Less is More, Jason Hickel
Highlights
Even though we have known for nearly half a century that human civilisation itself is at stake, there has been no progress in arresting ecological breakdown. None. It is an extraordinary paradox. Future generations will look back on us and marvel at how we could have known exactly what was going on, in excruciating detail, and yet failed to solve the problem.
Introduction
Technology is absolutely essential in the fight against ecological breakdown. We need all the efficiency improvements we can get. But scientists are clear that they will not be enough, on their own, to fix the problem. Why? Because in a growth-oriented economy, efficiency improvements that could help us reduce our impact are harnessed instead to advance the objectives of growth – to pull ever-larger swathes of nature into circuits of extraction and production. It’s not our technology that’s the problem. It’s growth.
Introduction
there was another powerful faction that regarded animist ideas as a problem: capitalists. The new economic system that began to dominate after 1500 required a new relationship with the land, with the soils, and with the minerals beneath the surface of the earth: one built on the principles of possession, extraction, commodification and ever-increasing productivity, or, in the discourse of the time, ‘improvement’. But in order to possess and exploit something you must first regard it as an object. In a world where everything was alive and pulsing with spirit and agency, where all beings were regarded as subjects in their own right, this sort of possessive exploitation – in other words, property – was ethically unfathomable.
Chapter One
In the 1700s, these ideas coalesced into a system of explicit values: idleness is sin; productivity is virtue. In the Calvinist theology that was popular in Western Christianity at the time, profit became the sign of moral success – the proof of salvation. To maximise profit, people were encouraged to organise their lives around productivity. Those who fell behind in the productivity race and slipped into poverty were branded with the stigma of sin. Poverty was recast not as the consequence of dispossession, but as the sign of personal moral failing.
Chapter One
The power of technology is that it enables capital and labour to be more productive – to produce more and faster. But it also speeds up the appropriation of nature.
Chapter Two
Kuznets was careful to emphasise that GDP is flawed. It tallies up the market value of total production, but it doesn’t care whether that production is helpful or harmful. GDP makes no distinction between $100 worth of tear gas and $100 worth of education And more importantly, it does not account for the ecological and social costs of production. If you cut down a forest for timber, GDP goes up. If you extend the working day and push back the retirement age, GDP goes up. If pollution causes hospital visits to rise, GDP goes up. But GDP says nothing about the loss of the forest as habitat for wildlife, or as a sink for emissions. It says nothing about the toll that too much work and pollution takes on people’s bodies and minds. And not only does it leave out what is bad, it also leaves out much of what is good: it doesn’t count most non-monetised economic activities, even when they are essential to human life and well-being. If you grow your own food, clean your own house or care for your ageing parents, GDP says nothing. It only counts if you pay companies to do these things for you.
Chapter Two
It’s not growth that’s the problem, it’s growthism
Chapter Two
GDP growth is driving total energy demand up at such a rapid pace that these new fuels aren’t replacing the older ones, they are being added on top of them. The shift to oil and gas hasn’t been an energy transition, but an energy addition.
Chapter Two
In some nations, renewables have begun to displace fossil fuels. But on a global scale, growth in energy demand is swamping growth in renewable capacity. All that new clean energy isn’t replacing dirty energies, it’s being added on top of them.19 This dynamic should give us pause. Yes, we need as much renewable energy as we can get – but it won’t make enough of a difference if the global economy continues to grow at existing rates. The more we grow, the more energy the global economy requires, the more difficult it is to cover it with cleaner energy sources.
Chapter Two
It’s essential that we stabilise the size of the human population. The good news is that this is not a particularly difficult matter: as the economist Kate Raworth put it to me, ‘It’s one growth curve that the world actually knows how to flatten, so it’s not the one that keeps me awake at night.’ What brings a nation’s birth rate down? Investing in child health, so that parents can be confident their children will survive; investing in women’s health and reproductive rights, so that women have greater control over their own bodies and family size; investing in girls’ education to expand their choices and opportunities; and ensuring economic security for all. With these policies in place, population growth falls fast – even within a single generation.24 Gender justice and economic justice must be central to any vision for a more ecological economy.
Chapter Two
What’s happening here should be understood as a process of atmospheric colonisation. A small number of high-income nations have appropriated the vast majority of the safe atmospheric commons, and have contributed the vast majority of emissions in excess of the planetary boundary.
Chapter Two
communities in the global South are, after a long history of colonisation and structural adjustment, least able to adapt to climate breakdown. This is particularly true for the poorest, who are more likely to live on marginal land vulnerable to droughts and floods, who don’t have the financial buffer to see themselves through disasters, and who cannot easily relocate, or find new livelihoods, or defend their human rights. That the excess emissions of a few rich nations will harm billions of people in poorer nations is a crime against humanity and we should have the clarity to call it that
Chapter Two
Under capital’s growth imperative, there is no horizon – no future point at which economists and politicians say we will have enough money or enough stuff. There is no end, in the double sense of the term: no maturity and no purpose. The unquestioned assumption is that growth can and should carry on for ever, for its own sake. It is astonishing, when you think about it, that the dominant belief in economics holds that no matter how rich a country has become, their GDP should keep rising, year after year, with no identifiable end point. It is the definition of absurdity. We do see this pattern playing out in nature, sometimes, but only with devastating consequences: cancer cells are programmed to replicate for the sake of replicating, but the result is deadly to living systems
Chapter Two
Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive. It
Chapter Five
But perhaps the most important part about shortening the working week is that it frees people to spend more time caring – be it nursing a sick relative, playing with children, or helping restore a woodland. This essential reproductive work (most of which is normally done by women) is totally devalued under capitalism; it is externalised, unpaid, invisible and unrepresented in GDP figures
Chapter Five
reducing inequality is a powerful way to reduce ecological pressure. It cuts high-impact luxury consumption by the rich, and reduces competitive consumption across the rest of society. But it also removes pressures for unnecessary growth. The policies I’ve proposed here would lead to a disaccumulation of capital. This would cut rent-seeking behaviour, and the rich would lose their power to force us to extract and produce more than we need. The economy would shift away from unnecessary
Chapter Five
. Since the 1980s endless waves of privatisation have been unleashed all over the world, of education, healthcare, transport, libraries, parks, swimming pools, water, housing, even social security. Social goods everywhere are under attack for the sake of growth. The idea is that by making public goods scarce, people will have no choice but to purchase private alternatives. And in order to pay, they will have to work more, producing additional goods and services that must find a market, and thereby creating new pressures for additional consumption elsewhere in the system.
