Less is More

Highlights

PREFACE: By Kofi Mawuli Klu and Rupert Read of XR

we are in a common crisis with differentiated effects. And we must be aware that some governments will respond with worsening environmental racism and hidden agendas of eco-fascism.

PREFACE: By Kofi Mawuli Klu and Rupert Read of XR

As XR’s greatest supporter, Greta Thunberg, most memorably put it, speaking earlier this year to global ‘elites’: ‘We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of endless economic growth. How dare you!’

PREFACE: By Kofi Mawuli Klu and Rupert Read of XR

The coronavirus crisis showed us all who the key workers are, worldwide: our medics, our food-growers, our distributors, and so on. If we refocused society around need rather than artificially-created wants — Jason sets out powerfully how distorted our lives are by advertising, reminding us that basically that is all that titans such as Facebook and Google are — we could recalibrate a world where together we could become more satisfied, and less separated.

PREFACE: By Kofi Mawuli Klu and Rupert Read of XR

There is hope here again of achieving a beautiful coincidence: what we need to do to survive is the same as what we need to do to have better lives.

PREFACE: By Kofi Mawuli Klu and Rupert Read of XR

In the early chapters of this book, Jason tells the terrifying history of capitalism. It’s so grim that one might want to deny it. But it’s true. And we need to face the truth, to face up to the reality underlying the climatic and ecological devastation we are enduring. When Jason tells us all the hard truth that ‘GDP-growth is an index of the welfare of capitalism, not of the welfare of humans’, we need to listen.

PREFACE: By Kofi Mawuli Klu and Rupert Read of XR

The movement to evolve beyond our model of growth-at-all-costs must be born in solidarity with the South. It must be about decolonization and about reparations, or it has missed the point.

PREFACE: By Kofi Mawuli Klu and Rupert Read of XR

We in this society are inclined to always imagine more technological innovations as the way to solve our problems. But why are we not equally eager to imagine more social innovations too? It shows a great poverty of imagination to stop with capitalism, to assume that it is the only game in town. No! We are creative beings. We can imagine bigger than that. We can innovate in all sorts of ways.

PREFACE: By Kofi Mawuli Klu and Rupert Read of XR

XR is succeeding so far because an increasing number of people are finally willing to face their fears, their despair even, about (the likelihood of) collapse — and to commit to doing something big about it. You can help that process. Join the growing direct honesty about the trajectory our societies are on. And then join the rebellion against that pseudo-destiny, our current path toward self-destruction

PREFACE: By Kofi Mawuli Klu and Rupert Read of XR

To achieve that vision – and to avert the alternative. And that necessarily involves radical action to transform the status quo rapidly, in ways that go beyond the capacity of normal politics.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

The ecological crisis happening around us is much more serious than we generally assume. It’s not just one or two discrete issues, something that could be solved with a targeted intervention here and there while everything else carries on as normal. What’s happening is the breakdown of multiple, interconnected systems – systems on which human beings are fundamentally dependent.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

It seemed like a good idea at the time: transfer land to big companies, rip up any hedges and trees and plant it all with a single crop, spray it from aeroplanes and harvest with giant combines. Beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, whole landscapes were remade according to the totalitarian logic of industrial profit, most of it for livestock feed, with the goal of maximising extraction. They called it the Green Revolution but, from the perspective of ecology, there was nothing ‘green’ about it. By reducing complex ecological systems to a single dimension, everything else became invisible. Nobody noticed what was happening to the insects and the birds. Or even to the soil itself.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

UN scientists have found that 40% of the planet’s soils are now seriously degraded. Agricultural soil is being lost more than 100 times faster than it is being formed.6 In 2018, a scientist from Japan made the effort to sort through evidence on earthworm populations from around the world. He found that on industrial farms earthworm biomass had plunged by a dramatic 83%. And as the earthworms died off, the organic content of soils collapsed by more than half. Our soils are being turned into lifeless dirt.7

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Recent figures show that around 85% of global fish stocks are now depleted or facing collapse. Haddock have fallen to 1% of their former volume; halibut, those magnificent giants of the sea, to one-fifth of 1%. Fish catches are beginning to decline around the world, for the first time in recorded history.10 In the Asia-Pacific, fishery yields are on track to hit zero by 2048.11

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Most of this is due to aggressive overfishing: just as with agriculture, corporations have turned fishing into an act of warfare, using industrial megatrawlers to scrape the seafloor in their hunt for increasingly scarce fish, hauling up hundreds of species in order to catch the few that have ‘market value’, turning coral gardens and colourful ecosystems into lifeless plains in the process.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Oceans are also being affected by climate change. More than 90% of the heat from global warming gets absorbed into the sea.12 As oceans heat up, nutrient cycles are being disrupted, food chains broken, and vast stretches of marine habitat are dying off.13 At the same time, industrial emissions are causing oceans to become more acidic. This is a problem, because ocean acidification has driven mass extinction events a number of times in the past. It played a major role in the last extinction event, 66 million years ago, when ocean pH dropped by 0.25. That small shift was enough to wipe out 75% of marine species. On our present emissions trajectory, ocean pH will drop by 0.4 by the end of the century.14 We know what’s about to happen. We can see it coming

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

marine animals are disappearing at twice the rate that land animals are.15 Vast coral ecosystems are being bleached into dead, colourless skeletons.16 Divers have reported that even remote reefs once teeming with life are now plagued by the stench of decomposing flesh.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

This is the thing about ecology: everything is interconnected. It’s difficult for us to grasp how this works, because we’re used to thinking of the world in terms of individual parts rather than complex wholes. In fact, that’s even how we’ve been taught to think of ourselves – as individuals. We’ve forgotten how to pay attention to the relationships between things. Insects necessary for pollination; birds that control crop pests, grubs and worms essential to soil fertility; mangroves that purify water; the corals on which fish populations depend: these living systems are not ‘out there’, disconnected from humanity. On the contrary: our fates are intertwined. They are, in a real sense, us.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

We tend to think about climate change as primarily a matter of temperature. Many people are not particularly concerned about this, because our everyday experience with temperature is that a few degrees doesn’t really make that much of a difference. But temperature is just the beginning – it’s the loose thread on the sweater.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

So far we’ve only barely breached 1°C over pre-industrial levels. On our current trajectory we are on track to reach a rise of up to 4°C by the end of the century. If we factor in countries’ pledges to cut emissions under the Paris Agreement – which are voluntary and non-binding – global temperatures will still rise by as much as 3.3°C. These are not incremental changes. Humans have never lived on such a planet. That deadly heatwave that struck Europe in 2003? That will be a normal summer. Spain, Italy and Greece will turn into deserts, with climates more like the Sahara than the Mediterranean as we know it. The Middle East will be cast into permanent drought.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

As a handy rule of thumb, scientists say that for every degree we heat the planet, the yields of staple cereal crops will decline by 10%.22 On our present trajectory, that means losses of up to 30% this century. In some cases it will be worse: Indian wheat and US corn could plummet by as much as 60%

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warming more than 2 degrees is likely to cause ‘sustained food supply disruptions globally’. As one of the lead authors of the report put it: ‘The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing.’ Add this to soil depletion, pollinator die-off and fishery collapse, and we’re looking at spiralling food emergencies.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

As migration pressures build, politics are becoming more polarised, fascist movements are on the march, and international alliances are beginning to fray. Factor in escalating displacement due to famines, storms and rising seas, plus dwindling arable farmland, and there’s no predicting what conflagrations might occur.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Ecosystems are complex networks. They can be remarkably resilient under stress, but when certain key nodes begin to fail, knock-on effects reverberate through the web of life. This is how mass extinction events unfolded in the past. It’s not the external shock that does it – the meteor or the volcano: it’s the cascade of internal failures that follows. It can be difficult to predict how this kind of thing plays out. Things like tipping points and feedback loops make everything much riskier than it otherwise might be. This is what makes climate breakdown so concerning.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Take the polar ice caps, for example. Ice functions like a giant reflector, bouncing light from the sun back out into space. This is known as the albedo effect. But as ice sheets disappear and reveal the darker landscapes and oceans beneath, all that solar energy gets absorbed and radiated as heat into the atmosphere. This drives yet further warming, which causes the ice to melt even faster – completely irrespective of human emissions. In the 1980s, Arctic sea ice covered an average of about 7 million square kilometres. As I write this it’s down to about 4 million.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Feedback loops affect forests, too. As the planet heats up, forests become drier and more vulnerable to fire. When forests burn they release carbon into the atmosphere, and we lose them as a sink for future emissions. This exacerbates global warming, but it also has a direct impact on rainfall. Forests literally produce rain. The Amazon, for instance, exhales some 20 billion tons of water vapour into the atmosphere every day, like an enormous river flowing invisibly into the sky. Much of it ends up raining back down onto the forest, but it also produces rain much further afield – across South America and even as far north as Canada. Forests are critical to our planet’s circulatory system; they are like giant hearts that pump life-giving water around the world.25 As forests die off, droughts become more common, and forests in turn become yet more vulnerable to fire. The speed at which this is happening is frightening. On our current trajectory, most rainforests will wither away into savannah before the end of this century.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

All of this complexity opens up real questions about our ability to control global temperatures. Some scientists worry we may not be able to ‘park’ temperature increases at 2 degrees, as the Paris Agreement assumes. If we heat to 2 degrees, we might trigger cascades that could spiral out of control and push the Earth into a permanent ‘hothouse state’. Temperatures could soar far above the target threshold, and we would be utterly powerless to stop it.27 In light of these risks, the only rational response is to do everything possible to keep warming to no more than 1.5°C. And that means cutting global emissions to zero much, much faster than anyone is presently planning.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

eco-facts carry a double message. On the one hand they cry out, urging us to wake up and act right now. But at the same time they imply that the trauma is not yet fully here – that there’s still time to avert disaster. This is what makes them so beguiling, so reassuring, and why we seem strangely to crave more of them. The danger of this is that we will all be lulled into waiting around for the facts to become more extreme. Once we reach that point, we tell ourselves, we’ll finally get around to doing something about it. But the ultimate eco-fact is never going to arrive. It’s never going to be good enough.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

We’re already in the middle of it. We are living in a world that is dying.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Even though we have known for nearly half a century that human civilisation itself is at stake, there has been no progress in arresting ecological breakdown. None. It is an extraordinary paradox. Future generations will look back on us and marvel at how we could have known exactly what was going on, in excruciating detail, and yet failed to solve the problem.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

What explains this inertia? Some will point to fossil fuel companies and the vice-like grip they have on our political systems. And certainly there is truth to this. Some of the larger companies, despite knowing about the dangers of climate breakdown long before it was part of the public debate, have bankrolled politicians who have either denied the science outright or sought to obstruct meaningful action whenever possible. It is in large part thanks to their efforts that the international climate treaties are not legally binding, for they have lobbied vigorously against such a move. And they have waged an extraordinarily successful disinformation campaign that for decades eroded public support for climate action, particularly in the United States, the one country that could feasibly lead a global transition.

Fossil fuel companies, and the politicians they have bought, bear significant responsibility for our predicament. But this alone doesn’t explain our failure to act. There’s something else – something deeper. Our addiction to fossil fuels, and the antics of the fossil fuel industry, is really just a symptom of a prior problem. What’s ultimately at stake is the economic system that has come to dominate more or less the entire planet over the past few centuries: capitalism.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

We have a tendency to describe capitalism with familiar, well-worn words like ‘markets’ and ‘trade’. But this isn’t quite accurate. Markets and traders were around for thousands of years before capitalism, and they are innocent enough on their own. What makes capitalism different from most other economic systems in history is that it’s organised around the imperative of constant expansion, or ‘growth’: ever-increasing levels of industrial extraction, production and consumption, which we measure as Gross Domestic Product (GDP).29 Growth is the prime directive of capital. Not growth for any particular purpose, mind you, but growth for its own sake. And it has a kind of totalitarian logic to it: every industry, every sector, every national economy must grow, all the time, with no identifiable end-point.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

This can be difficult to wrap our minds around. We tend to take the idea of growth for granted because it sounds so natural. And it is. All living organisms grow. But in nature there is a self-limiting logic to growth: organisms grow to a point of maturity, and then maintain a state of healthy equilibrium. When growth fails to stop – when cells keep replicating just for the sake of it – it’s because of a coding error, like what happens with cancer. This kind of growth quickly becomes deadly.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Under capitalism, global GDP needs to keep growing by at least 2% or 3% per year, which is the minimum necessary for large firms to make aggregate profits.30 That might seem like a small increment, but remember, it’s an exponential curve, and exponential curves have a way of sneaking up on us with astonishing speed. Three per cent growth means doubling the size of the global economy every twenty-three years, and then doubling it again from its already doubled state, and then again, and again. This might be OK if GDP were just plucked out of thin air. But it’s not. It is coupled to energy and resource use, and has been for the entire history of capitalism

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

As GDP grows, the global economy churns through more energy, resources and waste each year, to the point where it is now dramatically overshooting what scientists have defined as safe planetary boundaries, with devastating consequences for the living world.31

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

the ecological crisis is not being caused by everyone equally. This is a crucial point to grasp. As we will see in Chapter 2, low-income countries, and indeed most countries in the global South, remain well within their fair share of planetary boundaries. In fact, in many cases they need to increase energy and resource use in order to meet human needs. It’s high-income countries that are the problem here, where growth has become completely unhinged from any concept of need, and has long been vastly in excess of what is required for human flourishing.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Global ecological breakdown is being driven almost entirely by excess growth in high-income countries, and in particular by excess accumulation among the very rich, while the consequences hurt the global South, and the poor, disproportionately.32 Ultimately, this is a crisis of inequality as much as anything else.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

We know exactly what we need to do in order to avert climate breakdown. We need to mobilise a rapid rollout of renewable energy – a global Green New Deal – to cut world emissions in half within a decade and get to zero before 2050. Keep in mind that this is a global average target. High-income nations, given their greater responsibility for historical emissions, need to do it much more quickly, reaching zero by 2030.33 It is impossible to overstate how dramatic this is; it is the single most challenging task that humanity has ever faced.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

once we have 100% clean energy, what are we going to do with it? Unless we change how our economy works, we’ll keep doing exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: we’ll use it to power continued extraction and production, at an ever-increasing rate, placing ever-increasing pressure on the living world, because that’s what capitalism requires. Clean energy might help deal with emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion and mass extinction. A growth-obsessed economy powered by clean energy will still tip us into ecological disaster.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Capitalism is fundamentally dependent on growth. If the economy doesn’t grow it collapses into recession: debts pile up, people lose their jobs and homes, lives shatter. Governments have to scramble to keep industrial activity growing in a perpetual bid to stave off crisis. So we’re trapped. Growth is a structural imperative – an iron law. And it has ironclad ideological support: politicians on the left and right may bicker about how to distribute the yields of growth, but when it comes to the pursuit of growth itself they are united. There is no daylight between them. Growthism, as we might call it, stands as one of the most hegemonic ideologies in modern history. Nobody stops to question it.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

It is because of their commitment to growthism that our politicians find themselves unable to take meaningful action to stop ecological breakdown. We have dozens of ideas for how to fix the problem, but we dare not implement them because doing so might undermine growth. And in a growth-dependent economy, that cannot be allowed to happen. Instead, the very newspapers that carry harrowing stories about ecological collapse also report excitedly on how GDP is growing every quarter, and the very politicians who wring their hands about climate breakdown also call dutifully for more industrial growth every year. The cognitive dissonance is striking

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Some people try to reconcile this tension by leaning on the hope that technology will save us – that innovation will make growth ‘green’. Efficiency improvements will enable us to ‘decouple’ GDP from ecological impact so we can continue growing the global economy for ever without having to change anything about capitalism. And if this doesn’t work, we can always rely on giant geo-engineering schemes to rescue us in a pinch.

It’s a comforting fantasy. In fact, I once believed it myself. But when I began to peel back the layers of nice-sounding rhetoric, I realised that it is just that – a fantasy. I have been researching this for a number of years, in collaboration with colleagues in ecological economics, and in 2019 we published a review of existing evidence.36 I’ll explain the details in Chapter 3, but the conclusions boil down to this: ‘green growth’ is not a thing. It has no empirical support. These findings were an epiphany for me, and forced me to change my position. In an era of ecological emergency, we cannot afford to build policy around fantasies.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Technology is absolutely essential in the fight against ecological breakdown. We need all the efficiency improvements we can get. But scientists are clear that they will not be enough, on their own, to fix the problem. Why? Because in a growth-oriented economy, efficiency improvements that could help us reduce our impact are harnessed instead to advance the objectives of growth – to pull ever-larger swathes of nature into circuits of extraction and production. It’s not our technology that’s the problem. It’s growth.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Fredric Jameson once famously said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. This isn’t so surprising, really. After all, capitalism is all we know.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Even if we were to somehow put an end to it, what would happen afterwards? What would we replace it with? What would we do on the day after the revolution? What would we call it? Our capacity for thought – and even our language – stops at the boundaries of capitalism, and beyond lies a terrifying abyss.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

It would be naïve to underestimate the power of human creativity. So why is it that, when it comes to our economic system, we have so readily swallowed the line that capitalism is the only possible option and we shouldn’t even think about creating something better? Why are we so wedded to the dusty dogmas of this old sixteenth-century model, to the point of dragging it doggedly into a future for which it is manifestly unfit?

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

In 2017, an American college sophomore named Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in New York and posed a simple question to Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives at the time and one of the most powerful people in the world. He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine no longer support capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats, Pelosi’s party, could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a vision for an alternative economy.37

Pelosi was visibly taken aback. ‘I thank you for your question,’ she said, ‘but I’m sorry to say we’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.’

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

While most people may not describe themselves as anti-capitalist, survey results nonetheless show that large majorities question core tenets of capitalist economics. A YouGov poll in 2015 found that 64% of people in Britain believe capitalism is unfair. Even in the US, it’s as high as 55%. In Germany, a solid 77%. In 2020, a survey by the Edelman Trust Barometer showed that a majority of people around the world (56%) agree with the statement, ‘Capitalism does more harm than good’. In France it’s as high as 69%. In India it’s a staggering 74%.38 On top of this, fully three-quarters of people across all major capitalist economies say they believe corporations are corrupt.39

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

These sentiments become even stronger when the questions are framed in terms of growth. A poll conducted by Yale University in 2018 found that no fewer than 70% of Americans agree with the statement that ‘environmental protection is more important than growth’. And these results hold even in Republican states, including in the deep South. The results are lowest in Oklahoma, Arkansas and West Virginia, but even there an overwhelming majority of voters (64%) take this position.40 This completely upends longstanding assumptions about American attitudes towards the economy.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

‘Do you believe that environment should be made a priority even if doing so damages economic growth?’ Surely people would be hesitant to agree with this kind of trade-off. Yet in almost all cases, large majorities (between 55% and 70%) said yes. There were only two exceptions, where support fell just shy of 50%. We find similar results outside Western Europe and North America. A scientific review of surveys found that when people have to choose between environmental protection and growth, ‘environmental protection is prioritised in most surveys and countries’.41

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

A major consumer research study found that on average about 70% of people in middle- and high-income countries around the world believe that over-consumption is putting our planet and society at risk, that we should buy and own less, and that doing so would not compromise our happiness or well-being

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

In 2018, 238 scientists called on the European Commission to abandon GDP growth and focus on human well-being and ecological stability instead.43

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

For decades we’ve been told that we need growth in order to improve people’s lives. But it turns out this isn’t actually true. Beyond a certain point, which high-income countries have long since surpassed, the relationship between GDP and well-being completely breaks down. As we’ll see in Chapter 4, it’s not growth that matters; it’s how income and resources are distributed. And right now they are distributed very, very unequally

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

over the past 40 years, 28% of all new income from global GDP growth has gone to the richest 1% (all of whom are millionaires).45 This is astonishing, when you think about it. It means that nearly a third of all the labour we’ve rendered, all the resources we’ve extracted, and all the CO2 we’ve emitted over the past half-century has been done to make rich people richer.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Scientists have made it clear that the only feasible way to reverse ecological breakdown and keep global warming under 1.5°C, or even 2°C, is for high-income countries to actively slow down the mad pace of extraction, production and waste.46

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Reducing resource use removes pressure from ecosystems and gives the web of life a chance to knit itself back together, while reducing energy use makes it much easier for us to accomplish a rapid transition to renewables before dangerous tipping points begin to cascade.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Instead of mindlessly pursuing growth in every sector, whether or not we actually need it, we can decide what kinds of things we want to grow (sectors like clean energy, public healthcare, essential services, regenerative agriculture – you name it), and what sectors need to radically degrow (things like fossil fuels, private jets, arms and SUVs). We can also scale down the parts of the economy that are designed purely to maximise profits rather than to meet human needs, like planned obsolescence, where products are made to break down after a short time, or advertising strategies intended to manipulate our emotions and make us feel that what we have is inadequate.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

As we liberate people from the toil of unnecessary labour, we can shorten the working week to maintain full employment, distribute income and wealth more fairly, and invest in public goods like universal healthcare, education and affordable housing. As we’ll see in Chapter 5, all of this has been proven, over and over again, to have a powerful positive impact on people’s health and well-being. These are the keys to a flourishing society. The evidence is truly inspiring.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Let me emphasise that degrowth is not about reducing GDP. Of course, slowing down unnecessary extraction and production may mean that GDP grows more slowly, or stops growing, or even declines. And if so, that’s OK. Under normal circumstances, this might trigger a recession. But a recession is what happens when a growth-dependent economy stops growing. It is chaotic and disastrous. What I’m calling for here is something completely different. It is about shifting to a different kind of economy altogether – an economy that doesn’t need growth in the first place. To get there, we need to rethink everything from the debt system to the banking system, to liberate people, businesses, states and even innovation itself from the stuffy constraints of the growth imperative, freeing them to focus on higher goals.

Note

Todo list is big

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

We can create an economy that is organised around human flourishing instead of around endless capital accumulation; in other words, a post-capitalist economy. An economy that’s fairer, more just, and more caring.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

These ideas have been percolating on different continents for the past few decades, like whispers of hope. We inherit them from people like Herman Daly and Donella Meadows, the pioneering founders of ecological economics; from philosophers like Vandana Shiva and André Gorz; social scientists like Arturo Escobar and Maria Mies; economists like Serge Latouche and Indigenous activists like Berta Cáceres.48 Suddenly these ideas are rushing into the mainstream, and inspiring an extraordinary shift in scientific discourse

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Now we have a choice before us: will we ignore science in order to maintain our world view, or will we change our world view?

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

This time, it’s a matter of life and death.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

To find the path ahead of us, we first need to understand how we got locked into the growth imperative to begin with. We need to understand the inner logic of capital. This requires reaching into the deep history of capitalism, to see if we can grasp what makes it all tick. But along the way we’ll discover that there’s something else at stake, something unexpected. Ultimately, capitalism itself is just a symptom. The real problem lies much deeper, in the realm of ontology – in our theory of being.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Those of us who live in capitalist societies today have been taught to believe that there is a fundamental distinction between humans and nature: humans are separate from and superior to nature; humans are subjects with spirit and mind and agency, whereas nature is an inert, mechanistic object. This way of seeing the world is known as dualism. We inherit these ideas from a long line of thinkers, from Plato to Descartes, who primed us to believe that humans can rightfully exploit nature and subject it to our control. We didn’t always believe these things. In fact, those who sought to pave the way for capitalism in the sixteenth century first had to destroy other, more holistic ways of seeing the world, and either convince or force people to become dualists. Dualist philosophy is responsible at a deep level for our ecological crisis.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

My colleagues in anthropology have long pointed out that for most of human history people operated with a very different ontology – a theory of being that we refer to, broadly, as animist. For the most part, people saw no fundamental divide between humans and the rest of the living world. Quite the opposite: they recognised a deep interdependence with rivers, forests, animals and plants, even with the planet itself, which they saw as beings equivalent to humans and animated by the very same spirit. In some cases they even regarded them as kin.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

We see traces of this philosophy still flourishing today, from the Amazon basin to the highlands of Bolivia to the forests of Malaysia, where people think about and interact with non-human beings – from jaguars to rivers – not as ‘nature’ but as relatives. When you see the world this way, it fundamentally changes how you behave. If you start from the premise that all beings are the moral equivalent of persons, then you cannot simply take from them. To exploit nature as a ‘resource’ for the sake of human enrichment is morally reprehensible – similar to slavery or even to cannibalism. Instead, you have to enter into a relationship of reciprocity, in the spirit of the gift. You have to give at least as much as you receive.

This logic, which has inherent ecological value, runs directly against the core logic of capitalism, which is to take – and, more importantly, to take more than you give back. In fact, as we will see, this is the basic mechanism of growth.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

Biologists are discovering that humans are not standalone individuals, but composed largely of microorganisms on which we depend for functions as basic as digestion. Psychiatrists are learning that spending time around plants is essential to people’s mental health, and indeed that certain plants can heal humans from complex psychological traumas. Ecologists are learning that trees, far from being inanimate, communicate with each other and even share food and medicine through invisible mycelial networks in the soil. Quantum physicists are teaching us that individual particles that appear to be distinct are inextricably entangled with others, even across vast distances. And Earth-systems scientists are finding evidence that the planet itself operates like a living superorganism.

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Anthropocene

All of this is changing how we think about our position in the web of life, and paving the way for new theories of being. At the very time our planet is plunging into ecological catastrophe, we are beginning to learn a different way of seeing ourselves in relation to the rest of the living world. We are beginning to remember secrets we long ago forgot; secrets that linger in our hearts like whispers from the ancestors.

ONE: Capitalism – A Creation Story

Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

ONE: Capitalism – A Creation Story

It was only with the rise of capitalism over the past few hundred years, and the breathtaking acceleration of industrialisation from the 1950s, that on a planetary scale things began to tip out of balance. Once we understand this, it changes how we think about the problem. We call this human epoch the Anthropocene, but in fact this crisis has nothing to do with humans as such. It has to do with the dominance of a particular economic system: one that is recent in origin, which developed in particular places at a particular time in history, and which has not been adopted to the same extent by all societies. As the sociologist Jason Moore has pointed out, this isn’t the Anthropocene – it’s the Capitalocene.1

ONE: Capitalism – A Creation Story

Markets have been around for many thousands of years, in different times and places. Capitalism, however, is relatively recent – only about 500 years old.2 What makes capitalism distinctive isn’t that it has markets, but that it is organised around perpetual growth. It is a system that pulls ever-expanding quantities of nature and human labour into circuits of accumulation. And it works according to a simple, straightforward formula: take more than you give back.

ONE: Capitalism – A Creation Story

The ecological crisis is an inevitable consequence of this system. Capitalism has tipped us out of balance with the living world.

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Capitalism didn’t just ‘emerge’. There was no smooth, natural ‘transition’ from feudalism to capitalism. Historians have a much more interesting and significantly darker story to tell

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In the early 1300s, commoners across Europe began rebelling against the feudal system. They refused to submit to unpaid labour, they rejected the taxes and tithes extracted by nobles and the Church, and they began demanding direct control over the land they tilled. These were not just petty complaints popping up here and there. It was organised resistance. And in some cases it grew into outright military conflicts. In 1323, peasants and workers took up arms in Flanders in a battle that lasted five years before their defeat by the Flemish nobility. Similar rebellions erupted elsewhere across Europe – in Bruges, Ghent, Florence, Liège and Paris.3

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These early rebellions had little success. In most cases they were crushed by well-armed militaries. And when the Black Death struck in 1347 things only seemed to get worse: bubonic plague wiped out a third of Europe’s population, triggering an unprecedented social and political crisis.

But in the wake of this disaster, something unexpected happened. Because labour was scarce and land abundant, suddenly peasants and workers had more bargaining power. They were able to demand lower rents for land, and higher wages for their labour. Nobles found themselves on the back foot, and the balance of power tilted in commoners’ favour for the first time in generations. Commoners began to realise that this was their chance: they had an opportunity to change the very foundations of the social and political order. They grew more hopeful, more confident, and the rebellions gained steam.4

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In England, Wat Tyler led a peasants’ revolt against feudalism in 1381, inspired by the radical preacher John Ball, famous for his call: ‘Now the time is come in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.’ In 1382 a revolt in the Italian city of Ciompi succeeded in taking over the government. In Paris, a ‘workers’ democracy’ seized power in 1413. And in 1450 an army of English peasants and workers marched on London in what became known as Jack Cade’s Rebellion. Entire regions rose up during this period, forming assemblies and recruiting armies.

