Less is More, by Jason Hickel

An economic model structured to make profits rather than meet human needs engineered the collapse of the biosphere. Reversing this model is totally achievable—not for having less, but more.

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Living in an age of mass extinction

In late 2017, a team of scientists reported that three-quarters of flying insects in Germany had vanished over the course of 25 years. According to their conclusion, the collapse was likely caused by converting forests to farmland and the intensive use of agricultural chemicals. The study went viral. One of the scientists declared, “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. . . . If we lose the insects, then everything is going to collapse.”¹ Concerning the unraveling of the biosphere, insects are like the canaries in the coal mine. They signal the breakdown of nature’s interconnected systems—systems upon which humans depend.

In 2019, a task force set up by the United Nations, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), published its first comprehensive report, drawing on 15,000 studies from around the world and representing the consensus of hundreds of scientists.² Simply put, the extinction rate is now 1,000 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution. “We are currently, in a systematic manner, exterminating all non-human living beings,” said Anne Larigauderie, the IPBES executive secretary.

This book, however, is not about doom but hope. The author says, “It’s about how we can shift from an economy that’s organised around domination and extraction to one that’s rooted in reciprocity with the living world.” Therefore, the first step of this shift is to acknowledge how much the unrestrained industrialization of human activity has impacted the natural world and, consequently, the very conditions of our survival.

In this regard, the industrialization of agriculture, or the “Green Revolution,” which started in the middle of the twentieth century, has been anything but green. Complex ecological systems were reduced to a single dimension for greater yields and profits. As a result, 40% of the planet’s soils are now seriously degraded. As of now, agricultural soil is still being lost more than 100 times faster than it is being formed with the worms, grubs, insects, fungi, and millions of microorganisms it needs to avoid turning into lifeless dirt. This is why crop yields are now declining on a fifth of the world’s farmland. It is calculated that, at that rate, the Earth can support only another sixty years of harvests.³

What about oceans? Just as with agriculture, corporations have turned fishing into an act of warfare, leaving lifeless ocean plains behind them. Farming chemicals and consumers’ plastics, for their part, further endanger the oceans’ fragile ecosystems by ending up in the sea. Because of greenhouse gases released in the atmosphere, oceans heat up, and nutrient cycles are disrupted, leading vast stretches of marine habitat to die off. The same carbon emissions are causing oceans to become more acidic. On that point, when ocean pH dropped by 0.25 66 million years ago, 75% of marine species were wiped out. On our present trajectory, the pH will have dropped by 0.4 at the end of the century. Marine animals are already disappearing at twice the rate that land animals are.⁴

This is the state of affairs on planet Earth at the moment. But beyond the dire warnings of scientific data, it is important to understand that nature works as a whole. In other words, we cannot assess the dynamics of the ecological crisis today by using the same reductive and mechanistic type of thinking that caused it in the first place.

Climate change, for example, has started to get real to many people because extreme weather events happen more frequently. But its most dangerous aspect is barely acknowledged. “Ecosystems, says Jason Hickel, are complex networks. They can be remarkably resilient under stress, but when certain key nodes begin to fail, knock-on effects reverberate through the web of life. This is how mass extinction events unfolded in the past. It’s not the external shock that does it – the meteor or the volcano: it’s the cascade of internal failures that follows. . . . This is what makes climate breakdown so concerning.” In practical terms, climate change engineers its own feedback loops, such as the albedo effect, the release of methane previously caught in permafrost, the dying of forests, etc.—all completely irrespective of human emissions. Above 2°C of global warming, the phenomenon could very well spiral out of control.⁵

Behind the eco-fact

“Even though we have known for nearly half a century that human civilisation itself is at stake,” says the author, “there has been no progress in arresting ecological breakdown. None.” Why?

Fossil fuel companies and the politicians they buy undeniably bear significant responsibility for that inertia. But the fossil industry’s antics are just a symptom of a deeper problem. This problem ultimately resides in the economic system that has come to dominate the planet over the past few centuries: capitalism.

Jason Hickel explains: “Markets and trade were around for thousands of years before capitalism, and they are innocent enough on their own. What makes capitalism different from most other economic systems in history is that it’s organised around the imperative of constant expansion, or ‘growth’: ever-increasing levels of industrial extraction, production and consumption, which we have come to measure in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Growth is the prime directive of capital. Not growth for any particular purpose, mind you, but growth for its own sake. And it has a kind of totalitarian logic to it: every industry, every sector, every national economy must grow, all the time, with no identifiable end-point.”

In nature, organisms grow to a point of maturity and then maintain a state of healthy equilibrium. Under capitalism, by contrast, large firms need to grow their profits indefinitely to remain competitive. As a so-called “healthy” GDP growth is assumed to be between 2% and 3% per year to avoid the risk of recession, it is no wonder that the earth’s recycling capacities are exceeded further year after year. This means that we are steadily engineering our own demise as a civilization and, quite likely, as a species.

Countries do not exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries to the same extent. The global ecological breakdown is driven almost entirely by high-income ones in a growth race unhinged from actual human needs.⁶

The imperative of growth in capitalism is the issue. Though it is technically possible to entirely shift to renewables in the short period we have left to keep the rise of global temperatures below 1.5°C, this cannot be done if the energy demand keeps rising at its present rate. Fossil fuels will very much have to stay in the picture for decades to come. Besides, even when the world has 100% clean energy, what will be the benefit if we keep plundering the planet at an ever-increasing rate? Even if we solved the emissions issue, what about deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion, and the overall collapse of the biosphere?

