By Beatrice Sturmdrang
INTRODUCTION:
When considering any number of potentially viable ways to mitigate, mollify, or lessen the harmful effects of anthropogenic climate change, one is immediately stuck by the obviousness of several possibilities. Some of them are already more or less being adopted, to varying degrees of consistency and efficacy. The transition to electric vehicles, for example, is already well underway, although critics deride the electric cars, such as Teslas, as symbolic of eco-capitalism, or a maintenance of the status quo with a green veneer. It is not enough to simply introduce yet more forms of consumption when the most salient and grave problem facing humanity stems from the very fact that the earth’s resources are finite, we must radically alter the relationship that humanity has with the natural world. Rather than allowing us to continue to extract resources at even greater degrees of efficiency, while avoiding the consequences (as the panglossian techno-futurists assured us), our prodigious technological development (and dependency) has only manifested in such a way as to all but guarantee the elimination of crucial natural resources from this planet.
DEGROWTH:
Instead of focusing in on one specific tactic for the effective mitigation of anthropogenic climate change, this essay relates and underwrites ideas that have gained some cache in academic circles in recent decades, all subsumed under the larger category name: DEGROWTH. Degrowth is an abstract, varied, but widely agreed upon set of parameters that policymakers could implement to effectively transition the national and world economies from those that prioritize and necessitate infinitely expanding, linear growth, to economies designed to safeguard and promote the wellbeing of actual people. Shortly after its invention and rise to prominence as a metric in the 1930s, the concept of the Gross Domestic Product as an indicator of the economic health of a nation gain traction and currency among western economists. It is still widely used and relied upon despite it not being an accurate reflection of quality of life. The ultra-wealthy classes of corporate leaders and financiers, and the politicians who cross-pollinate between and among these elite groups, have benefitted from the deliberate misrepresentation of GDP as an indicator of a nation’s general wellbeing. To quote Kate Raworth, whose book Doughnut Economics presents and elucidates an economic system that prioritizes human needs over profits and growth, “the answer to inequality, we were told by the infinite growth proponents (such as Walt Rostow), was more growth.”
Exponents of the promise of economic degrowth blame the infinite-growth paradigm that the West has been operating in for the last sixty-plus years for the frog-in-boiling-water state that we find ourselves in relative to climatic change. It is clear that the western world, or the developed world (the nations who were colonial powers in the 19th century, and earlier in some cases) has pursued industrial development that is plainly unsustainable; unsustainable not in the figurative sense, but in a practical, literal sense. Unlimited growth models have catastrophically failed to foreground the importance of human dignity and wellbeing in their system of profit-seeking and blind innovation. Proponents of a degrowth model ask: “What would our economy look like if the ultimate goal of all economic activity were to enable people to flourish by having all their basic needs met?” This model would allow for blitzkrieg decarbonization, which would go a long way toward righting the ecological ship, so to speak. Degrowth frameworks can be used to promote and leverage an array of climate-conscious policies that can have such varied goals as reversing biodiversity loss, reforestation, and the radical reduction of energy use, among many others.
THE WASTE OF CONSUMERISM
If growth, and profit, are the sole incentives being pursued by businesses, the desire to market a quality product can quickly be replaced by the desire to market the cheapest, poorest quality item, made in the most remote, dismal factory with modern slave labor, to cut costs as much as possible. This has led to widely-known practices such as programmed obsolescence, which is rampant in many industries but in the consumer electronics sector in particular, which consists of the engineering of products to be of deliberately poor quality to create an artificial need to repurchase the device before its natural life-cycle would normally end. It is precisely this kind of logic that has been driving the rapid globalization of the world, which is more or less the recolonization of the global south by the economically hegemonic global north.
A fully implementable degrowth agenda would target harmful sectors such the fossil-fuel industry, private aviation services, intensive agribusiness, advertising, and more. State actors tasked with implementing degrowth agendas would require enforcement arms with enough leverage to hold large corporate entities accountable for their flagrant disregard of planetary limits and human life generally. Any industries deemed unnecessary or unproductive for meeting human needs will be targeted by degrowth task-forces. The emphasis will move away from enriching a minority of wealthy shareholders and financiers, and toward providing, at a society-wide scale, a socially conscious economic framework out of which opportunity, leisure, and human agency are each available for all citizens, regardless of their financial status. With the newly assumed social responsibility of modern degrowth states, it stands to reason that robust sets of public services will be provided for out of the limited revenues generated by the taxes on regressive businesses and negligent corporate actors. Services that are crucial for the maintenance of any even moderate quality of life, such as education, healthcare, and housing, all of which have been left to the greed and caprice of the private sector in our pro-growth system, which sees private equity frequently buyout struggling hospitals to sell off the real estate and lease it back to the hospital at astronomical rates of return, and then leaving the hospital to slowly fall into bankruptcy after being exploited for the benefit of a few investors in New York, all of the crucial human services will be provided for every citizen in a degrowth model; they will be the foundation, the bedrock upon which modern liberty and fraternity is built. A reworking of the distributive effects of our current economic orthodoxy is desperately needed if we can even properly conceive of a society that truly offers freedom to its citizens. It is only when we can radically alter our relationship to economics and the world around us that we can begin to properly adapt and react to the newly emerging climate crises and threats.
WHY DEGROWTH? PRACTICAL BENEFITS AND CONCLUSION
There are currently housing developments in urban settings, such as Vienna, the first twelve floors of which are dedicated to conveying a visual representation of urban renewal in the form of ecologically minded city-planning. The normally utilitarian and uniform array of balconies has been replaced by a stunning, deliberate arboreal installation that draws the eye of the passerby and the online viewer with equal astonishment. These buildings also serve as socially progressive, public housing in Vienna. This is a really instructive example of the kind of innovative, socially conscious public projects that degrowth, if properly pursued, will come to embody. As an inspiring forerunner, these gorgeous Vienna housing towers serve two ends: they provide a social good, in the form of shelter for economically insecure Viennese, and they act as air-quality control mechanisms by the profusion of plant life into the urban environ. It is precisely this kind of forward thinking that can propel us out of the danger zone and into a new paradigm of successful adaptation and climate mitigation. It is hard to remain optimistic in the face of such colossal blows to climate adaptation as second the Trump presidency, yet, reading and thinking about programmatic solutions, that are far reaching and well-designed, like shifting toward a degrowth economy, can help keep the hope alive, and hopefully the human race as well.
CITATIONS:
Hickel, J., Kallis, G., Jackson, T., O’Neill, D. W., Schor, J. B., Steinberger, J. K., Victor, P. A., & Ürge-Vorsatz, D. (2022, December 12). Degrowth can work – here’s how science can help. Nature News. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04412-x
a, b, c, 1, & d. (2023, August 22). Degrowth and the global south: The twin problem of global dependencies. Ecological Economics. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800923002094#:~:text=138)%20argues%20degrowth%20should%20be,the%20discourse%20as%20a%20whole.
About doughnut economics. DEAL. (n.d.). https://doughnuteconomics.org/about-doughnut-economics
THE CONVERSATION PIECE 