By the middle of the 1400s, wars were erupting between peasants and nobles across Western Europe, and as the rebels’ movement grew their demands broadened. They weren’t interested in tweaking the system a bit around the edges – they wanted nothing short of revolution.

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According to the historian Silvia Federici, an expert in the political economy of the Middle Ages, ‘the rebels did not content themselves with demanding some restrictions to feudal rule, nor did they only bargain for better living conditions. Their aim was to put an end to the power of the lords.’5

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As feudalism fell apart, free peasants began to build a clear alternative: an egalitarian, co-operative society rooted in the principles of local self-sufficiency. The results of this revolution were astonishing, in terms of the welfare of commoners. Wages rose to levels higher than ever before in recorded history, doubling or even tripling in most regions and in some cases rising as much as sixfold.6 Rents declined, food became cheap, and nutrition improved. Workers were able to bargain for shorter working hours and weekends off, plus benefits like meals on the job and payment for each mile they had to travel to and from work. Women’s wages shot up too, narrowing what under feudalism had been a substantial gender pay gap. Historians have described the period from 1350 to 1500 as ‘the golden age of the European proletariat’.7

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It was a golden age for Europe’s ecology, too. The feudal system had been an ecological disaster. Lords put peasants under heavy pressure to extract from the land and forests while giving nothing back. This drove a crisis of deforestation, overgrazing, and a gradual decline in soil fertility. But the political movement that emerged after 1350 reversed these trends and inaugurated a period of ecological regeneration. Once they won direct control of the land, free peasants were able to maintain a more reciprocal relationship with nature: they managed pastures and commons collectively, through democratic assemblies, with careful rules that regulated tillage, grazing and forest use.8 Europe’s soils began to recover. The forests regrew

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Needless to say, Europe’s elites were not pleased with this turn of events. They considered the high wages ‘scandalous’, and were irritated that commoners would only hire themselves out for short periods or limited tasks, leaving as soon as they had enough income to satisfy their needs. ‘Servants are now masters and masters servants,’ complained John Gower in Miroir de l’Omme (1380). As one writer put it in the early 1500s: ‘The peasants are too rich … and do not know what obedience means; they don’t take law into any account, they wish there were no nobles … and they would like to decide what rent we should get for our lands.’9 And according to another: ‘The peasant pretends to imitate the ways of the freeman, and gives himself the appearance of him in his clothes.’10

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As national income was shared more evenly across the population it became more difficult for nobles to pile up the profits they had enjoyed under feudalism. This is an important point. We often assume that capitalism emerged somehow naturally from the collapse of feudalism, but in fact such a transition would have been impossible. Capitalism requires elite accumulation: piling up excess wealth for large-scale investment. But the egalitarian conditions of post-feudalist society – self-sufficiency, high wages, grassroots democracy and collective management of resources – were inimical to the possibility of elite accumulation. Indeed, this is exactly what elites were complaining about.

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Nobles, the Church and the merchant bourgeoisie united in an organised attempt to end peasant autonomy and drive wages back down. They did so not by re-enserfing peasants – that had proved to be impossible. Rather, they forced them off their land in a violent, continent-wide campaign of evictions. As for the commons – those collectively managed pastures, forests and rivers that sustained rural communities – they were fenced off and privatised for elite use. They became, in a word, property.

This process was known as ‘enclosure’.12 Thousands of rural communities were destroyed during the enclosure movement; crops were ripped up and burned, whole villages razed to the ground. Commoners lost their access to land, forests, game, fodder, water, fish – all the resources necessary for life. And the Reformation added further fuel to the bonfire of dispossession: as Catholic monasteries were dismantled across Europe, their lands were snapped up by nobles and cleared of the people who lived there.

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Peasant communities didn’t go down without a fight, of course. But they had precious little success. In Germany, an organised peasant rebellion in 1525 was defeated in a massacre that left more than 100,000 commoners dead – one of the bloodiest slaughters in world history. In 1549, a rebellion led by Englishman Robert Kett managed to take control of Norwich, the country’s second largest city, before the military put them down: 3,500 rebels were massacred and their leaders hanged from the city’s walls.

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Over the course of three centuries, huge swathes of Britain and the rest of Europe were enclosed and millions of people removed from the land, triggering an internal refugee crisis. It would be difficult to overstate the upheaval that characterised this period – it was a humanitarian catastrophe. For the first time in history, commoners were systematically denied access to the most basic resources necessary for survival. People were left without homes and food. We don’t need to romanticise subsistence life to recognise that enclosure produced conditions that were far worse; worse even than under serfdom. In England, the word ‘poverty’ came into common use for the first time to describe the mass of ‘paupers’ and ‘vagabonds’ that enclosure produced – words that prior to this period rarely if ever appeared in English texts.

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Yet as far as Europe’s capitalists were concerned, enclosure was working like magic. It enabled them to appropriate huge amounts of land and resources that had previously been off limits. Economists have always recognised that some kind of initial accumulation was necessary for the rise of capitalism. Adam Smith called this ‘previous accumulation’, and claimed that it came about because a few people worked really hard and saved their earnings – an idyllic tale that still gets repeated in economics textbooks. But historians see it as naïve. This was no innocent process of saving. It was a process of plunder. Karl Marx insisted on calling it ‘primitive accumulation’, to highlight the barbaric nature of the violence it entailed.

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But the rise of capitalism also depended on something else. It needed labour. Lots of it, and cheap. Enclosure solved this problem too. With subsistence economies destroyed and commons fenced off, people had no choice but to sell their labour for wages – not to earn a bit of extra income, as under the previous regime, nor to satisfy the demands of a lord, as under serfdom, but simply in order to survive. They became, in a word, proletarians. This was utterly new in world history. Such people were referred to at the time as ‘free labourers’, but this term is misleading: true, they were not forced to work as slaves or serfs, but they nonetheless had little choice in the matter, as their only alternative was starvation. Those who controlled the means of production could get away with paying rock-bottom wages, and people would have to take it. Any wage, no matter how small, was better than death

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There was no gradual ‘transition’, as people like to assume, and it certainly wasn’t peaceful. Capitalism rose on the back of organised violence, mass impoverishment, and the systematic destruction of self-sufficient subsistence economies. It did not put an end to serfdom; rather, it put an end to the progressive revolution that had ended serfdom

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For human welfare, the consequences of enclosure were devastating. It reversed all of the gains the free peasants had won. According to the economists Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins, from the 1500s to the 1700s real wages declined by as much as 70%.13 Nutrition deteriorated and starvation became commonplace: some of the worst famines in European history struck in the 1500s, as subsistence economies were ripped up. The social fabric was left so shredded that between 1600 and 1650 populations across Western Europe actually declined. In England, we can see the imprint of this catastrophe clearly in the historical public health record: average life expectancy at birth fell from forty-three years in the 1500s to the low thirties in the 1700s.14

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The enclosure movement went further in Britain than anywhere else in Europe. The monarchy had initially sought to limit enclosure, worried about the social crises it was creating. But those limits were abolished after the Civil War of the 1640s and the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the bourgeoisie assumed control of Parliament and obtained the power to do more or less whatever they pleased. Wielding the full force of the state, they introduced a series of laws – the Parliamentary Enclosures – that set off a wave of dispossession faster and more far-reaching than anything that had come before. Between 1760 and 1870, some 7 million acres were enclosed by legal writ, about one-sixth of England. By the end of this period there was almost no common land left in the country.

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This final, dark episode in the destruction of the English peasant system coincided exactly with the Industrial Revolution. The dispossessed poured desperate and shell-shocked into the cities, where they provided the cheap labour that fuelled the dark Satanic mills immortalised in the poetry of William Blake.

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Industrial capitalism took off, but at extraordinary human cost. Simon Szreter, one of the world’s leading experts on historical public health data, has shown that this first century of the Industrial Revolution was characterised by a striking deterioration in life expectancy, down to levels not seen since the Black Death in the fourteenth century. In Manchester and Liverpool, the two giants of industrialisation, life expectancy collapsed compared to non-industrialised parts of the country. In Manchester it fell to a mere twenty-five years. And it was not just in England; this same effect can be seen in every other European country where it has been studied. The first few hundred years of capitalism generated misery to a degree unknown in the pre-capitalist era.16

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When Europeans began to colonise the Americas in the decades after 1492, they were not driven by the romance of ‘exploration’ and ‘discovery’, as our schoolbooks would have it. Colonisation was a response to the crisis of elite disaccumulation that had been caused by the peasant revolutions in Europe. It was a ‘fix’. Just as elites turned to enclosure at home, they sought new frontiers for accumulation abroad. In 1525, the very year that German nobles massacred those 100,000 peasants, the Spanish king Carlos I awarded the kingdom’s highest honour to Hernán Cortés, the conquistador who slayed 100,000 Indigenous people as his army marched through Mexico and destroyed the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. The congruence of these two events is striking. In the decades that inaugurated the rise of capitalism, enclosure and colonisation were intimately connected.

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The scale of colonial appropriation was staggering. From the early 1500s through the early 1800s, colonisers siphoned 100 million kilograms of silver out of the Andes and into European ports. To get a sense of the scale of this wealth, consider this thought experiment: if invested in 1800 at the historical average rate of interest, that quantity of silver would today be worth $165 trillion – more than double the world’s GDP. And that’s on top of the gold that was extracted from South America during the same period. This windfall played a key role in the rise of European capitalism. It provided some of the surplus that ended up invested in the Industrial Revolution; it enabled the purchase of land-based goods from the East, which allowed Europe to shift its population from agriculture to industrial production; and it funded the military expansion that powered further rounds of colonial conquest.17

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Cotton was the most important commodity in Britain’s industrial rise; the lifeblood of Lancashire’s iconic mills. And sugar became a key source of cheap calories for Europe’s industrial workers.18 But neither cotton nor sugar grow in Europe. To get them, Europeans appropriated vast tracts of land for plantation agriculture – millions of acres across much of Brazil, the West Indies and North America.

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As for who powered all the mines and plantations: up to 5 million Indigenous Americans were enslaved for this purpose – a process so violent that it wiped out much of the population.19 But even this was not enough. Another 15 million souls were shipped across the Atlantic from Africa during three centuries of state-sponsored human trafficking. The United States extracted so much labour from enslaved Africans that, if paid at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, it would add up to $97 trillion today – four times the size of the US GDP.20

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And that’s just the United States; it doesn’t count the Caribbean and Brazil. The slave trade amounted to an extraordinary appropriation of labour, transferred from Indigenous and African communities into the pockets of European industrialists.

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But there were also subtler forms of appropriation at work. In India, British colonisers extracted extraordinary sums of money in the form of taxes. Between the years 1765 and 1938, they siphoned the equivalent of $45 trillion out of India and into British coffers. This flow allowed Britain to buy strategic materials like iron, tar and timber, which were essential to the country’s industrialisation. They also used it to finance the industrialisation of white settler colonies like Canada and Australia, and to pay for the British welfare system that, after the 1870s, finally started to address the misery generated by enclosure.21 Today, British politicians often seek to defend colonialism by claiming that Britain helped ‘develop’ India. But in fact exactly the opposite is true: India developed Britain.

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The point here is that the Industrial Revolution – and Europe’s industrial growth – did not emerge ex nihilo. It hinged on commodities that were produced by slaves, on lands stolen from colonised peoples, and processed in factories staffed by European peasants who had been forcibly dispossessed by enclosure. We tend to think of these as separate processes, but they all operated with the same underlying logic. Enclosure was a process of internal colonisation, and colonisation was a process of enclosure. Europe’s peasants were dispossessed from their lands just as Indigenous Americans were (although, notably, the latter were treated much worse, excluded from the realm of rights, and even humanity, altogether). And the slave trade is nothing if not the enclosure and colonisation of bodies – bodies that were appropriated for the sake of surplus accumulation just as land was, and treated as property in the same way.

It might be tempting to downplay these moments of violence as mere aberrations in the history of capitalism. But they are not. They are the foundations of it. Growth has always relied on processes of colonisation.

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All of this added a final piece to the rise of capitalism. You see, Europe’s capitalists had created a system of mass production, but they needed somewhere to sell it. Who would absorb all this output? The enclosures provided a partial solution: by destroying self-sufficient economies, they created not only a mass of workers but also a mass of consumers – people wholly dependent on capital for food, clothes and other essential goods.

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But this alone was not enough. They needed to break into new markets abroad. The problem was that much of the global South, particularly Asia, had their own artisanal industries, and were uninterested in importing things they could make for themselves. Colonisers solved this problem by using asymmetric trade rules to destroy the South’s domestic industries, forcing them to serve not only as a source of raw materials but also as a captive market for Europe’s mass-produced goods. This completed the circuit. But the consequences were devastating: as European capital grew, the South’s share of global manufacturing collapsed, from 77% in 1750 down to 13% by 1900.22

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The paradox of artificial scarcity

In the wake of enclosure, Europe’s peasants – those who remained in rural areas rather than migrating to cities – found themselves subject to a new economic regime. They were back once again under the rule of landlords, but this time in an even worse position: at least under serfdom they had secure access to land; now they were granted only temporary leases on it. And these weren’t just ordinary leases. They were allocated on the basis of productivity. So to retain their access to land peasants had to devise ways to intensify their production, working longer hours and extracting more from the soil each year. Those who fell behind in this race would lose their tenancy rights and face starvation. This put peasants in direct competition with one another, with their own kin and neighbours, transforming what had been a system of collective co-operation into one organised around desperate antagonism.

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The application of this logic to land and farming marked a fundamental transformation in human history. It meant that, for the first time, people’s lives were governed by the imperatives of intensifying productivity and maximising output.23 No longer was production about satisfying needs, no longer about local sufficiency: instead, it was organised around profit. This is crucial: those principles of homo economicus that we assume to be engraved in human nature were instituted during the enclosure process.24

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The same pressures were at play in the cities. Refugees from enclosure who ended up in urban slums had no choice but to accept work for meagre wages. Because the refugees were many and jobs were few, competition among workers drove down the cost of labour, destroying the guild system that had previously protected the livelihoods of skilled craftsmen. Faced with the constant threat of replacement, workers were under pressure to produce as much as was physically possible; they regularly worked for sixteen hours a day, significantly longer than they had worked prior to enclosure.

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These regimes of forced competition generated a dramatic surge in productivity. Between 1500 and 1900, the quantity of grain extracted per acre of land shot up by a factor of four. And it was this feature – known at the time as ‘improvement’ – that came to serve as the core justification for enclosure. The English landowner and philosopher John Locke admitted that enclosure was a process of theft from the commons, and from commoners, but he argued that this theft was morally justifiable because it enabled a shift to intensive commercial methods that increased agricultural output.25

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Any increase in total output, he said, was a contribution to the ‘greater good’ – the betterment of humanity. The same logic was used to justify colonisation, and invoked by Locke himself to defend his claims to American lands. Improvement became the alibi for appropriation.

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Today, the very same alibi is routinely leveraged to justify new rounds of enclosure and colonisation – of lands, forests, fisheries, of the atmosphere itself; but instead of ‘improvement’ we call it ‘development’, or ‘growth’. Virtually anything can be justified if it contributes to GDP growth. We take it as an article of faith that growth benefits humanity as a whole; that it is essential to human progress. But even in Locke’s time the alibi was clearly a ruse.

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While the commercialisation of agriculture did increase total output, the only ‘improvement’ was to the profits of the landowners. While output soared, commoners were hit by two centuries of famine. So too in the factories. None of the gains from the surge in labour productivity went back to the workers themselves; indeed, wages declined during the enclosure period. Profits were pocketed instead by those who owned the means of production.

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The essential point to grasp here is that the emergence of the extraordinary productive capacity that characterises capitalism depended on creating and maintaining conditions of artificial scarcity. Scarcity – and the threat of hunger – served as the engine of capitalist growth. The scarcity was artificial in the sense that there was no actual depletion of resources: all the same land and forests and waters remained, just as they always had, but people’s access to them was suddenly restricted. Scarcity was created, then, in the very process of elite accumulation. And it was enforced by state violence, with peasants massacred wherever they found the courage to tear down the barriers that cut them off from the land.26

This was a conscious strategy on the part of Europe’s capitalists

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In Britain, the historical record is full of commentary by landowners and merchants who felt that peasants’ access to commons during the revolutionary period had encouraged them to leisure and ‘insolence’. They saw enclosure as a tool for enhancing the ‘industry’ of the masses.

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In 1771 the agriculturalist Arthur Young noted that ‘everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious’. The Reverend Joseph Townsend emphasised in 1786 that ‘it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour’. ‘Legal constraint,’ Townsend went on, ‘is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise … whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions … Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse.’

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Patrick Colquhoun, a powerful Scottish merchant, saw poverty as an essential precondition for industrialisation:

Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.

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These passages reveal a remarkable paradox. The proponents of capitalism themselves believed it was necessary to impoverish people in order to generate growth.

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In India, colonisers tried to pressure peasants to shift from subsistence farming to cash crops for export: opium, indigo, cotton, wheat and rice. But Indians were unwilling to make this transition voluntarily. To break their resistance, British officials imposed taxes that plunged peasants into debt, leaving them with no choice but to comply

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. The British East India Company and later the Raj sought to speed this transition along by dismantling the communal support systems that people relied on: they destroyed granaries, privatised the irrigation systems, and enclosed the commons that people used for wood, fodder and game. The theory was that these traditional welfare systems made people ‘lazy’, accustomed to easy food and leisure; by removing them, you could discipline people with the threat of hunger, and get them to compete with one another to extract ever higher yields from the land.

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From the perspective of agricultural productivity, it worked; but the destruction of subsistence agriculture and communal support systems left peasants vulnerable to market fluctuations and droughts.

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During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the height of the British Empire, 30 million Indians perished needlessly of famine in what the historian Mike Davis has called the ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’. Needlessly, because even at the peak of the famine there was a net surplus of food. In fact, Indian grain exports more than tripled during this period, from 3 million tons in 1875 to 10 million tons in 1900. This was artificial scarcity taken to new extremes – far worse than anything that was inflicted within Europe. 28

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The same process of enclosure and forced proletarianisation played out over and over again during the period of European colonisation – not just under the British but under the Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch as well – with examples too numerous to recite here. In all of these cases scarcity was created, purposefully, for the sake of capitalist expansion.

How odd that the history of capitalism – a system that generated such extraordinary material productivity – is marked by the constant creation of scarcity, scarred by devastating famines and a centuries-long process of immiseration. This apparent contradiction was first noticed in 1804 by James Maitland, the 8th Earl of Lauderdale.29 Maitland pointed out that there is an inverse relation between what he called ‘private riches’ and ‘public wealth’, or commons, such that an increase in the former can only ever come at the expense of the latter.

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The scarcer something is, the more money you can extort from people who need it. For instance, if you enclose an abundant resource like water and establish a monopoly over it, you can charge people to access it and therefore increase your private riches. This would also increase what Maitland called the ‘sum-total of individual riches’ – what today we might call GDP. But this can be accomplished only by curtailing people’s access to what was once abundant and free. Private riches go up, but public wealth goes down. This became known as the ‘Lauderdale Paradox’.

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Maitland recognised that this was happening during the process of colonisation. He noticed that colonisers were burning down orchards that produced fruits and nuts, so people who once lived off the natural abundance of the land would be compelled instead to work for wages and purchase food from Europeans. What was once abundant had to be made scarce. Perhaps the most iconic example of this was the salt tax the British Raj imposed on India. Salt was freely available all along India’s coasts – all you had to do was bend down and scoop it up. Yet the British made people pay for the right to do this, as part of a scheme to produce revenue for the colonial government. Public wealth had to be sacrificed for the sake of private riches; commons sabotaged for growth.

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Enclosure and colonisation were necessary preconditions for the rise of European capitalism. It destroyed subsistence economies, created a mass of cheap labour, and by generating artificial scarcity set the engines of competitive productivity in motion. Yet, as powerful as these forces were, they were not sufficient to break down the barriers to elite accumulation. Something else was needed – something far subtler but nonetheless equally violent. Early capitalists not only had to find ways to compel people to work for them, they also had to change people’s beliefs. They had to change how people regarded the living world. Ultimately, capitalism required a new story about nature.

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For most of our 300,000-year history, we humans have had an intimate relationship with the rest of the living world. We know that people in early human societies were likely to be able to describe the names, properties and personalities of hundreds if not thousands of plants, insects, animals, rivers, mountains and soils, in much the same way people today know the most recondite facts about actors, celebrities, politicians and product brands. Aware that their existence depended on the well-being of other living systems around them, they paid close attention to how those systems worked. They regarded humans as an inextricable part of the rest of the living community, which they saw in turn as sharing the essential traits of humanity. Indeed, the art our ancestors left hidden on stone surfaces around the world suggests that they believed in a sort of spiritual interchangeability between humans and non-human beings.

Anthropologists refer to this way of seeing the world as animism

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animism – the idea that all living beings are interconnected, and share in the same spirit or essence

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Because animists draw no fundamental distinction between humans and nature, and indeed in many cases insist on the underlying relatedness – even kinship – of all beings, they have strong moral codes that prevent them from exploiting other living systems. We know from animist cultures today that while people of course fish, hunt, gather and farm, they do so in the spirit not of extraction but of reciprocity. Just as with gifts exchanged among people, transactions with non-human beings are hedged about with rituals of respect and politeness. Just as we take care not to exploit our own relatives, so animists are careful to take no more than ecosystems can regenerate, and give back by protecting and restoring the land.

In recent years anthropologists have come to see this as more than just a cultural difference. It is deeper than that. It is a fundamentally different way of conceptualising the human. It is a different kind of ontology – an ontology of inter-being.

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This ontology came under attack with the rise of empires, which gradually came to see the world as split in two, with a spiritual realm of gods separate from and above the rest of creation. Humans were given a privileged place in this new order: made in the image of the gods themselves, and thus possessed of the right to rule over the rest of creation. This idea – the principle of dominion – grew firmer during the Axial Age with the rise of transcendental philosophies and religions across the major Eurasian civilisations: Confucianism in China; Hinduism in India; Zoroastrianism in Persia; Judaism in the Levant and Sophism in Greece. We can see it spelled out in ancient Mesopotamian texts dating back 3,000 years. And perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in Genesis itself:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every thing that creeps upon the ground.

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Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student, publicly rejected transcendentalism, insisting that the essence of things lies within them, not in some ethereal elsewhere, and that all beings have souls and share versions of the same spirit. Building on Aristotle, many philosophers regarded the living world itself as an intelligent organism, or even as a deity.

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The Roman philosopher Seneca saw the earth as a living organism with springs and rivers flowing through her like blood through veins, with metals and minerals forming slowly in her womb, and morning dew like perspiration on her skin.30

These ideas remained prominent in so-called pagan cultures across Europe, which rejected the Christian distinction between sacred and profane. They regarded the living world – plants and animals, mountains and forests, rivers and rain – as enchanted, filled with spirits and divine energy. As Christendom expanded through Europe it sought to repress these ideas wherever it encountered them, as in the persecution of the Celtic Druids, but it never succeeded in stamping them out; they remained common currency among peasants

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in the wake of the peasant rebellions, as feudalism collapsed after 1350 and commoners wrested control of the land from feudal lords, these ideas became openly accepted.

We can trace animistic ontologies all the way to the Renaissance, where even then the dominant view regarded the material world as animated, and saw the Earth as a living, nurturing mother. In the fifteenth century, Pico della Mirandola wrote:

All this great body of the world is a soul, full of intellect and of God, who fills it within and without and vivifies the All … The world is alive, all matter is full of life … Matter and bodies or substances … are energies of God. In the All there is nothing which is not God.

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But then something happened. In the 1500s, there were two powerful factions of European society who were worried about the striking revival of animistic ideas, and set out to destroy them.

One was the Church. As far as the clergy were concerned, the notion that spirit suffused the material world threatened their claim to be the only conduits to the divine, and the only legitimate proxies of divine power. This was a problem not only for priests, but also for the kings and aristocrats who ultimately depended on their sanction. Animistic ideas had to be defeated because they were loaded with subversive implications. If spirit is everywhere, then there is no God – and if there is no God then there is no priest, and no king. In such a world, the divine right of kings crumbles into incoherence.32 And that’s exactly what happened. The ideas of Aristotle inspired many of the medieval peasant rebellions that sought to overthrow feudalism. These movements were denounced by the Church as heretical, and the charge of heresy was used to justify brutal violence against them.

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But there was another powerful faction that regarded animist ideas as a problem: capitalists. The new economic system that began to dominate after 1500 required a new relationship with the land, with the soils, and with the minerals beneath the surface of the earth: one built on the principles of possession, extraction, commodification and ever-increasing productivity, or, in the discourse of the time, ‘improvement’. But in order to possess and exploit something you must first regard it as an object. In a world where everything was alive and pulsing with spirit and agency, where all beings were regarded as subjects in their own right, this sort of possessive exploitation – in other words, property – was ethically unfathomable.

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The historian Carolyn Merchant argues that animistic ideas limited the extent to which people considered it permissible to plunder the earth. ‘The image of the earth as a living organism and nurturing mother had served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of human beings,’ she writes. ‘One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her entrails for gold or mutilate her body … As long as the earth was considered to be alive and sensitive, it could be considered a breach of human ethical behaviour to carry out destructive acts against it.’33

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This is not to say that people didn’t extract from the land or mine the mountains. They did; but they did so with careful decorum and rituals of respect. Miners, smiths and farmers offered propitiation. They believed they were permitted to take from the earth, as one might receive a gift, but that to take too much, or too violently, would invite calamity.

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Those who sought to advance capitalism had to find a way not only to strip humans from the land, but to destroy the animist ideas that enjoyed such prominence – to strip the earth of its spirit and render it instead a mere stock of ‘natural resources’ for humans to exploit.

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They found their first answer in Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the Englishman celebrated as the ‘father of modern science’.

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Bacon actively sought to destroy the idea of a living world, and to replace it with a new ethic that not only sanctioned but celebrated the exploitation of nature. To this end, he took the ancient theory of nature-as-female and transformed her from a nurturing mother into what he called a ‘common harlot’. He cast nature, and indeed matter itself, as devious, disordered, wild and chaotic – a beast that, to quote his words, must be ‘restrained’, ‘bound’ and ‘kept in order’.

For Bacon, science and technology were to serve as the instruments of domination. ‘Science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her,’ Bacon wrote. And with the knowledge thus gained, ‘man’ would not ‘merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course’, but ‘have the power to conquer and subdue, to shake her to her foundations’. Nature must be ‘bound into service’ and made into a ‘slave,’ ‘forced out of her natural state and squeezed and moulded’ for human ends.

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Bacon’s use of torture as a metaphor here is revealing, as he himself – in his role as Attorney General under King James I – deployed torture against the peasant rebels and heretics of his time, and worked to legitimise the practice as a means of defending the state. Just as Bacon saw torture as a weapon against peasant insurrection, so he saw science as a weapon against nature. Like peasants, nature had resisted domination too long. Science was to break her once and for all.

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Not only is nature something to be controlled and manipulated, it is also transformed from a living organism into inert matter. Nature may appear to be alive and moving, but its motion should be understood as that of a machine, Bacon said – nothing more than a system of pumps and springs and cogs. But it was in the hands of another man, only a few years later, that this vision of nature-as-machine was formulated into a coherent philosophy: the French thinker René Descartes.

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He argued that there was a fundamental dichotomy between mind and matter. Humans are unique among all creatures in having minds (or souls), he claimed – the mark of their special connection to God. By contrast, the rest of creation is nothing but unthinking material. Plants and animals have no spirit or agency, intention or motivation; they are mere automatons, operating according to predictable mechanical laws, ticking away like a clock

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In an attempt to prove the point, Descartes took to dissecting living animals. He nailed their limbs to boards and probed their organs and nerves – including, in one particularly grotesque episode, his wife’s dog. While the animals writhed and wailed in agony, he insisted this was only the ‘appearance’ of pain, just a reflex: muscles and tendons responding automatically to physical stimuli. He urged people not to be fooled by the appearance of sentience or intelligence. It’s not the deer or the owl itself that is the appropriate object of analysis, he said: to recognise the mechanical nature of life you have to dig in and peer at the parts, not the whole. What seems like life is really just inert matter. An object.

