I would like to suggest to add sustainability in all aspects to our preamble.
We have such a chapter in the German program preamble where we define sustainability as acting in all regards, be it with resources, environment, society, education, economy, always with the factor of sustainability in mind. Behavior that is not sustainable will eventually destabilize and destroy a society, so we should avoid it.
I agree on that about sustainability – nice if you comment on my proposal about a common presentation - how we came to be - also,
Do you happen to have or know where to find some contact list for all the european pirate parties?
Unfortunately not. As a party of the digital age we are remarkably bad at providing the necessary infrastructure for networking 
But since this is communicated via the PPEU I hope that most people will be reached somehow. For Germany I will try to push the info into the right channels.
Tangentially related, is degrowth also part of “sustainability”?
I prefer to talk about “optimization”, but I think is easier to everybody to understand if I use “degrowth”.
I think degrowth is a receipe for desaster. So no, it is not sustainable at all.
I think that the idea of growth always will be attractive, but as we are starting to se that a striving for undifferentiated economic growth regardless of what accelerates the circulation of money is not very fruitful, we could talk about what needs to grow and why. Generally, things can grow without more money being spent, such as ourselves, and the communities ways of interacting, social responsibility, creativity in society and other inner qualities, that have been overlooked in the quest for money circulation. But some material sectors need also to grow, such as repairs, recycling, second hand, sharing economy, energy efficiency etc.
And definitely the free internet!
Some things will have to relax a bit, but on general degrowth , I agree it is not a very useful concept.
In the last years we have seen a decoupling of growth and environmental impact. Circular economy, energy and material efficiency and replacement of materials by bio based resources are lowering the impact.
This is a path we should push for.
Degrowth on the other hand would risk the loss of technology we will need to counter climate change and adapt to the consequences we can not avoid.
What the supporters of degrowth do not account for is the complexity of supply chains and knowledge chains for modern technology. We would have to go back to a pre industrial population and technology level to sufficiently lower our impact on the environment, just cutting back a bit would more likely throw us into the mid 20th century.
So this definitely is not an option. Besides the fact that it is really hard to find people who will applaud a lowering of standards.
I suppose the internet is at the centre of that? Which we definitely promote, based on its “good ol’ form” at least. “Reasonable digitalisation”. I think the important thing is to exchange the purely quantative discourse for a more qualitative one. As you wrote, not talking about “lower standards” but other standards than hunting maximal quantities of everything. The unmeasurable but easily experienced quality of life in all its aspects.
The internet would be a collateral damage of degrowth.
Cutting back on technology and production scaling through quantity will kill modern electronics.
Many people have no idea how complex the whole international “machine” is that makes electronics. The actual production of semiconductors is based on applied quantum physics. The investments necessary to make this technology available work only with mass production. Building a state of the art semiconductor plant costs 10-20 billion Euros and there is only a single company in the world that is capable of building the necessary machines (ASML in Netherlands).
There are many specialized companies that supply some aspects for the whole process, i.e. there is a company in Berlin that is cutting edge in wafer stages, those are basically the tablets on which silicon wafers rest while being processed. Due to the fine structure of modern semiconductors even the slightest deviation of the wafer stage will deform the wafer and cause a production failure. So you need the wafer stages to be smooth within better than 1 nanometer.
If degrowth is cutting into the industry then investments in such technology will drop, resulting in skyrocketing costs, loss of know how and eventually collapse of the technology chain.
And collapse of the technology does not mean stepping back to maybe the 1990s, it means going back basically to start. Other industries would follow, so we would fall back by at least half a century.
We are simply too many people on this planet for such an experiment and the coming climate change is going to cause problems we can not solve without high tech.
So no degrowth with me.
I agree, no talking of degrowth, but also no talking of (unspecified) economic growth of anything. You know the old Einstein saying about finding solutions (in this case merely words/concepts) on another level integrating the former. We want some things to grow (the creative exchange on the internet, the recycling companies etc etc) some things to fade away (for example all costs related to crime, waste, depressions etc)
i love this suggestion. And will look for more Pirate based ideas!
