct and training, macro-economics has always alienated me because of the unchallenged hegemony of growth. Throughout my adult life, I’ve been acutely aware of degradation of the environment being driven by the economy, but the universal advocacy for economic growth led me to think that there must be a fundamental requirement for it that I just hadn’t grasped. But in the summer of 2022 a friend gifted me a copy of Jason Hickel’s book Less is More. It made me realise that the reason economic growth seems so fundamental to our way of life is that our social and economic structures have, for centuries, been deliberately structured around it to provide opportunities for a limited number of people to accumulate wealth. It vividly described now nature is commodified and enclosed to facilitate growth and the accumulation of wealth into the hands of these few.

The book changed my outlook: where previously I had viewed the future – especially the future for my children and grandchildren – with a sort of resigned hopelessness, Less is More showed me that there is an alternative way forward. Of course it wasn't long before I found and read Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics and soon after, the Doughnut Economics Action Lab and this community.

I work for UKCEH as a web programmer, but I have also developed open source digital tools for ecologists in my own time. I am currently working on a new doughnut visualisation tool which I would like to make available to this community when complete.