Imagine you’re tending to honeysuckle. You’d like to add a bit of spunk to your garden shed, and vines begin to creep in tendrils along its oak siding. Seasons slip by: Ropes of green entangle with jumbled watering cans like an image from a children’s storybook. Uh oh. You can’t find the shed’s door. Your plants — the asparagus devoid of a trowel, the sweet potatoes rotting beneath unturned soil — suffer.
The tumbling honeysuckle’s growth, a clumsy metaphor, reflects the state of the global economy: overgrown and restless. How might we break the ironclad grip that swaths of green — paper green — hold over our minds and hearts? How can we shrink/slow/reverse economic growth while simultaneously embracing continued human progress?
No, I’m not talking about a forced recession. The fiscal crisis of 2008 left millions wallowing in financial turmoil, offering no equitable and socially optimal means to shrink economic expansion. No, I’m not talking about population control either. The rampant spread of Covid-19 killed 4.5 million and counting, but the earth didn’t heal despite the quirky memes suggesting otherwise.
We aren’t the problem, but we’re trapped in a system that is.
A recent study in The JoCP — Crisis or Opportunity? Economic Degrowth for Social Equity and Ecological Sustainability — outlines the fruitful opportunities afforded by an approach that decenters materiality as a pathway to fulfillment: degrowth. The recession of the early 2000s constituted an blip in global economic growth. And it suggested the promise of degrowth: it slowed deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon, and it curbed global CO2 output. What if we could shift our economic framework to allow for positive social change while localizing our economies and lessening the pervasive nature of consumerism?
Degrowth pushes against the concept of ‘green growth,’which assumes that technological innovations alone can Save The Earth. In line with a degrowth mindset is the idea of communal ownership, bodily autonomy, and strengthened relationships: shared housing, widespread public transportation, easily accessible birth control, and a tumbling of monopolies.
Increased GDP doesn’t equate to a higher overall quality of life, as that wealth isn’t distributed equally. It’s time we took our clippers to systems of monetary trade, altering the social norms linking ‘material gain’ to some perceived notion of ‘success,’ metaphorically trimming back the honeysuckle’s growth so that the whole garden might flourish.
ICREA Researcher and ecological economist Georgios Kallis describes degrowth as a willful scaling back — a decreased level of spending on both the part of the government and the general public. A de emphasis on materiality opens up the opportunity for movement away from capitalistic notions of wealth and ownership, inspiring a critical reconsideration of whether a fleet of Teslas will lead to contentment. As defined by 140 multidisciplinary scientists during a Parisienne conference in 2008, economic degrowth denotes a reduction of the ‘‘collective capacity to acquire and use physical resources.” Ultimately, degrowthers believe that improved social welfare can still take place sans economic expansion.
Economic degrowth does not denote a return to pre-industrial technology, but steers away from materiality as a pathway to personal meaning. That means more time spent with friends and family, fewer hours spent toiling behind an office’s imposing oak desk, along, soon-to-be obsolescent Macbook keeping time, fleeting second by fleeting second. Doesn’t sound too bad, right?
It’s important to remember that degrowth requires some level of voluntary simplicity. Unlike the recession, degrowth emerges from collective choice, a willful turn from gaudy advertisements, from buying a hands-free vertical egg cooker by tapping ‘Buy Now.’ The onus of responsibility regarding ecological change doesn’t rest on the consumer, but we still have the volition to contemplate the how’s and why’s of our spending. Recognizing the hold that material items wield over our psyche will allow us to critically reflect on our values; acknowledging the paradox of green capitalism will render our environmental activism more sound. Ultimately, those among us with the privilege to lobby, boycott, and advocate — to help in shifting the alleged connection between ‘money’ and ‘purpose’— should do so.
photo of my garden in Athens, Ohio
In shifting value systems away from the insular pursuit of material goods, we plant the seeds for sustainable degrowth, for finding joy that does not derive from that all-encompassing papery green. A scaling back of the honeysuckle will reveal the once-vine covered wheelbarrow and oaken shed, allowing the garden — the snap pea plot, the elderberry bushes — to flourish unfettered by invasive green.