We need better economic ideas that encourage moderation in our consumption while tackling the underlying constraints of neo-liberal economics in sustaining life on Earth and solving the global inequality crisis. Minimalism and self-sufficiency declutter consumption practices and respect the limits of the living planet.

As the climate emergency worsens, the wealthiest will suffer from it the least. This is despite the disproportionate contribution of the uber rich in the Minority World – most of whom live obscenely in their opulence – to the continuing climate crisis. In contrast, poorpeople – most of them living in the Majority World – will be hit hardest and most severely by the effects of rapid global heating.

Increasing the defense industry’s efficiency and equipping the armed forces with the most suitable weapons to meet their missions is often the main goal behind a country’s efforts to enhance civil–military integration. This is not necessarily the case for India, though. Equally, or even more important, is the pursuit of military self-sufficiency and the acquisition of a world-level military R&D and production capacity. Arguably, civil–military integration serves both ends. The growing interest of the Indian military in emerging technologies and the existence of a relatively strong civilian IT industry in India reinforce this logic and clear the way to military–civil fusion. However, the dual demands of equipping the forces with suitable armaments and strengthening India’s military self-sufficiency can be contradictory. This reality, coupled with low and occasionally inefficient national investments in defense R&D, has confronted India’s MCF with multiple difficulties. Aware of this situation, India has taken various measures to expand private industries’ participation in military procurement. Yet, the forces that work in favor and against India’s MCF are still at odds.

The Greek world from ca. 750 onwards saw the establishment of wealthy elites, the widespread use of chattel and other slaves, and the occupation of new territories across the Mediterranean, all of which laid the groundwork for later developments. Elite property owners exploited the labour of the free poor, thereby adding to their own surpluses while keeping levels of consumption in the wider community minimal and archaeologically invisible. Only when and where social unrest or outright civil war led to restrictions on exploitation, and when new trading opportunities emerged around 600, did a middling class begin to establish itself, and to create demand for a range of staples that they could not produce themselves. In the late sixth century, the economic and social structure of the classical Greek world took shape, as regional and local specialisation and trade networks reached a level that enabled significant – if unquantifiable – per capita growth. Not all parts of the Greek world shared equally in these developments. Sparta, Crete, and Thessaly retained a polarised social structure of leisured elite and slave workers and continued to aim at agricultural self-sufficiency, institutionalising key features of the old predatory regimes that other Greeks were leaving behind.

This chapter argues that the agricultural and human disaster of the Great Irish Famine, and its broader cultural interpretation as a preventable tragedy, catalyzed an eco-nationalist consciousness within Irish political and literary circles. Literary landscapes functioned as tools of cultural preservation as well as a means through which a new Ireland might be constructed. Justin Dolan Stover demonstrates how this included political platforms that identified land ownership, agricultural self-sufficiency, and conservation as prerogatives of a politically independent state. The chapter argues that political writing and literary ecology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland often shared multifaceted concerns within anticolonial discourse.

Farming has experienced a major revolution in post-war Britain. The advent of artificial fertilisers and powerful pesticides transformed agriculture, which, combined with financial subsidies, greatly increased food production starting in the 1950s. These changes proved devastating for farmland wildlife. Hedges were removed to increase field sizes, ponds were discarded, autumn ploughing and use of silage devastated wildflower meadows. Many species of plants, invertebrates and birds declined dramatically as a result of these ‘improvements’. Drainage, water abstraction and pollution from fertilisers virtually exterminated many freshwater organisms, including amphibians, over much of the countryside. The marine environment has not been unscathed, with ongoing damage from offshore fish farms and bottom trawling. Dense conifer plantations, initiated after the First World War, have wrecked precious habitats such as heathlands and have precipitated declines of rare species dependent on them. The primary objective of agricultural intensification, a move towards self-sufficiency in food production, has not been met and has actually decreased as the human population has expanded.

The year 2019 marks the 25th anniversary of the birth of democratic South Africa. While many hoped that the transition from apartheid to democracy would come with improved standards of living, this aspiration remains a mirage to millions confronted with prevalent hunger. To this end, the chapter interrogates whether those who benefitted from the spoils of apartheid, their descendants, the emerging black middle-class and the state have a moral obligation to provide for those still plagued by the legacies of apartheid, the poor and food insecure. But what happens if few honour their moral responsibility and others fail? The chapter argues that in order to mobilise sufficient funds for effective food security programmes, the state needs to establish a separate tax system which allocates specific amounts to each relatively wealthy person to contribute to this end. The chapter recommends that the affluent and the state should provide more than their expected allocation, especially as there is likelihood that some might resist this proposal. Moreover, while serving as a means to the ends of the food secure, the state and the affluent community should formulate an exit strategy for the have-nots to enable the majority to become self-sufficient.

