I would like to preface that I am not indigenous and I am writing from what I have learned from indigenous comrades

Since dawn of capitalism and colonialism, there has been the story of growth and degrowth. For many leftists in western world, growth is unchallenged, they want to keep consuming, keep making more and more. Whenever degrowth comes into question people who hate green capitalism start talking about “socialist growth” citing China’s example or North Korea’s example when none of these places are without faults of their own. Many leftists haven’t grown out of earn-and-spend model of capitalism where if you have enough money then you don’t have any moral responsibility to the world and you can consumption whatever you want, for many this becomes doing “enough work”. Take a smartphone, computer, or gen ai, crypto, or anything that today is constituted by capitalism and exists for it, many just want a better and better computer without knowing what they’ll do with so much computing power, many want chatbots not knowing eventually we might as well run out of silicon to make chips that run these machines because they need so much compute to do next to nothing and all while polluting the environment and consuming resources like industrial meat farms. Many talk about renewable energy to fuel their “socialist growth” but I don’t think they know what happens when you do too much of anything, even the renewables won’t save world after a point what will they do then? Destroy the sun to create energy on Mars? Why is this the case especially in the west? We don’t see comrades from other parts of the world talking about things like this, they’re more considerate about what they are going to do, I mentioned China earlier, Chinese closed mines which was harming the environment of the surrounding area, Chinese policy carries many important elements of caring for nature around them despite many contradictions relating to consumerism especially. I believe many leftists haven’t untangles their mind from a colonial epistemology, to them nature is science and can be reduced to empirical science not something a shaman experiences, these leftists can’t support colonization of other people (though many still do) so they have a new frontier to conquer, nature and other beings in it, these leftists are still in that colonial thinking where nature and animals in it are separate and different than humans and it is duty of humans of conquer these animals and nature and thus instead of working with nature they want to make their own life as better as possible at expense of future generations and current natural world. When these people talk about degrowth it is about how they and only they can experience a curated version of nature which you can imagine produces horrendous results but that’s the colonial world. Colonialism is the primary contradiction in this world, many want to reap fruits of colonialism’s assualt on nature in a socialist manner instead of going beyond colonialism, beyond imperial thinking.