Par Carolinedemonstera
Ecocroissance is a French-born concept that questions the myth of infinite economic growth in a finite living world.
Rooted in ecological reality and developed through concrete entrepreneurial practice, Ecocroissance proposes a model of growth that accepts limits, values biodiversity, and places responsibility at its core.
This concept is articulated by Caroline, founder of Passionplants, a cooperative marketplace dedicated to rare plants, artisanship, and the protection of living systems.
Ecocroissance does not seek to replace existing economic theories, nor does it offer a universal solution. Instead, it opens a space for reflection and action, where economic activity is no longer disconnected from the biological, ethical, and collective conditions that make life possible.
In a time marked by ecological collapse, resource exhaustion, and social fragmentation, Ecocroissance invites a fundamental question: how can we continue to grow without destroying the living foundations that sustain us?
1. Why “Ecocroissance” Is Not Translated
Ecocroissance is intentionally not translated.
This choice is neither aesthetic nor symbolic — it is conceptual.
Existing economic vocabulary already offers multiple terms to address the ecological crisis: green growth, sustainable development, degrowth, circular economy. Each of these notions carries valuable insights, but each also reveals limits. Some focus on technological optimization, others on reduction, others on efficiency within existing frameworks. None fully address the tension between growth and the living world as a shared ethical responsibility.
Ecocroissance was coined to inhabit this unresolved space.
The term brings together two forces often presented as incompatible: growth and ecology. Not to reconcile them artificially, but to hold them in dialogue. Ecocroissance does not deny growth, nor does it glorify it. It asks instead: what kind of growth is compatible with life, and under what conditions?
Translating the word would immediately anchor it to pre-existing narratives. Green growth suggests continuity with industrial expansion. Degrowth implies a necessary retreat. Ecocroissance proposes neither acceleration nor collapse, but orientation. It shifts the question from quantity to quality, from performance to responsibility, from abstraction to living systems.
Keeping the French term also matters because Ecocroissance is not a universal formula. It emerged from a specific context: lived entrepreneurial practice, ecological engagement, and a European cultural relationship to limits, care, and collective responsibility. Naming the concept in its original language preserves its situated nature, while allowing it to circulate, evolve, and be interpreted elsewhere.
Ecocroissance is therefore not a label to be adopted, but a concept to be explored.
It invites translation through practice rather than through words.
2. The Limits of Dominant Economic Narratives
For decades, dominant economic narratives have been structured around a single assumption: growth is both necessary and inherently positive. Whether framed as progress, development, competitiveness, or innovation, growth is presented as the primary indicator of collective success.
Yet this assumption increasingly collides with reality.
The living world operates within finite boundaries. Soils regenerate slowly. Water cycles are fragile. Biodiversity, once lost, is forever. Economic systems, however, continue to rely on models that treat these limits as external constraints rather than central conditions. As a result, ecological damage is often framed as a side effect to be corrected later, rather than as a signal that the model itself is misaligned with life.
Gross Domestic Product remains the dominant metric of success, despite its inability to distinguish between what sustains life and what degrades it. Destruction, extraction, and repair are all counted as positive contributions as long as they generate monetary flow. Care, regeneration, and preservation — essential activities for living systems — remain largely invisible.
In response, alternative narratives have emerged. Some emphasize technological innovation as a solution, promising decoupling between growth and ecological impact. Others advocate for reduction, restraint, or withdrawal from growth altogether. These perspectives have expanded the debate, but they often remain trapped in a binary opposition: grow or shrink, accelerate or stop.
Ecocroissance begins from a different observation. The problem is not growth alone, but unexamined growth — growth disconnected from biological realities, ethical responsibility, and collective consequence. When growth becomes an end in itself, it loses orientation. It no longer asks what it serves, whom it benefits, or what it consumes.
What is missing from dominant narratives is not data, but relationship. Relationship to time, to territory, to non-human life, and to future generations. Economic systems are treated as abstract machines, rather than as processes embedded within living ecosystems.
By exposing these limits, Ecocroissance does not seek to replace one dominant narrative with another. It proposes instead a shift in perspective: from expansion to coherence, from optimization to care, from accumulation to responsibility.
3. What Ecocroissance Actually Proposes
Ecocroissance does not propose a new economic system to be imposed, replicated, or standardized. It proposes a reorientation — a way of redefining growth by anchoring it in the conditions that make life possible.
