there is a bitter irony to the fact that we have been persuaded to use the word ‘growth’ to describe what has now become primarily a process of breakdown.

We are all heirs of dualist ontology. We can see it everywhere in the language we use about nature today. We routinely describe the living world as ‘natural resources’, as ‘raw materials’, and even – as if to emphasise its subordination and servitude – as ‘ecosystem services’. We talk about waste and pollution and climate change as ‘externalities’,

Easterlin Paradox, after the economist who first pointed it out. In the United States, happiness rates peaked in the 1950s, when GDP per capita was only about $15,000 (in today’s dollars). Since then the average real income of Americans has quadrupled, and yet happiness has plateaued and even declined for the past half-century. The same is true of

But this isn’t how ecology actually works. The problem with economic growth isn’t just that we might run out of resources at some point. The problem is that it progressively degrades the integrity of ecosystems. As onshore oil reserves run dry we can switch to offshore reserves, but both sources contribute to climate breakdown. We might be able to

In 2009, a team led by Johan Rockström at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the US climatologist James Hansen, and Paul Crutzen, the man who coined the term Anthropocene, published a groundbreaking paper describing a new concept they referred to as ‘planetary boundaries’.31 The Earth’s biosphere is an integrated system that can withstand significant

Scientists estimate that the planet can handle a total material footprint of up to about 50 billion tons per year.14 That’s considered to be a maximum safe boundary. Today we’re exceeding that boundary twice over. And, as we will see, virtually all of this overshoot is being driven by excess consumption in high-income nations – consumption that is

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.

by ideology I mean in the technical sense: a set of ideas promoted by the dominant class, which serves their material interests, and which everybody else has internalised to such an extent that they are willing to go along with a system they might otherwise reject as unjust. The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci has called this ‘cultural

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. Factor in escalating