Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Unlike the Green New Deal, however, degrowth isn’t a policy platform – it’s more of a movement, or what participants call an “umbrella concept,” bringing together a wide diversity of ideas and social and environmental justice struggles.
Reality is complex, what is possible and what not is hard to know, and the roads to ecosocialism (or however else you might want to call an egalitarian and sustainable future) are many.
But by systematically presenting a degrowth theory from one particular perspective – an ecological economics perspective with anti-capitalist leanings – the book is a welcome addition to degrowth scholarship.
Our obsession with economic growth is making our task much more difficult than it needs to be. It’s like we’ve chosen to fight this battle facing uphill, with one hand tied behind our back.
Post-growth policy begins with the very principle that – as the Yellow Vests themselves have pointed out – should inform all ecological policy: greater equality. Indeed, the post-growth movement has long argued that equality can be a substitute for growth.
Everything about the lifestyle we are accustomed to, as rich westerners, has to change. If we let that sink in for a little bit that is when the real disruption comes in, giving way to a radical shift in perspective. So, where do we go from here?
It turns out, degrowth is a lot of things: a criticism, a proposal, a hypothesis, a provocation, a conversation, a deceleration, a downscaling, a reimagining, a project, a lens, a movement, a set of practices, an invitation to dream of worlds beyond growth.
Considering the large ecological debts of the Global North and the related structural inequalities of power and wealth, it can be doubted that a one-fits-all solution such as the SDGs helps bridge the existing extreme inequalities between countries.
So here’s what we can do. Let’s not waste time speculating. Let’s impose a legal limit on annual resource use and waste – something that de-growthers have been demanding for a long time – and tighten that limit year-on-year until we are back down to planetary boundaries.
I reject the fetishization of GDP as an objective in the existing economy, so it would make little sense for me to focus on GDP as the objective of a degrowth economy. Wanting to cut GDP is as senseless as wanting to grow it.
But advocates of the circular economy rarely grapple with a central truth: the circular economy depends on a significant and sustained period of economic degrowth. Instead they tend to focus on innovations that deliver efficiencies and unlock new economic opportunities.
I recently wrote a post criticizing ecomodernism as “magical thinking”. I argued that it ignores key scientific studies on the unviability of absolute decoupling in order to advance an ecologically reckless insistence on growth. Not surprisingly, ecomodernists were not particularly happy about this.
