Photo: Peter Knight
The global network Sufficiency4Sustainability (S4S), which advocates for sufficiency as a path to sustainability, was just founded in late May this year. It is composed of a web of thinkers, researchers, professors and professionals devoted to promoting “the development of public policies to provide enough for all and curb overconsumption.”
Founding members of the S4S network include economists like Ricardo Abramovay and André Lara Resende, ecology specialist Torrey McMillan, ecological economists Herman Daly and Clovis Cavalcanti and political scientist Sergio Abrantes. Peter Knight coordinates the network and serves as its webmaster, while also being an economist specialized in the use of information and communication technologies.
Knight believes that there are critical areas of human knowledge that are, at the moment, treated separately in general, and that humankind would benefit if these were more integrated. In short, these are sustainability, exponential technologies, sufficiency, artificial intelligence, universal basic income, public policies, changing values and alternative economics. Short explanations of these areas are given at S4S website.
In representation of basic income in the S4S network, Peter Knight contacted and got the interest of BIEN’s International Advisory Board Chair Phillipe Van Parijs. The former has also developed, over the years, a close relationship with Eduardo Suplicy, also a former member of BIEN’s Executive Committee and still active basic income activist.
The S4S network is an open ended organization, whose members “are exploring how changing values and public policies might result in lower material and energy use by the relatively well-off while raising the consumption of the poor to a level sufficient to meet basic human needs, resulting in a total worldwide material and energy consumption that is ‘sustainable’ in the sense that the planet can bear it without a massive die-off of population due to exhaustion of material and environmental resources”.
More information at:
The Sufficiency4Sustainability website