Narratives of the past inform all major decisions and solutions in the present social domain, but perceptions of history are often interpreted and represented from the perspective of those with the most social power and status. In order to understand status, consumption, or any other lived experiences in the past, academic research should therefore be wary of written sources. This chapter demonstrates the value of archaeology in evaluating deeply rooted assumptions that social status is inevitably linked to privileged consumption patterns by demonstrating how the modern notion of Western democracy and its links to status and consumption differs from its idealized Classical paragon.

Plato’s cosmology in the Timaeus can be seen as being framed in biological terms, since it claims the universe as a whole to be a living being, more specifically, a created god. In this chapter, I show that the central assumption that leads Plato to understand the created cosmos as a living being is the idea that the world is as good as possible. In a second step, I want to show that this assumption of the world’s bestness is also responsible for two important twists to the biological framing Plato uses. First, being as good as possible also implies that the world is self-sufficient, which means that many of our common biological notions are of no relevance for an account of the cosmos as a living being. Secondly, I show that while Plato gives an account of all kinds of living beings, his assumption of the bestness of the world leads him to be ultimately interested only in rational living beings. Accordingly, what starts out in biological terms turns into a form of rational psychology and rational theology. This will finally lead to a discussion whether Plato works with a consistent notion of life in the Timaeus.

This chapter is devoted to Fichte’s derivation of content for the moral law from his theory of the transcendental conditions of I-hood in Part III of the ”System of Ethics”. The chapter suggests that Fichte gives us a quasi-phenomenological account of how the I develops through system of drives in which nature and freedom are constitutively intertwined. In this framework, the chapter argues, embodiment plays a crucial role, because it is through the body that the natural drive address itself an agent, and for Fichte it is through the body that one exercises causality in the world. The chapter examines the details of this theory of embodiment by setting it in the larger context of Fichte’s confrontation with Kant’s formal idea of morality. The quasi-phenomenological set up of the argument is grounded in Fichte’s attempt to bridge the gap between the strict apriorism of the ethical law grounded in reason and the experiential dimension of the “original drive” as it is progressively and infinitely actualized in our life.

“Cynics and Stoics” is an investigation into ecological aspects of both schools’ injunction that individuals should practice “self-sufficiency” (autarkeia) and live “according to Nature.” The relationship of autarky to the sustainability of systems on a global scale is considered in light of Cynic and Stoic cosmopolitanism and virtue ethics. The relationship of subsistence to sustainability is illuminated by Cynic practice and grounded in the modern concept of “appropriate technology.” The Stoic doctrine of oikeiōsis (“proprioception”) is presented as an early instance of an “environmental ethics” that still speaks to the manifold relationships that human beings have to one another and that our species has to the rest of the natural world.

In an analysis that brings together literary, historical, and linguistic perspectives, this chapter examines similarities and differences in the ways that Plutarch and Pliny discuss (or avoid discussing) patronage among elites, asking what the divergences can tell us about the limits of cultural sharing between Greeks and Romans during the early empire. This chapter puts Plutarch’s and Pliny’s silences about elite dependency and interdependency into dialogue with one another by comparing their treatments of closely related topics such as inequality, hierarchy, and obligation. While both authors write openly about inequality and are aware of its social effects, Plutarch is far more concerned than his Roman counterpart about its potentially disruptive results. Likewise, Pliny is markedly more open than Plutarch about ties of obligation among elites. Many factors contribute to these differences, but the most important for this study are the greater reification of obligation in the Latin language and self-conscious cultural differentiation on the part of Greeks within the Roman empire. The chapter’s final section delves deeper into these issues, examining how each author reinforces his larger cultural priorities in respect of unequal friendship and reciprocity through his use of Homeric exempla.

Chapter 7 examines smart contracts’ ability to self-perform, self-enforce, and self-remedy and the remaining applicability of contract law and contract remedies. Smart contracts (coupled with blockchain technology) have created visions of self-executing, self-enforcing, and self-remedying contracts that eliminate the need for courts or arbitral tribunals to apply contract law to disputes. The theory goes that, since the possibility of breach is eliminated in such contracts, contract remedies become unnecessary.

Chapter 5 discusses the evidence presented in the preceding four chapters and its overall significance for the understanding of the development of Egypt during the Third Intermediate Period. The chapter discusses a series of interconnected characteristics identified within Third Intermediate Period culture and society which relate to the political and economic power of regions, the nucleation of both settlements and people, self-sufficiency at a collective and individual level, defence, both physical and spiritual, regionality in terms of settlement development and material culture, and finally elite emulation through objects. These characteristics are also discussed in association with the themes of continuity and change/transition compared with the previous New Kingdom, and also within aspects of the (Egyptian) north and (Libyan) south socio-cultural and socio-geographical divide.