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In Descartes’ hands, the continuum between humans and the rest of the living world was sliced into a clear, unbridgeable dichotomy. This vision came to be known as dualism, and Descartes’ theory of matter came to be known as mechanical philosophy. It was an explicit attempt to disenchant the world – a direct attack on the remaining principles of animist philosophy. And from the 1630s, these ideas came to dominate science. We often think of the Church and science as antagonists, but in fact the architects of the Scientific Revolution were all deeply religious, and shared common cause with the clergy: to strip nature of spirit.

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During the Enlightenment, dualist thought became mainstream for the first time in history. It gave sanction to the enclosure and privatisation of common land, as land was rendered but a thing to be possessed. And it was enclosure, in turn, that enabled dualism’s rise to cultural dominance: only once commoners were alienated from the land and severed from forest ecosystems could they be convinced to imagine themselves as fundamentally separate from the rest of the living world, and to see other beings as objects.

Note

Dualisme et enclosure s’alimentent mutuellement

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Of course, the fallacies of mechanical philosophy couldn’t last long. Within a century the notion of inert matter was debunked, as it became clear to scientists that animals and plants and other organisms are in fact alive.34 But the damage was done. Dualism had taken hold in European culture. It became entrenched because it satisfied the need of powerful groups to divide the world in two. Once nature was an object, you could do more or less anything you wanted to it. Whatever ethical constraints remained against possession and extraction had been removed, much to the delight of capital. Land became property. Living beings became things. Ecosystems became resources.

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During the revolutionary period, peasant work followed a rhythm that from the perspective of industrialists appeared to be irregular and undisciplined: it depended on weather and seasons, on festivals and feast days. Life was organised around the principles of sufficiency and desire: people would work as much as they needed, and the rest of the time they spent dancing, telling stories, drinking beer … having fun. As the sociologist Juliet Schor puts it:

The medieval calendar is filled with holidays … not only long ‘vacations’ at Christmas, Easter and midsummer but also numerous saints’ and rest days. In addition to official celebrations, there were often weeks’ worth of ales – to mark important life events (brides’ ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in England took up probably one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbours. The ancien regime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travellers noted that holidays totalled five months per year.35

According to the English historian E.P. Thompson, these festivals and carnivals ‘were, in an important sense, what men and women lived for’.36

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European elites leveraged Descartes’ dualism to change people’s beliefs about nature. But they also took it one step further, and sought to change people’s beliefs about labour, too.

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Peasant lifeways were incompatible with the kind of labour that was required for capital accumulation. Labour needed to go well beyond need; it needed to become a total way of life.

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Yes, enclosure helped solve this problem to some extent, by putting peasants at the mercy of hunger and forcing them to compete with each other. But it was not enough. In the wake of enclosure, Europe filled up with ‘paupers’ and ‘vagabonds’ – people who had been pushed off the land but either couldn’t find work or otherwise refused to submit to the brutal conditions of the new capitalist farms and factories. They survived by begging, hawking and stealing food.

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This problem preoccupied European governments for some three centuries. To deal with it, and assuage elite fears that the growing underclass might come to pose a political threat, states began to introduce laws forcing people to work. In 1531, England’s King Henry VIII passed the first Vagabonds Act, describing ‘idleness’ as ‘the mother and root of all vices’ and ordering that vagabonds should be bound, whipped, and forced to ‘put themselves to labour’. A series of other vagabond acts followed, each harsher than the one before. In 1547, Edward VI decreed that at the first offence vagabonds should be branded with a ‘V’ and subjected to two years of forced labour. The second offence was punishable by death.

These laws unleashed an extraordinary outpouring of state violence against the dispossessed. In England, no fewer than 72,000 vagabonds were hanged during the reign of Henry VIII. In the 1570s, some 40,000 were executed over the course of a single decade.38 The goal was to fundamentally change people’s beliefs about labour. Elites had to literally whip people into becoming docile, obedient, productive workers.

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Descartes succeeded in not only separating mind from body, but also establishing a hierarchical relationship between the two. Just as the ruling class should dominate nature and control it for the purposes of productivity, so the mind should dominate the body for the same purpose.

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During the 1600s, Descartes’ views were leveraged to bring the body under control, to defeat its passions and desires, and impose on it a regular, productive order. Any inclination towards joy, play, spontaneity – the pleasures of bodily experience – was regarded as potentially immoral. In the 1700s, these ideas coalesced into a system of explicit values: idleness is sin; time is money. In the Calvinist theology that was popular in Western Christianity at the time, profit became the sign of moral success – the proof of salvation. To maximise profit, people were encouraged to organise their lives around productivity.39 Those who fell behind in the productivity race and slipped into poverty were branded with the stigma of sin. Poverty was recast not as the consequence of dispossession, but as the sign of personal moral failing.

These ethics of discipline and self-mastery became central to the culture of capitalism.

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The ‘workhouses’ that were built by parishes across Britain to absorb the ‘idle’ poor functioned partly as factories and partly as cultural re-education camps, rooting out any residual spirit of resistance while instilling the values of productivity, time and respect for authority. In the 1800s, factories developed timetables and the assembly line, with the purpose of extracting maximum productivity out of each worker. The early 1900s gave us Taylorism, with every tiny motion of a worker’s body reduced to the most efficient possible movement. Work was progressively stripped of meaning, pleasure, talent and mastery.

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There is nothing natural or innate about the productivist behaviours we associate with homo economicus. That creature is the product of five centuries of cultural re-programming.

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Descartes’ theory of the body made it possible to think of human labour as something that can be separated from the self, abstracted, and exchanged on the market – just like nature. Like land and nature, labour too was transformed into a mere commodity; a notion that would have been unthinkable only a century earlier. The refugees that enclosure was producing came to be seen not as subjects with rights, but as a mass of labour to be disciplined and controlled for the sake of capitalist growth.

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In order to generate profits for growth, capital seeks to appropriate nature as cheaply as possible – and ideally for free.40 The elites’ seizure of Europe’s commons after 1500 can be seen as a massive, uncompensated appropriation of nature. So too with colonisation, when Europeans grabbed huge swathes of the global South; vastly more land and resources than Europe itself contained. Silver and gold from South America, land for cotton and sugar in the Caribbean, Indian forests for fuel and shipbuilding, and – during the scramble for Africa that got under way after 1885 – diamonds, rubber, cocoa, coffee, and countless other commodities. All of this was appropriated virtually for free. By ‘free’ here I mean not just in the sense that they didn’t pay for it, but also in the sense that they gave nothing back. There was no gesture of reciprocity with the land. It was pure extraction; pure theft. In a system where nature is ‘external’, the costs of plundering it can be externalised.

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Enclosure and colonisation enabled the appropriation of cheap labour too. While capital paid wages, however meagre, to Europe’s proletarian workers (mostly males), it did not pay for the (mostly female) labour that reproduced them: the women who cooked their food, cared for them when ill, and raised the next generation of workers. Indeed, it was enclosure that first produced the figure of the housewife that remains with us today, by cutting women off not only from the means of subsistence but from wage labour too, and confining them to reproductive roles. In the new capitalist system, a mass of hidden female labour was appropriated by elites virtually for free. Descartes’ dualism was recruited for this task too. Within the dualist framework, bodies were set out on a spectrum. Women were regarded as closer to ‘nature’ than men. And they were treated accordingly – subordinated, controlled and exploited.41 No need for compensation. As with all nature, the costs of extraction were externalised.

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in order to enslave someone, you first have to deny their humanity. Dualism served this purpose brilliantly: Africans and Indigenous Americans were cast as objects in the European imagination, and exploited as such. As the Martiniquan writer Aimé Césaire put it, colonisation is, at base, a process of thingification.42

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Europe’s elites saw animist thought as an obstacle to capitalism – in the colonies just as in Europe itself – and sought to eradicate it. In order to do so, they set up a new binary: ‘civilised’ versus ‘savage’. To become civilised, to become fully human, and to become willing participants in the capitalist world economy, Indigenous people would have to be forced to abandon animist principles, and made to see nature as an object.

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We all know that the violence of colonisation was justified as part of a ‘civilising mission’. What we tend not to grasp is that one of the key goals of this mission was to eradicate animist thought. The object was to turn the colonised into dualists – to colonise the mind as well as the body. As the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has put it: ‘Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world.’44

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Dualism runs so deep that it wriggles into our language even when we’re trying to be more conscientious. The very notion of ‘the environment’ – that thing we’re supposed to care about – presupposes that the living world is nothing more than a passive container, a backdrop against which the human story plays out.

‘Environment’. The strangeness of this innocent-seeming term becomes even clearer when we translate it into Spanish: ambiente. In the language of the conquistadors, the living world is cast as nothing more than mood lighting. From the perspective of animist ontology, this would be equivalent to regarding your mother and siblings as mere decorative portraits adorning the wall. It would be unthinkable.

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Postmodernism prides itself on critiquing the hubris of Mind and Self and Truth, and on questioning grand metanarratives of human progress. And yet in the end all it does is take dualism to new extremes. The world, reality, doesn’t really exist; or it does exist but it doesn’t matter what it is, in itself, since reality is whatever humans construct it to be. Nothing really exists until it has been realised by humans, constituted in human language, given names and meaning, and inserted into our symbolic world. Reality outside our own experience literally dwindles into insignificance. Postmodernists may critique modernism, but only after accepting its basic terms.45

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It’s no wonder that we react so nonchalantly to the ever-mounting statistics about the crisis of mass extinction. We have a habit of taking this information with surprising calm. We don’t weep. We don’t get worked up. Why? Because we see humans as fundamentally separate from the rest of the living community. Those species are out there, in the environment. They aren’t in here; they aren’t part of us.46 It is not surprising that we behave this way. After all, this is the core principle of capitalism: that the world is not really alive, and it is certainly not our kin, but rather just stuff to be extracted and discarded – and that includes most of the human beings living here too. From its very first principles, capitalism has set itself at war against life itself.

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Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing.

Murray Bookchin

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when we think about the longer history of capitalism, it becomes clear that something is missing from this story. Enclosure, colonisation, dispossession, the slave trade … historically, growth has always been a process of appropriation: the appropriation of energy and work from nature and from (certain kinds of) human beings. Yes, capitalism has driven some extraordinary technological innovations, and these innovations have driven an extraordinary acceleration of growth. But the main contribution that technology makes to growth is not that it produces money out of thin air, but rather that it enables capital to expand and intensify the process of appropriation.1

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In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this process was accelerated by the large-scale discovery of fossil fuel reserves – first coal and then oil – and the invention of technologies (like the steam engine) to extract and use them. A single barrel of crude oil can perform about 1700kWh of work. That’s equivalent to 4.5 years of human labour. From the perspective of capital, tapping into underground oceans of oil was like colonising the Americas all over again, or a second Atlantic slave trade – a bonanza of appropriation. But it also supercharged the process of appropriation itself. Fossil fuels are used to power giant drills for deeper mining, trawlers for deep-sea fishing, tractors and combines for more intensive farming, chainsaws for faster logging, plus ships and trucks and aeroplanes to move all of these materials around the world at staggering speeds. Thanks to technology, the process of appropriation has become exponentially faster and more expansive.

We can see this acceleration reflected in the breathtaking speed at which GDP has shot up over the past century. But it would be a mistake to see this growth as driven by fossil fuels and technology. It has been facilitated by fossil fuels and technology,

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A few months ago I found myself on stage for a televised debate about the future of capitalism, in front of a live audience. My opponent stood up and argued that there’s nothing wrong with capitalism as such. The problem is that capitalism has been corrupted by greedy CEOs and venal politicians. All we need to do is deal with the bad apples and everything will be fine. After all, when it comes down to it, capitalism is just about people buying and selling things in the market – like your local farmers’ market, or a souk in Morocco. These are innocent people using their skills to make a living; what could possibly be wrong with that?

It’s a nice story, and it seems reasonable enough. But in fact the image here of small shops in farmers’ markets and souks has nothing to do with capitalism. It is a false analogy. And it gets us no closer to understanding why capitalism is driving ecological collapse. If we really want to understand how capitalism works, we need to dig a bit deeper.

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This might seem like a good description of capitalism on the face of it – free exchange of useful things between individuals. Just like in a farmers’ market or a souk. But in reality there is nothing here that is particularly capitalist. It could be any economic system at all, at more or less any time or place in human history

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What makes capitalism distinctive is that, for capitalists, value is reckoned quite differently. While a capitalist might recognise the usefulness of things like chairs and pears, the goal of producing them isn’t to have a nice place to sit or a tasty afternoon snack, or even to sell them for other useful things. The goal is to produce and sell them for one purpose above all others: to make a profit. In this system, it is the ‘exchange-value’ of things that matters, not their use-value.2

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This is the exact opposite of a use-value economy. But here’s where things get interesting. Under capitalism, it’s not enough to generate a steady profit. The goal is to reinvest that profit to expand the production process and generate yet more profit than the year before

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To understand what’s going on here, we need to draw a distinction between two types of companies. Take your local restaurant, for example. It makes a profit at the end of the year, but the owners are content with more or less the same profit year after year: enough to pay the rent, put food on the table for their family, and maybe go for a holiday in the summer. While such a business might participate in elements of capitalist logic (paying wages, making a profit), it is not capitalist as such, since ultimately the profit is organised around some conception of use-value. This is how the vast majority of small businesses operate. Such shops existed thousands of years before capitalism emerged.

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Now consider a corporation, like Exxon or Facebook or Amazon. A corporation doesn’t operate according to the steady-state approach favoured by your local restaurant. Amazon’s profits don’t just go to putting food on the table for Jeff Bezos – they go into expanding the company: buying up competitors, putting local shops out of business, breaking into new countries, building more distribution centres, pumping out marketing campaigns to get people to buy stuff they don’t need, all to extract more profit each year than the year before.

It’s a self-reinforcing cycle – an ever-accelerating treadmill: money becomes profit becomes more money becomes more profit. And this is where we begin to see what makes capitalism distinctive. For capitalists, profit isn’t just money at the end of the day, to be used for satisfying some specific need – profit becomes capital. And the whole point of capital is that it must be reinvested to produce more capital. This process never ends – it just continues expanding

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Unlike your local restaurant, which is focused on satisfying particular concrete needs, there is no identifiable end point to the process of accumulating exchange-value. It is fundamentally unhinged from any conception of human need.

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Looking at the formula above, it becomes clear that capital behaves a bit like a virus. A virus is a piece of genetic code that is programmed to replicate itself, but it cannot do so on its own: it has to infect a host cell and force that cell to create copies of its DNA, and then each of those copies goes on to infect other cells in order to create more copies, and so on. The sole purpose of a virus is self-replication. Capital too is built on a self-replicating code, and like a virus it seeks to turn everything it touches into a self-replicating replica of itself – more capital. The system becomes a juggernaut, an unstoppable machine that’s programmed for endless expansion.

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We often talk about the relentless expansionary drive of corporations like Amazon or Facebook as due to greed; CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg are just obsessed with accumulating money and power, we might say. But it’s not quite so simple. The reality is that these firms, and the CEOs who run them, are subject to a structural imperative for growth. The Zuckerbergs of the world are just willing cogs in a bigger machine.

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Here’s how it works. Imagine you’re an investor. You want returns of, say, 5% per year, so you decide to invest in Facebook. Remember, this is an exponential function. So if Facebook keeps churning out the same profits year after year (i.e., 0% growth), it will be able to repay your initial investment but it won’t be able to pay you any interest on it. The only way to generate enough surplus for investor returns is to generate more profit each year than the year before. This is why when investors assess the ‘health’ of a firm, they don’t look at net profits; they look at the rate of profit – in other words, how much the firm’s profits grow each year. From the perspective of capital, profit alone doesn’t count. It is meaningless. All that counts is growth.

Investors – people who hold accumulated capital – scour the globe in desperate search of anything that smells like growth. If Facebook’s growth shows signs of slowing down, they’ll pump their money into Exxon instead, or into tobacco companies, or into student loans – wherever the growth is at. This restless movement of capital puts companies under enormous pressure to do whatever they can to grow – in the case of Facebook, advertising more aggressively, creating ever-more addictive algorithms, selling users’ data to unscrupulous agents, breaking privacy laws, generating political polarisation and even undermining democratic institutions – because if they fail to grow then investors will pull out and the firm will collapse. The choice is stark: grow or die

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Why do investors engage in this restless quest for growth? Because when capital sits still, it loses value (due to inflation, depreciation, etc.). So as capital piles up in the hands of accumulators, it creates enormous pressures for growth. And the more that capital accumulates, the more the pressure builds.

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This becomes a problem because growth is a compound function. The global economy has typically grown at about 3% a year. This is what economists say is necessary to ensure that most capitalists realise a positive return. Three per cent doesn’t sound like very much, but that’s because our minds normally think of growth in linear terms. Compound growth – which is the basic structure of capital reinvestment – can be difficult to get our heads around. Indeed, it has an uncanny way of sneaking up on us.

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Richard Price. Compound growth, he pointed out, ‘increases at first slowly … but, the rate of increase being continuously accelerated, it becomes in some time so rapid as to mock all the powers of the imagination’.

Take the global economy in the year 2000 and grow it at the usual rate of 3% a year. Even at this modest-sounding increment, economic output will double every twenty-three years, which means quadrupling before the middle of the century, within half a human lifespan. And if we continue growing at that same rate, by the end of the century the economy will be twenty times bigger – twenty times more than we were already doing in the roaring 2000s. Another hundred years later and it’s 370 times bigger. Another hundred years after that and it’s 7,000 times bigger, and so on. It mocks all the powers of the imagination.

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Some credit this aggressive energy for the rapid innovation that characterises capitalism. Certainly there is truth to that. But it also has the tendency to become extremely violent. Every time capital bumps up against barriers to accumulation (say a saturated market, a minimum-wage law, or environmental protections), then like a giant vampire squid it writhes in a desperate attempt to whip those barriers out of the way and plunge its tentacles into new sources of growth.3 This is what is known as a ‘fix’.4 The enclosure movement was a fix. Colonisation was a fix. The Atlantic slave trade was a fix. The Opium Wars against China were a fix. The western expansion of the United States was a fix. Each one of these fixes – all of them violent – opened up new frontiers for appropriation and accumulation, all in service of capital’s growth imperative.

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In the nineteenth century the global economy was worth a little more than $1trillion,intoday’smoney.Thatmeanseachyearcapitalneededtofindnewinvestmentsworthabout$30 billion – a significant sum. This required a huge effort on the part of capital, including the colonial expansion that characterised the nineteenth century. Today the global economy is worth over $80trillion,sotomaintainanacceptablerateofgrowthcapitalneedstofindoutletsfornewinvestmentsworthanother$2.5 trillion next year. That’s the size of the entire British economy – one of the biggest in the world. Somehow we have to add the equivalent of another British economy next year, on top of what we are already doing, and then add even more than that the following year, and so on.

Where can this quantity of growth possibly be found? The pressures become enormous. It’s what is driving the pharmaceutical companies behind the opioid crisis in the United States; the beef companies that are burning down the Amazon; the arms companies that lobby against gun control; the oil companies that bankroll climate denialism; and the retail firms that are invading our lives with ever-more sophisticated advertising techniques to get us to buy things we don’t actually want. These are not ‘bad apples’ – they are obeying the iron law of capital.

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Over the past 500 years, an entire infrastructure has been created to facilitate the expansion of capital: limited liability, corporate personhood, stock markets, shareholder value rules, fractional reserve banking, credit ratings – we live in a world that’s increasingly organised around the imperatives of accumulation.

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The Depression devastated the economies of the United States and Western Europe, and governments found themselves scrambling for a response. In the United States, officials reached out to the economist Simon Kuznets and asked him to develop an accounting system that would reveal the monetary value of all the goods and services produced in the economy. The idea was that if you can see what is happening in the economy more clearly, you can figure out where things are going wrong and intervene more effectively. Kuznets created a metric called Gross National Product, which provided the basis for the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) metric we use today.

But Kuznets was careful to emphasise that GDP is flawed. It tallies up monetised economic activity, but it doesn’t care whether that activity is useful or destructive. If you cut down a forest for timber, GDP goes up. If you extend the working day and push back the retirement age, GDP goes up. If pollution causes hospital visits to rise, GDP goes up. But GDP includes no cost accounting. It says nothing about the loss of the forest as habitat for wildlife, or as a sink for emissions. It says nothing about the toll that too much work and pollution takes on people’s bodies and minds. And not only does it leave out what is bad, it also leaves out much of what is good: it doesn’t count non-monetised economic activities, even when they are essential to human life and well-being. If you grow your own food, clean your own house or care for your ageing parents, GDP says nothing. It only counts if you pay companies to do these things for you.

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Kuznets warned that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic progress. He thought we should improve it to account for the social costs of growth. But then the Second World War struck. As the Nazi threat mounted, Kuznets’ concerns about well-being faded into the background. Governments needed to count all economic activities – even negative ones – so they could identify every shred of money and productive capacity available for the war effort. This more aggressive vision of GDP ended up becoming dominant. And at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, when world leaders sat down to decide the rules that would govern the world economy in the wake of the war, it was enshrined as the key indicator of economic progress – exactly what Kuznets had warned against.

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As soon as we start focusing on GDP growth, we’re not only promoting the things GDP measures, we’re promoting the indefinite increase of those things, regardless of the costs.

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During the Depression it was clear that output was too low – so to pull themselves out of it, Western governments invested heavily in infrastructure projects and created huge numbers of well-paid jobs, putting money into people’s pockets to stimulate demand and get things moving again. It worked, and GDP went up. But growth was not a goal in and of itself. Remember, this was the progressive era of President Franklin Roosevelt. For the first time in history, the goal was to raise the level of output specifically in order to improve people’s livelihoods and achieve progressive social outcomes – quite unlike during the previous 400 years. In other words, early progressive governments treated growth as a use-value.

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But that didn’t last long. When the OECD was founded in 1960, the top goal in its charter was (and remains) to ‘promote policies designed to achieve the highest sustainable rate of economic growth’. Suddenly the objective was to pursue not just higher levels of output for some specific purpose, but the highest rate, indefinitely, for its own sake. The British government followed suit, setting a target of 50% growth over the course of a single decade – an extraordinary rate of expansion, and the first time growth for its own sake was enshrined as a national policy objective.5

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During the Cold War, the grand competition between the West and the USSR came to be adjudicated largely by rates of growth. Which system could grow GDP the fastest? And of course growth was not only symbolically powerful in this contest; to the extent that it enabled more investment in military capacity, it also translated into real material clout.

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growthism – forever changed the way that Western governments managed their economies. The progressive policies that had been used to improve social outcomes after the Great Depression, like higher wages, labour unions and investment in public health and education, suddenly became suspect. These policies had led to high levels of well-being, but in so doing had made labour too ‘expensive’ for capital to maintain a high rate of profit. In the late 1970s, growth in Western economies began to slow down and returns on capital began to decline. Governments came under pressure to do something about it – to create a ‘fix’ for capital. So they attacked unions and gutted labour laws in order to drive the cost of wages down, and they privatised public assets that had previously been off limits to capital – mines, railways, energy, water, healthcare, telecommunications and so on – creating lucrative opportunities for private investors. During the 1980s this strategy was pursued with particular zeal by Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, inaugurating the approach that today we call neoliberalism.6

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With the rise of neoliberalism, governments’ pursuit of growth shifted away from social objectives (use-values) and focused instead on creating the conditions for capital accumulation (exchange-value). The interests of capital came to be internalised by the state, to the point where today the distinction between growth and capital accumulation has almost completely collapsed. Now the goal is to tear down barriers to profit – to make humans and nature cheaper – for the sake of growth.

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After the end of colonialism in the 1950s, many newly independent governments had been developing a new direction in economics. They were rolling out progressive policies to rebuild their countries, using tariffs and subsidies to protect domestic industries; improving labour standards and raising workers’ wages; and investing in public healthcare and education. All of this was intended to reverse the extractive policies of colonialism and improve human welfare – and it was working. Global South economies grew at 3.2% per year during the 1960s and 1970s. Crucially, in most cases growth was not pursued as a goal in and of itself; it was a means to recovery, independence, and human development – much as it was for the West in the years after the Great Depression

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But Western powers were not happy with this turn of events, as it meant they were losing access to the cheap labour, raw materials and captive markets that they had enjoyed under colonialism. So they intervened. During the debt crisis of the 1980s, they leveraged their power as creditors and used their control over the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to impose ‘structural adjustment programmes’ across Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia (with the exception of China and a few others). Structural adjustment forcibly liberalised the economies of the global South, tearing down protective tariffs and capital controls, cutting wages and environmental laws, slashing social spending and privatising public goods – all to break open profitable new investments for foreign capital and multinational companies.7

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Neoliberal globalisation fundamentally reshaped the economies of the South. Governments were forced to abandon their focus on human welfare and economic independence and focus instead on creating the best possible conditions for capital accumulation. This was done in the name of growth, but the consequences were disastrous. Structural adjustment caused two decades of crisis, with rising poverty, inequality and unemployment. Growth rates across the South actually collapsed during the 1980s and 1990s, from 3.2% to 0.7%.8 But as far as capital was concerned, it worked like a charm: it enabled multinational companies to post record profits, and sent the incomes of the richest 1% soaring.9 Western growth rates recovered, which was the real objective of neoliberal globalisation (it was a fix!), but at the expense of human lives elsewhere in the world.

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Today, nearly every government in the world, rich and poor alike, is focused single-mindedly on GDP growth. This is no longer a matter of choice. In a globalised world where capital can move freely across borders at the click of a mouse, nations are forced to compete with one another to attract foreign investment

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Governments find themselves under pressure to cut workers’ rights, slash environmental protections, open up public land to developers, privatise public services – whatever it takes to please the barons of international capital in what has become a global rush towards self-imposed structural adjustment.10 All of this is done in the name of growth.

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The governments of the world are bound to a new rule: not to achieve a level of output adequate to improve wages and build social services, but rather to pursue growth for its own sake.

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The concrete use-values of economic production (meeting human needs) have been subordinated to the pursuit of abstract exchange-value (GDP growth). Governments justify this by saying that GDP growth is the only way to reduce poverty, to create jobs and to improve people’s lives. Indeed, growth has come to stand in for human well-being, and even progress itself. This is remarkable, given that GDP measures such a narrow slice of economic activity.

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GDP growth is, ultimately, an indicator of the welfare of capitalism. That we have all come to see it as a proxy for the welfare of humans represents an extraordinary ideological coup.

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Of course, in some respects it’s true. In capitalist economies, people’s livelihoods are tied to GDP growth. We all need jobs and wages in order to survive. And here’s where the problems begin. Under capitalism, companies are constantly finding ways to increase labour productivity in order to push down the costs of production. As labour productivity improves, firms need fewer workers. People get laid off and unemployment rises; poverty and homelessness go up. Governments have to respond by scrambling to generate more growth just to create new jobs. But the crisis never goes away; it just keeps recurring, year after year. This is known as the ‘productivity trap’.11

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We are in the absurd position of needing perpetual growth just in order to avoid social collapse.

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There are other traps governments find themselves in. If a government wants to invest in public healthcare and education, it has to find (or create) the money to do so. One option is to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, but in countries where moneyed interests have political influence this risks triggering a backlash. Given this risk, even progressive parties find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. How do you get the resources to improve the lives of ordinary people without turning powerful rich people against you? Growth.

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Then there’s the debt trap – one of the most powerful of the growth imperatives. Governments finance their activities in large part by selling bonds, which is a way of borrowing money. But bonds come with interest, and interest is a compound function. In order to pay interest on bonds, governments have to generate revenues, which usually means pursuing growth. When economies slow down, governments can’t pay their debts, triggering a crisis that can quickly spiral out of control: bonds lose their value, and in order to sell them governments have to promise higher interest rates, putting them yet further into debt. The only way to get out of such a crisis is to start slashing any ‘barriers’ to growth – labour laws, environmental protections, capital controls, anything to give investors the ‘confidence’ they need to keep buying bonds. Just like companies, governments face a stark choice: grow the economy or collapse.

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On top of all this, governments pursue growth because GDP is the currency of international political power. This is clearest in military terms: the bigger your GDP, the more tanks, missiles, aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons you can buy. But it’s also true in economic terms. For example, a nation’s bargaining power at the World Trade Organization depends on the size of its GDP. The biggest economies are able to push through trade deals that serve their own interests, and they’re able to wield sanctions as a weapon to force smaller economies to fall in line. Governments find themselves scrambling in a desperate, dog-eat-dog competition to get to the top of the pile, just to avoid being pushed around

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Geopolitical pressure has become a powerful driver of the growth imperative.

