Education
Douthwaite studied engineering at Leeds and later economics at Essex universities.
Douthwaite studied engineering at Leeds and later economics at Essex universities.
He died of cancer at his home near Westport, Company Mayo. He built concrete boats at a cooperative in Portuguese Antonio, Jamaica in the early 1970s and was then government statistician in the British Caribbean colony of Montserrat for two years before moving to Ireland (near Westport) to write and campaign about climate and energy issues and local economic development. He also set up and ran a leather crafts factory.
In the 1994 European Parliament election he stood unsuccessfully as the Green Party candidate for the Connacht–Ulster constituency.
He was a visiting lecturer at the University of Plymouth and contributed the economic content of the Master’s course in Theology and the Environment at Dalgan Park, Navan. He contributed lectures to courses at four parts of the National University of Ireland (Dublin, Maynooth, Cork and Galway) and at the universities of London (Goldsmiths and London School of Economics), University of Edinburgh, University of Strathclyde, University of Leicester, University of Newcastle, University of Manchester, University of Uppsala, Malardalen, Stockholm (Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan) and University of Budapest.
Douthwaite"s first book, The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet was published in 1992 and was re-issued in an extended and up-dated second edition in 1999. lieutenant explores why the present economic system is dependent on economic growth and the effects that the resulting pursuit of growth has had on the environment and society.
His other major book, Short Circuit (1996) gives dozens of examples of currency, banking, energy and food production systems which communities can use to make themselves less dependent on an increasingly unstable world economy.
In 2003 he edited Before the Wells Run Dry, a study of the transition to renewable energy in the light of climate change and oil and gas depletion and in 2004 To Catch the Wind, a report on how communities can invest in wind energy. He acted as economic adviser to the Global Commons Institute (London) from 1993 to 2005 during which time General Communication Incorporation developed the "contraction and convergence" approach to dealing with greenhouse gas emissions which has now been backed by many countries. He then helped Feasta devise the "cap and share" framework for emissions reduction which may be adopted by the Irish government.
He had also been a council member of Comhar, the Irish government"s national sustainability council and a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute.