3 January 2024. Degrowth | Nature
Some form of ‘degrowth’ is inevitable, so it might be better to manage it. // Giving non-human species the chance to thrive
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1: Planning for degrowth
There was an article in Nature from late 2022 on degrowth that got some sudden attention over the holidays because economists and tech bros noticed it and turned out on social media to do some hating. In fact the lead author, Jason Hickel, claimed on Ex-Twitter that as a result the paper was the most-read on Nature during the break.
Regular readers here will know that my main issue with the idea of “degrowth” is the name—that if you’re trying to change behaviour around an idea that is deeply culturally embedded in 250 years of modernity, it’s best (a) not to do it head-on, and (b) not to frame it as a negative. But I’ll park that for now.
The short paper, which is outside of the Nature paywall, has an impressive collection of authors. The ones whose work I know include Hickel, Tim Jackson, Giorgos Kallis, Juliet Schor, and Juliet Steinberger (whom I mentioned on Just Two Things last year).
They argue that there are five principles that a “degrowth society” needs to be organised around:
Reduce less-necessary production
Improve public services
Introduce a green jobs guarantee
Reduce working time, and
Enable sustainable development.
I’m to work through these briefly, to explain the thinking that sits behind each.
(Rally for a Just Transition in Canada. Photo: Barry Hetschko/flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
1. Reduce less-necessary production
This is about
scaling down destructive sectors such as fossil fuels, mass-produced meat and dairy, fast fashion, advertising, cars and aviation, including private jets. At the same time, there is a need to end the planned obsolescence of products, lengthen their lifespans and reduce the purchasing power of the rich.
I’m assuming the point about the rich is because of their lopsided impact on emissions. But there’s a bit more to it. There’s a whole lot of corporate governance changes that are also needed to reduce the way that growth is baked into corporate behaviour:
For example, the ‘fiduciary duty’ of company directors needs to be changed. Instead of prioritizing the short-term financial interests of shareholders, companies should prioritize social and environmental benefits and take social and ecological costs into account.
And a bit more again: we’ll also need macro-economic models that don’t just focus on GDP but allow policy makers to balance multiple objectives—economic, financial, social and ecological. These do exist, but are typically single country models.
2. Improve public services
This is because good quality public services can deliver a good quality of life that is coupled with lower resource use. Buses are a more sustainable transport solution than private cars, for example.
This will also require different forms of financing:
Governments must stop subsidies for fossil-fuel extraction. They should tax ecologically damaging industries such as air travel and meat production. Wealth taxes can also be used to increase public resources and reduce inequality.
Governments that issue their own currencies can use these as a mechanism for this, as they did to bail out the banks in 2008 and pay for furloughed workers in 2020. The researchers don’t mention this, but where governments are investing in green infrastructure this typically has revenue streams attached to it, so can be separated out from current expenditure—and represents an attractive investment for long-term investors such as pension funds.
3. Green jobs guarantee
This would train and mobilize labour around urgent social and ecological objectives, such as installing renewables, insulating buildings, regenerating ecosystems and improving social care. A programme of this type would end unemployment and ensure a just transition out of jobs for workers in declining industries or ‘sunset sectors’, such as those contingent on fossil fuels.
The article suggests that some kind of basic income guarantee might be part of this, but I’d suggest that a “good jobs guarantee” is more important. I contributed to some work with the British Trades Union Congress on this a few years ago (the report they published is here).
One of the critical issues in the room was that jobs in the oil and gas sectors were well-paid, skilled, and unionised (these three facts are connected) but many of the emerging jobs in the renewables sector were not. The trades unionists in the room were pretty clear that they weren’t going to voluntarily swap well-paid and unionised work for poorly-paid non-unionised work. And given that well-paid skilled work drives productivity, why should they?
4. Reduce working time
I’ve written about this here before, but the summary in the article is about
lowering the retirement age, encouraging part-time working or adopting a four-day working week. These measures would lower carbon emissions and free people to engage in care and other welfare-improving activities.