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Growth is so deeply embedded in our economics and politics that the system can’t survive without it.

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If growth stops, companies go bust, governments struggle to fund social services, people lose their jobs, poverty rises, and states become politically vulnerable. Under capitalism, growth is not just an optional feature of human social organisation – it’s an imperative to which all are hostage. If the economy doesn’t grow, everything falls apart. We’re in a straight-jacket. So it’s no surprise that governments around the world have placed the full force of the state behind perpetuating the treadmill of accumulation.

All of this has powered an extraordinary acceleration of GDP since 1945. And from the perspective of ecology, this is where things start to go wrong.

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None of this is to say that growth is bad, in and of itself. That’s not my argument. It’s not growth that’s the problem, it’s growthism: the pursuit of growth for its own sake, or for the sake of capital accumulation, rather than to meet concrete human needs and social objectives.

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When we look at the impact that growthism has had on our planet since the 1980s, it makes the period of enclosure and colonisation seem quaint by comparison. All of the land and resources that colonisers appropriated across multiple continents and pulled into the juggernaut of capital – all of that has been dwarfed many times over.

We can see this playing out in the statistics on raw material consumption. This metric tallies up the total weight of all the stuff humans extract and consume each year, including biomass, metals, minerals, fossil fuels and construction materials. These figures tell an astonishing story. They show a steady rise of material use in the first half of the 1900s, doubling from 7 billion tons per year to 14 billion tons per year. But then, in the decades after 1945, something truly bewildering happens. As GDP growth becomes entrenched as a core political objective around the world, and as economic expansion starts to accelerate, material use explodes: it reaches 35 billion tons by 1980, hits 50 billion tons by 2000, and then screams up to an eye-watering 92 billion tons by 2017.12

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Of course, some of this increase represents important improvements in people’s access to necessary goods (in other words, use-value), particularly in poorer parts of the world; and we should celebrate that. But most of it does not. Scientists estimate that the planet can handle a total material footprint of up to about 50 billion tons per year.13 That’s considered to be a maximum safe boundary. Today we’re exceeding that boundary twice over. And, as we will see, virtually all of this overshoot is being driven by excess consumption in high-income nations – consumption that is organised not around use-value but exchange-value.

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Keep in mind that every ton of material stuff that’s extracted from the earth comes with an impact on the planet’s living systems. Ramping up the extraction of biomass means razing forests and draining wetlands. It means destroying habitats and carbon sinks. It means soil depletion, ocean dead zones and overfishing. Ramping up the extraction of fossil fuels means more carbon emissions, more climate breakdown and more ocean acidification. It means more mountaintop removal, more offshore drilling, more fracking and more tar sands. Ramping up the extraction of ores and construction materials means more open-cast mining, with all the downstream pollution that entails, and more cars and ships and buildings that demand yet more energy. And all this entails more waste: more landfills in the countryside, more toxins in our rivers, and more plastics in the sea. According to the United Nations, material extraction alone is responsible for 80% of total global biodiversity loss.14 In fact, scientists often use material footprint as a proxy for ecological impact itself.15

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Why are we burning through so much fossil fuel in the first place? Because economic growth requires energy. For the entire history of capitalism, growth has always caused energy use to rise.16

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There has been a radical acceleration of fossil fuel use since 1945, rising along with the explosion in both GDP and material use. And carbon emissions have gone up right along with it. Annual emissions more than doubled from 2 billion tons per year to 5 billion tons per year during the first half of the 1900s. During the second half of the century they rose fivefold, reaching 25 billion tons by the year 2000. And they have continued to rise since then, despite a string of international climate summits, reaching 37 billion tons in 2019.

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Coal is by far the most carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels. Oil – which has grown much more quickly than coal since 1945 – emits less CO2 per unit of energy. And natural gas is less intensive still.17 As the global economy has come to rely more on these less polluting fuels, one might think that emissions would begin to decline. This has happened in a number of high-income nations, but not on a global scale. Why? Because GDP growth is driving total energy demand up at such a rapid pace that these new fuels aren’t replacing the older ones, they are being added on top of them. The shift to oil and gas hasn’t been an energy transition, but an energy addition.

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Yes, we need as much renewable energy as we can get – but it won’t make enough of a difference if the global economy continues to grow at existing rates. The more we grow, the more energy the global economy requires, the more difficult it is to cover it with cleaner energy sources.

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All of this changes how we think of GDP growth. We have been trained to see exponentially rising GDP as a proxy for human progress. But it’s not quite so simple. We need to retrain our eyes

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A more holistic way of thinking about growth is to recognise that it is broadly equivalent to the rate at which our economy is metabolising the living world. This is not a problem, in and of itself; but past a certain point – which, as we will see, rich nations have long since surpassed – it becomes extremely destructive.

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Under capitalism, the rate of growth is the rate at which nature is being commodified and roped into circuits of accumulation. That we have come to rely on this as our primary indicator of progress reveals the extent to which we have come to see the world from the perspective of capital rather than from the perspective of life.

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Indeed, there is a bitter irony to the fact that we have been persuaded to use the word ‘growth’ to describe what has now become primarily a process of breakdown.

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But there’s something wrong with this picture. The language I’ve been using here – the language of ‘we’ – isn’t quite accurate. Even when we accept that capitalism is driving ecological breakdown, we have a tendency to describe it in collective terms, as if all humans are equally responsible. The ideology of the Anthropocene has a way of worming its way back into our discourse. But this assumption blinds us to what’s really going on. The word ‘Anthropocene’ is wrong not just because previous economic systems did not pose a threat to global ecology in the way that capitalism does today. It’s also that even today not all people are equally responsible.

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Once we grasp the relationship between GDP growth and ecological impact, it’s easy enough to guess that countries with higher GDP per capita will have higher ecological impact, and vice versa. And that’s exactly how it plays out. We can see this disparity in virtually every category of consumption for which we have data.

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Low-income countries consume only about 2 tons of material stuff per person per year. Lower-middle-income countries consume about 4 tons per person, and upper-middle-income countries consume about 12. As for high-income nations, they consume many times more than this: about 28 tons per person per year, on average. To put this in perspective, ecologists say that a sustainable level of material footprint, rendered in per capita terms, is about 8 tons per person. High-income nations blow past that boundary nearly four times over.21

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Consider this: if high-income nations were to consume at the average level of the rest of the world, we would not be overshooting the safe boundary at all. We’d be operating roughly within the planet’s biocapacity, rather than staring down the barrel of an ecological emergency. By contrast, if everyone in the world were to consume at the level of high-income countries, we would need the equivalent of four planets to sustain us

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If you buy a can of Pringles produced in a faraway factory, shipped across the world on aeroplanes and trucks, stored in huge warehouses and packaged in copious amounts of plastic and cardboard, it is more materially intensive than buying potato chips from a stall at your local farmers’ market. The more an economy relies on corporate supply chains, the more intensive its material use is likely to be.

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As we will see in the second part of this book, most global South countries will need to increase resource use in order to meet human needs, while high-income countries will need to dramatically reduce consumption to get back within sustainable levels.

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What brings a nation’s birth rate down? Investing in child health, so that parents can be confident their children will survive; investing in women’s health and reproductive rights, so that women have greater control over their own bodies and family size; and investing in girls’ education to expand their choices and opportunities. With these policies in place, population growth falls fast – even within a single generation.23 Gender justice must be central to any vision for a more ecological economy.

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But stabilising the global population would not cause ecological damage to automatically level off, in and of itself. In the absence of more consumers, capital finds ways to get existing consumers to consume more. Indeed, that has been the dominant story for the past few hundred years: the growth rate of material use has always significantly outstripped the growth rate of the population. Indeed, material use keeps rising even when populations stabilise and decline. This has been the case in every single historical example of population stability under capitalism.

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The data on material consumption shows that high-income countries are the biggest drivers of ecological breakdown. But there’s another side to this equation: we also have to ask where in the world that breakdown is happening. High-income nations depend in large part on extraction from the global South. In fact, fully half of the total materials they consume are extracted from poorer countries, and generally under unequal and exploitative conditions. The coltan in your smartphone comes from mines in the Congo. The lithium in your electric car battery comes from the mountains of Bolivia. The cotton in your bedsheets comes from plantations in Egypt. And this dependency does not run in the other direction. The vast majority of materials that are consumed in the South ultimately originate from the South itself, even if they are cycled through multinational value chains.24

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In other words, there is an enormous net flow of resources that goes from poor countries to rich countries. The patterns of extraction that characterised colonisation remain very much in place today. But this time, instead of being seized by force, those resources are being handed over by governments that have been rendered dependent on foreign investment and beholden to the growth imperatives of capitalism.

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You wouldn’t know it from the dominant narrative, though. The media tend to focus on each country’s current territorial emissions. By this metric, China is the biggest culprit by far. China emits 10.3 gigatons of CO2 per year, almost double that of the United States, which comes in as the second worst offender. The European Union is third, but India is not far behind, and emits more than major industrial nations like Russia and Japan.

Looking at the data from this angle we might be tempted to conclude that responsibility for the climate crisis is shared across nations. But there are a number of problems with this approach. First, it doesn’t correct for population size. When we look at it in per capita terms, the story changes completely. India emits only 1.9 tons of CO2 per person. In China it’s 8 tons per person. By contrast, Americans emit more than 16 tons per person – double that of China and eight times more than Indians. Plus, we also have to account for the fact that, since the 1980s, high-income nations have outsourced much of their industrial production to poorer countries in the global South, thereby shifting a big chunk of their emissions off the books. If we want a more accurate picture of national responsibility, we need to look beyond just territorial emissions and count consumption-based emissions too.

But the biggest problem with the usual media narrative is that when it comes to climate breakdown, what matters is the stocks of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not annual flows. So we need to look at each country’s historical emissions. When we approach it this way, it becomes clear that the highly industrialised nations of the global North – in particular the United States and Western Europe – are responsible for the vast majority of the problem.

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What’s happening here should be understood as a process of atmospheric colonisation. A small number of high-income nations have appropriated the vast majority of the safe atmospheric commons, and have contributed the vast majority of emissions in excess of the planetary boundary.

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The distribution of climate-change-related deaths is even more skewed towards the South. Data from 2010 indicates that around 400,000 people died that year due to crises related to climate breakdown – mostly hunger and communicable disease. No fewer than 98% of these deaths occurred in the South. And the vast majority, 83%, occurred in the countries that have the lowest carbon emissions in the world. By 2030, climate-related deaths are projected to reach up to 530,000 a year. Virtually all of these will happen in the South. Rich countries will suffer only 1% of climate-related deaths within their borders.

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Disease is another important factor. Rising temperatures are expanding the range of tropical diseases like malaria, meningitis, dengue and zika. As Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has put it: ‘Climate change is, among other things, an unconscionable assault on the poor.’28

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This assault is already happening. Take Somaliland, for example – a small nation in the Horn of Africa. Over the past few years, a series of consecutive droughts has killed 70% of the country’s livestock, devastating rural communities and forcing tens of thousands of families to flee. ‘We used to have droughts before,’ said Shukri Ismail Bandare, the Minister for Environment, in an interview with the Financial Times. ‘We used to name the droughts. They would be 10 or 15 years apart. Now it is so frequent that people cannot cope with it. You can touch it in Somaliland, the climate change – it is real, it is here’.29

Remember, this is happening at 1°C. Two degrees will be a death sentence for much of the global South. The only reason that people have come to accept 2°C as a reasonable target is because climate negotiators from the United States and other powerful countries have pushed for it, over the loud objections of their colleagues from the South – and particularly from Africa. When the 2°C target was announced at the Copenhagen summit in 2009, Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chief negotiator for the G77, said: ‘We have been asked to sign a suicide pact.’ ‘It is unfortunate,’ he went on, ‘that after 500 years-plus of interaction with the West we are still considered “disposables”.’

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The trauma of climate breakdown in the South directly echoes the trauma of colonisation. The South has suffered twice over: first from the appropriation of resources and labour that fuelled the North’s industrial rise, and now from the appropriation of atmospheric commons by the North’s industrial emissions. If our analysis of the climate crisis is not attentive to these colonial dimensions, then we have missed the point.

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The thing about growth is that it sounds so good. It’s a powerful metaphor that’s rooted deeply in our understanding of natural processes: children grow, crops grow … and so too the economy should grow. But this framing plays on a false analogy. The natural process of growth is always finite. We want our children to grow, but not to the point of becoming obese, or 9 feet tall, and we certainly don’t want them to grow on an endless exponential curve; rather, we want them to grow to a point of maturity, and then to maintain a healthy balance. We want our crops to grow, but only until they are ripe, at which point we harvest them and plant afresh. This is how growth works in the living world. It levels off.

The capitalist economy looks nothing like this. Under capital’s growth imperative, there is no horizon – no future point at which economists and politicians say we will have enough money or enough stuff. There is no end, in the double sense of the term: no maturity and no purpose.

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The unquestioned assumption is that growth can and should carry on for ever, for its own sake. It is astonishing, when you think about it, that the dominant belief in economics holds that no matter how rich a country has become, their GDP should keep rising, year after year, with no identifiable end point. It is the definition of absurdity.

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cancer cells are programmed to replicate for the sake of replicating, but the result is deadly to living systems.

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The business-as-usual scenario, with economic growth continuing at its normal rate, showed that sometime between 2030 and 2040 we would run into a crisis. Driven by the compound nature of the growth function, renewable resources would begin to reach the limits of their renewability, non-renewable resources would begin running out, and pollution would begin to exceed the capacity of the Earth to absorb it. Nations would have to spend increasing amounts of money to try to solve these problems, thereby spending less on the reinvestment that’s required to keep generating growth. Economic output would begin to fall, the food supply would stagnate, living standards would diminish, and populations would begin to collapse. ‘The most probable result,’ they wrote, somewhat ominously, ‘will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.’

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Limits to Growth exploded onto the scene and became one of the best-selling environmental titles in history, tapping into the countercultural ethos that prevailed in the wake of the youth rebellions of 1968.

But then the backlash came – and it came with overwhelming force. The report was denounced in the pages of the Economist, Foreign Affairs, Forbes and the New York Times, and big-name economists came out railing against it. They said that the model was too simplistic. It didn’t account for the seemingly limitless innovation of which capitalism is capable.

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Sure, existing reserves of non-renewable resources might run out, but new technologies would enable us to find new reserves, or ways to use substitute materials. And yes, there might be limits to the amount of land available for renewable resources like food, but we can always develop better fertilisers and more productive crop varieties, or grow food in warehouses.

The Oxford professor Wilfred Beckerman went so far as to say that, thanks to the wonders of technological progress, there is ‘no reason to suppose that economic growth cannot continue for another 2,500 years’. Ronald Reagan ran an election campaign against incumbent President Jimmy Carter – an environmentalist – by attacking the notion of limits, and linking a celebration of limitlessness to the spirit of the American Dream itself. ‘There is no such thing as limits to growth,’ he said, ‘because there is no such thing as limits to the human imagination.’ It was a winning message, and Americans bought it. Reagan beat Carter in a landslide.

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The problem with economic growth isn’t just that we might run out of resources at some point. The problem is that it progressively degrades the integrity of ecosystems. As onshore oil reserves run dry we can switch to offshore reserves, but both sources contribute to climate breakdown. We might be able to substitute one metal for another, but ramping up the mining of any metal is going to poison rivers and ruin habitats. And we might be able to intensify our extraction from the land by pumping it full of chemicals, but not without triggering soil depletion and pollinator collapse. The process of substitution and intensification might get us around resource limits for a while, but it still drives ecological breakdown. That’s the problem.

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In terms of ecology, this is a more coherent way of thinking about limits. Our Earth is a plentiful place – it generates an abundance of forests and fish and crops every year. It is also remarkably resilient, as it not only reproduces these things as we use them, it absorbs and processes our waste too: our emissions, our chemical run-off, and so on. But in order for the planet to maintain these capacities, we can only take as much as its ecosystems can regenerate, and pollute no more than the atmosphere and rivers and soil can safely absorb. If we overshoot these boundaries, ecosystems begin to break down and the web of life begins to unravel. That’s what’s happening right now. According to the most recent data, we have already shot past four of the planetary boundaries: for climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation and biogeochemical flows. And ocean acidification is nearing the boundary.

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Hitting or crossing the planetary boundaries doesn’t mean that economic growth will suddenly stop. We are already sliding into dangerous tipping points, and growth shows no sign of ending. In fact, one can imagine that GDP might continue growing even as social and ecological systems begin to collapse. Capital will pile into new growth sectors like sea walls, border militarisation, Arctic mining and desalinisation plants. Indeed, many of the world’s most powerful governments and corporations are already positioning themselves to capitalise on likely disaster scenarios. They know very well what’s ahead if we carry on with business as usual.

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Of course, as a strategy for maintaining aggregate GDP growth, this will only work for a time. As ecological breakdown triggers tipping points, as agricultural output declines, as mass displacement undermines political stability, and as cities are ruined by rising seas, the environmental, social and material infrastructure that underpins the possibility of growth – and indeed the possibility of organised civilisation – will fall apart.

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Trying to predict when we might bump into the limits to growth is exactly the wrong way to think about it. We will find ourselves plunging into ecological collapse well before we run into the limits to growth

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Once we realise this, it completely changes the way we think about the question of limits. As the political ecologist Giorgos Kallis has put it, the problem isn’t that there are near-term limits to growth – it’s that there aren’t. If we want to have any chance of surviving the Anthropocene, we can’t just sit around and wait for growth to crash into some kind of external limit. We must choose to limit growth ourselves.

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We need to reorganise the economy so that it operates within planetary boundaries, to maintain the Earth’s life-supporting systems which we depend on for our existence.31

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Climate change is an engineering problem and has engineering solutions.

Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil

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Even as the evidence about the relationship between economic growth and ecological breakdown continues to pile up, growthism remains entrenched. It has the staying power and ideological fervour of a religion. Of course, this is hardly surprising: our economic system is structurally dependent on growth, it serves the interests of the most powerful factions of our society, and it is rooted in a deep-seated world view of dominion and dualism that goes back some 500 years. This edifice will not yield easily. Not even to science.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

When I reflect on the conflict between science and growthism, I can’t help but think of Charles Darwin. As I mentioned in the introduction, Darwin’s findings about evolution posed such a radical challenge to the dominant world view at his time that they were almost impossible for people to accept. To see humans as descended from non-humans rather than created in the image of God required a total paradigm shift. Something similar is happening right now. Ecological science requires that we learn to see the human economy not as separate from ecology but as embedded within it. This poses a radical challenge to the dominant world view, and to capitalism itself. Yet rather than accept this evidence and change their world view, those who seek to preserve the present system instead devise elaborate alternative theories explaining that we needn’t change course; that we can carry on growing the global economy indefinitely and everything will be fine.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

This narrative relies heavily on the claim that technology will save us, in one way or another. For some, it is a simple matter of switching the global economy to renewable energy and electric cars; once we do that, there’s no reason we can’t keep growing for ever. After all, solar and wind power are getting cheaper all the time, and Elon Musk has shown that it’s possible to mass-produce storage batteries at a rapid clip. For others, it’s a matter of ‘negative-emissions technologies’ that will pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Still others bank on the hope of enormous geo-engineering schemes: everything from blocking out the sun to changing the chemistry of the oceans. Of course, even if these solutions succeed in stopping climate change, continued growth will still drive continued material use, and continued ecological breakdown. But here too some insist that this is not a problem. Efficiency improvements and recycling technologies will allow us to make growth ‘green’.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

These hopes have been touted by some of the richest and most powerful people in the world, including presidents and billionaires. The ecological crisis is no reason to start questioning the economic system, they say. It’s a comforting narrative, and one I myself once clung to. But the more I have explored these claims, the more it has become clear to me that to take this position requires accepting an extraordinary risk. We can choose to keep shooting up the curve of exponential growth, bringing us ever closer to irreversible tipping points in ecological collapse, and hope that technology will save us. But if for some reason it doesn’t work, then we’re in trouble. It’s like jumping off a cliff while hoping that someone at the bottom will figure out how to build some kind of device to catch you before you crash into the rocks below, without having any idea as to whether they’ll actually be able to pull it off. It might work … but if not, it’s game over. Once you jump, you can’t change your mind.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

If we’re going to take this approach, the evidence for it had better be rock-solid. We’d better be dead certain it will work.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Here’s how the Paris Agreement works. Each country submits a pledge on how much they will reduce their annual emissions. The pledges – known as Nationally Determined Contributions – are supposed to be set in line with the goal of keeping warming to 1.5°C. But if you add up all the pledges that have been made by signatory nations, you’ll notice something rather strange: they don’t come anywhere close to keeping us under 1.5°C. In fact, they don’t even keep us under 2°C. Even if all the countries in the world fulfil their pledges – which are voluntary and non-binding, so there’s certainly no guarantee of this – global emissions will keep rising. We’ll still be hurtling towards 3.3°C of global warming by the end of the century. In other words, even with the Paris Agreement in place, we’re on track for catastrophe.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Emit now, clean up later.

It was a crazy gamble, and everyone knew it. But the idea spread like wildfire.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

It was incredibly alluring – a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card – and it offered real hope to green growth optimists.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

A few years after Obersteiner’s paper was published the IPCC started including BECCS in its official models, even though there was still no evidence of its feasibility. And in 2014 the idea took centre stage: BECCS appeared in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), not only as a side show, but as the dominant assumption in no fewer than 101 of the 116 scenarios for staying under 2°C. AR5 is the blueprint that the Paris Agreement relies on. Governments are using the AR5 scenarios as a guide when it comes to deciding how quickly to reduce their emissions. This helps explain why national plans significantly overshoot the carbon budget for 2°C: it’s because everyone’s relying on scenarios that assume BECCS will save us.

In other words, BECCS sits right at the centre of our big plan to save the world, even though most people have never even heard of it. Journalists never mention it, our politicians never talk about it; not because they’re trying to hide something, or because it’s too complicated to explain, but because most of them don’t know it even exists. They’re just following the scenarios. The future of our planet’s biosphere, and of human civilisation, hinges on a plan that very few people know about, and to which nobody has consented.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

The proposal was stunning in its elegance. First you establish massive tree plantations around the world. The trees suck CO2 out of the atmosphere as they grow. Then you harvest the trees, churn them into pellets, burn them in power plants to generate energy, capture the carbon emissions at the chimneys and store it all underground where it can never escape. Voila: a global energy system that produces ‘negative emissions’.

This technology is known as BECCS: bio-energy with carbon capture and storage. When Obersteiner published his paper there was no evidence that the scheme would actually work; it was just speculation. But the sheer possibility of it captivated those who were looking for politically palatable ways of staying under 2°C

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

There are four main problems with the idea – each potentially fatal.

First, BECCS has never been proven to be scalable. To make it work would require that we create a global carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) system capable of sucking up some 15 billion tons of CO2 a year. Right now we have capacity to handle about 0.028 billion tons – and only a fraction of that is verified. Since a typical CCS facility can handle about 1 million tons, we would need to construct some 15,000 new facilities all around the world.2 The scale of this development is enormous – it would be one of the biggest infrastructural feats ever attempted in human history – and we have no idea whether it’s possible to pull it off in time. We also have no idea whether it will be commercially viable. Right now it is not. It will only become viable if governments around the world agree to put a price on carbon at least ten times higher than it is presently priced in the European Union.3

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

This isn’t an insurmountable obstacle, but it does make the ‘overshoot now, clean up later’ strategy highly risky. If we bet on BECCS, and choose to not reduce our emissions in the near term, there’s no going back. If BECCS fails then we will be locked into a future of extreme global warming. When you’re gambling with the fate of human civilisation, and indeed with the web of life itself, the stakes are simply too high.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Even if we somehow manage to overcome the technical and economic obstacles, we’ll bump straight into another crisis. In order for BECCS to remove as much carbon as the IPCC scenarios assume, we will need to create biofuel plantations covering an area two to three times the size of India, gobbling up about two-thirds of the planet’s arable land. This would require shifting land away from food crops, which is a problem when we’re trying to feed a population that’s on track to grow to at least 9 billion by the middle of the century. In other words, relying on BECCS at scale would be likely to cause severe food shortages and could even trigger famines. It’s not difficult to imagine the conflicts this would catalyse. And let’s not pretend that powerful nations are going to willingly give their own land over to biofuels; it’s more likely they’ll attempt to seize land elsewhere, setting off a kind of climate colonialism

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

On top of all this, BECCS would be an ecological disaster in its own right. A team of researchers led by the German scientist Vera Heck has estimated that the rollout of biofuel plantations at scale would have a number of devastating impacts. Vast tracts of forest would have to be destroyed, slashing global forest cover by 10% from its already-precarious levels. This would drive an additional 7% loss in biodiversity, further exacerbating mass extinction.7 And the use of chemical fertilisers for monoculture on such an unprecedented scale would decimate insect populations, pollute water systems, exacerbate soil depletion and worsen coastal dead zones.8 In addition, BECCS plantations would require twice as much water as we already use for farming, placing communities and ecosystems around the world under significant stress.9

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

In other words, BECCS might help us in the battle against climate change, but only by pushing us headlong into a number of other deadly problems. If global warming was the only crisis we were facing, this might seem like a reasonable risk to take. But given that it’s only one part of a broader ecological crisis, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s a suicidal strategy.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

overshooting the carbon budget means triggering possible tipping points and feedback loops that could push temperatures completely out of our control. And if that happens, the whole exercise would have been in vain. We might be able to pull carbon out of the atmosphere at some future point, but we cannot reverse climate tipping points.10

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

The latest assessments show that safe use of BECCS – in a way that respects planetary boundaries and human food systems – will allow us to reduce global emissions by at most 1%. That’s an important contribution, to be sure; but it’s a far cry from the saviour technology that people once hoped it would be.12

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

if we want to have a decent shot at keeping temperatures under 1.5°C, we have to cut global emissions in half by 2030 and get to zero before 2050.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

It means nothing less than the rapid and dramatic reversal of our present direction as a civilisation. We have built up a global fossil-fuel infrastructure over the past 250 years, and now we have to completely overhaul it in only thirty. Everything has to change, in a matter of decades. And keep in mind that this is for the world as a whole. Rich nations have to cut emissions much more quickly, given the scale of their historical contributions to climate breakdown, while poorer nations can take it more slowly. Scientists at the Stockholm Environment Institute calculate that rich countries need to reach zero emissions before 2030.13

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Today the world is producing 8 billion more megawatt hours of clean energy each year than in 2000. That’s a lot – enough to power all of Russia. But over exactly the same period, economic growth has caused energy demand to increase by 48 billion megawatt hours. In other words, all the clean energy we’ve been rolling out covers only a small fraction of new demand. It’s like shovelling sand into a pit that just keeps getting bigger

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

more growth means more energy demand, and more energy demand makes it all the more difficult (impossible, in fact) to generate enough renewable capacity to meet it.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

replacing the world’s projected fleet of 2 billion vehicles is going to require an explosive increase in mining: global annual extraction of neodymium and dysprosium will go up by another 70%, annual extraction of copper will more than double, and cobalt will need to increase by a factor of almost four – all for the entire period between now and 2050. We need to switch to electric cars, yes; but ultimately we need to radically reduce the number of cars we use.