Rather than offering abstract principles, Ecocroissance articulates three interconnected dimensions: limits, living systems, and collective responsibility.
1. Growth With Boundaries
In Ecocroissance, limits are not perceived as obstacles, but as structural realities.
Living systems function within boundaries: biological, temporal, territorial. Ignoring these limits does not produce freedom, but fragility. Economic growth that exceeds ecological thresholds creates short-term gains at the cost of long-term collapse.
Ecocroissance proposes growth that:
- respects biological regeneration cycles
- acknowledges finite resources
- integrates ethical thresholds alongside economic ones
Boundaries provide orientation. They define what is viable, what is responsible, and what can endure. Growth without limits is directionless; growth with limits becomes intentional.
2. Growth Rooted in Living Systems
Ecocroissance places the living world at the center of economic reflection, not as a resource, but as a reference.
Plants, ecosystems, and natural cycles demonstrate forms of growth that are neither linear nor extractive. They grow through adaptation, cooperation, resilience, and slowness. They stop when conditions are no longer favorable. They regenerate rather than accumulate.
By observing living systems, Ecocroissance values:
- cycles over constant expansion
- resilience over performance
- care over extraction
This perspective does not romanticize nature. It recognizes that economic activity is embedded in ecological systems and must remain compatible with their functioning.
3. Growth as a Collective Process
Ecocroissance rejects the idea that growth is an individual achievement detached from its social and ecological context.
Economic activity always relies on shared infrastructures, shared ecosystems, and shared consequences. Growth, therefore, cannot be evaluated solely through individual profit or isolated success.
Ecocroissance emphasizes:
- cooperative and decentralized models
- shared responsibility and redistribution
- accountability toward both human and non-human stakeholders
Growth becomes a collective process when its benefits and costs are acknowledged, distributed, and assumed together.
4. An Oriented Form of Growth
Ecocroissance does not define growth by scale, speed, or volume.
It defines growth by coherence.
A growing activity is one that:
- strengthens living systems rather than weakening them
- sustains social and ecological relationships
- remains accountable to its long-term impacts
Growth is no longer measured by how much is produced, but by how well life is sustained.
5. Ecocroissance in Practice: A Living Example
Ecocroissance is not an abstract framework developed in isolation. It emerged through lived experience, experimentation, and the concrete challenges of building an economic activity within ecological constraints.
Passionplants, a cooperative marketplace dedicated to rare plants and artisanship, offers a tangible illustration of how Ecocroissance can take form in practice. Not as a model to replicate, but as a situated experiment shaped by real-world limits.
Rather than pursuing rapid expansion or volume-driven growth, Passionplants was designed with intentional boundaries. Growth is deliberately moderated in order to preserve trust, quality, and ecological coherence. Sellers are identified and verified, favoring accountability over anonymity. This choice reduces scale but strengthens relationships.
Economic value is not extracted without return. A portion of the platform’s commission is redistributed toward biodiversity protection and animal welfare initiatives. This redistribution is not framed as compensation, but as recognition: economic activity relies on living systems and must contribute to their preservation.
Passionplants also resists certain industrial logics dominant in the plant trade. Mass-produced practices that prioritize speed and uniformity over resilience are consciously avoided. Preference is given to slow cultivation, responsible sourcing, and human-scale production, even when these choices limit short-term profitability.
These decisions are neither perfect nor final. They evolve through constraints, feedback, and adjustment. Ecocroissance does not demand purity; it requires consistency.
What matters is not the absence of contradiction, but the willingness to remain accountable to the living conditions that make economic activity possible. In this sense, Passionplants functions less as a success story than as a continuous negotiation between growth, care, and responsibility.
Ecocroissance lives precisely in this tension — not as an ideal to reach, but as a practice to sustain.
6. Ecocroissance as a Cultural and Ethical Shift
Beyond economics, Ecocroissance implies a cultural transformation. It questions not only how we produce and exchange, but how we relate to time, care, and the living world.
Modern economic systems are built on acceleration. Speed is equated with efficiency, expansion with success, and permanence with weakness. In this context, slowness is perceived as failure, and limits as threats. Ecocroissance challenges this cultural conditioning by reintroducing time as a meaningful dimension rather than a variable to be optimized.
