Vlad Bunea
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Degrowth of Humans and Sheep follows Harding C., an insurance clerk struck by lightning while rescuing a sheep, who begins inexplicably to shrink. He is not alone. A disparate cast of characters — industrialists, bankers, scientists, and ecologists — find themselves miniaturised and forced to build a new society inside oak trees.
What unfolds is a darkly comic and philosophically rich allegory about ecological limits, capitalism, and what it means to live together. As the community debates how to organise itself — between an investment banker’s expansionist, hierarchical vision and an ecologist’s call for harmony with nature — the novel becomes a profound meditation on degrowth, human exceptionalism, and the possibility of another way.
Written in a peculiar, slightly experimental prose in the spirit of José Saramago and Camilo José Cela, this is a bold and original work that weaves speculative fiction with ecological and social critique.
“Rituals are discussions about the life of our gardens, of our fellow villagers, followed by a group walk around the village, when the designated poet of the day recites verse about life in nature, moral lessons from history and on occasion the religious professionals say sermons from their respective holy literature, in such a way that does not proselytize… their sermons are crafted so that they speak to the needs and dreams of shrunken humans living in Village, a very diverse bunch having to live under the same conditions, leaving no room for creating sects with competing interests. Perhaps this was the purpose of the shrinking, whether it came about by design or accident, to create a condition for humans to live together, to walk by the same rituals, to discover a path together.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vlad Bunea is an economist, novelist, essayist who lives in Toronto. He is the author of several works of fiction: The Urban Dictionary of Very Late Capitalism (2021), The Intimate Diary of Pope Francis the Second (2019), Gals, Gods, Guns: 100 very short stories (2017), Womb Town (2016), Snowstorm in Cuba (2015). He is a member of the Degrowth Research Circle at York University, and editor of The Sufficiency and Wellbeing Magazine. He writes at https://vladbunea.substack.com/
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