Stirrings

“Degrowth” is the bad word that turns most decision-makers apoplectic. Capitalism is all we know. Even the Soviets were predicated on growth for the sake of growth, their model simply relying on State rather than private ownership of means of production. Still, what makes us think, in the 21st century, that the unquestioned economic pattern Europe started to follow in the sixteenth century is all there is to the future of mankind?

The question is not only philosophical. “As evidence about the relationship between GDP growth and ecological breakdown continues to mount, says the author, scientists around the world are shifting their approach. In 2018, 238 scientists called on the European Commission to abandon GDP growth and focus on human well-being and ecological stability instead.⁷ The following year, more than 11,000 scientists from over 150 countries published an article calling on the world’s governments ‘to shift from pursuing GDP growth and affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving well-being.’”⁸ Jason Hickel also reminds us that “the richest 1% (all of whom are millionaires) capture some $19 trillion in income every year, which represents nearly a quarter of global GDP. This is astonishing, when you think about it. It means that a quarter of all the labour we render, all the resources we extract, and all the CO2 we emit is done to make rich people richer.”

It is not that hard to figure out a planned reduction of excess energy and resource use to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a just and equitable manner. The major aspect of this economic shift couldn’t be any more basic: giving the economy a goal. Under capitalism, it has none. Growth for the sake of growth is assumed to be the goal by default, but as Simon Kuznets—the economist who created the concept of GDP—clearly stated, “Objectives should be explicit: goals for ‘more’ growth should specify more growth of what and for what.”⁹ Aside from destroying nature, this absence of a genuine and legitimate goal explains why ending poverty, improving human well-being, and ensuring the conditions of flourishing lives for all are assumed to be consequences of economic growth under capitalism rather than the economic engine that they should be. We have an abstract mechanic view economy instead of a human and organic one. Like blood, money is essential to keep the economic body functioning—no more, no less.¹⁰

Growth is not by itself the enemy. Some sectors of the economy might need to grow, such as clean energy or regenerative agriculture, and others to drastically degrow, such as fossil fuels or the armament industry. Some regions of the world need economic growth overall; for others, simply managing the fruit of people’s work should be the priority. It is worth noting that getting out of the treadmill of growth for the sake of growth implies prioritizing public goods like universal healthcare, education, and affordable housing, which are essential for a thriving economy.

How did the world come to choose blind capital accumulation rather than genuine human enrichment? At the core of the capitalist mindset is the deeply ingrained belief that extracting and exploiting resources is what man was supposedly put on earth to do. It is thus assumed that doing so can only make things better. This implicitly means, as well, that mankind is superior to “nature” and that, for this reason, the cost of our activities on the latter cannot make a relevant category in the calculation of the corporations’ bottom line. Environmental damages are mere “externalities.” By detaching ourselves from nature, we detached ourselves from ourselves, and capitalism became our pilgrim’s staff on that hallucinated path.

And yet, what the Western world has professed for so long is totally at odds with human beings’ position in the web of life. Scientific findings in various fields today, be it biology, psychiatry, ecology, or physics, confirm that all things are interrelated at a human and physical level. There is no distance between us and nature or us and others but a constant and deep interconnecting process. In that light, considering our surroundings as a resource to be plundered at will appears as the epitome of ignorance.

Conflating the capitalist imperative of growth for the sake of growth with economic activity as such, many negatively associate degrowth with the imposition of limits. The exact opposite is true. Degrowth is not against growth but growthism. Conceptually referring to limits puts us on the wrong foot since the notion of limits derives from the dualistic frame of thinking that got the world into its present trouble in the first place. Our destiny is not about limits but interconnectedness. Degrowth, therefore, is not at all about having less but more. More through a better pre-distribution of the economic outcome and more through expanding the boundaries of human community and consciousness.

1. Warning of ‘ecological Armageddon’ after dramatic plunge in insect numbers, by Damian Carrington. The Guardian, Wed 18, Oct 2017
2. IPBES, Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, 2019. See also: Gerardo Ceballos et al., Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(30), 2017.
3. Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues, Scientific American, December 5, 2014
4. Ocean acidification can cause mass extinctions, fossils reveal. Damian Carrington, The Guardian, Mon 21, Oct 2019. See also Malin Pinsky et al., Greater vulnerability to warming of marine versus terrestrial ectotherms, Nature 569(7754), 2019, pp. 108–111.
5. Will Steffen et al., Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(33), 2018, p. 8252–8259.
6. See the interactive comparison country by country made available by the University of Leeds, in England, and the Climate Equity Reference Calculator of the Climate Equity Reference Project.
7. The EU needs a stability and wellbeing pact, not more growth, The Guardian, Sun 16, Sep 2018
8. William Ripple et al., World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency, BioScience, 2019.
9. (Kuznets, S. (1962) ‘How to judge quality,’ in Croly, H. (ed.), The New Republic, 147: 16, p. 29.)
10. For a history and overview of degrowth, see Kallis, The Case for Degrowth; for global South perspectives, see Arturo Escobar, Degrowth, postdevelopment, and transitions: a preliminary conversation, Sustainability Science, 2015.