Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

What does this Earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?

Yes

Insects are essential to pollination and plant reproduction, they break down organic waste and turn it into soil, and they provide a vital source of food for thousands of other species.

Yes

‘With insect extinctions, we lose much more than species’, they wrote. We lose ‘large parts of the tree of life’, and such losses ‘lead to the decline of key ecosystem services on which humanity depends.’

Very true

reciprocity

totalitarian

More than 90% of the heat from global warming gets absorbed into the sea.

Yes

oceans heat up, nutrient cycles are being disrupted, food chains broken, and vast stretches of marine habitat are dying off.15 At the same time, carbon 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

Yes

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.

Wow

On our present emissions trajectory, ocean pH will drop by 0.4 by the end of the century.

Crazy

marine animals are disappearing at twice the rate that land animals are.

I

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

So true

these living systems are not ‘out there’, disconnected from humanity. On the contrary: our fates are intertwined. They are, in a real sense, us.

Need to understand as humans

And if temperatures rise by 3°C or 4°C, sea levels will go up by as much as 100cm, and possibly 200cm.

Hmm

every degree we heat the planet, the yields of staple cereal crops will decline by 10%.

Yes

It’s not the external shock that does it – the meteor or the volcano: it’s the cascade of internal failures that

Yes

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.

Interesting

marine ice-cliff instability.

ameliorate

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.

I hate pwople...

Within this system, growth 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.

But nit true...

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.

least 2% or 3% per year,

doubling the size of the global economy every twenty-three years,

Anthropocene

Even if this wasn’t a problem, we must ask ourselves: 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.

True

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.

Remember

We have dozens of ideas for how to fix the problem, but we dare not implement them because doing so might undermine growth.

The real problem...

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.

The issue... Growth