If someone asked, "how much stuff do you have? ", could you give them a number? Think of every piece of clothing, every kitchen appliance, every stick of furniture.
Every device, every cup, every shoe. And the rest. Unless you're an uber minimalist, that's pretty hard.
Because most of us have a lot of stuff. Having more has given us a lot of comfort and a lot of choice, but with a pretty big price tag. Like more carbon emissions, more resource depletion, more pollution.
Our addiction to making and consuming more stuff is exhausting the planet. Everyone's talking about avoiding a climate catastrophe, but is switching to renewable energy and buying electric cars while keeping the status quo really going to help? A growing number of people say no.
They want us to fundamentally change the way we run our economies, and with that our lives. Some call it degrowth. That means making less of the stuff that's bad for our planet while investing more in the things that are good for us.
So, can less really be more? Let's find out. For decades, countries have been judged by the growth of their GDP.
That's Gross Domestic Product. The more goods and services produced, the higher the GDP, the cooler the country. Everyone is happy when GDP goes up, and scared if it doesn't.
Some of the things GDP counts are really good for us. Like hospitals, housing and schools. But GDP also counts bad things such as rebuilding from hurricanes and earthquakes as a positive economic indicator.
It doesn't take into account unpaid housekeeping and care work, access to education, and psychological well-being. Things that benefit our welfare in less tangible but really important ways. For example, it also doesn't take the pollution and ecological destruction – that our expanding economic systems create – into account.
"To keep having GDP growth accumulating you also need to keep having more material stuff extracted and going through the economy. This is not sustainable on a planet with a finite amount of resources. " Kai Heron lectures in political ecology at Lancaster University in the UK.
"The idea that we can just have endless material throughput, more stuff, over and over, more material accumulation. We can keep extracting resources from the ground and then putting it into waste and landfill sites. " So this is where the idea of degrowth comes in.
The term degrowth is credited to André Gorz, an Austrian French social philosopher who in 1972 questioned whether it was a good idea to constantly make more stuff. Shortly after, academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a report called "The Limits of Growth. " This rigorous forecast concluded that unless growth was curbed, civilization would collapse by 2072.
Suffice to say, it didn't go down well. The academic journal Nature even called it, "a whiff of doomsday. " Degrowth talk started to crop up again in the 2000s, once data began to show just how irreversibly we were harming the planet.
A recent paper in Nature – yes, the one who poo-pooed degrowth back in the 70s – suggested that it should be "widely and thoroughly considered. " And the term has now made its way into the most recent IPCC report on how to stay below 1. 5 degrees Celcius.
One degrowth approach that has been "widely considered" is "decoupling" – where you get to maintain economic growth while reducing carbon emissions. "Where I live in the UK, it's very proud of itself, because it claims that it's managed to successfully decarbonise its economy while GDP – it's not doing well –, but GDP is growing slowly, while our emissions appear to be going down. " Surprisingly, especially countries with advanced economies have been able to do it – for example by shifting towards renewable energy sources.
Like Denmark, which reduced its consumption based emissions by 35 percent between 2000 and 2019 while growing the GDP per capita by 16 percent. Germany reduced its carbon emissions per capita by 24 percent in the same time frame while growing 26 percent. And even the United States did the same.
Which sounds great, and definitely is a first step – but the problem is that decoupling is only concerned about CO2. "We live in many ecological crisis, not just one. It's not just an issue of fossil fuels emissions.
So, if we just say words about decarbonisation only, you're missing ecological degradation, biodiversity loss. The UK has some of the worst biodiversity loss of any country in the world, never mind the EU. This doesn't solve that problem.
" What next? The problem is, even those who support what degrowth stands for think the word itself is problematic. "Why I don't like the term degrowth – it has a negative feel to it.
" Juliet Schor is a professor of sociology at Boston College who studies the relationship between labor, the economy and consumption. "The key thing is shrinking the material inputs into economic activity. " Degrowth sounds scary, like it wants people to return to the dark ages.
But it actually just means scaling down the least sustainable industries. Like mass produced meat and dairy, fast fashion, car and aviation manufacturing. Or ensuring that things we rely on – refrigerators, phones, washing machines – have a longer shelf life.