The problem here is not that we’re going to run out of key minerals – although that may indeed become a concern. The real issue is that this will exacerbate an already existing crisis of overextraction. Mining has already become a big driver of deforestation, ecosystem collapse and biodiversity loss around the world. If we’re not careful, growing demand for renewable energy will exacerbate this crisis significantly.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Lithium is another ecological disaster. It takes 500,000 gallons of water to produce a single ton of lithium. Even at present levels of extraction this is causing real problems. In the Andes, where most of the world’s lithium is located, mining companies are burning through the water tables and leaving farmers with nothing to irrigate their crops. Many have had no choice but to abandon their land altogether. Meanwhile, chemical leaks from lithium mines have poisoned rivers from Chile to Argentina, Nevada to Tibet, killing off whole freshwater ecosystems. The lithium boom has barely started, and it’s already a catastrophe.21

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

all of this is just to power the global economy by 2050. Things become even more extreme when we start accounting for growth into the future. As energy demand continues to rise, material extraction for renewables will become all the more aggressive – and the more we grow, the worse it will get. Even after achieving a full energy transition, to keep the global economy growing at projected rates would mean doubling the total global stock of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries every thirty or forty years, for ever.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Parts of Latin America, Africa and Asia are likely to become the target of a new scramble for resources, and some countries may become victims of new forms of colonisation. It happened in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the hunt for gold and silver from South America. In the nineteenth century, it was land for cotton and sugar plantations in the Caribbean. In the twentieth century, it was diamonds from South Africa, cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and oil from the Middle East. It’s not difficult to imagine that the scramble for renewables might become similarly violent.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

become as destructive as fossil fuel companies – buying off politicians, trashing ecosystems, lobbying against environmental regulations, even assassinating community leaders who stand in their way, a tragedy that is already unfolding.22 This is important.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

As for fusion power – the running joke is that engineers have been saying it’s a decade away for about six decades now. While we have managed to create successful fusion reactions, the problem is that the process requires more energy than it produces. A big fusion experiment presently under way in France may be close to solving that problem (and that’s a big maybe), but even the most optimistic projections indicate that it won’t happen for another ten years.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Solar radiation management is only a partial response to the crisis we face. It would do nothing to slow the pace of ocean acidification, or deforestation, or soil depletion, or mass extinction. And this brings us to the next point

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

The problem with this vision is that it misses one key, unavoidable point: emissions are only one part of the crisis. In addition to climate breakdown, we are already overshooting a number of other planetary boundaries, driven by ever-increasing extraction from the Earth. The problem isn’t just the type of energy we’re using; it’s what we are doing with it.

Even if we had a 100%-clean-energy system, what would we do with it? Exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, trawl more fish, mine more mountains, build more roads, expand industrial farming, and send more waste to landfill – all of which have ecological consequences our planet can no longer sustain

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

We will do these things because our economic system demands that we grow production and consumption at an exponential rate. In fact, the whole idea behind using clean energy to power a ‘green growth’ system is so that we can keep growing material production and consumption. Otherwise why would we need to keep growing energy demand?

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Because rich countries have outsourced so much of their production to other countries – mostly in the global South – that side of resource use has been conveniently shifted off their balance sheet. To account for this, scientists prefer to use a measure called ‘material footprint’, which includes the total resources embodied in a nation’s imports.

Using this more holistic measure it quickly becomes clear that the material consumption of rich nations hasn’t been falling at all. In fact, in recent decades it’s been increasing dramatically, even to the point of outpacing GDP growth. There has been no decoupling. It was all an illusion of accounting.26

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

People might earn their money on YouTube, but they spend it buying things like furniture and cars. But it’s also because services themselves turn out to be resource-intensive in their own right. Take the tourism sector, for example. Tourism is classed as a service, and yet it requires an enormous material infrastructure to keep it going – airports, planes, buses, cruise ships, resorts, hotels, swimming pools and theme parks (all of which are services themselves).

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Services have grown from 63% of GDP in 1997 to 69% in 2015, according to World Bank data. Yet during this same period global material use has accelerated

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

People will spend their money on movies and plays, for example, or on yoga and restaurants and new computer software. So GDP will continue growing for ever while resource use declines.

It’s a comforting thought, and it sounds reasonable enough. Fortunately, we now have the evidence to test whether it holds up. Over the past few years scientists have developed a number of models to determine the impact of policy changes and technological innovation on material use. And the results are quite surprising.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

In 2016, a second team of scientists tested a different scenario: one in which the world’s nations all agreed to go above and beyond existing best practice.30 In their best-case scenario, they assumed a tax that would raise the price of carbon to $236 per ton (which in turn raises the costs of material extraction and transportation), and imagined technological innovations that would double the efficiency with which we use resources. The results were almost exactly the same as in Dittrich’s study. Even under these stringent conditions, resource use keeps going up. No absolute decoupling, and no green growth.

Finally, in late 2017 the UNEP – an institution that once eagerly promoted green growth theory – weighed in on the debate.31 It tested a scenario with carbon priced at a whopping $573 per ton, slapped on a resource extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation spurred by strong government support. The results? Resource use still goes up, nearly doubling by the middle of the century. As these results trickled out, UNEP had no choice but to change its position, admitting that green growth was a pipe dream: absolute decoupling of GDP and material use is simply not possible on a global scale.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

James Watt had just introduced his steam engine, which was significantly more efficient than previous versions: it used less coal per unit of output. Everyone assumed that this would reduce total coal consumption. But oddly enough, exactly the opposite happened: coal consumption in England soared. The reason, Jevons discovered, was that the efficiency improvement saved money, and capitalists reinvested the savings to expand production. This led to economic growth – and as the economy grew, it chewed through more coal.

This odd result became known as the Jevons Paradox. In modern economics, the phenomenon is known as the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate, named after the two economists who described it in the 1980s. And it doesn’t just apply to energy – it applies to material resources too. When we innovate more efficient ways to use energy and resources, total consumption may briefly drop, but it quickly rebounds to an even higher rate. Why? Because companies use the savings to reinvest in ramping up more production.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Jevons described this as a ‘paradox’, but if you think about it it’s not particularly surprising. Under capitalism, growth-oriented firms do not deploy new and more efficient technologies just for fun. They deploy them in order to facilitate growth. The same is true at the level of the whole economy. Ask any economist and they’ll tell you: efficiency improvements are good because they stimulate economic growth.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

despite constant improvements in efficiency, aggregate energy and resource use has been rising for the whole history of capitalism. There’s no paradox; it’s exactly what economists expect. Rising throughput happens not despite efficiency gains, but because of them

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

there’s also something else going on. The technological innovations that have contributed most to growth have done so not because they enable us to use less nature, but because they enable us to use more.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Take the chainsaw, for instance. It’s a remarkable invention that enables loggers to fell trees, say, ten times faster than they are able to do by hand. But logging companies equipped with chainsaws don’t let their workers finish the job early and take the rest of the day off. They get them to cut down ten times as many trees as before. Lashed to the growth imperative, technology is used not to do the same amount of stuff in less time, but rather to do more stuff in the same amount of time.

The steam engine, the cotton gin, fishing trawlers

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

In a system where technological innovation is leveraged to expand extraction and production, it makes little sense to hope that yet more technological innovation will somehow magically do the opposite.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Let me be clear: technological innovation is absolutely important to the battle ahead. It is vital, in fact. We’re going to need all the innovations and efficiency improvements we can get to drastically reduce the resource and carbon intensity of our economy. But the problem we face doesn’t have to do with technology. The problem has to do with growth. Over and over again, we see that the growth imperative wipes out all the gains our best technology delivers.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

In a post-growth economy, efficiency improvements would actually reduce our impact on the planet

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

once we are liberated from the growth imperative, we will be free to focus on different kinds of innovations – innovations designed to improve human and ecological welfare, rather than innovations designed to speed up the rate of extraction and production.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

The idea of a ‘circular economy’ has been gaining traction in policy circles recently as a response to the ecological crisis. These days everybody seems to be into it. The claim is that if we can scale up our recycling rate then we can keep growing GDP indefinitely, without worrying about the ecological impact of consumption. The European Union sees this as a plan to save capitalism, hoping that a circular economy will ‘foster sustainable economic growth’.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

the idea that recycling will save capitalism doesn’t hold water. First, most of our material use cannot be recycled. Forty-four per cent of it is food and energy inputs, which become irreversibly degraded as we use them.33 Twenty-seven per cent is net addition to stocks of buildings and infrastructure. Another big chunk is waste from mining.34 In the end, only a small fraction of our total material use has circular potential. Even if we recycled all of it, economic growth would keep driving total resource use up. In any case, we’re moving in the wrong direction: recycling rates have been declining over time, not improving. In 2018, the global economy achieved a recycling rate of 9.1%. Two years later it was down to 8.6%. This isn’t because our recycling systems are getting worse. It’s because growth in total material demand is outstripping our gains in recycling. Once again, it’s not our technology that’s the problem – it’s growth.35

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

there’s an even more fundamental problem with the idea of a ‘green growth’ circular economy. Even if we were able to recycle 100% of materials, that would pose a problem for the prospect of GDP growth. Growth tends to require an ‘outside’: an external source from which to extract value for free, or as close to free as possible. In a circular economy, the cost of materials is internalised. That’s good from the perspective of ecology, but bad from the perspective of capital accumulation. Recycling costs money, and the cost of paying for recycled materials makes it more difficult to generate ever-rising surplus.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

In an era of climate emergency and mass extinction, we don’t have time to speculate about imaginary possibilities. We don’t have time to wait for this juggernaut of ecological destruction to suddenly stop being destructive, when all the evidence says it won’t happen. It is unscientific, and a profoundly irresponsible gamble with human lives – with all of life.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

There is an easy way to solve this problem. For decades, ecological economists have proposed that we can put an end to the debate once and for all with a simple and elegant intervention: impose a cap on annual resource use and waste, and tighten that cap year-on-year until we are back within planetary boundaries.36

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

If green growthers really believe GDP will keep growing, for ever, despite rapid reductions in material use, then this shouldn’t worry them one bit. In fact, they should welcome such a move. It will give them a chance to prove to the world once and for all that they are right. Indeed, putting hard limits on resource use and waste will help incentivise the transition, spurring the shift toward dematerialised GDP growth.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

But every time we propose this policy to green growthers, they wriggle away. Indeed, to my knowledge, not a single proponent of green growth has ever agreed to take it up. Why not? I suspect that on some deep level – despite the fairy tales – they realise that this is not how capitalism actually works. For 500 years, capitalism has depended on extraction from nature. It has always needed an ‘outside’, external to itself, from which to plunder value, for free, without an equivalent return. That’s what fuels growth. To put a limit on material extraction and waste is to effectively kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Let’s imagine that we cap resource use, scale it down to a sustainable level of 50 billion tons per year, and hold it there. And let’s imagine that the green growthers are correct, and GDP keeps growing by 3% a year, for ever. Remember, this is exponential, so in 200 years global GDP is some 1,000 times bigger than it is today. What will this hypothetical scenario look like? When capital is no longer allowed to plunder nature in order to fuel the growth imperative, we must ask ourselves: what new forms of exploitation might it devise?

The first culprit will be human labour. It’s not difficult to imagine that if capital is rendered unable to exploit nature, it will double down instead on exploiting people. The growth imperative already places extraordinary pressure on politicians around the world to cut wages and labour regulations. It’s reasonable to expect that in a resource-steady scenario this pressure would intensify considerably. There would be a race to find ever-cheaper sources of labour.

But let’s give the benefit of the doubt to green growthers, and assume that they’re progressive enough to want to not only keep labour regulations but also improve them. Let’s say we agree on an international minimum wage of some kind – a hard floor on labour exploitation to match the hard cap on material exploitation. In such a scenario, capital will be under enormous pressure to find new horizons for surplus accumulation. It will need to find a ‘fix’ somewhere – new horizons for appropriation, new outlets for investment, and new markets for sales.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

When capital has bumped up against limits to profit-growth in the past, it has found fixes in things like colonisation, structural adjustment programmes, wars, restrictive patent laws, nefarious debt instruments, land grabs, privatisation, and enclosing commons like water and seeds. Why would it be any different this time? Indeed, a study by the ecological economist Beth Stratford finds that when capital faces resource constraints, this is exactly what happens: it turns to aggressive rent-seeking behaviour. It seeks to grab existing value wherever it can, with clever mechanisms to suck income and wealth from the public domain into private hands, and from the poor to the rich, exacerbating inequality.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Now, some might argue that capitalism could theoretically find growth opportunities in completely immaterial goods. That might sound nice on the face of it. But the thing about immaterial goods is that they tend already to be abundant and freely available, or are otherwise very easy to share. In order to secure growing profits in a context where all new value must be immaterial, then capital may well seek to enclose immaterial commons that are presently abundant and free, to make them artificially scarce and force people to pay for them. One can imagine an economy where not only water and seeds are privatised, commodifed and sold back to people for money, but also knowledge, songs and green spaces; maybe even parenting and physical touch; perhaps even the air itself. As for the rest of us, we would have to work more and more, producing (presumably) immaterial things for sale, simply in order to earn enough wages to buy access to immaterial things that we used to get for free.

The point here is that closing off the usual go-to fix (extraction from nature) will generate pressure for capital to find other fixes. That is the violent side of growth. It’s naïve to pretend that these other fixes will somehow magically not be harmful, when we have 500 years of data to suggest that the reality is likely to be otherwise.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

Whenever there appears to be a conflict between ecology and growth, economists and politicians opt for the latter and try ever more creative ways to get reality to conform to it. Politicians are willing to bet everything on speculative technologies to avoid facing the imperative of radical emissions reductions. Proponents of green growth resort to outlandish imaginary scenarios and clever accounting tricks to maintain the illusion that we can carry on with the status quo. They are willing to risk everything – literally everything – just to keep GDP rising.

THREE: Will Technology Save Us?

And yet, remarkably, none of these people has ever bothered to justify their core premise – the assumption that we need to keep expanding the economy, year-on-year, for ever. It is simply taken as an article of faith. Most people don’t stop to question it, and indeed in some circles to do so is a kind of heresy. But what if this assumption is wrong? What if high-income countries don’t need growth? What if we can improve human well-being without having to expand the economy at all? What if we can generate all the innovations we need for a rapid transition to renewable energy without a single dollar of additional GDP? What if instead of trying so desperately to decouple GDP from resources and energy use, we could decouple human progress from GDP instead? What if we could find a way to release our civilisation, and our planet, from the constraints of the growth imperative?

If we’re willing to imagine speculative science-fiction fairy tales to keep the existing economy chugging along, why not just imagine a different kind of economy altogether?

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

We have discovered that, remarkably for a claim that has become so entrenched in our society, the underlying empirical basis for it is weak. It turns out that the relationship between growth and human progress isn’t quite as obvious as we once thought. It’s not growth itself that matters – what matters is how income is distributed, and the extent to which it is invested in public services. And past a certain point, more GDP isn’t necessary for improving human welfare at all.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

the American demographer Samuel Preston pointed to another piece of evidence that seemed to bolster McKeown’s thesis. Countries with higher GDP per capita also tend to have higher life expectancy. People in poor countries generally live shorter lives, while people in rich countries generally live longer lives. It’s impossible to escape the obvious conclusion: GDP growth must be the key driver of progress on this key indicator of human welfare.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

Teams from the World Bank and the IMF went around the global South arguing that if governments wanted to improve social indicators like infant mortality and life expectancy, they needn’t bother building public health systems (which many of them had been trying to do after the end of colonialism); instead, they should just focus on paving the way for growth. Do whatever it takes: get rid of environmental protections, slash labour laws, cut spending on healthcare and education, reduce taxes on the rich – it might seem regressive, and it may do a bit of harm in the short term, but ultimately it’s the only true way to improve people’s lives.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

Those were heady days. During the 1980s and 1990s, the first two decades of the neoliberal era, this narrative reigned supreme. It served as the core justification for the structural adjustment programmes that were imposed so aggressively across the global South in the wake of the debt crisis

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

The thing is, when McKeown and Preston published their claims, neither of them were looking at long-term data. If they had been able to dig a bit more deeply into the historical record, they would have come to a rather different conclusion. As we saw in Chapter 1, the long rise of capitalism, from 1500 right into the Industrial Revolution, caused dramatic social dislocation everywhere it went. The enclosure movement in Europe, the Indigenous genocides, the Atlantic slave trade, the spread of European colonisation, the Indian famines; all of this took a measurable toll on human welfare around the world. The scars remain starkly visible in the public health record. For the vast majority of the history of capitalism, growth didn’t deliver welfare improvements in the lives of ordinary people; in fact, it did exactly the opposite.1 Remember, capitalist expansion relied on the creation of artificial scarcity. Capitalists enclosed the commons – lands, forests, pastures and other resources that people depended on for survival – and ripped up subsistence economies in order to push people into the labour market. The threat of hunger was used as a weapon to enforce competitive productivity. Artificial scarcity quite often caused the livelihoods and welfare of ordinary people to collapse even as GDP grew.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

simple intervention, something McKeown had overlooked: sanitation.2 In the middle of the 1800s, public health researchers had discovered that health outcomes could be improved by introducing simple sanitation measures, such as separating sewage from drinking water

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

All it required was a bit of public plumbing. But public plumbing requires public works, and public money. You have to appropriate private land for things like public water pumps and public baths. And you have to be able to dig on private property in order to connect tenements and factories to the system. This is where the problems began. For decades, progress towards the goal of public sanitation was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class. Libertarian-minded landowners refused to allow officials to use their property, and refused to pay the taxes required to get it done.

The resistance of these elites was broken only once commoners won the right to vote and workers organised into unions. Over the following decades these movements, which in Britain began with the Chartists and the Municipal Socialists, leveraged the state to intervene against the capitalist class. They fought for a new vision: that cities should be managed for the good of everyone, not just for the few. These movements delivered not only public sanitation systems but also, in the years that followed, public healthcare, vaccination coverage, public education, public housing, better wages and safer working conditions. According to research by the historian Simon Szreter, access to these public goods – which were, in a way, a new kind of commons – had a significant positive impact on human health, and spurred soaring life expectancy through the twentieth century.3

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

This explanation is now backed up by a strong consensus among public health researchers. Recent data shows that water sanitation measures alone explain 75% of the decline in infant mortality in the United States between 1900 and 1936, and half the total decline in mortality rates. A recent study led by an international team of medical scientists found that, after sanitation, the greatest predictor of improved life expectancy is access to universal healthcare

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

Don’t get me wrong. It’s true that nations with higher income tend in general to have better life expectancies than nations with lower income. But there is no automatic relationship between these two variables. ‘The historical record is clear that economic growth itself has no direct, necessary positive implications for population health,’ Szreter points out. ‘The most that can be said is that it creates the longer-term potential for population health improvements.’6 Whether or not that potential is realised depends on the political forces that determine how income is distributed. Progress in human welfare has been driven by progressive political movements and governments that have managed to harness economic resources to deliver robust public goods and fair wages. In fact, the historical record shows that in the absence of these forces, growth has quite often worked against social progress, not for it.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

In fact, there are many countries that manage to achieve strikingly high levels of human welfare with relatively little GDP per capita. We tend to see these countries as ‘outliers’, but they prove the very point that Szreter and other public health researchers have been trying to make: it’s all about distribution. And what matters most of all is investment in universal public goods. This is where things get interesting.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

The European Union as a whole has 36% less income than the United States, and yet beats the US not only on life expectancy but on virtually every other indicator of human welfare.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

Estonia is right towards the top of world education rankings too, but with 66% less income than the US.8

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

What explains the remarkable results that these countries have achieved? It’s simple: they’ve all invested in building high-quality universal healthcare and education systems.9 When it comes to delivering long, healthy, flourishing lives for all, this is what counts.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

The good news is that this is not at all expensive to do. In fact, universal public services are significantly more cost-effective to run than their private counterparts. Take Spain, for example. Spain spends only $2,300perpersontodeliverhigh-qualityhealthcaretoeveryoneasafundamentalright,achievingoneofthehighestlifeexpectanciesintheworld:83.5years;afullfiveyearslongerthanAmericans.Bycontrast,theprivate,for-profitsystemintheUnitedStatessucksupaneye-watering$9,500 per person, while delivering lower life expectancy and worse health outcomes.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

Past a certain threshold, more growth actually begins to have a negative impact. We can see this effect when we look at alternative metrics of progress, like the Genuine Progress Indicator. GPI starts with personal consumption expenditure (which is also the starting point for GDP) and adjusts for income inequality as well as the social and environmental costs of economic activity. By accounting for the costs as well as the benefits of growth, this measure gives us a more balanced view of what’s happening in an economy. When we plot this data over time, we see that global GPI grew along with GDP until the mid-1970s, but since then has flattened out and even declined, as the social and environmental costs of growth have become significant enough to cancel out consumption-related gains.12

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

the continued pursuit of growth in high-income nations is exacerbating inequality and political instability,13 and contributing to problems like stress and depression from overwork and lack of sleep, ill health from pollution, diabetes and obesity, and so on.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

Consider this thought experiment: if Portugal has higher levels of human welfare than the United States with $38,000lessGDPpercapita,thenwecanconcludethat$38,000 of America’s per capita income is effectively ‘wasted’. That adds up to $13trillionperyearfortheUSeconomyasawhole.That’s$13 trillion worth of extraction and production and consumption each year, and $13 trillion worth of ecological pressure, that adds nothing, in and of itself, to the fundamentals of human welfare. It is damage without gain. This means that the US economy could in theory be scaled down by a staggering 65% from its present size while at the same time improving the lives of ordinary Americans, if income was distributed more fairly and invested in public goods.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

In the United States, happiness rates peaked in the 1950s, when GDP per capita was only about $15,000 (in today’s dollars). Since then the average real income of Americans has quadrupled, and yet happiness has plateaued and even declined for the past half-century. The same is true of Britain, where happiness has declined since the 1950s despite a tripling of income.14 Similar trends are playing out in country after country.

What explains this paradox? Researchers have found that – once again – it’s not income itself that matters, but how it’s distributed.15 Societies with unequal income distribution tend to be less happy. There are a number of reasons for this. Inequality creates a sense of unfairness; it erodes social trust, cohesion and solidarity. It’s also linked to poorer health, higher levels of crime and less social mobility. People who live in unequal societies tend to be more frustrated, anxious, insecure and discontent with their lives. They have higher rates of depression and addiction.

It’s easy to imagine how this might play out in real life. If you get a raise at work it’s bound to boost your happiness. But what happens when you discover that your colleagues got a raise that was twice what you received? Suddenly you’re not happy at all – you’re upset. You feel devalued. Your sense of trust in your boss takes a hit, and your sense of solidarity with your colleagues falls apart.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

The more our friends and neighbours have, the more we feel that we need to match them just to feel like we’re doing OK. The data on this is clear: people who live in highly unequal societies are more likely to shop for luxury brands than people who live in more equal societies.16 We keep buying more stuff in order to feel better about ourselves, but it never works because the benchmark against which we measure the good life is pushed perpetually out of reach by the rich (and, these days, by social media influencers). We find ourselves spinning in place on an exhausting treadmill of needless over-consumption.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

So, if not income, what does improve well-being? In 2014, the political scientist Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn conducted a review of all the existing data on this question. He found something remarkable: countries that have robust welfare systems have the highest levels of human happiness, when controlling for other factors. And the more generous and universal the welfare system, the happier everyone becomes.17 This means things like universal healthcare, unemployment insurance, pensions, paid holiday and sick leave, affordable housing, daycare and strong minimum wages. When people live in a fair, caring society, where everyone has equal access to social goods, they don’t have to spend their time worrying about how to cover their basic needs day to day – they can enjoy the art of living. And instead of feeling they are in constant competition with their neighbours, they can build bonds of social solidarity.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

The data on happiness is remarkable. But some researchers have pointed out that we shouldn’t be satisfied with looking just at happiness. We should look at people’s sense of meaning – a more profound state that lies beneath the tumult of daily emotions. And when it comes to meaning, what matters has even less to do with GDP. People feel they have meaningful lives when they have the opportunity to express compassion, co-operation, community and human connection. These are what psychologists refer to as ‘intrinsic values’. These values don’t have to do with external indicators like how much money you have, or how big your house is; they run much deeper than that. Intrinsic values are far more powerful, and more durable, than the fleeting rush we might get from a boost in income or material consumption.19 We humans are evolved for sharing, co-operation and community. We flourish in contexts that enable us to express these values, and we suffer in contexts that stifle them.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

We know that Costa Ricans live long lives: around eighty years on average. But the researchers had noticed that Nicoyans live even longer, with a life expectancy of up to eighty-five years – one of the highest in the world. This is odd, because Nicoya is one of the poorest parts of Costa Rica, in monetary terms. It is a subsistence economy where people live traditional, agricultural lifestyles. So what explains these results? Costa Rica has an excellent public healthcare system, so that’s a big part of it. But the researchers found that Nicoyans’ extra longevity is due to something more. Not diet, not genes, but something completely unexpected: community. The longest-living Nicoyans all have strong relationships with their families, friends and neighbours. Even in old age, they feel connected. They feel valued. In fact, the poorest households have the longest life expectancies, because they are more likely to live together and rely on each other for support.20

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

Imagine. People living subsistence lifestyles in rural Costa Rica enjoy longer, healthier lives than people in the richest economies on Earth. North America and Europe may have highways and skyscrapers and shopping malls, huge homes and cars and glitzy institutions – all the markers of ‘development’. And yet none of this gives them a shred of advantage over the fishermen and farmers of Nicoya when it comes to this core measure of human progress. The data piles up. Over and over again, we see that the excess GDP that characterises the richest nations wins them nothing when it comes to what really matters.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

It means that upper-middle income and high-income nations – countries over the threshold of $10,000 per capita – could in theory deliver flourishing lives for all, achieving real progress in human development, without needing any additional growth in order to do so. We know exactly what works: reduce inequality, invest in universal public goods, and distribute income and opportunity more fairly.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

As societies become more egalitarian, people feel less pressure to pursue ever-higher incomes and more glamorous status goods. This liberates people from the treadmill of perpetual consumerism. Take Denmark, for example. Consumer research shows that because Denmark is more equal than most other high-income countries, people buy fewer clothes – and keep them for longer – than their counterparts elsewhere. And firms spend less money on advertising, because people just aren’t as interested in unnecessary luxury purchases.21 This is one of the reasons why more egalitarian societies turn out to have lower levels of per capita emissions, when correcting for other factors.22

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

The richest 10% of the world’s population are responsible for almost half the world’s total lifestyle carbon emissions. In other words, the global climate crisis is being driven largely by the global rich. And things become even more lopsided as we climb the income ladder. The richest 1% emit thirty times more than the poorest 50% of the human population.23 Why? It’s not only because they consume more stuff than everybody else, but also because the stuff they consume is more energy-intensive: huge houses, big cars, private jets, frequent flights, long-distance holidays, luxury imports, and so on.24 And if the rich have more money than they can spend, which is virtually always the case, then they invest their excess in expansionary industries that are quite often ecologically destructive.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

This leads us to a simple but radical conclusion: any policy that reduces the incomes of the very rich will have a positive ecological benefit. And because the excess incomes of the rich win them nothing when it comes to welfare, this can be accomplished without any cost to social outcomes

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

The French economist Thomas Piketty, one of the world’s leading experts on inequality, doesn’t mince his words: ‘A drastic reduction in purchasing power of the richest would therefore in itself have a substantial impact on the reduction of emissions at global level.’25

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There are also ecological benefits to be reaped from investing in public services. Public services are almost always less intensive than their private equivalents. Britain’s National Health Service, for instance, emits only one-third as much CO2 as the American health system, and delivers better health outcomes in the process. Public transportation is less intensive in terms of both energy and materials than private cars. Tap water is less intensive than bottled water. And things like public parks, swimming pools and recreational facilities are less intensive than everyone buying bigger yards, private pools and personal gym equipment. Plus, it’s more fun

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

If you visit Finland, you’ll find a whole society that thrives on the conviviality of public saunas – it’s a national pastime that plays a big role in making Finland one of the happiest countries in the world.26

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Shared public goods also take pressure off people’s need for private income. Take the United States, for example. Americans are under extraordinary pressure to work ever-longer hours and pursue ever-higher incomes, because the cost of accessing basic goods like healthcare and education is not only outrageously high, but constantly rising. Decent health insurance can be prohibitively expensive to buy, and the cost of deductibles and co-payments is often enough to sink people into debt for their whole lives. Health insurance premiums have nearly quadrupled since 2000.27 As for education, a family with two kids can expect to pay up to half a million dollars just to put them through college – almost 500% more than in the 1980s.28 These prices have nothing to do with the ‘real’ cost of healthcare and education: they are an artefact of a system organised around profit.

Now, consider this: if the US were to transition to a public health and education system, people would be able to access the goods they need to live well for a mere fraction of the cost. Suddenly they would be under much less pressure to pursue high incomes just in order to get by.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

When it comes to human welfare, it’s not income as such that matters. It’s what that income can buy, in terms of access to the things we need to live well. It’s the ‘welfare purchasing power’ of income that counts. Trying to run a household on $30,000 in the United States would be a struggle. You can forget sending your kids to a decent university. But the exact same income in Finland, where people enjoy universal healthcare and education and rent controls, would feel luxurious. By expanding people’s access to public services and other commons, we can improve the welfare purchasing power of people’s incomes, enabling flourishing lives for all without needing any additional growth.

