Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

We don’t have a right to ask whether we are going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this Earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it? –Wendell Berry

Extinction Rebellion [XR] is sometimes criticised for having demands that are (too) hard to achieve. But it’s important to be clear about what XR is not: XR is not an all-purpose way of fixing our adrift civilisation. Rather, XR is the smoke-alarm.

XR is a recognition of emergency. We have learned a lot about emergencies over the past year, with the rise of the coronavirus pandemic.

If the coronavirus is teaching us something about solidarity in action, then that is a real hope in this dangerous hour.

inanities and insanities of ‘growthism’:

There is a sense in which we really can have it all – at least all that actually matters. A simpler way.

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.

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!’

Much like food rationing during World War Two in countries such as the UK:

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.

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.

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.

The movement to evolve beyond our model of growth-at-all-costs must be born in solidarity with the South.

It must be about decolonisation and about reparations, or it has missed the point.

We in this society are inclined to always imagine more technological innovations as the ...

why are we not equally eager to imagine more social...

It shows a great poverty of imagination to stop with capitalism, to assume that it is the only game in to...

Less is More provides a kind of proof that there is nothing unrealistic about what we are asking for. On the contrary: if one is really willing to face reality, there is nothing more unrealistic than the fantasy of continuing the status quo much longer.

Introduction Welcome to the Anthropocene

of flying insects in Germany’s nature reserves had vanished over the course of twenty-five years – due, they concluded, to the conversion of surrounding forests to farmland, followed by the intensive use of agricultural chemicals.

‘If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.’

Insect decline appears to be happening everywhere. A global review of evidence published in 2019 found that at least 10% of insect species are at risk of extinction, and probably more.3

This is not a book about doom. It is a book about hope. It’s about how we can shift from an economy that’s organised around domination and extraction to one that’s rooted in reciprocity with the living world.

Living in an age of mass extinction

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

scientists warn, the Earth will be able to support only another sixty years of harvests.

In the Asia-Pacific, fishery yields are on track to hit zero by 2048.11

Oceans are also being affected by climate change. More than 90% of the heat from global warming gets absorbed into the sea.12 Oceans act like a buffer, protecting us from the worst effects of our emissions.

it’s already beginning to play out in real time: marine animals are disappearing at twice the rate that land animals are.

We are sleepwalking into a mass extinction event – the sixth in our planet’s history, and the first to be caused by human economic activity. The rate of extinction is now 1,000 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution.

Around one million species are now at risk of extinction, within decades.

‘The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever,’

‘We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.’

‘We are currently, in a systematic manner, exterminating all non-human living beings.’ Scientists are not k...

‘Humanity will eventually pay a very high price,’ the authors wrote, ‘for the decimation of the only assemblage of life that we know of in the universe.’18

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.

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.

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.

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.

Behind the eco-fact

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.

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.

whatever we might think of capitalism, it’s important to have a clear-eyed view of what it is and how it works.

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 ti...

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 maintain rising aggregate profits.

A growth-obsessed economy powered by clean energy will still tip us into ecological disaster.

The tricky part is that it seems we have little choice about this. Capitalism is fundamentally dependent on growth.