Repairing instead of replacing something the moment it stops working. So it's not just about stopping growth, but about increasing growth in sectors that benefit society as a whole. Like creating green jobs.
Training workers on installing renewable energy, insulating buildings and regenerating ecosystems. And investing in public transportation and services. It might also mean four-day work weeks and freeing up time for people to engage in care and other activities that improve their welfare.
"Households with more time – affluence if you want to call it, shorter working hours, more free time – are able to do things in more sustainable ways. " "It's a powerful tailwind for lower carbon emissions, for a better a quality society, for restoring social fabric. A milder form of degrowth is called doughnut economics.
Sectors are allowed to grow, but only within a "sweet spot" – like the ones in this green area – where social needs are being met and it's environmentally sustainable. If the economy grows more than that, it goes into the territory of environmental destruction. The doughnut still relies on degrowth's principle of scaling back harmful activity.
But is that just wishful thinking? Might this new approach to growth actually make life worse for us? This is the crux of the degrowth debate: Would it unravel the advances humans have made?
Many facets of modern life, like living longer and lower rates of child mortality are associated with high GDP among other factors. Economists that are in favor of the current system say that more immediately, degrowth could mean widespread job loss, mortgage defaults and business closures. That it would force us all into a permanent recession.
Curtailing research and innovation – the things we need to develop green and more effective technologies. The problem is that active degrowth hasn't happened anywhere yet – meaning that nobody knows whether that would happen. "How do you address the creation of a world where rich countries don't effectively slam the doors behind themselves and say, 'we're going to diminish our growth a bit and we're not going to let you catch up to where we are.
'" This is Zeke Hausfather. He's a climate researcher and energy systems analyst. "That is a challenge and a lot of the solutions around that involve large scale redistribution of wealth and resources between countries that might be possible in a perfect world but in a real world is very politically challenging.
" One suggestion by degrowthers is that unpayable debts held by low and middle income countries should be canceled, so that they can focus their spending on public services. The idea is to even the playing field. "Key things for the Global South are technology transfer, to leapfrog dirty technologies, and to get the latest generation of renewable technologies to Global South countries for their energy needs.
Number two, finance – climate finance to make that possible and to also finance other poverty alleviation and so forth. " Supporters say that through economic degrowth, the needs of more people could actually be served. "People who are working class, racialized minorities in the US, in Europe or people in the Global South will probably have more.
Better quality transportation, better insulated housing. They would have the water and energy they need that isn't contaminated and polluted. " But despite all the talk of reducing emissions and pollution, we're still living way above our means.
If everyone consumed resources like a person currently living in the US, we'd need 5 Earths to sustain us. That's according to the Global Footprint Network. We're losing forests.
Depleting the oceans of sealife. It won't matter how much we reduce emissions if we deplete the planet of its resources. But we keep the rate up, because it's good for GDP.
Still, we seem to perceive increasing GDP as a sign that we are winning that, however you frame it, giving it up for the sake of our future on this planet sounds to most people like we're asking them to start losing. "If you're waiting for the world to overthrow capitalism to address climate change, you're going to be waiting a long time. " So, is the answer to deliberately slow down economic growth?
You won't find many governments willing to do that. "Moving away from GDP for example, to metrics that value human impact across a variety of dimensions. The Human Development Index that the UN provides is a good example of that.
There's been some experimentation with the country Bhutan and it's Gross Happiness Index that they've talked a lot about. So, there may be ways to redefine these metrics of success, that would make it more palatable for politicians to embrace things that don't necessarily increase GDP but increase the average well-being of people in a way that is less resource intensive or destructive. " Another example is what former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern did in 2019, when she announced a national budget that prioritized citizen well-being and happiness over GDP and economic growth.
Under the budget, all new spending was required to advance government priorities like improving mental health, reducing child poverty, and addressing the inequalities faced by its indigenous population. Degrowthers envision an economy driven by alternative principles. "The wager on degrowth is that we need to imagine a different future.
A new relationship between humans and non-human nature in which humanity but also nature can flourish and thrive and frankly recover from centuries of capitalist accumulation and exploitation and neocolonial plunder. " What do you think? Is degrowth desirable, or achievable?
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