Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

The study went viral, capturing headlines around the world. ‘We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon,’ one of the scientists said. ‘If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.’1 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.

The crisis has become so severe that in 2020, scientists published a ‘warning to humanity’ about the fate of insects. ‘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.’

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.

Our soils are being turned into lifeless dirt.9 The consequences are worrying, to say the least. Crop yields are now declining on a fifth of the world’s farmland.10 If this continues, scientists warn, the Earth will be able to support only another sixty years of harvests.11 The very soils that have formed the foundations of human civilisation for tens of thousands of years are suddenly, in a matter of decades, on the verge of collapse.

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.12 In the Asia-Pacific, fishery yields are on track to hit zero by 2048.13

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 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.16 We know what’s about to happen.

What begins as a vague inkling about moths and beetles, the flickers of a childhood memory, turns into a crippling realisation, like a blow to the gut. 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.

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%.24 On our present trajectory, that means losses of up to 30% this century.

In fact, it’s happening already.26 Many of those fleeing places like Guatemala and Somalia are doing so because their farms are no longer viable. The international system is already straining, with 65 million people displaced from their homes by wars and droughts – more than at any time since the Second World War. As migration pressures build, politics are becoming more polarised, fascist movements are on the march, and international alliances are beginning to fray.

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.

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.

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 production and consumption, which we have come to measure in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).31 Growth is the prime directive of capital. And as far as capital is concerned, the purpose of increasing production is not primarily to meet specific human needs, or to improve social outcomes. Rather, the purpose is to extract and accumulate an ever-rising quantity of profit. That is the overriding objective. 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.

the ecological crisis is not being caused by all human beings 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.

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

the very politicians who wring their hands about climate breakdown also call dutifully for more industrial growth every year. The cognitive dissonance is striking.

‘green growth’ is not a thing. It has no empirical support.

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 US 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.39 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.’

In 2018, 238 scientists called on the European Commission to abandon GDP growth and focus on human well-being and ecological stability instead.45 The following year, more than 11,000 scientists from over 150 countries published an article calling on the world’s governments ‘to shift from pursuing GDP growth and affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving well-being.’46 This would have been unthinkable in mainstream circles only a few years ago, but now there’s a striking new consensus forming.

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.49 The exciting part is that we know we can do this while at the same time ending poverty, improving human well-being, and ensuring good lives for all.50 Indeed, that is the core principle of degrowth.

We can also scale down forms of production 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.

While markets have been around for many thousands of years, in different times and places, capitalism 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; indeed, it is the first intrinsically expansionist economic system in history.

Capitalism didn’t just ‘emerge’. There was no smooth, natural ‘transition’ to capitalism, and it has nothing to do with human nature.

feudalism fell apart, free peasants began to build a clear alternative: an egalitarian, co-operative society rooted in the principles of local self-sufficiency.

During the revolutionary period from 1350 to 1500, elites suffered what historians have described as a crisis of ‘chronic disaccumulation’.11 As national income was shared more evenly across the population it became more difficult for elites 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.

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.

All of this upends the usual story that we’re told about the rise of capitalism. This was hardly a natural and inevitable process. 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. Indeed, by securing virtually total control over the means of production, and rendering peasants and workers dependent on them for survival, capitalists took the principles of serfdom to new extremes. People did not welcome this new system with open arms; on the contrary, they rebelled against it. The period from 1500 to the 1800s, right into the Industrial Revolution, was among the bloodiest, most tumultuous times in world history.

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

Today, British politicians often seek to defend colonialism by claiming that Britain helped ‘develop’ India. But in fact exactly the opposite is true: Britain exploited India to develop itself.

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

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, and for the benefit of capital. This is crucial: those principles of homo economicus that we assume to be engraved in human nature were instituted during the enclosure process.24

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 proponents of capitalism themselves believed it was necessary to impoverish people in order to generate growth.

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.

no option but to sell themselves for wages.

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.

Anthropologists refer to this way of seeing the world as animism – the idea that all living beings are interconnected, and share in the same spirit or essence. 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.

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.

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’.

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.

Writing in the late 1700s, Immanuel Kant, one of Western philosophy’s most celebrated ethicists, wrote: ‘As far as non-humans are concerned, we have no direct duties. They are there merely as the means to an end. The end is man.’35

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

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; productivity is virtue.

Poverty was recast not as the consequence of dispossession, but as the sign of personal moral failing.

Work was progressively stripped of meaning, pleasure, talent and mastery.

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.

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. As with land and nature, labour too was transformed into a mere commodit...

In order to generate profits for growth, capital seeks to appropriate nature as cheaply as possible – and ideally for free.

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. 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.

if they fail to grow then investors will pull out and the firm will collapse. The choice is stark: grow or die.

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. The concrete use-values of economic production (meeting human needs) have been subordinated to the pursuit of abstract exchange-value (GDP growth).