Matthias Schmelzer is Professor for Social-Ecological Transformation at the University of Flensburg. Andrea Vetter teaches transformation design at Braunschweig University of Art. And Aaron Vansintjan is a writer based in Montreal. Their book, The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism, provides a comprehensive guide to degrowth at the confluence of movements.

The rhetorical challenge confronting degrowth in the United States is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in what is perhaps the best and most thorough degrowth treatment to date, The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism, by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan. At once cautiously pragmatic, rigorously critical, and unapologetically radical, this book characterizes degrowth as an array of perspectives in conversation with a variety of critiques, none of which is rigid and exclusive and all of which may collaborate on a big-tent left politics opposed to the merciless churn of the capitalist cogs. There are many reasons to stand against consumer capitalism, and many angles from which to attack it. Together, assembled in tight but flexible formation, these form the center and the flanks of the degrowth advance—at least among the various factions of the European left.

If Giorgos Kallis’s strength is his clarity, and Hickel’s is his history, Schmelzer, Vetter, and Vansintjan are most at home in the theoretical realm. Their critique of growth merges seven distinct others, culminating in a Venn diagram of points and evidences with comprehensive footnotes below. In a single chapter that ranges over one hundred pages of discussion, the authors identify and explain critiques of growth from vantages ecological, socio-economic, cultural, anti-capitalist, anti-industrialist, feminist, and otherwise oriented by the North-South divide. Recognized for their individual merits, these various critiques are then unified and aligned beneath the degrowth umbrella, embraced for their broad points of agreement and set against those regressive arguments that may prepare the way for green fascism. Understanding that some dramatic economic change is now on the horizon, the authors suggest that the failure of a carefully charted leftward turn portends a jarring lurch to the right in the years ahead.

Accordingly, Schmelzer and his coauthors guide readers forward with cautious attention to practicalities. Here again, the writers are plainly sensitive to the utopian smear and meticulous to show that their plan can work in the real world. Nodding toward the late Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright, they acknowledge that any credible alternative to capitalism must satisfy at least three criteria—desirability, viability, and achievability—and much of the book is devoted to explaining how degrowth clears the bar in each case.

Degrowth is desirable because it is necessary, confirmed at exhaustive length by the preceding critiques and demanded by grim economic and ecological forecasts. It is viable because many of its components have worked already, as evidenced by the success of large-scale programs like social security, universal healthcare and higher education, as well as those of small-scale solidarity economies in various European collectives and cooperatives. The achievability question is, as yet, unanswered, because a degrowth vision for the global economy still has not been realized. In that sense, the future of degrowth still waits to be established by the thinkers, writers, organizers, activists, and politicians who will see it through to completion, or not.

Having categorized and dissected the relevant social, economic, and ecological theories pertaining to degrowth, the authors invite their readers to engage at any or all points, drawing their own conclusions and making their own way into an emergent movement desirous of a great many participants, drawn from a diversity of backgrounds, and willing to wear a variety of hats.

But of all the constituencies considered and courted by Schmelzer and his coauthors, centrists and conservatives are not invited. This is understandable, perhaps, given their presumed lack of sympathy for and solidarity with sweeping leftist projects. But their support remains vital to the success of any initiative that pledges to reorient the entire global economy. If such change is necessary—and degrowth proponents argue emphatically that it is—then this important empirical claim demands an adept rhetorical posture, one that can occupy the common sense of the citizenry.

Indeed, this is how the rhetorical challenge of degrowth is best encapsulated, at least for American audiences. By situating degrowth amid the myriad movements and social theories animating the European left, the authors of this book can’t help but emphasize how many diverse movements and theories are at work in this area. If there is opportunity for collaboration and coalition, there is also plenty of room for in-fighting and fracture, and this is even without the center-to-center-right included in the discourse. If the practical impacts of economic growth, carbon dioxide emission, habitat destruction, mass extinction, etc are compelling–and I, for one, think that they are–then the case for degrowth has to be made in a pragmatic idiom that will bring a much larger and more politically diverse coalition around to see it through.