Although the trials of shorter working weeks have been positive, there are some areas we need to understand better. For example, the researchers suggest we need to understand the barriers to introducing shorter working weeks. (In the UK this includes bone-headed Conservative ministers trying to score political points in an over-centralised state).
We also need to understand the relationship between working hours and emissions better:
Although less commuting lowers energy use and carbon emissions during compressed work weeks, behaviours during three-day weekends remain underexplored. More travel or shopping during free time could increase emissions.
5. Enable sustainable development
This has both an international and a national/local aspect to it:
(C)ancelling unfair and unpayable debts of low- and middle-income countries, curbing unequal exchange in international trade and creating conditions for productive capacity to be reoriented towards achieving social objectives.
There’s a whole area of analysis around the idea of “systems of provision”—I may come back to this in Just Two Things another time—which looks at the whole system around the way a public or social objective, or an economic outcome, is delivered, linking both socio-technical systems perspectives and systems of political economy. The researchers mention housing in the Nature paper:
In many parts of the world, property markets cater to developers, landlords and financiers. This contributes to segregation and inequality, and can push working people out of city centres so they are dependent on cars, which increases fossil-fuel emissions. Alternative approaches include public or cooperative housing, and a financial system that prioritizes housing as a basic need.
The politics of this
As I said at the start, one of the problems of “degrowth” is that it includes the word “growth” in it. It’s unhelpful: this is really a discussion about quality of life and productivity—ways to be able to live well while doing less, including working less. It’s not as if the current model is working well at the moment, but as soon as you mention the word “growth” it evokes uncritically all of the dominant ideas of modernity.
And people who have uncritical views of what “growth” involves haven’t really thought through the impact on our economies of climate change, resources depletion, poor soil quality, biodiversity loss, etc. In the Limits to Growth model review in 2005, the base case, which has been tracking actual outcomes too well for too long to be a coincidence, leads to industrial decline in the 2020s and population decline in the 2030s. (And no: the systems research says that technology can’t fix this in the time we have.)
So at one level, the choice we have is whether we manage growth down gently, and improve wellbeing outcomes at the same time, or just have it come crashing down around us. The people who responded to Jason Hickel’s tweets by asking him if he agreed that growth led to technology development were looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
And for some reason, this whole discussion reminds me of the famous cartoon about dealing with climate change. Because: All of these five principles are a more equitable, more inclusive, and more effective way of organising the way we live and work.
(Cartoon by Joel Pett for USA Today)
2: Giving non-human species the chance to thrive
The poet and critic Sheenagh Pugh, now retired to Shetland, runs a blog where she reviews an eclectic mix of poetry, fiction and non-fiction books. Looking through her list of reviews published in 2023, I noticed an interesting review of Black Ops and Beaver Bombing, by Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall, about “the diversity of wildlife in (Britain) and the way in which we are systematically reducing it.”
Mathews helped to draw up Britain’s Review of the Population and Conservation Status of British Mammals, as well as the first Red List of endangered British mammals. This list is accepted by government agencies and then ignored by them (meaning that they accept the evidence but don’t act on it. A quarter of Britain’s native land mammals are at risk of extinction; 44% are at risk.
There’s a quote in italics at the start of the review that I assume (just from the typography) is taken from the book:
We know that different kinds of privilege – class, ethnicity, and so on – can determine the destinies of individuals and entire communities. Yet these are mere details compared with the privilege of being human. Other species exist only with our permission, and if the extensive list of man-made extinctions is anything to go by, that permission can be withdrawn at any time.
But at the same time, we can also help these species to flourish. The book is perhaps seen as being about the battles between those members of our species that are trying to help them to flourish, and those who are not:
(W)hen the National Trust found wild boar on its land it “hired marksmen to exterminate them forthwith, camouflaging the news with dollops of euphemism in case their more squeamish members couldn’t bear very much reality: ‘we have taken the difficult decision to remove the animals from the estate’”.
