Degrowth, One Way or Another
I have several times in this newsletter touched on degrowth, and the idea that advanced industrial economies must significantly downscale not just literal carbon emissions but their industrial engines in the name of global ecological health (a broader category than atmospheric carbon pollution and even climate change). Degrowth invariably produces quite a bit of debate among people who should know better—should, but don’t. I find the debate, specifically degrowth “skeptics,” sort of ridiculous: people addicted to their computers and urbanized, Western lives question political feasibility in a collapsing biosphere. So my response to this conversation is typically something like: we’re getting degrowth one way or another.
In other words, our current economic/environmental arrangement is not sustainable, has not been for a very long time, and won’t last, whether or not we craft the winning political slogan.
Still, in their particular denial the skeptics make a real point: The prospect of less–energy intensive lives is not an easy pill to swallow, and likely will be received almost uniformly negatively absent redistribution, a vastly improved social arrangement, and some meaningful, collective ecological sensibility.
In this light, what to make of recent US government policies—the tariffs, the withdrawal of Ukraine and other international aid, and perhaps above all the attempted dismantling of much of the federal bureaucracy?
One explanation for the apparent incongruity between the obvious impacts of these actions and the idea that the current government is in place to, say, bring egg prices down: While the people who run this country may not use the word degrowth, and may not even know what it means, on some level they know it’s coming. Rather than seeking to slow the process, or equalize it—obviously, anathema to them—they are expediting it in the hopes they can most effectively capitalize, stripping the ship as they sink it and redirecting the anger that invariably results.
Some have compared this to the sell-off of state assets after the collapse of the USSR, which I think is a reasonable comparison, and also an instructive one for understanding the world we’re in, because that country’s decimation in a breakdown eagerly spurred along and dramatically worsened by the West was fundamental in crafting contemporary Russia (and much of the world today).
Whether they will be successful in this I don’t know, but I think this is basically the framework we’re working in, and essential to understanding current and future policies that may seem superficially paradoxical. More importantly, I think it is vital for people with more sober sensibilities about where the world is and is going to recognize that these choices, while obviously reckless and insane, are responding to a broader situation.
The world is not going back to the sort of stability we’ve been familiar with. So we must attempt some sort of Latour’s alchemy, working for the best possible form of degrowth under the circumstances. I’ll have more thoughts on specifics in future newsletters but presumably this should involve those elements alluded to above: equity, social solidarity, and a reinvigorated way of understanding ourselves ecologically. Because, call it what you want, degrowth is coming, no matter what.
Hope those of you in the Northeast have enjoyed this anomalously cold winter (by the standards of the 2020s, at least). Despite the fact that a destabilized polar vortex and off-the-charts warming more broadly are probably the cause, I have been extremely grateful for the low temperatures, for the snow and frozen rivers, the injections of Arctic air. We shouldn’t take these things for granted any longer, even in northern New England.
So while the winter lasts, get outside, breathe the cold air, eat snow (fresh snow). Some good reading for these times below.
