Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

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.

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.

This is called ‘degrowth’ – a planned reduction of excess energy and resource use to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just and equitable way.

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 sentient beings, just like people, and animated by the very same spirit. In some cases they even regarded them as kin.

Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

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

What makes capitalism distinctive isn’t that it has markets, but that it is organised around perpetual growth; indeed, it is the first intrinsically expansionist economic system in history. It pulls ever-rising quantities of nature and human labour into circuits of commodity production. And because the goal of capital is to extract and accumulate surplus, it has to get these things for as cheap as possible. In other words, capital works according to a simple, straightforward formula: take more – from nature and from labour – than you give back.

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’.

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.

Under capitalism, growth always requires new frontiers from which to extract uncompensated value. It is, in other words, intrinsically colonial in character.

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.

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.36

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

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.

Enclosure and colonisation enabled the appropriation of cheap labour too. And 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.

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.42 No need for compensation. As with everything shunted into the category of ‘nature’, the costs of extraction were externalised.

‘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.’

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.

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.

The real per capita income gap between the global North and global South is four times larger today than it was at the end of colonialism.10

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.

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.

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.

Gender justice and economic justice must be central to any vision for a more ecological economy.

According to data from the Climate Vulnerability Monitor, the South bears 82% of the total costs of climate breakdown, which in 2010 added up to $571 billion in losses due to drought, floods, landslides, storms and wildfires.28 Researchers predict that these costs will continue to rise. By 2030 the South will suffer 92% of total global costs, reaching $954 billion.

It’s worth pausing to reflect on the growing fascination with geo-engineering. What’s interesting about it is that it embodies the very same logic that got us into trouble in the first place: the idea that the living planet, rendered as mere ‘nature’, is nothing but a set of passive materials that can be subdued, conquered and controlled. Geo-engineering represents dualism taken to astonishing new extremes, unimaginable by Bacon and Descartes, where the planet itself must be bent to the will of man so that capitalist growth can continue indefinitely.

Ask any economist and they’ll tell you: efficiency improvements are good because they stimulate economic growth. This is why we see that, 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.

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.

What explains this paradox? Researchers have found that – once again – it’s not income itself that matters, but how it’s distributed.20 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.

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.

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.31 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.32

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.33

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.

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.

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.

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. Banks would still be able to lend money, of course, but they would have to back it with 100% reserves, dollar for dollar.55

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.57

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

We are not the defenders of the river. We are the river. Fisherman, Magdalena River, Colombia

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

Anthropologists refer to this way of being as animism. The religious studies scholar Graham Harvey defines animism quite simply as the claim ‘that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others’.5 Animists approach animals and plants and even rivers and mountains as subjects in their own right, rather than as objects. There is no ‘it’ in such a world view. Everything is ‘thou’.

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

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. And it improves one’s sense of well-being as much as earning an extra $10,000, moving to a neighbourhood with $10,000 higher median income, or being seven years younger

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.

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.