Living systems do not grow endlessly or uniformly. They grow in cycles, pauses, and adaptations. They respond to conditions rather than forcing outcomes. By aligning economic activity with these rhythms, Ecocroissance restores legitimacy to slowness, patience, and attention — qualities often marginalized in dominant narratives.
At its ethical core, Ecocroissance repositions care as an economic value. Care for ecosystems, for people, for non-human life, and for future generations. This care is not sentimental; it is structural. It recognizes that fragility is not a defect, but a condition of life, and that responsibility emerges precisely from interdependence.
Ecocroissance also invites a shift in how success is perceived. Instead of celebrating accumulation, visibility, or domination, it values coherence, durability, and relational balance. Success becomes the capacity to sustain meaningful activity without degrading the conditions that support it.
This perspective resonates with feminist ethics, ecological thought, and indigenous and relational worldviews, without appropriating them or claiming universality. Ecocroissance does not seek to merge all traditions into a single doctrine. It acknowledges plurality, situated knowledge, and the necessity of context.
Ultimately, Ecocroissance proposes a cultural reorientation:
from control to attention,
from extraction to relationship,
from abstraction to presence.
It suggests that economic transformation cannot occur without a parallel transformation in values — a redefinition of what we consider desirable, legitimate, and worth sustaining.
7. Why Ecocroissance Matters Now
We are living through a turning point rather than a simple crisis.
Ecological disruption, biodiversity collapse, resource depletion, and social fragmentation are no longer distant projections. They are present conditions shaping everyday life, economic decisions, and political tensions. What once appeared as isolated warning signals has converged into a systemic reality.
At the same time, dominant economic narratives show signs of exhaustion. The promise that growth alone will resolve inequality, instability, and ecological damage is increasingly questioned, not only by activists or researchers, but by citizens, entrepreneurs, and institutions facing tangible limits.
This moment is not defined solely by what is collapsing, but by what is no longer convincing.
Technological optimism, while valuable, struggles to compensate for the scale and speed of degradation. Efficiency gains are often offset by increased consumption. Environmental policies, when disconnected from structural economic change, remain corrective rather than transformative. The gap between ecological urgency and economic inertia continues to widen.
Ecocroissance matters now because it addresses this gap without resorting to denial or fatalism.
It does not assume that collapse is inevitable, nor that innovation alone will suffice. It begins instead with a simple acknowledgment: economic activity is embedded in living systems, and these systems have limits that cannot be negotiated indefinitely.
This historical moment demands concepts capable of holding complexity. Not slogans, not promises of painless transition, but frameworks that accept tension, contradiction, and responsibility. Ecocroissance offers such a framework by refusing both blind acceleration and total withdrawal.
What makes this period a turning point is precisely the coexistence of urgency and possibility. Old models persist, but their legitimacy erodes. New practices emerge, but lack shared language and structure. Ecocroissance contributes a name, a direction, and a space of articulation for these emerging realities.
It does not claim to provide answers for all contexts. It offers a way to ask better questions — questions grounded in life, limits, and collective consequence.
In this sense, Ecocroissance is not a response to crisis alone.
It is a response to transition.
8. A Living Concept, Not a Closed Theory
Ecocroissance is not a finished theory, nor a doctrine to be adopted or applied uniformly. It is a living concept, shaped by practice, reflection, and dialogue.
It emerged from concrete experience rather than abstraction, and it continues to evolve through experimentation, constraint, and adaptation. As contexts change, Ecocroissance must remain responsive — not by dissolving its principles, but by testing them against reality.
This openness is intentional. Closed systems tend to prioritize coherence over relevance. Ecocroissance chooses the opposite: relevance grounded in coherence with living systems. It accepts contradiction as a signal for adjustment, not as a failure to be concealed.
Ecocroissance does not seek consensus. It invites participation.
Participation from entrepreneurs, artisans, farmers, creators, researchers, and citizens who recognize that economic activity cannot remain detached from ecological and social conditions. Participation that takes the form of practice, not adherence; contribution, not replication.
The strength of Ecocroissance lies not in its capacity to scale rapidly, but in its ability to remain rooted, adaptable, and accountable. It values continuity over domination, depth over reach, and responsibility over performance.
In this sense, Ecocroissance is less a model to implement than a direction to inhabit.
A direction that asks, continuously and collectively:
How can our ways of growing remain compatible with the living world that sustains us?
Author’s Note
This article is part of an ongoing body of work on Ecocroissance, developed by Caroline, founder of Passionplants.
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