Discovering Degrowth
Climate change is often described as the issue of our time, and in many senses that is true. Beyond the coronavirus, it is one of the most urgent and threatening challenges humanity faces, but it is only one. The climate emergency is a symptom of a system where no country on Earth provides the opportunities for all of its citizens to thrive at the same time as operating within sensible ecological boundaries. The full result is multiple overlapping social and environmental crises happening right here in the present and looming on the horizon of the future.
Despite talks of a green recovery, it remains to be seen whether the wider shock of the pandemic and the subsequent reconstruction will provide the catalyst for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions or a fossil fuelled rebound back to business as usual (this hinges in part on the outcome of the US election). Coronavirus has also shown us how different problems are connected, from the biodiversity disaster that is linked to the origin of the virus, to the multiple forms of inequality that have determined its impacts. Looking beyond the decision for a green recovery there is another choice, of whether we want to emerge from the immediate pressure of the virus into a world where we lurch from one crisis to the next, treating the symptoms but never the causes.
It seems unlikely that we will succeed in pulling ourselves out of this free-fall without considering entirely different ways of living. One idea of this nature that is gaining increasing attention is degrowth — a concept and a movement that calls for ‘a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being’. It aims to replace our current competitive, extractive, consumer-focused economy with one based on stewardship, care, sufficiency and cooperation. In a bid to learn more about proposals that seek to holistically address the challenges humanity is facing, I have begun to read more about the thoughts and arguments surrounding degrowth. The following is the beginning of a distillation of thoughts and findings that I have encountered during the time that I have spent delving into the topic so far.
My snap judgement of degrowth was that it stood to block the noble aims of technological and scientific development and therefore human progress
A very simplistic, and often initial, interpretation of degrowth is as a strand of environmentalism that argues for shrinking the economy. Most people who hear this are taken aback at the idea and feel an immediate sense of resistance rise up against the concept. I certainly wasn’t enthusiastic about it when I first heard the term around 2012. At that time, I was a physics postgraduate doing scientific research under the belief that science and technology were the key elements to solving society’s most pressing challenges. My snap judgement of degrowth was that it stood to block the noble aims of technological and scientific development and therefore human progress. On reflection, my indignation arose because degrowth challenged concepts that were intertwined with my identity as a young scientist.
You don’t need to be an idealistic scientist to experience such feelings when confronted with the idea of degrowth. Almost all of us have lived our lives absorbing the idea that economic growth is a good thing. You would be hard pressed to find any news coverage that reports a growing economy in negative terms or vice versa. While few of us would claim to fully understand the economy, we know that when it slows down we could get a recession which is bad news for jobs and incomes.
In her famous last speech in the House of Commons as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher lambasted socialist idealsaimed at reducing inequality, suggesting instead that concentrating our efforts on high economic performance makes everyone better off regardless of the gap between rich and poor. Decades later, David Cameron and George Osborne won two elections based on the perverse idea of austerity, in which the public sector and welfare system was demolished supposedly in order to secure the long-term health of the economy. So wedded are we to the idea that our living standards depend on continued growth that many of us are apparently willing to sacrifice greater equality and our actual welfare in its name.
It is by no means only those on the right who place growth at the centre of their economic agenda. Mainstream left-wing and centre parties also lay claim to economic credibility, with rhetoric intended to assure voters that their commitment to greater fairness or equality makes them no less able to deliver a strong and growing economy (a stance that tellingly never quite seems to convince voters). They might believe that everyone should get a fairer slice of pie, but they want to make sure you know the pie will get bigger too.
Placing policies of economic growth on a pedestal is not done without justification. Since World War Two, we have measured our economies in terms of GDP (the total monetary value of all goods and services traded within an economy during a period of time). With data spanning decades, it is now clear that up to a point, countries with higher GDP generally perform better on many other indicators of progress such as life expectancy and child mortality. In short, growth appears to have brought us out of poverty and into a world of higher living standards. Depending on who you talk to, this is a success story for capitalism, innovation, the modern nation state or some combination of the above.
So why, years after initially being confronted by degrowth and rejecting it, have I now become interested in it?
The overwhelming consensus is that growth is good and without consciously deciding to, or indeed knowing much about it, I agreed. So why, years after initially being confronted by degrowth and rejecting it, have I now become interested in it?
A stream of overlapping realisations made me revisit degrowth. Probably the first was that science and technology alone will not save us from the challenges we face as a species. My naive optimism gave way to the knowledge that the direction of science is not a pre-determined path of discovery. Instead, like any human endeavour it is shaped by the landscape of power and intention at any point in time. The choices about what technologies are eventually deployed as solutions for real-world problems depend on many economic, social and political factors. In essence, I learnt that the broad aims of any society and the way that we organise ourselves to pursue them will determine the types of technology we get. Growth promises more innovation, but alone it says nothing about what kind.