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

This means fundamentally reversing the economic policies that have dominated for the past forty years. Guided by the dogmas of neoliberalism, governments have privatised public services, slashed social spending, cut wages and labour protections, handed tax cuts to the richest and sent inequality soaring. In an age of climate breakdown, we need to be doing exactly the opposite.

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it is precisely because of neoliberalism that we have seen such a significant disjuncture between GDP and human welfare. Here again, the US provides a good example. Real GDP per capita in the US has doubled since the 1970s. One might assume that such extraordinary growth would have delivered decisive improvements to human lives. And yet the opposite has happened. The poverty rate today is higher, and real wages are lower, than they were forty years ago.29 Despite half a century of growth the country has regressed on these core indicators. How could this possibly have happened? It’s because the vast majority of the new income generated by growth has been appropriated by the already-rich. The annual incomes of the richest 1% have more than tripled over this period, soaring to an average of $1.4 million per person, while ordinary people have gained hardly anything at all.30

FOUR: Secrets of the Good Life

With data like this on the table, it becomes clear that growthism is little more than ideology – an ideology that benefits a few at the expense of our collective future. We’re all pushed to step on the accelerator of growth, with deadly consequences for our living planet, all so that a rich elite can get even richer. From the perspective of human life, this is clearly an injustice. And indeed we have been aware of this problem for some time. But from the perspective of ecology, it is even worse – it is a kind of madness.

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Justice in the South

Rich countries don’t need growth in order to achieve human progress. But this conclusion doesn’t hold for poorer countries. Take the Philippines, for example. These islands in the western Pacific fall short on a number of key social indicators, including life expectancy, sanitation, nutrition and income. But they also remain well within safe planetary boundaries, in terms of their use of land, water, energy, material resources and so on.31 There’s no reason that the Philippines shouldn’t increase its use of these resources to the extent that doing so is necessary to improve people’s lives. The same is true for most countries in the global South.

Here’s the good news. My colleagues and I have analysed data for over 150 nations, and our results show that it’s possible for global South countries to achieve strong outcomes on every human development indicator (including life expectancy, well-being, sanitation, income, education, electricity, employment and democracy) while remaining within or near planetary boundaries. Here again, Costa Rica – which I described above – provides an excellent example of what this might look like.32 But this requires an entirely different way of thinking about growth. Instead of pursuing growth for its own sake and hoping that it will magically improve people’s lives, the goal must be to focus on improving people’s lives first and foremost – and if that requires or entails economic growth, then so be it. In other words, organise the economy around the needs of humans and ecology, rather than the other way around.

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This approach to development has a long history in the global South. It was championed by anti-colonial leaders including Mahatma Gandhi, Patrice Lumumba, Salvador Allende, Julius Nyerere, Thomas Sankara and dozens of other figures who insisted on a human-centred economics, with an emphasis on the principles of justice, welfare and self-sufficiency

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What does this look like, in practice? It means, following the example of states like Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, Cuba and Kerala, investing in robust universal social policy to guarantee healthcare, education, water, housing, social security. It means land reform so that small farmers have access to the resources that they need to thrive. It means using tariffs and subsidies to protect and encourage domestic industries. It means decent wages, labour laws and a progressive distribution of national income. And it means building economies that are organised around renewable energy and ecological regeneration rather than around fossil fuels and extractivism.

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It’s important to remember that many of these policies were used widely across the South in the post-colonial decades, from the 1950s to the 1970s, before that vision was dismantled by structural adjustment programmes from the 1980s onwards. A few countries managed to escape this fate. Costa Rica was one of them. So were South Korea and Taiwan (although their ecological policies have fallen short). They continued to pursue a more progressive approach to economic policy, and continued investing in public services – and today they enjoy high levels of human development as a result. They stand as beacons of what the South could have been, had it been left alone.

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When people think of the global poor, they quite often imagine countries that are cut off from the world economy – backwaters untouched by globalisation, and unconnected from the lives of people in rich countries. But this image gets it completely wrong. The poor are deeply integrated into the circuits of global capital. They work in sweatshops for multinational companies like Nike and Primark. They risk their lives mining the rare-earth minerals that we depend on for our smartphones and computers. They harvest the tea leaves and coffee beans and sugar cane that most people consume every day. They pick the berries and bananas that Europeans and North Americans eat every morning for breakfast. And in many cases theirs is the land from which the oil and coal and gas that power the global economy is extracted – or at least it used to be, before it was taken from them. All told, they contribute the vast majority of the labour and resources that go into the global economy.35

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The poorest 60% of humanity receives only about 5% of total global income.36 Over the course of the past four decades since 1980, their daily incomes have increased by an average of about 2 cents per year.37 Forget ‘trickle-down’ economics – this is barely even a vapour.

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The rich lay claim to an almost unimaginable share of the income the global economy generates; income that is extracted from the lands and bodies of the poor.

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To put these sums in perspective, consider this: to bring everyone in the world above the income poverty line of $7.40perday,andtoprovideuniversalpublichealthcareforeverypersonintheglobalSouthatastandardequivalenttothatinCostaRica,wouldrequireabout$10 trillion.39 That’s a significant sum, on the face of it. But notice that it’s only half of the annual income of the richest 1%. By shifting $10trillionofexcessannualincomefromtherichest1$158 trillion, which amounts to nearly half of the world’s total.40

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The key thing to understand is that right now, more resources and money flow from the global South to the global North each year than the other way around. This might be surprising to hear, because we are accustomed to the familiar narrative that emphasises all the aid that rich countries give to poor countries, which amounts to more than $100billionayear.Butthatflowofaid–andeventheflowofprivateinvestment,whichaddsuptoanother$500 billion a year – is outstripped many times over by money that flows in the other direction. There is a net drain from poor countries to rich countries.

Take labour, for example. The global North depends in large part on the labour of workers in the global South. But researchers estimate that people who work in export industries in the global South lose around $2.8 trillion in underpaid wages each year, when compared to the value of the labour they contribute to international trade.41 There’s a straightforward fix for this problem: we could introduce a global minimum wage. It could be managed by the International Labour Organization, and fixed as a percentage of each country’s median income in order to avoid disrupting existing patterns of comparative advantage.

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We could do something about illicit financial flows too. Right now, some $1 trillion is stolen out of global South countries each year and stashed in offshore secrecy jurisdictions, mostly by multinational companies seeking to evade taxes.42 For example, companies might generate profits in Guatemala or South Africa, but then shift that money into tax havens like Luxembourg or the British Virgin Islands. This starves global South countries of the revenues they need to invest in public services. But it is not an intractable problem: we could shut down the tax evasion system with laws to regulate cross-border trade and corporate accounting.

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Under the existing arrangement, the United States holds veto power over all major decisions made at the World Bank and the IMF, while the majority of the vote is controlled by high-income countries. In the World Trade Organization, bargaining power depends largely on GDP, so the biggest economies almost always get their way. Democratising these institutions would ensure that global South countries have greater control over the decisions that affect them, and greater control over their own economic policy. The UN estimates that fairer trade rules at the WTO could allow poor countries to earn over $1.5 trillion in additional export revenues each year.43

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There are many other interventions we might consider. We could cancel odious debts, freeing poor countries to invest in public healthcare and education instead of sending all their money to foreign banks; we could put an end to corporate land grabs, and distribute land back to small farmers; we could reform the subsidy regimes that give high-income countries an unfair advantage in the global agricultural industry. All these changes would enable the people of the South to capture a fairer share of existing global income, shifting money from the very richest (banks and multinational companies) to the world’s majority, while enabling people to access the goods they need to live well.

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Once we grasp the scale of national and global inequalities, then the narrative that seeks to cast GDP growth as a proxy for human progress begins to seem a bit tendentious – perhaps even a bit ideological. And by ideology I mean in the technical sense: a set of ideas promoted by the dominant class, which serves their material interests, and which everybody else has internalised to such an extent that they are willing to go along with a system they might otherwise reject as unjust. The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci has called this ‘cultural hegemony’: when an ideology becomes so normalised that it is difficult or even impossible to reflect on it.

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The elites of our world know very well what’s going on here. It would be silly to assume they don’t. They know the data on income distribution. They live by that data. They spend their lives thinking of ways to increase their share of national and global income. Their call for more growth is ultimately about speeding up the mechanisms of accumulation; the claims about the putative relationship between growth and human progress are just an alibi. Of course, they hope that growth will end up improving the incomes of the poor, and in so doing pacify social conflict. After all, elite accumulation is more politically palatable if the incomes of the poor are rising too. But this strategy cannot be sustained in an era of ecological crisis. Something has to give.

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The problem with growthism is that for decades it has distracted us from the difficult politics of distribution. We have ceded our political agency to the lazy calculus of growth – the notion that growth is automatically good for everyone. The climate emergency changes this. It forces us to face up to the brutal inequalities of the global economy. It forces us into the zone of political contestation.

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We need to be able to specify growth for whom, and for what ends. We must learn to ask: where does the money go? Who benefits from it?

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if growth is a substitute for equality, then equality can be a substitute for growth.44

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Those who insist that aggregate growth is necessary to improve people’s lives force us into a horrible double-bind. We are made to choose between human welfare or ecological stability – an impossible choice that nobody wants to face. But when we understand how inequality works, suddenly the choice becomes much easier: between living in a more equitable society, on the one hand, and risking ecological catastrophe on the other.

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achieving this will not be easy. It will require an enormous struggle against those who benefit so prodigiously from the status quo. And presumably this is why some are so eager that we avoid this course of action: they would prefer to sacrifice the planet in order to maintain the existing distribution of global income.

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There’s no question we need innovation to solve the climate crisis. We need better solar panels, better wind turbines, better batteries, and we need to figure out how to dismantle the global fossil fuel infrastructure and replace it with renewables. That’s a big challenge. But here’s the good news: we don’t need growth in order to do it.

First, there is no evidence to back up the assumption that aggregate growth is necessary for achieving these goals. It doesn’t make sense to grow the whole GDP and just blindly hope that it will magically end up invested in solar panel factories. If that’s how the Allies had approached the need for tanks and aircraft during the Second World War, the Nazis would be in charge of Europe right now.

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This kind of mobilisation requires government policy to guide and direct existing financial resources. The vast majority of major, collaborative infrastructure projects around the world have been guided by government policy and funded by public resources: sanitation systems, road systems, railway networks, public health systems, national power grids, the postal service. These are not the spontaneous outcomes of market forces, much less of abstract growth. Projects like these require public investment. Once we realise this, it becomes clear that we can fund the transition quite easily by directing existing public resources from, say, fossil fuel subsidies (which presently stand at $5.2trillion,6.5$1.8 trillion) into solar panels, batteries and wind turbines.45

Government policy can also be used to guide private investment. We know that when governments begin investing in specific sectors it ‘crowds in’ other investors who are eager to take advantage of incentives or provide necessary upstream supplies.46 On top of this, simple rules can be introduced that require large companies and rich individuals to use a share of their income (say, 5%) to buy bonds designed to fund specific projects – like a rapid rollout of renewable energy. Such measures have been used by governments many times in the past – such as during the New Deal in the United States, and during the developmentalist period in the global South – and there’s no reason we can’t do it again.

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Over and over again, it turns out that the dominant belief in the necessity of growth is under-justified. Those who call for continued growth at the expense of ecological stability are ready to risk everything – literally – for the sake of something we don’t really even need.

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NGOs all over the world are now talking about the importance of ‘well-being economies’. Countries like Bhutan, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Bolivia have all taken steps in this direction. And in 2013 the Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that GDP will no longer be used as the key metric of progress in China, reversing longstanding policy.

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As soon as we shake ourselves free from the tyranny of GDP, we can have an open discussion about what we really value. This is the ultimate democratic act, and yet so far the ideological lockdown on growthism has effectively prevented us from doing so.

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While using better indicators might remove some of the political pressure for growth, it will not in and of itself arrest the rise of the juggernaut. Material and energy use doesn’t rise only because politicians and economists pursue GDP growth. It rises because capitalism is organised around the imperative of constant expansion. We might choose to measure well-being, but if industrial activity keeps expanding behind the scenes, as it were, we’ll still end up in ecological trouble.

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GDP is not an arbitrary metric of economic performance. It’s not as though it’s some kind of mistake – an accounting error that just needs to be corrected. It was devised specifically in order to measure the welfare of capitalism. It externalises social and ecological costs because capitalism externalises social and ecological costs.

FIVE: Pathways to a Post-Capitalist World

We cannot save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed.

Greta Thunberg

FIVE: Pathways to a Post-Capitalist World

When astronomers finally accepted that the Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun, suddenly all the maths became easier. The same thing happens when we take growth away from the centre of the economy. The ecological crisis suddenly becomes much easier to solve.

FIVE: Pathways to a Post-Capitalist World

Let’s start with the most immediate challenge we face. If we want to reduce emissions fast enough to stay under 1.5°C (or even 2°C, but we should never countenance such a dangerous future) then we need to scale down total energy use. The less energy we use, the easier it is to achieve a rapid transition to renewables. Of course, low-income countries still need to increase their energy use in order to meet human needs. So it’s high-income countries we need to focus on here; countries that exceed planetary boundaries and consume vastly more than they require.

FIVE: Pathways to a Post-Capitalist World

Capitalism is a giant energy-sucking machine.1 In order to reduce energy use, we need to slow it all down. Slow down the mad pace of extraction, production and waste, and slow down the mad pace of our lives.

This is what we mean by ‘degrowth’. Again, degrowth is not about reducing GDP. It is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive. It is the first step toward a more ecological civilisation

FIVE: Pathways to a Post-Capitalist World

Of course, doing this may mean that GDP grows more slowly, or stops growing, or even declines. And if so, that’s okay; because GDP isn’t what matters. Under normal circumstances, this might cause a recession. But a recession is what happens when a growth-dependent economy stops growing: it’s a disaster. Degrowth is completely different. It is about shifting to a different kind of economy altogether – an economy that doesn’t need growth in the first place. An economy that’s organised around human flourishing and ecological stability, rather than around the constant accumulation of capital.

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As we saw in Chapter 2, high-income nations consume on average 28 tons of material stuff per person per year. We need to bring that back down to sustainable levels. What’s brilliant about focusing on materials is that it has a range of powerful benefits. Slowing down material use means taking pressure off ecosystems. It means less deforestation, less habitat destruction, less biodiversity collapse. And it means our economy will use less energy, thus enabling us to achieve a faster transition to renewables.2 It also means we will need fewer solar panels and wind turbines and batteries than would otherwise be the case, which means less pressure on the places (mostly in the global South) where the materials for these things are extracted, and less pressure on the communities that live there

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In other words, degrowth – reducing material and energy use – is an ecologically coherent solution to a multi-faceted crisis. And the good news is that we can do this without any negative impact on human welfare. In fact, we can do it while improving people’s lives. How is this possible? The key is to remember that capitalism is a system that’s organised around exchange-value, not around use-value. Production is geared primarily toward accumulating profit rather than toward satisfying human needs. In fact, in a growth-oriented system, the goal is quite often to avoid satisfying human needs, and even to perpetuate need itself. Once we understand this, it becomes clear that there are huge chunks of the economy that are actively and intentionally wasteful, and which do not serve any recognisable human purpose.

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Step 1. End planned obsolescence

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nyone who has ever owned an Apple product knows this all too well. Apple’s growth strategy seems to rely on a triple tactic: after a few years of use, devices become so slow as to be worthless; repairs are either impossible or prohibitively expensive; and advertising campaigns are designed to convince people that their products are obsolete anyhow. Apple is not the only one, of course. Tech companies sold a total of 13 billion smartphones between 2010 and 2019. Only about 3 billion of them are in use today.5 That means 10 billion smartphones have been discarded over the past decade. Add desktops, laptops and tablets and we’re talking about mountains of needless e-waste – most of it generated by planned obsolescence. Every year, 150 million discarded computers are shipped to countries like Nigeria, where they end up in sprawling open-air dumps that leak mercury, arsenic and other toxic substances into the land.6

It’s not that the possibility for long-lasting, upgradable devices doesn’t exist – it does – but its development is suppressed in favour of growth. Our biggest technology firms, which we celebrate as our greatest innovators, stifle the innovation we need because it runs against the growth imperative. And it’s not just appliances and smartphones. It’s everything

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There’s a paradox here. We like to think of capitalism as a system that’s built on rational efficiency, but in reality it is exactly the opposite. Planned obsolescence is a form of intentional inefficiency. The inefficiency is (bizarrely) rational in terms of maximising profits, but from the perspective of human need, and from the perspective of ecology, it is madness: madness in terms of the resources it wastes, and madness in terms of the needless energy it consumes. It is madness too in terms of human labour, when you consider the millions of hours that are poured into producing smartphones and washing machines and furniture simply to fill the void created, intentionally, by planned obsolescence. It’s like shovelling ecosystems and human lives into a bottomless pit of demand. And the void will never be filled.

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How might we address these inefficiencies? One option is to introduce mandatory extended warranties on products. The technology already exists for appliances to last on average two to five times longer than they presently do, with lifespans up to thirty-five years, at little additional cost. With simple legislation, we could require manufacturers to guarantee their products for the duration of maximum feasible lifespans. If Apple was held to a 10-year guarantee, watch how quickly they would redesign their products to be resilient and upgradeable.

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We could also introduce a ‘right to repair’, making it illegal for companies to produce things that can’t be repaired by ordinary users, or by independent mechanics, with affordable replacement parts. Laws along these lines are already being considered in a number of European parliaments. Another option would be to switch to a lease model for large appliances and devices, requiring manufacturers to assume full responsibility for all repairs, with modular upgrades to improve efficiency whenever possible.

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If washing machines and smartphones lasted four times longer, we would consume 75% fewer of them. That’s a big reduction of material throughput, without any negative impact on people’s lives. In fact, if anything it would improve quality of life, as people wouldn’t have to deal with the frustration and expense of constantly replacing their equipment.

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Step 2. Cut advertising

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Up to the 1920s, consumption was a relatively perfunctory act: people just bought what they needed. Advertisements did little more than inform customers of the useful qualities of a product. But this system posed an obstacle to growth, because once people’s needs were satisfied, purchases slowed down. Companies seeking a ‘fix’ – a way to surmount the limits of human need – found it in the new theories of advertising being developed at the time by Edward Bernays, the nephew of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Bernays pointed out that you can provoke people to consume far beyond their needs simply by manipulating their psychology. You can seed anxiety in people’s minds, and then present your product as a solution to that anxiety. Or you can sell things on the promise that they will provide social acceptance, or class distinction, or sexual prowess. This kind of advertising quickly became indispensable to American companies desperate to generate growing demand.

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A survey conducted in the 1990s revealed that 90% of American CEOs believed it would be impossible to sell a new product without an advertising campaign; 85% admitted that advertising ‘often’ persuaded people to buy things they did not need; and 51% said that advertising persuaded people to buy things they didn’t actually want.7 These are extraordinary figures. They reveal that advertising amounts to manipulation on an industrial scale. And in the age of the internet, it has become more powerful and insidious than even Bernays himself could have dreamed. Browser cookies, social media profiles and big data allow firms to present us with ads tailored not just to our personalities – our specific anxieties and insecurities – but even to our likely emotional state at any given time. Firms like Google and Facebook are worth more than companies like BP and Exxon, purely on the promise of advertising. We think of these companies as innovators, but the majority of their innovations appear to be focused on developing ever more sophisticated tools to get people to buy things.

It’s a kind of psychological warfare

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advertisers are turning to more aggressive ways of getting at the last remaining milliseconds of our attention. They are fracking, as it were, for our minds. We are exposed to thousands of ads every day, and with every year that ticks by the ads become more insidious. It’s an assault on our consciousness – the colonisation not only of our public spaces but also of our minds. And it works. Research reveals that advertising expenditures have a direct and highly significant impact on material consumption.8 The higher the spend, the higher the consumption. And right now the global advertising spend is rising fast: from $400billionin2010,to$560 billion in 2019, making it one of the biggest industries in the world.9

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There are many ways to curb the power of advertising. We can introduce quotas to reduce total ad expenditure. We can legislate against the use of psychologically manipulative techniques. And we can liberate public spaces from ads – both offline and online – where people don’t have a choice about what they see.

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The results? Happier people: people who feel more secure about themselves and more content with their lives. Cutting ads has a direct positive impact on people’s well-being.11 In addition to slowing down needless consumption, these measures would also free our minds – so we can follow our thoughts, our imaginations, our creativity without being constantly interrupted. And we can fill those spaces instead with art and poetry, or with messages that build community and affirm intrinsic values.

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Some economists worry that limiting advertising would undermine market efficiency. Ads help people make rational decisions about what to buy, they say. But this claim doesn’t hold water. In reality, most advertising does exactly the opposite: it is designed to manipulate people into making irrational decisions.12 And let’s face it: in the age of the internet, people don’t actually need ads in order to find and evaluate products. A simple search is enough to do the trick. The internet has rendered advertising obsolete (ironically, for a place that has become filled with ads), and we should embrace this fact.

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Step 3. Shift from ownership to usership

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There is another inefficiency that’s built into capitalism. A lot of the stuff we consume is necessary but rarely used. Pieces of equipment like lawnmowers and power tools are used perhaps once a month, for maybe an hour or two at most, and for the rest of the year lie idle. Manufacturers want everyone to own a garage full of things that can otherwise quite easily be shared, but a more rational approach would be to establish neighbourhood workshops where equipment can be stored and used on an as-need basis. Some communities are already doing this, maintaining shared equipment with a neighbourhood fund. Projects like these can be scaled up by city governments, and enabled by apps for easy access. Shifting from ownership to ‘usership’ can have a big impact on material throughput

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Sharing a single piece of equipment among ten households means cutting demand for that product by a factor of ten, while saving people time and money in the process.

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This is particularly true of cars. We know we need to switch to electric cars, but ultimately we also need to dramatically scale down the total number of cars. The most powerful intervention by far is to invest in affordable (or even free) public transportation, which is more efficient in terms of the materials and energy required to move people around. This is vital for any plan to get off fossil fuels. Bicycles are even better, as many European cities are learning (as I write this, Milan is handing over 35 kilometres of streets to cyclists, in a bid to keep pollution low after their coronavirus lockdown). And for journeys that can’t be made with either, we can develop publicly owned, app-based platforms for sharing cars between us – without the rentier intermediation that has made platforms like Uber and Airbnb so problematic.

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Step 4. End food waste

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Here’s a fact that never ceases to amaze me: up to 50% of all the food that’s produced in the world – equivalent to 2 billion tonnes – ends up wasted each year.13 This happens across the supply chain. In high-income nations it’s due to farms that discard vegetables that aren’t cosmetically perfect, and supermarkets that use unnecessarily strict sell-by dates, aggressive advertising, bulk discounts and buy-one-get-one-free schemes. Households end up tossing away 30-50% of the food they purchase. In low-income nations it’s due to poor transportation and storage infrastructure, which means food ends up rotting before it makes it to market.

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Food waste represents an extraordinary ecological cost, in terms of energy, land, water and emissions. But it also represents a big opportunity. Ending food waste could in theory cut the scale of the agriculture industry in half, without any loss of access to the food we presently need. That would allow us to cut global emissions by up to 13%, while regenerating up to 2.4 billion hectares of land for wildlife habitat and carbon sequestration.14

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When it comes to degrowth, this is low-hanging fruit. Some countries are already taking steps in this direction. France and Italy have both recently passed laws preventing supermarkets from wasting food (they have to donate unsold food to charities instead). South Korea has banned food waste from landfills altogether, and requires households and restaurants to use special composting receptacles that charge fees by weight.

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Step 5. Scale down ecologically destructive industries

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On top of targeting intentional inefficiencies and waste, we also need to talk about scaling down specific industries that are ecologically destructive and socially less necessary. The fossil fuel industry is the most obvious example, but we can extend this logic to others.

Take the beef industry, for instance. Nearly 60% of global agricultural land is used for beef – either directly for cattle pasture or indirectly for growing feed.15 It’s one of the most resource-inefficient foods on the planet, in terms of the land and energy it requires per calorie or nutrient. And the pressure to find land for pasture and feed is the single greatest driver of deforestation. As I write this, the Amazon rainforest is literally being burned for the sake of beef. Yet, far from being essential to human diets, beef accounts for only 2% of the calories humans consume. In most cases the industry could be radically scaled down without any loss to human welfare.16

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The gains would be astonishing. Switching from beef to non-ruminant meats or plant proteins like beans and pulses could liberate almost 11 million square miles of land – the size of the United States, Canada and China combined.17 This simple shift would allow us to return vast swathes of the planet to forest and wildlife habitat, creating new carbon sinks and cutting net emissions by up to 8 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year, according to the IPCC. That’s around 20% of current annual emissions. Scientists say that degrowing the beef industry is among the most transformative policies we could implement, and is essential to avoiding dangerous climate change.18 A first step would be to end the subsidies high-income countries give to beef farmers. Researchers are also testing proposals for a tax on red meat, which they find would not only curtail emissions but deliver a wide range of public health benefits, while driving medical costs down.19

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The beef industry is just one example. There are many others we could consider. We could scale down the arms industry and the private jet industry. We could scale down the production of single-use plastics, disposable coffee cups, SUVs and McMansions (in the United States, house sizes have doubled since the 1970s20). Instead of building new stadiums for the Olympics and the World Cup every few years we could reuse existing infrastructure. We know that to reach our climate goals we will need to scale down the commercial airline industry, starting with policies like a frequent flyer levy, ending routes that can be served by train, and getting rid of first-class and business-class cabins, which have the highest CO2 per passenger mile. And we must shift from an economy based on energy-intensive long-distance supply chains to one where production happens closer to home.

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We need to have an open, democratic conversation about this. Rather than assuming that all sectors must grow, for ever, regardless of whether or not we actually need them, let’s talk about what we want our economy to deliver. What industries are already big enough and shouldn’t grow any larger? What industries could be usefully scaled down? What industries do we still need to expand? We have never asked these questions. During the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, we all learned the difference between ‘essential’ industries and superfluous ones; it quickly became apparent which industries are organised around use-value, and which ones are mostly about exchange-value. We can build on those lessons.

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This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. My point here is to illustrate that we can accomplish significant reductions in material throughput without any negative impact on human welfare. And here’s the powerful part. This approach would not only reduce the flows of material goods, it would also reduce the stocks that support those flows. Half of all the materials that we extract each year go to building up and maintaining material stocks: things like factories and machines and transport infrastructure.21 If we consume half as many products, we also need half as many factories and machines to produce them, half as many aeroplanes and trucks and ships to transport them, half as many warehouses and retail outlets to distribute them, half as many garbage trucks and waste disposal plants to process them when they’re binned, and half as much energy to produce and maintain and operate all of that infrastructure. The efficiencies begin to multiply.

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Ultimately, governments need to roll out concrete targets for reducing material and energy use. As we saw in Chapter 3, taxes alone won’t be enough. Ecological economists insist that the only way to do it is with a hard limit: cap resource and energy use at existing levels and ratchet them down each year until you get back within planetary boundaries.22

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This approach will rapidly change incentives across the economy, forcing companies and governments to be more rational, efficient and innovative.

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The key is that this has to be done in a just and equitable way, to ensure that everyone has access to the resources and livelihoods they need to flourish, and so small businesses and underdog industries don’t get squeezed out by bigger players. This can be done with a cap, fee and dividend system: charge industries a progressively rising fee for resource and energy use, and distribute the yields as an equal dividend to all citizens

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The policies I’ve suggested above are likely to reduce total industrial production. This might be OK from the perspective of human needs (none of us would be worse off if our smartphones lasted twice as long), but it does leave us with a difficult question. As products last longer, as we shift to sharing things, and as we slash food waste and scale down fast fashion, employment in these industries will decline and jobs will disappear across the supply chains. In other words, as our economy becomes more rational and efficient, it will require less labour.

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it’s one reason why politicians consider degrowth to be so unthinkable

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by introducing a job guarantee (a policy that happens to be resoundingly popular23), and roll out retraining programmes so that people laid off from shrinking industries can transition easily to others (renewable energy, public services, maintenance, etc.). This approach would allow everyone to benefit from the time that’s liberated by reducing material throughput. It’s an essential part of any degrowth strategy.

