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.

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.44 These are striking results.

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.

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 no accident. In the decades that inaugurated the rise of capitalism, enclosure and colonisation were deployed as part of the same strategy.

From the early 1500s through the early 1800s, colonisers siphoned 100 million kilograms of silver out of the Andes and into European ports.

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

they siphoned sums that would today be worth around $45 trillion out of India and into British coffers.

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.

Public wealth had to be sacrificed for the sake of private riches;

Enclosure and colonisation were necessary preconditions for the rise of European capitalism. They opened frontiers for the appropriation of cheap resources, destroyed subsistence economies, created a mass of cheap labour, and by generating artificial scarcity set the engines of competitive productivity in motion.

pagan cultures across Europe, which rejected the Christian distinction between sacred and profane.

Those who fell behind in the productivity race and slipped into poverty were branded with the stigma of sin.

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

From its very first principles, capitalism has set itself at war against life itself.

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.

Under capitalism, growth is not just an optional feature of human social organisation – it’s an imperative to which all are hostage.

there is an enormous net flow of resources that goes from poor countries to rich countries, including around 10 billion tons of raw materials per year.

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.

people angry at a system that prioritises capital

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.

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.

after a certain point growth begins to become ‘uneconomic’: it begins to create more ‘illth’ than wealth. We can see this happening on a number of fronts: the continued pursuit of growth in high-income nations is exacerbating inequality and political instability,18 and contributing to problems like stress and depression from overwork and lack of sleep, ill health from pollution, diabetes and heart disease,

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.

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.

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.21 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.

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.41

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.

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.8 These are extraordinary figures.

Nearly 60% of global agricultural land is used for beef – either directly for cattle pasture or indirectly for growing feed.16 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, large parts of the Amazon rainforest are literally being burned down for the sake of beef.

One approach would be to introduce a cap on wage ratios: a ‘maximum wage’ policy. 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.

nobody ‘deserves’ this kind of wealth. It’s not earned, it’s extracted: from underpaid workers, from cheap nature, from rent-seeking, from political capture and so on. Extreme wealth has a corrosive effect on our society, on our political system, and on the living world.

This plays out in the realm of consumption too. 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.43 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.

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.

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.

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.

Capitalist growth has always been organised around an expansionary territorial logic.

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;

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’.

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.

plants remember things that happen to them, and change their behaviour accordingly. In other words, they learn.

trees can recognise their own relatives through mycorrhizal networks. Older ‘mother’ trees can identify nearby saplings that came from their own seeds,

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.

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.

spending time around trees makes people more co-operative, kinder and more generous.

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.

Nothing exists alone. Individuality is an illusion.