Most critiques of 'degrowth' are pretty uninformed, but it's kind of their fault. A better framing is *regeneration*, discernment as to what we want to grow / degrow. We want to grow ecological health and well being...we want to degrow extractive / wasteful linear throughput
I get why the term 'degrowth' was used, because it can't be coopted and greenwashed like 'sustainability'. But still, it invites a lot of misunderstanding and annoying clarifications.
Two of the most annoying misunderstandings are 1) that degrowthers don't want poor countries to have more stuff that they need (false) and 2) that they don't want development in a more holistic sense (also false)
The critiques also beg the question, growth of what? GDP as an indicator of societal health is so discredited at this point it's hard to take seriously. You can have growth, but only if you have a holistic indicator that accounts for natural capital, pollution, inequality, etc
And there is also a strain of degrowth that I would also reject, that being a top down technocratic (spreadsheet brain) contraction of the economy. Rather, I prefer (cosmo-)localization, which implies degrowth but due to a shift from global consumerism to community producerism
Someone asked me: isn't growing some of your own food not worth the opportunity cost of your time? Well, it improves my quality of life, makes me more resilient, and is more sustainable. And yes it is less 'efficient' in the narrow economic sense, but that's the implied degrowth