Chapter Five
Some critics have claimed that degrowth is nothing more than a new version of austerity. But in fact exactly the opposite is true. Austerity calls for scarcity in order to generate more growth. Degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary. If we are to avert climate breakdown, the environmentalism of the twenty-first century must articulate a new demand: a demand for radical abundance.
Chapter Five
In 2016, an international team of scientists presented the biggest-ever database on forest regrowth in the New World tropics. They found that across ecosystems, from wet forest to dry forest, it takes an average of only sixty-six years for a forest to recover 90% of its old-growth biomass, completely naturally. All you have to do is leave it alone.2 Sometimes it happens much faster than this: in Costa Rica, rainforests that had been razed for livestock pasture were found to regrow in as little as twenty-one years, similar to what happened on the Salgados’ farm. And while biodiversity generally takes longer to recover, in some cases it can return to old-growth levels in as little as thirty years.3
Chapter Six
Remember, the rise of capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries didn’t come out of nowhere. As we saw in Chapter 1, it required violence and dispossession and enslavement; but even more than that it required crafting a new story about nature. It required getting people to see nature, for the first time, as something fundamentally distinct from humans; something not only inferior and subordinate, but devoid of the animating spirit we ascribe to people. It required splitting the world in two. It required, in a word, separation. For the past 500 years, the dominant culture on our planet – the culture of capitalism – has been rooted in that rift.
Chapter Six
What a thrilling way to experience the world! For those of us raised in capitalist culture, trained in the conceits of dominion and dualism, it is almost impossible to comprehend. How much richer would our experience of the living world be if we regarded it as pulsing with intention and sociality? Who lives there? What are they like? What is their experience? What will we say to one another? Even just to imagine living this way seems like a portal to an enchanted world – one that’s hidden somehow right in plain view.
Anthropologists refer to this way of being as animism. The
Chapter Six
share. Not only among members of the same species, but across species barriers: Douglas firs and birches feed each other. And it’s not just trees; we now know that all plants – except for a handful of species – have this same relationship with mycorrhiza. Just as with our gut bacteria, these findings challenge how we think about the boundaries between species. Is a tree really an individual? Can it really be conceived as a separate unit? Or is it an aspect of a broader, multi-species organism
Chapter Six
these are the very dilemmas that the Achuar, Chewong and other animist communities face. And perhaps we can take lessons from the answers they’ve arrived at after generations of thinking about it. There’s nothing necessarily unethical about harvesting crops or cutting down trees, they say – or even hunting and eating animals, for that matter. What’s unethical is to do so without gratitude, and without reciprocity. What’s unethical is to take more than you need, and more than you give back. What’s unethical is exploitation, extraction and, perhaps worse still, waste.
Remember, for the Achuar and
Chapter Six
Kimmerer points out that we should receive food and materials from the living world with the same care and decorum and gratitude that we might receive a healthy, home-cooked meal from our grandmother. We should treat what we receive not as a right, but as a gift.29
Chapter Six
All of this runs exactly against the logic of capitalism. Capitalism ultimately relies on a single, overarching principle: take more than you give back. We’ve seen this logic in action for 500 years, beginning with enclosure and colonisation. In order to accumulate surplus, you have to extract uncompensated value from nature and bodies, which must be objectified and rendered as ‘external’.
Chapter Six
That’s where ecologists come in. Ecology is a unique branch of science, in that it seeks not only to understand the parts of a system, but how those parts relate to one another in a broader whole. Ecologists are adept at understanding and even managing ecosystem health. They are in some crucial respects like shamans. Drawing on insights from ecologists, whether their expertise comes from university training or from longstanding engagement with the land, we can determine how many trees can be felled, how many fish can be fished, and how much ore can be mined without tipping ecosystems out of balance, and we can set limits and quotas accordingly.
Chapter Six
Intrepid farmers around the world, from Virginia to Syria, are experimenting with more holistic methods called regenerative agroecology. They’re planting multiple crop species together to build resilient ecosystems, while using compost, organic fertilisers and crop rotation to restore life and fertility to the soils. In areas where these methods have been used, crop yields have improved, earthworms have returned, insect populations have recovered and bird species have rebounded.31 And perhaps best of all, as dead soils recover they are sequestering enormous quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere. In fact, scientists believe that if we’re going to have any chance of averting climate breakdown, we’ll need to roll out regenerative methods across most of the world’s farmland and pasture. It’s more effective by far than any artificial carbon-capture technology.
This is what reciprocity looks like in action. When you give back as much as you receive, it has a multiplier effect on ecosystem health. It revives life. And it’s not just in agriculture that this is happening. Regenerative approaches are being developed in forestry and fishing as well, and in many cases people are drawing on techniques that have long been used by Indigenous communities and small farmers in the global South.
