Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

How odd. We are a culture that is enamoured of newness, obsessed with invention and innovation. We claim to celebrate creative, out-of-the-box thinking. Certainly we would never say of a smartphone or a piece of art, ‘This is the best gadget or painting that has ever been created and it will never be surpassed, and we shouldn’t even try!’ It would

The thing about growth is that it sounds so good. It’s a powerful metaphor that’s rooted deeply in our understanding of natural processes: children grow, crops grow … and so too the economy should grow. But this framing plays on a false analogy. The natural process of growth is always finite. We want our children to grow, but not to the point of be

Africa, colonisers faced what they openly called ‘the Labour Question’: how to get Africans to work in mines and on plantations for low wages. Africans generally preferred their subsistence lifestyles, and showed little inclination to do back-breaking work in European industries. The promise of wages was in most cases not enough to induce them into

Governments have to scramble to keep industrial activity growing in a perpetual bid to stave off crisis. So we’re trapped. Growth is a structural imperative – an iron law. And it has ironclad ideological support: politicians on the left and right may bicker about how to distribute the yields of growth, but when it comes to the pursuit of growth its

Mexico is home to the Peñasquito mine, one of the biggest silver mines in the world. Covering nearly 40 square miles, the operation is staggering in its scale: a sprawling open-cast complex ripped into the mountains, flanked by two waste dumps each a mile long, and a tailings dam full of toxic sludge held back by a wall that’s 7 miles around and as

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 disp

Then there’s the debt trap – one of the most powerful of the growth imperatives. Governments finance their activities in large part by selling bonds, which is a way of borrowing money. But bonds come with interest, and interest is a compound function. In order to pay interest on bonds, governments have to generate revenues, which usually means purs

The interests of capital came to be internalised by the state, to the point where today the distinction between growth and capital accumulation has almost completely collapsed. Now the goal is to tear down barriers to profit – to make humans and nature cheaper – for the sake of growth.

When the 2°C target was announced at the Copenhagen summit in 2009, Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chief negotiator for the G77, said: ‘We have been asked to sign a suicide pact.’ ‘It is unfortunate,’ he went on, ‘that after 500 years-plus of interaction with the West we are still considered “disposables”.’ Cheap nature, he might have added.