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The exciting part is that reducing working hours has a substantial positive impact on people’s well-being. This effect has been demonstrated over and over again, and the results are striking. Studies in the US have found that people who work shorter hours are happier than those who work longer hours, even when controlling for income.24 When France downshifted to the thirty-five-hour week, workers reported that their quality of life improved.25 An experiment in Sweden showed that employees who reduced their working time to thirty hours reported improved life satisfaction and better health outcomes.26 Data also shows that shorter hours leave people feeling more satisfied with their jobs, boosting morale and happiness.27 And – perhaps best of all – shorter hours are associated with greater gender equality, both in the workplace and at home.28

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they’ll spend it on energy-intensive leisure activities, like taking long-haul flights for holidays. But the evidence shows exactly the opposite. It is those with less leisure time who tend to consume more intensively: they rely on high-speed travel, meal deliveries, impulsive purchases, retail therapy, and so on. A study of French households found that longer working hours are directly associated with higher consumption of environmentally intensive goods, even when correcting for income.29 By contrast, when people are given time off they tend to gravitate towards lower-impact activities: exercise, volunteering, learning, and socialising with friends and family.30

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researchers have found that if the United States were to reduce its working hours to the levels of Western Europe, its energy consumption would decline by a staggering 20%. Shortening the working week is one of the most immediately impactful climate policies available to us.31

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But perhaps the most important part about shortening the working week is that it frees people to spend more time caring – be it nursing a sick relative, playing with children, or helping regenerate a woodland. This essential reproductive work (most of which is normally done by women) is totally devalued under capitalism; it is externalised, unpaid, invisible and unrepresented in GDP figures. Degrowth will free us to reallocate labour to what really matters – to things that have real use-value. Care contributes directly to social and ecological well-being, and caring has been shown to be more powerful than material consumption when it comes to improving people’s sense of happiness and meaning, vastly outstripping the dopamine hit we might get from a shopping binge.

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The benefits of a shorter working week keep multiplying. One group of scientists summed up the evidence like this: ‘Overall, the existing research suggests that working time reduction potentially offers a triple dividend to society: reduced unemployment, increased quality of life, and reduced environmental pressures.’32 Transitioning to a shorter working week is key to building a humane, ecological economy.

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Keynes turned out to be correct about productivity gains, but his prophecy about working hours never came true. Why not? Because gains in labour productivity have been appropriated by capital. Instead of shortening the working week and raising wages, companies have pocketed the extra profits and required employees to keep working just as much as before. In other words, productivity gains have been used not to liberate humans from work but rather to fuel constant growth.

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In this sense, capitalism betrays the very Enlightenment values it claims to advance. We normally think of capitalism as organised around the principles of freedom and human liberation – that’s the ideology it sells us. And yet while capitalism has produced the technological capacity to provide for everyone’s needs many times over, and to liberate people from unnecessary labour, it deploys that technology instead to create new ‘needs’ and to endlessly expand the treadmill of production and consumption. The promise of true freedom is perpetually deferred.33

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a shorter working week and a job guarantee would strengthen the bargaining power of labour.

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Sam Pizzigati, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, argues that we should cap the after-tax wage ratio at 10 to 1.36 CEOs would immediately seek to raise wages as high as they can reasonably go. It’s an elegant solution, and it’s not unheard of. Mondragon, a huge workers’ co-operative in Spain, has rules stating that executive salaries cannot be more than six times higher than the lowest-paid employee in the same enterprise. Better yet, we could do it on a national scale, by saying that incomes higher than a given multiple of the national minimum wage would face a 100% tax. Imagine how quickly the income distribution would change.

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But it’s not just income inequality that’s a problem – it’s wealth inequality too. In the United States, for instance, the richest 1% have nearly 40% of the nation’s wealth. The bottom 50% have almost nothing: only 0.4%.37 On a global level the disparities are even worse: the richest 1% have nearly 50% of the world’s wealth. The problem with this kind of inequality is that the rich become extractive rentiers. As they accumulate money and property far beyond what they could ever use, they rent it out (be it residential or commercial properties, patent licences, loans, whatever). And because they have a monopoly on these things, everyone else is forced to pay them rents and debts. This is called ‘passive income’, because it accrues automatically to people who hold capital without any labour on their part. But from the perspective of everyone else it is anything but passive: people have to scramble to work and earn above and beyond what they would otherwise need, simply in order to pay rents and debts to the rich. It is like modern-day serfdom. And just like serfdom, it has serious implications for our living world. Serfdom was an ecological disaster because lords forced peasants to extract more from the land than they otherwise needed – all in order to pay tribute. This led to a progressive degradation of forests and soils. So it goes today: we are made to plunder the Earth simply to pay tribute to millionaires and billionaires.

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housing in London. House prices are astronomically high, to the point where a normal two-bedroom flat may cost £2,000 a month to rent, or £600,000 to buy. These prices bear no relationship to the cost of the land, materials and labour involved in building a house. They’re a consequence of policy decisions, such as the privatisation of public housing since 1980, and the low interest rates and quantitative easing that have pumped up asset prices since 2008. Meanwhile, wages in London have not kept pace – not even close. To cover the gap, ordinary Londoners have had to either work longer hours or take out loans (which represent a claim on their future labour), just to access a basic social good they used to be able to get for a fraction of the cost

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Capitalists enclose commons (‘public wealth’) in order to generate growth (‘private riches’), forcing people to work more simply to pay for access to resources they once enjoyed for free. As we create a post-growth economy we can flip this equation around: we can choose to restore commons, or create new commons, in order to render ever-rising incomes unnecessary. The commons become an antidote to the growth imperative.

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Artificial scarcity served as the engine of capital accumulation. This same logic operates today. It’s all around us. Take the labour market, for example. People feel the force of scarcity in the constant threat of unemployment. Workers must become ever more disciplined and productive at work or else lose their jobs to someone who will be more productive still – usually someone poorer or more desperate. But as productivity rises, workers get laid off – and governments have to scramble for ways to grow the economy in order to create new jobs. Workers themselves join in the chorus calling for growth, and push to elect politicians who promise it. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We could deliver productivity gains back to workers in the form of higher wages and shorter hours. The constant threat of unemployment is due to an artificial scarcity of jobs

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Ending planned obsolescence, capping resource use, shortening the working week, reducing inequality and expanding public goods – these are all essential steps to reducing energy demand and enabling a faster transition to renewables

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Inequality stimulates a sense of inadequacy. It makes people feel that they need to work longer hours to earn more income to buy unnecessary stuff, just so they can have a bit of dignity.41 In this sense, inequality creates an artificial scarcity of well-being. In fact, this effect is quite often wielded as an intentional strategy by economists and politicians. The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson once stated that ‘inequality is essential for the spirit of envy’ that keeps capitalism chugging along.

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Planned obsolescence is another strategy of artificial scarcity. Retailers seek to create new needs by making products artificially short-lived, to keep the juggernaut of consumption from grinding to a halt. The same goes for advertising, which stimulates an artificial sense of lack; a sense that something is literally missing. Ads create the impression that we are not beautiful enough, or masculine enough, or stylish enough.

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And then there’s the artificial scarcity of time. The structural compulsion to work unnecessarily long hours leaves people with so little time that they have no choice but to pay firms to do things they would otherwise be able to do themselves: cook their food, clean their homes, play with their children, care for their elderly parents. Meanwhile, the stress of overwork creates needs for anti-depressants, sleep aids, alcohol, dieticians, marital counselling, expensive holidays, and other products people would otherwise be less likely to require. To pay for these things, people need to work yet more to increase their incomes, driving a vicious cycle of unnecessary production and consumption.

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We see artificial scarcity being imposed on our public goods too. Since the 1980s endless waves of privatisation have been unleashed all over the world, of education, healthcare, transport, libraries, parks, swimming pools, water, housing, even social security. Social goods everywhere are under attack for the sake of growth. The idea is that by making public goods scarce, people will have no choice but to purchase private alternatives. And in order to pay, they will have to work more, producing additional goods and services that must find a market, and thereby creating new pressures for additional consumption elsewhere in the system.

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This logic reaches its height in the politics of austerity, which was rolled out across Europe in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Austerity (which is literally a synonym for scarcity) is a desperate attempt to restart the engines of growth by slashing public investment in social goods and welfare protections – everything from elderly heating allowances to unemployment benefits to public sector wages – chopping away at what remains of the commons so that people deemed too ‘comfortable’ or ‘lazy’ are placed once again under threat of hunger, and forced to increase their productivity if they want to survive. This logic is overt, just as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During the government of British Prime Minister David Cameron, welfare cuts were conducted explicitly in order to get ‘shirkers’ to work harder and to be more productive (‘workfare’, they called it).

Over and over again, it becomes clear that scarcity is created, intentionally, for the sake of growth. Just as during the enclosures in the 1500s, scarcity and growth emerge as two sides of the same coin.

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This exposes a remarkable illusion at the heart of capitalism. We normally think of capitalism as a system that generates so much (just consider the extraordinary cornucopia of stuff that’s displayed on television and in shopfronts). But in reality it is a system that is organised around the constant production of scarcity. Capitalism transforms even the most spectacular gains in productivity and income not into abundance and human freedom, but into new forms of artificial scarcity. It must, or else it risks shutting down the engine of accumulation itself. In a growth-oriented system, the objective is not to satisfy human needs, but to avoid satisfying human needs. It is irrational and ecologically violent.

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If scarcity is created for the sake of growth, then by reversing artificial scarcities we can render growth unnecessary. By decommodifying public goods, expanding the commons, shortening the working week and reducing inequality, we can enable people to access the goods that they need to live well without requiring additional growth in order to do so. People would be able to work less without any loss to their well-being, thus producing less unnecessary stuff and generating less pressure for unnecessary consumption elsewhere. And with our extra free time we would no longer have to engage in the patterns of consumption that are necessitated by time scarcity.42

Liberated from the pressures of artificial scarcity, and with basic needs met, the compulsion for people to compete for ever-increasing productivity would wither away. The economy would produce less as a result, yes – but it would also need less. It would be smaller and yet nonetheless much more abundant. In such an economy private riches (or GDP) may shrink, reducing the incomes of corporations and the elite, but public wealth would increase, improving the lives of everyone else. Exchange-value might go down, but use-value will go up. Suddenly a new paradox emerges: abundance is revealed to be the antidote to growth. In fact, it neutralises the growth imperative itself

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As Giorgos Kallis has pointed out, ‘capitalism cannot operate under conditions of abundance’.43

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Some critics have claimed that degrowth is nothing more than a new version of austerity. But in fact exactly the opposite is true. Austerity calls for scarcity in order to generate more growth. Degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary. If we are to avert climate breakdown, the environmentalism of the twenty-first century must articulate a new demand: a demand for radical abundance.

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The Law of Jubilee

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Reversing artificial scarcity is a powerful step towards liberating us from the tyranny of growth. But there are also other pressures we have to deal with – other growth imperatives to neutralise.

Perhaps the most powerful of these is debt.

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Whether you’re a university graduate or a country, once you’re in debt you can’t just be satisfied with earning back as much as you borrowed; you have to find ways to grow your earnings fast enough to pay off growing debt. You may end up having to pay off your original loan many times over – perhaps even for the rest of your life. If you don’t, then debt piles up and eventually triggers a financial crisis. Either you grow or you collapse.

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Countries loaded with old debts are under heavy pressure to deregulate logging and mining and other extractive industries, plundering ecosystems in order to meet their debt obligations. The same is true of households. Researchers have found that households with high-interest mortgages work longer hours than they would otherwise need to simply in order to stay afloat.44 As the anthropologist David Graeber has observed, the financial imperatives of debt ‘reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money’.45

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Fortunately, there’s a way to relieve this pressure. We can just cancel some of the debt. In an era of ecological breakdown, debt cancellation becomes a vital step towards a more sustainable economy. This may sound radical, but there’s plenty of precedent for it. Ancient Near-Eastern societies regularly declared non-commercial debts void, clearing the books and liberating everybody from bondage to creditors. This principle was institutionalised in the Hebrew Law of Jubilee, which decreed that debts should be automatically cancelled every seventh year.46 Indeed, debt cancellation became core to the Hebrew concept of redemption itself.

There are dozens of proposals for how we might do this in today’s econom

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We know it’s possible. In the wake of the coronavirus disaster in 2020, governments in a number of countries suddenly found the ability to make debts disappear.

We can do the same thing with the debts held by global South countries, which have been rising at an alarming rate. Big chunks of that debt are holdovers from the 1980s, when the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates so high as to put whole countries into permanent bondage to Wall Street.48 Then there are debts that were sold by corrupt lenders, and debts accumulated by old dictators with no democratic mandate who have long since been deposed. Researchers with the Jubilee Debt Campaign have proposed clear mechanisms for cancelling unjust debts like these, which would liberate poor countries from the pressure to plunder their own resources and exploit their citizens in the constant hunt for growth. Indeed, this is an important first step towards the reparations that rich countries owe for the climate debts they hold with respect to the rest of the world.

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Big creditors would lose out, of course, but we might decide that this is OK – a loss we’re willing to have them bear in order for us to build a fairer and more ecological society. We can cancel debts in such a way that nobody gets hurt.49 Nobody dies. Compound interest is just a fiction, after all. And the nice thing about fictions is that we can change them. Perhaps no one has put this more eloquently than David Graeber:

[Debt cancellation] would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is going to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.50

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The main reason our economy is so loaded with debt is because it runs on a money system that is itself debt. When you walk into a bank to take out a loan, you might assume that the bank is lending you money it has in its reserve, collected from other people’s deposits and stored in a basement vault somewhere. But that’s not how it works. Banks are only required to hold reserves worth about 10% of the money they lend out, or even less. This is known as ‘fractional reserve banking’. In other words, banks lend out about ten times more money than they actually have. So where does that extra money come from, if it doesn’t actually exist? Banks create it out of thin air when they credit your account. They literally loan it into existence.

More than 90% of the money that’s presently circulating in our economy is created in this manner. In other words, almost every single dollar that passes through our hands represents somebody’s debt. And this debt has to be paid back with interest – with more work, more extraction and more production. This is extraordinary, when you think about it. It means that banks effectively sell a product (money) that they produce out of nothing, for free, and then require people to go out into the real world and extract and produce real value to pay for it. It is so outlandish as to offend common sense. People have a difficult time believing it could possibly be true. As Henry Ford put it in the 1930s: ‘It is perhaps well enough that the people of the nation do not know or understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.’

Now, here’s the problem. Banks create the principal for all the loans they give, but they don’t create the money needed to pay the interest. There is always a deficit, always a scarcity. This scarcity creates intense competition, forcing everyone to scramble to find ways to get the money to pay back their debts, including by taking out yet more debt.

If you’ve ever watched a game of musical chairs, you have an idea of how this plays out.

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Each round of the game ramps up the scarcity of chairs, and players have to fight each other to get to one of the few that are left. It’s chaos. Now imagine we up the stakes. Instead of just getting knocked out of the game, you lose your home, your kids go hungry, and you can’t pay for medicines. Think about what such a game would look like – the desperate measures people would take to get to a chair – and you have a rough picture of how our economy works.51

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Casual observers of capitalist societies might conclude – as many economists have done – that vicious competition, maximisation and self-interested behaviour are hard-wired into human nature. But is it really human nature that makes us behave this way? Or is it just the rules of the game?

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One group argues that all we need to do is switch from the existing compound interest system, where debt grows exponentially, to a simple interest system, where it grows linearly – adding the same increment each year. Over time this would put a huge dent in total debt levels, bring our money system back in line with ecology, and allow us to shift to a post-growth economy without causing a financial crisis.52

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A second group argues that we need to go further, and abolish debt-based currency altogether. Instead of letting commercial banks create credit money, we could have the state create it – free of debt – and then spend it into the economy instead of lending it into the economy. The responsibility for money creation could be placed with an independent agency that is democratic, accountable and transparent, with a mandate to balance human well-being with ecological stability. Newly created money could be distributed partly in the form of a universal basic income: an idea that is becoming increasingly popular. Banks would still be able to lend money, of course, but they would have to back it with 100% reserves, dollar for dollar.53

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In the United Kingdom, a campaigning group called Positive Money has built a movement around the idea, and now it’s being picked up as another possible step towards a more ecological economy.54

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When people talk about ‘overthrowing’ or ‘abolishing’ capitalism, it can leave us with a real sense of unease about what will come afterwards. It’s easy to feel angry about our economic system, especially as we watch our planet die, but those who call for revolution all too rarely define what the new society might look like. It makes the future seem scary and unpredictable – who knows what nightmares might fill the void?

But when we focus on how to release our system from the growth imperative, we begin to get a sense of what a post-capitalist economy might look like. And it’s not scary at all. This is not the command-and-control fiasco of the Soviet Union, or some back-to-the-caves, hair-shirted disaster of voluntary impoverishment. On the contrary, it’s an economy that feels in key ways familiar, in the sense that it resembles the economy as we normally describe it to ourselves (in other words, perhaps as we wish it to be): an economy where people produce and sell useful goods and services; an economy where people make rational, informed decisions about what to buy; an economy where people get compensated fairly for their labour; an economy that satisfies human needs while minimising waste; an economy that circulates money to those who need it; an economy where innovation makes better, longer-lasting products, reduces ecological pressure, frees up labour time and improves human welfare; an economy that responds to – rather than ignores – the health of the ecology on which it depends.

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No one can give us a simple recipe for a post-capitalist economy; ultimately it has to be a collective project. All I’ve done here is offer a few possibilities that I hope will nourish the imagination. As for how to make it happen – that will require a movement, as with every struggle for social and ecological justice in history. And to some extent it is already emerging: from the school climate strikes to Extinction Rebellion, from La Via Campesina to Standing Rock; people are not only yearning for a better world, they are mobilising to bring it into being.

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I am not a political strategist, but I do want to offer one hopeful observation. Some people worry that there’s no way we can possibly accomplish the transition that’s required unless we have some kind of totalitarian government impose it from above. But this assumption doesn’t hold water. In fact, exactly the opposite is true.

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economists expect that people will make a ‘rational’ choice to exhaust resources in the present and leave future generations with nothing.

But it turns out that people don’t actually behave this way. The Harvard-Yale team put people in groups and gave them each a share of common resources to be managed across generations. They found that, on average, a full 68% of individuals chose to use their share sustainably, taking only as much as the pool could regenerate, sacrificing possible profits so that future generations could thrive. In other words, the majority of people behave exactly the opposite to how economic theory predicts.

The problem is that the other 32% chose to liquidate their share of the resources for the sake of quick profits. Over time, this selfish minority ended up depleting the collective pool, leaving each successive generation with a smaller and smaller supply of resources to work with. The losses compounded quickly over time: by the fourth generation the resources were completely exhausted, leaving future generations with nothing – a striking pattern of decline that looks very similar to what’s happening to our planet today.

Yet when the groups were asked to make decisions collectively, with direct democracy, something remarkable happened. The 68% were able to overrule the selfish minority and keep their destructive impulses in check. In fact, democratic decision-making encouraged the selfish types to vote for more sustainable decisions, because they realised they were all in it together. Over and over again, the scientists found that under democratic conditions, resources were sustained for future generations, at 100% capacity, indefinitely. The scientists ran the experiments for up to twelve generations, and they kept getting the same results: no net depletion. None.55

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What’s so fascinating about this is that it shows widespread and intuitive support for what ecological economists call a ‘steady-state’ economy. A steady-state economy follows two key principles in order to stay in balance with the living world:

1. Never extract more than ecosystems can regenerate.

2. Never waste or pollute more than ecosystems can safely absorb.

To get to a steady-state economy, we need to have clear caps on resource use and waste. For decades, economists have told us that such caps are impossible, because people will see them as irrational. It turns out they’re wrong. If given the chance, this is exactly the kind of policy that people want.

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It’s not ‘human nature’ that’s the problem here. It’s that we have a political system that allows a few people to sabotage our collective future for their own private gain.

How could this be? After all, most of us live in democracies – so why do real-life policy decisions look so different from what the Harvard-Yale experiment predicts? The answer is that our ‘democracies’ are not actually very democratic at all. As income distribution has grown increasingly unequal, the economic power of the richest has translated directly into increased political power. Elites have managed to capture our democratic systems.

We can see this particularly clearly in the United States, where corporations have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political advertising, and where there are few restrictions on donations to political parties. These measures – justified according to the principle of ‘free speech’ – have made it difficult for politicians to win elections without direct support from corporations and billionaires, placing them under pressure to align with the policy preferences of elites.

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On top of this, large companies and rich individuals spend an extraordinary amount of money lobbying governments. In 2010, $3.55billionwasspentonlobbying,upfrom$1.45 billion in 1998.56 And it pays off: one study found that money spent on lobbying the US Congress earned returns of up to 22,000% in the form of tax breaks and profits from preferential treatment.57

As a result of political capture, the interests of economic elites in the US almost always prevail in government policy decisions even when the vast majority of citizens disagree with them. In this sense, the US resembles a plutocracy more than a democracy.58

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We can see similar plutocratic tendencies when it comes to finance. A significant chunk of shareholder votes is controlled by massive mutual funds like BlackRock and Vanguard that have no democratic legitimacy. A small number of people decide how to use everyone else’s money, and exert extraordinary influence over companies’ practices, pushing them to prioritise profits above social and ecological concerns.60 Then there’s the media. In Britain, three companies control over 70% of the newspaper market – and half of that is owned by Rupert Murdoch.61 In the US, six companies control 90% of all media.62 It is virtually impossible to have a real, democratic conversation about the economy under these conditions.

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The same is true on an international level. Voting power in the World Bank and the IMF – two of the key institutions of global economic governance – is allocated disproportionately to a small number of rich countries. The global South, which has 85% of the world’s population, has less than 50% of the vote. Similar problems plague the World Trade Organization, where bargaining power depends on market size. The world’s richest economies almost always get their way when it comes to crucial decisions about the rules of the global trade system, while poorer countries – those that have the most to lose from ecological breakdown – are routinely overruled.

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One of the reasons we’re staring down the barrel of an ecological crisis right now is because our political systems have been completely corrupted. The preferences of the majority who want to sustain our planet’s ecology for future generations are trumped by a minority of elites who are quite happy to liquidate everything. If our struggle for a more ecological economy is to succeed, we must seek to expand democracy wherever possible. That means kicking big money out of politics; it means radical media reform; strict campaign finance laws; reversing corporate personhood; dismantling monopolies; shifting to co-operative ownership structures; putting workers on company boards; democratising shareholder votes; democratising institutions of global governance; and managing collective resources as commons wherever possible.63

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I opened this book by pointing out that large majorities of people across the world are questioning capitalism and yearning for something better. What if we had an open, democratic conversation about what kind of economy we want? What would it look like? How would it distribute resources? Whatever shape it might take, I think it’s safe to say it wouldn’t look anything like our current system, with its extreme inequality and its tyrannical obsession with endless growth. Nobody actually wants that.

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We have long been told that capitalism and democracy are part of the same package. But in reality the two may well be incompatible. Capital’s obsession with perpetual growth at the expense of the living world runs against the values of sustainability that most of us hold. When people are given a say in the matter, they end up choosing to manage the economy according to steady-state principles that run counter to the growth imperative. In other words, capitalism has a tendency to be anti-democratic, and democracy has a tendency to be anti-capitalist.

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We are not permitted to question capitalism and the conquest of nature. To do so is considered a kind of heresy. In other words, we are encouraged to believe in the values of critical independent thought, but not if it means questioning capitalism.64

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In an age of ecological breakdown, we must break this barrier down. We must subject capitalism to scrutiny – to reason. The journey to a post-capitalist economy begins with the most basic act of democracy.

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In the very earliest time

When both people and animals lived on earth

A person could become an animal if they wanted to

And an animal could become a human being.

Sometimes they were people

And sometimes animals

And there was no difference.

All spoke the same language.

Nalungiaq, Inuit elder1

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Some images have a way of searing themselves into your mind. I still remember when I first encountered the work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. I found myself alone in a dimly lit gallery, face to face with a black-and-white image of a vast desert in Kuwait, a landscape fractured by oil wells, belching thick columns of fire and smoke. And then another: a refugee camp in Tanzania, with makeshift tents sprawling to the horizons, families struggling to survive. And then an open-pit goldmine in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, teeming with men digging shoulder to shoulder, trudging barefoot in the mud, under the watchful eye of armed guards. The images bear witness to the trauma of our civilisation. They haunted me for months

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Salgado spent his career reporting from the front lines of a world in crisis, and eventually it broke him. In the late 1990s, after finishing a project on displacement and migration, he decided to quit photography. ‘I was sick. I was not well. I had lost faith in our species,’ he told Canada’s the Globe and Mail newspaper. He and his wife, Lélia, who were living abroad, decided to go back to Brazil. They had inherited his parents’ farm, where Salgado spent much of his childhood. He remembered it as a magical forest, a paradise rich with life and flowing with water. But when he returned to the land he found that nothing remained. Intensive livestock farming and deforestation had left it dry, barren and lifeless. The springs had stopped flowing. The hills were eroded. The soil had turned to dust.

As if in a bid to heal a deeper trauma, the Salgados decided to attempt something that everyone told them was impossible – to restore the land to Atlantic rainforest. They began the work in 1999, and the results astonished everyone. Six years later, what had been a 1,730-acre stretch of wasteland was covered over with a layer of hopeful green. And by 2012, the forest had bounced back. The springs were bubbling again, and the animals had returned: birds, mammals, amphibians, even some endangered species. Today that land stands as a beacon of ecosystem restoration, and has inspired many similar projects around the world.

What’s powerful about the Salgados’ story is that it illustrates how quickly ecosystems can regenerate.

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The research on this is truly exciting. In 2016, an international team of scientists presented the biggest-ever database on forest regrowth in the New World tropics. They found that across ecosystems, from wet forest to dry forest, it takes an average of only sixty-six years for a forest to recover 90% of its old-growth biomass, completely naturally. All you have to do is leave it alone.2 Sometimes it happens much faster than this: in Costa Rica, rainforests that had been razed for livestock pasture were found to regrow in as little as twenty-one years, similar to what happened on the Salgados’ farm. And while biodiversity generally takes longer to recover, in some cases it can return to old-growth levels in as little as thirty years.3 As these forests regrow, they pull an extraordinary amount of carbon out of the atmosphere – more than 11 tons of CO2 per hectare, every year.

These findings offer real hope. It means that if we take the step of scaling down excess industrial activity, the living world can recover with remarkable speed. This is not some distant dream. We would be able to see it happen during our lifetimes, before our very eyes. But we must act quickly, for ecosystems are likely to lose their regenerative capacity as global warming continues.

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From this perspective, I cannot help but feel that degrowth is, ultimately, a process of decolonisation. Capitalist growth has always been organised around an expansionary territorial logic. As capital pulls ever-increasing swathes of nature into circuits of accumulation, it colonises lands, forests, seas, even the atmosphere itself. For 500 years, capitalist growth has been a process of enclosure and dispossession. Degrowth represents a reversal of this process. It represents release. It represents an opportunity for healing, recovery and repair.

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By focusing all our attention on how to fix the economy, we risk ignoring the bigger picture. Yes, we must take steps to evolve beyond capitalism. But capitalism is only the proximate driver of the crisis we face; it’s not really the underlying cause. That’s something that lies much deeper.

Remember, the rise of capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries didn’t come out of nowhere. As we saw in Chapter 1, it required violence and dispossession and enslavement; but even more than that it required crafting a new story about nature. It required getting people to see nature, for the first time, as something fundamentally distinct from humans; something not only inferior and subordinate, but devoid of the animating spirit we ascribe to people. It required splitting the world in two. It required, in a word, separation. For the past 500 years, the dominant culture on our planet – the culture of capitalism – has been rooted in that rift.

Once we grasp this, then it becomes clear that the struggle before us is more than just a struggle over economics. It is a struggle over our very theory of being. It requires decolonising not only lands and forests and peoples, but decolonising our minds. To begin this journey, we need new sources of hope, new wellsprings of possibility – new visions for how things could be otherwise. What we will learn along the way is that the secret to building an ecological civilisation isn’t at all about limits and meagreness. It is about something radically bigger. Bigger than we can imagine.