In the case of wild boar, governments continue to classify them as a “feral pig”, and so they get no protection. Beavers are an interesting species here:
Beaver reintroduction is a win for everyone. “Water quality improves, flood risk is reduced, and a whole host of species increase in number: invertebrates, fish, amphibians, even other mammals such as water voles. Beavers are what ecologists call a keystone species, shaping the environment around themselves to almost everyone’s advantage.” Yet government continues doing all it can to entangle such projects in expense and red tape.
The book tells a story about a rural B&B (guest house) that had set up hides along a river to let their guests watch beavers at work and play. They made a useful supplementary living out of running “beaver tours”:
When officials suggested to them that the beavers should be captured and removed, they calmly replied that their 11,000 Twitter followers would be fascinated to hear about those plans. The officials went away and didn’t come back.”
(Beaver dam with visiting scientists, Scotland. Photo: Patrick Mackie/ Geograph. CC BY-SA 2.0)
One of the problems here is that despite repeated evidence to the contrary, environmental prosperity and economic prosperity can go hand in hand, and it doesn’t take much to manage things so this happens. But this is not the official view. The book talks about protecting forest animals, writing that
“every victory has to be won against a default policy of intensive monoculture timber production.”.
This monoculture timber production is disastrous environmentally, but isn’t even economically effective.
“Only about seven percent of our woodland cover comprises mixed-aged stands, compared with twenty-five percent in Croatia. You’d reasonably expect that, having prioritised efficiency over biodiversity, the forestry sector would be crucial to our Gross Domestic Product; in fact, it contributes less than 0.5% of national GDP, which puts us almost at the bottom of the European league tables. Croatia outperforms us more than threefold, and Sweden fivefold.”
Croatia’s national park of Plitvice, which is teeming with wildlife, also offers an example of how looking to environmental benefits creates forms of local prosperity:
“Plitvice employs a thousand people, and its 1.5 million annual visitors pay up to forty euros each, per day, towards the maintenance and improvement of the park. With an ambitious vision, you can save your corner of the planet and make a living. Without it, you can eke out a profit from commercial logging, antagonise the locals, and shoot wild boar on the side to cover the wages of a couple of rangers.”
There are some unlikely wins in here—an offshore windfarm has benefitted the grey seal population because it has created an area where trawlers can’t catch fish for example.
One of the problems with the dominant myopic view of wildlife is that activists take things into their own hands, which can cause different sorts of problems. Pugh suggests that public opinion is the only thing that will get public organisations to behave differently. But even this might not be enough. Habit seems to die hard, even when we know what we need to do to encourage biodiversity, as a story from the book relates:
“In the week of the COP26 summit in Glasgow, when the world’s attention was focused on climate change and biodiversity loss, our parish council sent in contractors under cover of darkness to clear a brambly field that provided habitat for three protected species: hedgehogs, slow-worms and dormice. Despite having been warned about the law, they didn’t bother to carry out any ecological surveys. The rules are barely policed, after all. This is how biodiversity loss happens under our noses – field by field, hedge by hedge.” (My emphasis).
Ecology is a local business, everywhere.
Update: Beatles
I wrote about the Beatles’ “final song”, the dreary Now and Then, in November. At the New Left Review blog Sidecar the cultural critic Owen Hatherley has a caustic but intriguing piece about the record, published during the break. Here’s one extract—I could have chosen several:
So what is McCartney trying to find in his cybernetic journeys into the past, and why is it that anyone might care? One answer could be found in the changes in the way music is consumed and understood in the 21st century. The last two decades have seen the near-total eclipse of what the more theoretically inclined British music press critics used to call ‘Rockism’ – that is, the belief in rock music as the bearer of authentic personal or political truth, best recorded in the raw… McCartney, by contrast, was never a ‘Rockist’, and had no commitment to any particular genre.
It’s a long piece and there’s a lot in it. Pour yourself a cup of something first.
j2t#528
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