How Degrowth Will Save the World
March is Cape Town’s best month. A less generous soul might say that it is the only few weeks of the year where Cape Town’s weather approximates its beauty. This work by Nigerian artist Ayobola Kekere-Ekun, although not about Cape Town, gives a sense of the languid fun spirit that flows through this month of the year.
Post Art Fair, we headed to one of Cape Town’s oldest restaurants, the charming Maria’s Greek Café. Maria’s is situated on leafy Dunkley Square and is always perfect for a lazy, tapas-led lunch. My personal highlight at the fair was Matthew Hindley’s The Smoky Mirror.
Last Sunday took us to Spier Wine Farm (I have fond memories of the farm, as it was the gathering place for the African Leadership Initiative’s Media Fellowship, which I was lucky enough to participate in). Spier’s tasting room stands on the edge of a wetland populated with all manner of birds whose names I don’t know. In a matter of minutes, the combination of great wine, and watching birds ripple the water, had me in a meditative mode.
I was simultaneously aware of how blessed we were to be able to enjoy that moment, and how fragile it was. Those birds had once been everywhere in the Western Cape and now they cling gratefully to these pockets of sanctuary tucked between miles of inhospitable land. Any step into exploring what to do about environmental destruction can feel overwhelming, and yet – as with anything – if we are to generate possibility, we need to pause to understand.
If you’ve been reading for a while, you know that every few months, we step back to look at the bigger themes that frame our world. We do so because we are only truly effective if we understand the context in which we operate. I am grateful to Nadia Padayachi, who gifted me Jason Hickel’s Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, which is the entry point to today’s conversation.
/ STRATEGY
Hickel starts by reminding us that we live in an unequal world in which the Global South has and continues to carry the overwhelming burden.
Commenting on the cost of slavery, Hickel notes “The United States extracted so much labour from enslaved Africans that, if paid at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, it would add up to $97 trillion today.” To put that in context, South Africa’s pre-pandemic GDP was a trifling $405 billion. “In India, British colonisers extracted extraordinary sums of money in the form of taxes. Between the years 1768 and 1938, they siphoned the equivalent of $45 trillion out of India and into British coffers.”
Doesn’t seeing those numbers make you pause? It suddenly makes debates about ‘aid’ and ‘canceling debt’ seem quite bizarre. Imagine a starting point of simply “repay what was taken”. That would radically shift global geopolitics.
These inequalities turn up in environmental destruction too. Ecologists estimate that a sustainable material-use footprint is around 8 tons per capita. Lower middle-income countries use around 4 tons. High-income countries about 28 tons. The global North, with 19% of the world’s population, represents 92% of global overshoot emissions
Hickel’s rationale for taking us through this detail is to argue that the most pressing problem for the world is not generating more but rather more distributing what we have more equally.
Drawing on the work of Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, he tells us that “countries that have robust welfare systems have the highest levels of human happiness…and the more generous and universal the welfare system, the happier everyone becomes.”
Hickel contrasts Spain and the U.S. Spain spends $2,300 per person to deliver healthcare to each person. In contrast, the U.S.’s private healthcare system costs $9,500 per person whilst delivering poorer results.
His argument for better distribution is that if we are to survive, we need to stop trying to grow the economy. He is quite obviously in favour of slowing population growth, shifting to renewable energy, recycling, and everything else familiar to us. However, he points out time and again, that the logic that pushes us to more growth, means inescapably a greater need for materials, which means more mines, more water use, more, more, more. More, which we barely have. More, which we will run out of.
The argument loops back to growth to deliver better lives for us all. And again, Hickel points out that there is indeed enough, it simply isn’t distributed optimally. That if we shift our measures to ones that reflect a different kind of progress, ones like the OECD’s Better Life Index or the Genuine Progress Indicator, we will lay the basis for a different, more sustainable kind of world – “an economy that’s organised around human flourishing and ecological stability, rather than round the constant accumulation of capital.”
How do we do this do?
There is much to be done in the space of public policy. Only a small percentage of us, are politicians, government officials, or lobbyists, yet we can all expand the debate of what is possible. There are so many peculiar contradictions.
We have policies for small business development. Yet, we allow massive, listed retailers to open pharmacies and have liquor licenses, effectively closing a decades-old entry point into business. We allow trading on weekends – lovely for us consumers – but closing the gap in which bodegas and corner stores used to flourish. We allow businesses like AirBnB to drive up inner-city housing prices, in turn increasing the commute time of locals, their petrol usage, and therefore carbon footprint.
The conversations we have in our businesses, the pressures we put on our elected officials, all help shift the imagination of what is possible. And a lot is.
/ SELF
Of course, there are many actions we can and must take. Support local businesses, buy locally grown food, recycle domestic food waste, reduce plastics, eat less beef, all actions that have a positive impact.
However, perhaps the most revolutionary step will be to shift how we imagine ourselves because we must use that imagination to reimagine how our societies are run – the most pressing solutions are systemic and structural, not only individual.
Each of us is home to trillions of microbial beings. Indeed, Hickel notes that “if you were to count up all the cells that constitute your body, you’d find more of them belong to other lifeforms than belong to ‘you’ as such”. He cites, British philosopher of science, John Dupre, who says “it is hard to claim that a creature is self-sufficient, or even that you can mark where it ends, and another begins.” If we acknowledge these connections, or even more radically, that we are simply one part of a greater, more complex whole, and we act in that way, well then so much becomes imaginable and therefore possible.
If we accept that the world is indeed radically abundant, that our problem is not scarcity, but distribution and imagination. A few times a week in Cape Town, I drive past two tarmacked city blocks. Behind high fences are parked a few of the city’s motor vehicle fleet. Outside, pressed up against, the self-same fences are the ramshackle tents of people desperate for a home. City officials speak of the scarcity of land for inner-city housing. A few blocks over is a storage facility for luxury cars. Enter and you’ll see cars stored carefully on lifts, liberating space – an entrepreneur has figured out the optimal use of inner-city space. With a bit of imagination, suddenly our city has a radical abundance of land for housing.
How might you approach your life if you saw yourself as the carrier of infinite possibility?
Pause for a moment, look at your life. Instead of seeing all the “can’t happens” that we’re conditioned to see, have a look for all that you do have. How might you use it?
/ SOUL
To close today, here are some snippets from Zoë Schlanger’s review of Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape Out Futures. I figured these astonishing facts would help as you seek to liberate your imagination.
That some mushrooms disperse their spores in tiny capsules that accelerate ten thousand times faster than a space shuttle during launch. That the shaggy ink cap mushroom can lift heavy paving stones overnight, despite not being made from tough material. It’s a mystery how they do it. That “total length of mycelium threaded through the globe’s uppermost four inches of soil is believed to be enough to span half the width of our galaxy.”
If the world is that remarkable, then surely connecting with it, seeing ourselves as part of it, working with it could liberate immense happiness.
I will leave you with these words from Nalungiaq, an Inuit elder, “In the very earliest times when both people and animal lived on earth, a person could become an animal if they wanted to, and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people, and sometimes animals, and there was no difference. All spoke the same language.”
I hope that you have a beautiful week.
Karl
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