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The story of humanity plays out like a journey, with our ancestors venturing out of Africa and migrating across the planet, over tens of thousands of years. Along the way they encountered a vast array of different ecosystems – from savannah to deserts, jungles to steppes, wetlands to tundra. With each new zone they entered, they had to learn how these ecosystems worked so that they could live within them sustainably, in reciprocity with the other species they depended on for nourishment and sustenance. Sometimes they succeeded. Sometimes they failed.

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Nowhere was this mixed record more pronounced than during the Austronesian expansion, when humans left mainland Asia about two or three thousand years ago and settled throughout the vast network of islands that stretches south and east into the Pacific Ocean. The people who set out on these expeditions came from a culture that was established in the crucible of an enormous continent, governed by stable monsoon weather conditions, where they regularly terraformed whole river basins for agriculture. Living on such a vast expanse of territory, they were accustomed to feeling like they had seemingly endless resources at their disposal – like they could do whatever they wanted to the land.

The migrants took this culture with them when they landed on the islands of Austronesia. But the expansive logic of the mainland civilisations didn’t work out quite so well on the islands. In fact, the consequences were devastating. Settlers tore through island megafauna in a bonanza of easy protein – giant turtles, birds, fish and other easy prey that were unaccustomed to human predators. They chopped down trees to clear the land for crops. All of this might have had little consequence on the mainland, but on the islands it proved to be disastrous. Keystone species died off. Ecosystems fell out of balance. Life began to unravel. A number of societies completely collapsed. Some of the islands were abandoned altogether.

But as the Austronesian expansion wore on, settlers learned from their mistakes. They learned that to build a thriving society within a bounded island ecosystem requires a completely different approach to ecology. They had to swap the ideology of expansion for an ideology of integration. They had to learn to pay attention to other species – learn their habits, their languages, and their relationships with others. They had to learn how much they could safely take from any given community, and how to give back in order to ensure its continuation. They had to learn not only to protect but to enrich the island ecosystems on which they depended. They had to develop new, more ecological ways of thinking about their relationship with animals and forests and rivers, and they had to build these into their myths and rituals so they would never be forgotten. Societies that took these steps ended up thriving in the Pacific islands.

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Today we stand at a similar juncture, and the future could go either way. We are a civilisation obsessed with expansion that has suddenly discovered, as it were, that it inhabits an island. Will we cling to our reckless old ideologies, or will we seek to learn a new, more intelligent way of being? Fortunately, if we choose the latter course, we do not have to start from scratch. Humans have developed ways of being ecological in an astounding variety of places. If we look to communities that live close to the land today, we can find a wealth of clues about what real ecological intelligence looks like.

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Over the past decade or two, the Achuar have attracted attention because there’s something rather unexpected about their world view that has riveted anthropologists and philosophers, and it’s now completely upending the way that they think about nature. For the Achuar, you see, ‘nature’ does not exist. This might seem absurd to Western observers, who tend to see the category of nature as self-evident. It certainly seemed absurd to me when I first encountered it. But linger with this idea for long enough and it becomes clear there’s something profound going on. And it may hold powerful secrets within.

If you visit the Achuar, you’ll find them living in small circular clearings in the middle of jungle, with dense walls of trees rising up all around them like giant waves of green – dark, brooding, pulsing with the noises of frogs, toucans, snakes, monkeys, jaguars, millions upon millions of insects, plus a universe of mosses and mushrooms and curling, roping vines. For many people, to live in such a way, cut off from other human communities, would feel tremendously lonely and isolated. But the Achuar see the jungle quite differently. They see people all around.

As far as the Achuar are concerned, most of the plants and animals that populate the jungle have souls (wakan) similar to the souls of humans, and are therefore classified, literally, as ‘persons’ (aents). Just like humans, plants and animals have agency, intentionality and even self-consciousness. They experience emotions and exchange messages, not only among themselves but also with other species, and even – through dreams – with humans. There is nothing that fundamentally distinguishes them, in essence, from people. In fact, the Achuar go so far as to regard plants and animals as their relatives. The monkeys and other animals they hunt for food are regarded as brothers-in-law, and the relationship between them is governed by similar rules of circumspection and mutual respect. As for the plants they rely on for food, they are regarded as children to be nourished and cared for. For the Achuar, the jungle is not just a source of sustenance. It is a terrain full of intimate connections and kinship.

It might be tempting to dismiss all of this as nothing but quaint metaphor. But it’s not. Just as we know that maintaining good relations with our partners and children and in-laws and neighbours is essential to maintaining a secure, happy life, so the Achuar know that their existence depends on maintaining good relationships with the teeming community of non-human (or more-than-human) persons with whom they share the forest. They know that they are fundamentally interdependent; that without them they would be nothing – non-existent. Their fates are bound together.

These same principles are held by most of the peoples that inhabit the Amazon rainforest. It is a widespread and completely normal way of interacting with the world. But it is not just Indigenous Amazonians who hold these views. This ethic is widely shared – albeit with important variations – among countless Indigenous communities on every continent.4 It is remarkable in its consistency. And in many cases it’s not only plants and animals that are regarded as persons, but also inanimate beings like rivers and mountains.

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For these communities, it is impossible to draw distinctions between humans and ‘nature’, as those of us who live in capitalist societies so routinely do – a legacy handed down to us by early Mesopotamian civilisations, transcendental religions and Enlightenment philosophers like Bacon and Descartes. Such a distinction would make no sense. Indeed, it would be morally reprehensible, almost even violent. It would be like one group of people denying the humanity of another group, seeking to exclude them from rights on racist grounds – just as Europeans once did in order to justify colonisation and slavery. It would seem like an affront to the right way of living, which requires an understanding of interdependence.

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It is a matter of mutual reciprocity. The moral code at play here is not that you should never take (that would lead to a quick demise), but that you should never take more than the other is willing or able to give – in other words, never more than an ecosystem can regenerate. And you have to make sure to give back in return, by doing what you can to enrich, rather than degrade, the ecosystems on which you depend.

This takes a lot of work. It requires listening, empathy, dialogue. For many Indigenous communities, the skills of managing relations between human and non-human beings are honed in particular by shamans. For much of the twentieth century, anthropologists believed that the shaman’s role was limited to serving as a medium between humans and their ancestors. Now it’s increasingly clear that in many cases shamans also mediate between the human community and the broader community of beings on which humans depend.

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Shamans grow to know these other beings intimately. In the Amazon, they communicate with them in trances and dreams, transmitting messages and intentions back and forth. Because shamans spend so much time interacting with their non-human neighbours, they have an expert’s grasp on how ecological systems work. They know exactly how many fish – and of what species – can be taken from a river in any given season while ensuring that plenty are able to spawn for the next year. They know how many monkeys can be safely hunted without harming a troupe. They know when a grove of fruit trees is healthy, and when it’s in trouble. They use this knowledge to make sure that humans never take more from their plant and animal relatives than the forest can safely provide.

In this sense, the shaman operates as a kind of ecologist; an expert who understands and maintains the fragile interdependencies that constitute the jungle ecosystem, with knowledge of botany and biology that may far outstrip that which even the most prestigious university professors would dare to claim.

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For those of us raised in capitalist culture, trained in the conceits of dominion and dualism, it is almost impossible to comprehend. How much richer would our experience of the living world be if we regarded it as pulsing with intention and sociality? Who lives there? What are they like? What is their experience? What will we say to one another? Even just to imagine living this way seems like a portal to an enchanted world – one that’s hidden somehow right in plain view.

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Some people make the mistake of thinking that when animists talk about non-human beings as ‘persons’, they are merely projecting human qualities onto them, seeing them (mistakenly) as humans in disguise. But that’s not what’s going on here. Rather, animists recognise other species as subjects – subjects who have their own subjective, sensory experience of the world, just as we humans do. And it is precisely because they are subjects that they are regarded as persons. Because to be a subject is to be a person.

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Indigenous communities that depend on foraging and hunting in the forests have to get to know their local plants and animals intimately. They spend tens of thousands of hours learning and imitating the calls of monkeys and birds and jaguars, to the point of mastering subtle differences in meaning and mood – skills that are essential for successful hunting. They will get to know the preferences of various plants for different kinds of soils, how they move in response to changes in temperature and light, and how they interact with beetles and ants and birds. Their lives depend on mastering this kind of knowledge. And in the process, they come to realise – how could they not? – that all these beings are experiencing the world in their own ways, with their own unique set of senses, and interacting and responding to it with their own type of intelligence. It is a process of radical empathy with non-human persons.7

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It seems obvious, in some ways. And yet it’s all too easy for us to forget – particularly if we live in cities, where people rarely if ever encounter other species as anything but decoration. Even in rural areas, on farms, wild species are quite often treated as mere pests, to be exterminated if at all possible. In these contexts, we easily slip into thinking of other beings not as subjects but as objects – when we think of them at all. Or maybe it’s not that we forget, or that we slip … maybe it’s that we subconsciously suppress what we know on some deep level to be true, because to let ourselves think about the fact that our economic system depends on the systematic exploitation of other living beings is just too much to bear.

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Scientists estimate that 80% of the planet’s biodiversity is to be found on territories stewarded by Indigenous peoples.8 Clearly they are doing something right. They’ve protected life. They’ve nourished it. Not out of charity, or because it’s beautiful, but because they recognise the fundamental interdependence of all beings.

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As growthism accelerates the sixth mass extinction event in our planet’s history, the contrast between animist values and capitalist values could hardly be more pronounced.

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Remember, Descartes started with the old monotheistic idea of a fundamental distinction between God and creation, and then took it one step further. Creation itself is divided into two substances, Descartes said: with mind (or soul), on the one hand, and mere matter on the other. Mind is special; it is part of God. It cannot be described with the normal laws of physics or maths. It is an ethereal, divine substance. Humans are unique among all creatures in having minds and souls, which is the mark of their special connection to God. As for the rest of creation – including the human body itself – it is nothing but inert, unthinking matter. It is but ‘nature’.

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Descartes’ ideas had no grounding in empirical evidence, but they became popular among European elites in the 1600s because they bolstered the power of the Church, justified the capitalist exploitation of labour and nature, and gave moral licence to colonisation. Even the very idea of ‘reason’ itself came to rely on these assumptions. Humans alone have reason, Descartes argued, because we alone have minds. And the first step of reason is to realise that we – our minds – are separate from our bodies, and separate from the rest of the world.

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From this perspective, the animist insistence on seeing the world as intimately interconnected was long regarded as irrational and unenlightened. In the nineteenth century, prominent anthropologists described it as ‘childish’: only children see the world as enchanted, but this is a cognitive error that we must correct. Indeed, not only reason but modernity itself – and modern science – came to be defined as the ability to ‘recognise’ the difference between humans and nature, subject and object. Animism provided the perfect foil for the emerging concept of the ‘modern’.

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The backlash against Descartes started with a brave Dutch philosopher by the name of Baruch Spinoza

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Spinoza pointed out that the universe must emerge from one ultimate cause – what today we might recognise as the Big Bang. Once we accept this fact, Spinoza argued, then we have to accept that while God and souls and humans and nature might seem to be fundamentally different kinds of entities, they are really just different aspects of a single, grand Reality – a single substance – and governed by the same forces. This has radical implications for the way we think about the world. It means that God ultimately participates in the same substance as ‘creation’. It means that humans participate in the same substance as nature. It means that mind and soul are the same substance as matter. In fact, it means that everything is matter, everything is mind, and everything is God.

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Ironically for a school of thought that was once considered the height of Enlightenment science, dualism ended up suffering a tremendous defeat at the hands of science itself. Indeed, today the tables have turned: Spinoza is now routinely recognised as one of the best thinkers in modern European philosophy, and celebrated as a key figure in the history of science.

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Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty began to question these everyday assumptions using a new framework called phenomenology. They pointed out that human consciousness, and therefore the self, cannot exist in some abstract, transcendental mind. All consciousness is derived from the experience of phenomena, and experience fundamentally depends on the body. Everything we know, everything we think – indeed, our very sense of self – derives from our embodied experience in the world.

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Once you accept this, it’s a short step to recognising that those other ‘phenomena’ that populate our field of experience, the other beings with whom we engage – not just other humans but plants and animals as well – they are beings with subjective experience too. After all, they are bodies, like us, sensing the world, engaging with it, responding to it, shaping it. In fact, the world that presents itself to us is co-created by other subjects, just as we co-create their world. We are all engaged with each other in a sensual dance of perception, an ongoing dialogue through which we come to know the world.

When we think of it this way, suddenly the subject-object distinction collapses. Husserl argued that the universe of experience isn’t defined by subject-object relations; rather, it is an inter-subjective field which is collectively produced. Everything we know, everything we think, everything we are, is shaped by mutual interaction with other subjects.

These insights from phenomenology bring us remarkably close to what animists have so long insisted upon

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Remember, Césaire described colonisation as a process of ‘thingification’. Living beings, nature and humans alike, had to be rendered as objects so they could be legitimately exploited. This paved the way for cheap nature and capitalist growth. Given this history, it becomes clear that any process of decolonisation must therefore begin with a process of de-thingification. This is what Indigenous philosophers teach us: that we must learn to see ourselves once again as part of a broader community of living beings. If our approach to degrowth does not have this ethic at its heart, then we have missed the point.

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In the late twentieth century, phenomenology managed to re-implant animist principles right into the heart of European philosophy. And science quickly followed. Over the past two decades, a cascade of scientific discoveries has started to radically change how we perceive ourselves in relation to the rest of the living world.

Take bacteria, for instance. For generations we were told that bacteria were bad – full stop. We armed ourselves with anti-bacterial soaps and chemical disinfectants and set out to purify our bodies and our homes and even our food of the invisible little enemies we call germs. But in recent years scientists have overthrown many of those early misconceptions.

Our gut, skin and other organs are populated by trillions of microbial beings – and it turns out that we depend on these little creatures for our very existence. Gut bacteria are vital for digestion, as they break down food and turn it into nutrients we can use. They help regulate our immune responses. They are even essential to healthy brain function, as they activate neural pathways and nervous-system signalling mechanisms that help us deal with stress, prevent anxiety and depression, and promote mental health. They may even play a role in our social lives: scientists have recently discovered that wiping out the microbiota in mice makes them behave in antisocial ways, and they anticipate that the same is likely to be true of humans.11 These facts utterly confound any clear distinctions between mind and body, human and ‘nature’. The assumptions that underpin dualist thought are disintegrating in the face of science.12

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When we see a tree, we tend to think of it as a singular unit – just as we think of ourselves as individuals. But biologists have discovered that it’s not quite so simple. They have come to understand that trees depend on certain kinds of fungi in the soil: hair-thin structures called hyphae that interlace with cells in the roots of trees to form mycorrhiza. The fungi benefit by receiving some of the sugar that plants produce through photosynthesis (which it cannot otherwise make), while the trees benefit in turn by receiving elements like phosphorous and nitrogen that they cannot produce for themselves, and without which they cannot survive.

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Simard also describes how trees seem to have ‘emotional’ responses to trauma in a way that’s not dissimilar to animals. After a machete whack or during an aphid attack, their serotonin levels change (yes, they have serotonin, along with a number of neurochemicals that are common in animal nervous systems), and they start pumping out emergency messages to their neighbours.

Of course, none of this is to say that plant intelligence is exactly like that of animals. In fact, scientists warn that our urge to constantly compare the intelligence of some species with that of others is exactly the problem: it ends up blinding us to how other kinds of intelligence might work. Set out in search of a brain and you’ll never even notice the mycorrhiza that have been pulsing through the earth, evolving right under our feet, for 450 million years.

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Trees aren’t only connected with each other. They are also connected with us. Over the past few years, research into human–tree relationships has yielded some truly striking findings.

A team of scientists in Japan conducted an experiment with hundreds of people around the country. They asked half of the participants to walk for fifteen minutes through a forest, and the other half to walk through an urban setting, and then they tested their emotional states. In every case, the forest walkers experienced significant mood improvements when compared to the urban walkers, plus a decline in tension, anxiety, anger, hostility, depression and fatigue.21 The benefits were immediate and effective.

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Trees also have an impact on our behaviour. Researchers have found that spending time around trees makes people more co-operative, kinder and more generous. It increases our sense of awe and wonder at the world, which in turn changes how we interact with others. It reduces aggression and incivility. Studies in Chicago, Baltimore and Vancouver have all discovered that neighbourhoods with higher tree cover have significantly fewer crimes, including assault, robbery and drug use – even when controlling for socio-economic status and other confounding factors.22 It’s almost as though being with trees makes us more human.

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And it’s not just mood and behaviour. It turns out that trees have an impact on our physical health too – in concrete, material terms. Living near trees has been found to reduce cardiovascular risk.24 Walking in forests has been found to lower blood pressure, cortisol levels, pulse rates and other indicators of stress and anxiety.25 Even more intriguingly, a team of scientists in China found that elderly patients with chronic health conditions demonstrated significant improvements in immune function after spending time in forests.26 We don’t know for sure, but this may have something to do with the chemical compounds that trees exhale into the air. The aromatic vapours released by cypress, for example, have been found to enhance the activity of a number of human immune cells, while reducing stress hormone levels.27

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In an attempt to quantify the overall benefit of trees, scientists in Canada found that trees have a more powerful impact on our health and well-being than even large sums of money. Having just ten more trees on a city block decreases cardio-metabolic conditions in ways comparable to earning an extra $20,000.Anditimprovesone’ssenseofwell-beingasmuchasearninganextra$10,000, moving to a neighbourhood with $10,000 higher median income, or being seven years younger.28

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These results are astonishing. There’s a real mystery here, which scientists still do not yet understand. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised. After all, we have co-evolved with trees for millions of years. We even share DNA with trees. After countless generations, we’ve come to depend on them for our health and happiness just as we depend on other humans. We are, in a very real sense, relatives.

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We are even starting to rethink the relationship between predators and their prey. In the past we saw this as a matter of domination and plunder – ‘dog eat dog’, ‘the law of the jungle’, ‘kill or be killed’. And certainly if you zoom in on discrete moments of predation they can be quite gruesome, as you’ll know if you’ve ever seen footage of a lion on the hunt. But zoom out and it becomes clear that there’s something else going on. Predation turns out to be more about balance and equilibrium than anything else.

In Alaska, for example, wolves keep caribou populations in check. This prevents the caribou from overgrazing saplings, which in turn allows forests to grow and flourish. Forests prevent erosion, which keeps soils healthy and enables rivers to run clear. Good soils give rise to berries and grubs, while clear rivers provide habitats for fish and other freshwater creatures. Fish and berries and grubs in turn feed bears and eagles. These interdependencies build strength and resilience into ecosystems, literally fleshing out the network. But the cascades of generosity also work in reverse. In areas where wolves have been exterminated, whole ecosystems fall apart: forests collapse, soils erode, rivers fill with silt, and eagles and bears disappear.

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Individuality is an illusion. Life on this planet is an interwoven mesh of relational becoming.

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Our planet is one, giant system of interlocking reciprocities. The British scientist James Lovelock has described the Earth as a superorganism, which automatically self-regulates in a manner that maintains the conditions for life, just as the human body self-regulates to keep internal systems in functional balance. This is the Gaia hypothesis, so named after the goddess of the Earth in Greek mythology. And indeed these findings from Earth-systems science and biogeochemistry would not be surprising to peoples who have long regarded the Earth as a living being, or even as a mother.

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What does all of this mean for us? How should we live in the light of this science?

Let’s go back to those findings about plants, just for the sake of argument. When research about plant intelligence first began circulating on social media, not everyone reacted well to it. If plants are intelligent, perhaps even conscious in some distributed sense, then how are we supposed to deal with the fact that harvesting crops must therefore be a kind of murder? How are we supposed to cut trees for furniture if it means splitting up a family? Thinking this way would make life so ethically fraught as to be practically impossible. For many people, this conundrum poses such a problem that they feel the only reasonable response is to reject the science itself.

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Post-capitalist ethics

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Interestingly, these are the very dilemmas that the Achuar, Chewong and other animist communities face. And perhaps we can take lessons from the answers they’ve arrived at after generations of thinking about it. There’s nothing necessarily unethical about harvesting crops or cutting down trees, they say – or even hunting and eating animals, for that matter. What’s unethical is to do so without gratitude, and without reciprocity. What’s unethical is to take more than you need, and more than you give back. What’s unethical is exploitation, extraction and, perhaps worse still, waste.

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Kimmerer points out that we should receive food and materials from the living world with the same care and decorum and gratitude that we might receive a healthy, home-cooked meal from our grandmother. We should treat what we receive not as a right, but as a gift.29

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What’s powerful about gifts is that they place us in a position of self-restraint, where we are careful to take no more than we need, and no more than the other is able to share. This has intrinsic conservational value, and it’s a radical act in the context of a culture that’s hell-bent on consumption far beyond the point of excess. And, as any anthropologist will tell you, gifts also bind us into long-lasting covenants of reciprocal exchange.30 They force us to consider what we can give back in return. The gift lingers; if you’ve received a gift from someone, you won’t accept another one until you’ve had a chance to give something back to them. In this sense, the logic of the gift is deeply ecological: it is about equilibrium, about balance. Indeed, it is how ecosystems maintain themselves.

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All of this runs exactly against the logic of capitalism. Capitalism ultimately relies on a single, overarching principle: take more than you give back. We’ve seen this logic in action for 500 years, beginning with enclosure and colonisation. In order to accumulate surplus, you have to extract uncompensated value from nature and bodies, which must be objectified and rendered as ‘external’.

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So what would it mean to extend the principles of reciprocity beyond the individual interactions that we might have with plants and animals and ecosystems? What would it mean to govern a whole economic system by these rules?

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Ecology is a unique branch of science, in that it seeks not only to understand the parts of a system, but how those parts relate to one another in a broader whole. Ecologists are adept at understanding and even managing ecosystem health. They are in some crucial respects like shamans

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we can switch to methods that don’t just minimise harm, but actively regenerate ecosystems. This is where the reciprocity part comes in; and it’s where things get particularly exciting. Take farming, for instance. Modern industrial farms are built as vast monocultures, with a single crop stretching from horizon to horizon, doused in chemical pesticides and herbicides designed to exterminate all other forms of life. If you’ve ever seen aerial photographs of the American Midwest, you know what this looks like: under capitalist agriculture, the land is reorganised according to a totalitarian logic with a single goal in mind: to maximise short-term extraction. This approach has turned rich topsoils into dust, releasing huge plumes of CO2 from the earth in the process. It’s caused insect and bird populations to collapse, while chemical run-off has killed whole freshwater ecosystems.

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Fortunately, there’s another way. Intrepid farmers around the world, from Virginia to Syria, are experimenting with more holistic methods called regenerative agroecology. They’re planting multiple crop species together to build resilient ecosystems, while using compost, organic fertilisers and crop rotation to restore life and fertility to the soils. In areas where these methods have been used, crop yields have improved, earthworms have returned, insect populations have recovered and bird species have rebounded.31 And perhaps best of all, as dead soils recover they are sequestering enormous quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere. In fact, scientists believe that if we’re going to have any chance of averting climate breakdown, we’ll need to roll out regenerative methods across most of the world’s farmland and pasture. It’s more effective by far than any man-made carbon-capture technology.

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This is what reciprocity looks like in action. When you give back as much as you receive, it has a multiplier effect on ecosystem health. It revives life. And it’s not just in agriculture that this is happening. Regenerative approaches are being developed in forestry and fishing as well, and in many cases people are drawing on techniques that have long been used by Indigenous communities and small farmers in the global South.

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Large agribusinesses have been slow to adopt these methods, however – despite the fact that they have been shown to improve the quality of crops and the long-term fertility of the soils. Why? Because it requires time and labour. It requires an intimate knowledge of the local ecosystem. It requires understanding the traits and behaviours of dozens of species, and how they interact with each other. It requires care. When you treat a farm like an ecosystem instead of a factory, you begin a relationship with the land that is inimical to the short-term extractivist logic of agribusiness.

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Instead of just encouraging reciprocity with ecosystems, they are giving nature the rights of legal personhood. If this sounds wild, take a minute to remember that we already give personhood status to certain non-human entities: namely, corporations. This is a twisted view of personhood that privileges accumulation over life itself. We can flip this logic around. Instead of giving personhood to Exxon and Facebook, we can give legal recognition to living beings. Why not redwoods? Why not rivers? Why not whole watersheds?

Over the past few years, a series of extraordinary court decisions in New Zealand has caused an international stir. In 2017, the Whanganui River – the country’s third longest river, which the Maori people have long considered to be sacred – was declared a legal person. It is now recognised as ‘an indivisible and living whole from the mountains to the sea’, incorporating both its physical and metaphysical elements. The Maori have been fighting for this since 1870. In the words of Gerrard Albert, the lead negotiator, ‘We consider the river an ancestor and always have.’ And it’s not just the river. In the same year, courts gave similar legal standing to Mount Taranaki, which towers over the island’s west coast. A few years prior, the Te Urewera national park was made a legal entity, no longer to be owned by the government as state property, but rather to be owned by itself.

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Some countries have gone further still. Ecuador’s 2008 constitution establishes the rights of nature itself ‘to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles’. Two years later, Bolivia passed the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, recognising that ‘Mother Earth is the dynamic living system formed by the indivisible community of all life systems and living beings who are interrelated, interdependent and complementary, which share a common destiny’. While some worry that these rights may turn out to be more rhetorical than real, there is nonetheless a lot of potential here, and they have already been successfully invoked in some cases to stop big industrial projects that might harm rivers and watersheds.

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All of this represents the beginning of a profound shift in consciousness. There’s something about the ecological crisis that seems to be opening us to new ways of thinking (or rather beckoning us to older ways of thinking) about our relationship with the more-than-human world. This takes us straight to the core of the problem. It gestures towards how we might begin to heal the rift from which this crisis has ultimately sprung. It empowers us to imagine a richer, more fertile future: a future free from the old dogmas of capitalism and rooted instead in reciprocity with the living world.

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We need high-income countries to scale down excess energy and material use; we need a rapid transition to renewables; and we need to shift to a post-capitalist economy that’s focused on human well-being and ecological stability rather than on perpetual growth. But we also need more than this – we need a new way of thinking about our relationship with the living world.

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Degrowth stands for de-colonisation, of both lands and peoples and even our minds. It stands for the de-enclosure of commons, the de-commodification of public goods, and the de-intensification of work and life. It stands for the de-thingification of humans and nature, and the de-escalation of ecological crisis. Degrowth begins as a process of taking less. But in the end it opens up whole vistas of possibility. It moves us from scarcity to abundance, from extraction to regeneration, from dominion to reciprocity, and from loneliness and separation to connection with a world that’s fizzing with life.

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Ultimately, what we call ‘the economy’ is our material relationship with each other and with the rest of the living world

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We must ask ourselves: what do we want that relationship to be like? Do we want it to be about domination and extraction? Or do we want it to be about reciprocity and care?

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How will the rest of the story unfold? It is within our power to write a different future, if we can summon the courage to do so. We have everything to lose, and a world to gain.

Acknowledgements

What are we doing here? Where are we going? What’s it all for? What is the end, as it were, of human existence? Growthism prevents us from stopping to think about these questions. It prevents us from reflecting on what we actually want our society to achieve. Indeed, the pursuit of growth comes to stand in for thought itself. We are in a trance. We slog on, mindlessly, unaware of what we’re doing, unaware of what’s happening around us, unaware of what we are sacrificing … who we are sacrificing.

Acknowledgements

Degrowth is an idea that shakes us out of the trance. ‘Sit, be still, and listen,’ Rumi wrote in one of his poems: ‘for you are drunk, and we are at the edge of the roof.’

This is not about living a life of voluntary misery or imposing harsh limits on human potential. On the contrary, it is exactly the opposite. It is about flourishing, and about reaching a higher level of consciousness about what we’re doing here and why.

Acknowledgements

But the trance is powerful. To escape it requires escaping the ruts grooved into our minds, the assumptions baked into our culture, the ideologies that shape our politics. That is no easy task. It requires courage and discipline. For me, it has been a long journey, and I still have many miles to go. At every step along the way I have relied on the grace of fellow travelers who have pulled me out of ruts and opened me to new ways of seeing the world.

Acknowledgements

I finished writing this book during the coronavirus lockdown in London. I will always remember it as a strange and eerie time. We all suddenly realized what parts of the economy really matter – and whose jobs we depend on most. For me, this was inescapably clear

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