Alongside this, I began to understand more about the wide range of impacts our energy and resource consumption can have. It is now widely understood that almost all products we produce, from sofas to smartphones, have effects on people and the planet somewhere along the line of their creation or use. This means that even technologies we class as sustainable will have negative impacts. In his book No Planet B, Mike Berners-Lee calculates that we can meet all of today’s electricity needs by covering a relatively small area of land in solar panels, but that if demand for energy continues to grow at today’s rate, then within three centuries we might need solar panels to cover all land on Earth. It is an oversimplified calculation that is full of assumptions, but nevertheless after hearing it, you can’t help but start to wonder about the downsides of even the most sustainable technologies when operated at massive scale.
Eventually I started to realise that my vague understanding of growth was also wrapped up in a sense of modernity. This is because the story of growth is intertwined with a broader narrative of progress that encompasses wealth, sophistication, liberal values and rationality, and stands in contrast to the simple, superstitious and stagnant poverty stricken lives of our ancestors. While many of these changes have coincided and may well be connected, using such a broad brush to paint a picture of progress conflates growth with many other phenomena and leads to a blurring of the lines between rising wealth and our identities as modern citizens. When growth gets criticised, it can feel less like a criticism of an economic regime and more of a wholesale rejection of our values and culture. Recognising this conflation helps us to separate out our identity and circumstances from the mechanism that got us here, and instead of leading us to knee-jerk reactions like my own, allows us to more dispassionately consider its advantages and disadvantages.
Other things I learnt about in the same period included the futility of GDP as an adequate measure of human welfare (a view that is shared by many mainstream economists), the need for equity in how we allocate the remaining carbon budget and the detrimental effects of consumerism on our mental health. None of these are evidence that we need degrowth, but all of this combined has been enough to shift my perspective and suggest that economic growth might not be the panacea it’s cracked up to be.
By catching glimmers of the growth vs. degrowth debate over time, I also began to realise that my initial impression was wrong. Degrowthers do not say we need to do less science, create less knowledge or stop developing sustainable technologies. It is not about decreasing GDP (although this is in part because they say we should largely abandon the metric) and it is definitely not about causing a devastating recession in pursuit of environmental security. Instead, it is about reducing the material throughput and energy consumption related to human activity in a controlled way, specifically in the parts of the world that are causing the most environmental destruction and depleting the most resources, and finding new ways to flourish as a civilisation. It is a valid and necessary critique of our current economic system that questions the mindless pursuit of economic growth, forcing us to consider what it is that we actually value.
There are of course many who come out explicitly against degrowth, including other groups that are motivated by environmental and social issues. Particularly vocal critics include ecomodernists who believe that we will be able to ‘decouple’ economic growth from the natural world through advanced technological innovations. Indeed, many of them would argue that this ‘green growth’ is beginning to happen already — a claim that is hotly contested by many studies. There is also a lot of difference of opinion among the broader post-growth community. For example, there is the school of ‘growth agnosticism’, which argues that we should focus on creating an economy which enables human prosperity within environmental limits, whether it is growing or not.
In this piece, I am not advocating for a particular point of view. There are many arguments for and against degrowth and although it has merits, I still have questions. I plan to explore the ins and outs of those in further detail later. Instead at this point, there are two important conclusions.
The first is that the debate that is created by a radical concept like degrowth is the kind of conversation we need to be having at every level in society. As the climate crisis deepens and the many other challenges approach rapidly, we need to be making the time and space for major discussions about the kind of transition that is needed to change the course that humanity is on. While most of us might not be economic or ecological experts who can design policy, we can all have honest and open discussions about the fundamentals — what kind of world we want to live in, how much wealth we need, what we want from technology, how we balance the needs of today with those of future generations and more. We need massive change and the process of figuring it out needs to happen everywhere from our living rooms to our parliaments.
The second point to take away comes from reflecting on my own initial reaction to degrowth, and it is that to face the challenge before us we must channel openness and humility. Being unafraid of unfamiliarity is the only way we are going to chart our way towards a better future. We all have many assumptions about the world built up from our own experience and the messages we are exposed to during our lifetimes and are sometimes unaware of the conditioning that has happened to us. That’s normal, but when an idea disagrees with what we recognise as normality, it can often feel like it is attacking our common sense, political ideology or even personal identity, and we can become defensive. Learning to sit with and eventually get past that point of discomfort, by testing our assumptions and finding our own answers, is not just necessary for change but liberating for each of us as people.
There are a multitude of avenues to explore from here, from understanding what constitutes economic growth and the forces driving it to the political appeal of degrowth and the limits of society’s desires. Rather than seeking to treat the problems we face as separate and proposing technological and policy solutions, degrowth at least acknowledges the breadth and depth of the situation we face. It touches on hard realities of material and energy use, social constructs like money and power and the quest for what it means to live a good life. I look forward to sharing more notes from here.
Thanks to Eirini Malliaraki and Sarah Holliday for their thoughts and comments.
