The concept of degrowth is powerful because it is clear that we need systemic change to avoid ecological collapse: business as usual with a “green tinge” isn’t going to be enough. It is also true that individual change drives cultural change which can be the key to unlocking political change leading to fundamental change.

Erin Remblance

As an Australian, it troubles me that if the whole world lived like us, we would need 

 nations like mine, worldwide we are living as if we have 1.75 planet Earths, a figure that has increased from 1 (that is, living within our means) since 

. What this boils down to is that those of us in the global north are taking from both countries in the global south and future generations to fuel our lifestyles today. The ‘

’ research is supported by the work of the late Earth System Scientist, Professor Will Steffen, who brought to our attention 

 1950 we can see that major Earth System changes became directly linked to changes largely related to the global economic system.” Steffen is referring to our growth-based economies, and while three percent economic growth each year might sound small, it means that within 24 years we will be consuming twice as many resources as today, and within 100 years 19 times as many. As economist Kenneth Boulding said: “[a]nyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

For this reason, I am a big proponent of degrowth in over-consuming nations in order to fit back within 

. For anyone not familiar with the term, degrowth is a planned, democratic reduction in material and energy use in high-income nations while improving the well-being of people in those nations. It is more than this though. While very often the focus of degrowth is on how life can be better in a smaller economy, 

 argue that “[t]he point of degrowth is to escape from a society that is absorbed by the fetishism of growth…. It implies decolonization of the imaginary and the implementation of other possible worlds”. In this respect, the former definition of degrowth applies only to over-consuming nations, while the latter definition applies to all nations, and to all people. It is this second definition of degrowth to which this essay relates.

The concept of degrowth is powerful because it is clear that we need systemic change to avoid ecological collapse: business as usual with a “

” isn’t going to be enough. It is also true that individual change drives cultural change which can be the key to unlocking political change leading to fundamental change. On this point, I find it fascinating to consider how “

” might free us from growthism and help unlock the cultural changes that will bring about the necessary systemic changes.

With this in mind, here are a couple of points to consider in relation to how growth may be enshrined in the psychological structure of our collective minds, largely based on the work of 

Our dreams for the future are centred around it being better than today, in the sense of ‘more’ (e.g., a bigger house, a larger salary, more travel).

We see ourselves as something to continually develop and optimise, our lives are seen as a process of creating biographies or filling curriculum vitae.

While we used to see paid labour as drudgery and something we did until we had met our needs, now we view it as noble, esteemed even, to be sought out and with no end. Sadly, this cultural 180° turnaround becomes a 

Similarly, society views ‘hard-work’ as virtuous and thus ‘hard-work’ entitles those who undertake it to whatever their heart desires without limit or consideration of the harm caused, their purchases being the fruits of their labour.

We typically live by the rhythms of the industrial workday via a standardised worldwide time regime, unaware that there is a natural rhythm of time (for example, consider that in 2023 there will be 13 moons but only 12 calendar months or that, on the whole, our pace of work is unchanged by the seasons).

It is a collective belief that we should be able to own parcels of land, excluding others from that land. An example of this is that home (and correspondingly land) ownership in Australia is described as the ‘

In various ways, these - and probably many more aspects of our modern day lives - relate back to the surpluses created by industrialisation (enabling the future to have more than today, a concept that is “

”), the enclosure of the commons (the very foundation of growth-dependent 

) and the subsequent imperative to work to have our needs met (rather than simply being able to directly meet our needs). Our ability to recognise and unpick these ‘mental infrastructures’ - that is, the worldview that influences all of our actions - will be key to throwing off the shackles of growth and unlocking a culture of sufficiency, whereby we recognise when we have ‘enough’ in a material sense and from then on meet our “

”, increasing our sense of wellbeing and contentment.

The work of Antonio Gramsci on cultural hegemony is relevant in unlocking a culture of sufficiency. 

 describes Gramsci’s theory on how the ruling class maintains power via a cultural form of dominance:

“…the ruling class creates an ideology in which its own values become common sense for the rest of society and Gramsci argued that the role of the state is to maintain institutions such as media and the education system that educate the masses on the cultural ideology of the ruling class. The goal of that education being that the working class develop a sense of freedom and a good life that serves the purposes of the people in power. In other words, the working class starts to value things like innovation and productivity and economic growth that doesn’t actually serve them.”

 cultural hegemony is by creating a new culture that is not based on the values of the ruling class. A counter-culture, if you like.

So, what are the counter-hegemonic narratives that we can begin to embrace? What would a mind and soul not infiltrated by growth look like? There is much to learn from indigenous cultures on this topic. As Jeff Sparrow highlights in his book, 

, First Nation Australians found paid labour to be antithetical to their egalitarian lifestyles:

“Today, we take the wages system for granted. It appears normal, almost eternal, since we can barely conceive of an alternative. It did not seem normal to pre-colonial people. In Australia, as elsewhere in the world, they found capitalist practices utterly horrifying…. Indigenous people, accustomed to an egalitarian ethos and to work carried out for the collective good, saw the authority exerted by employers as tyranny. As late as 1888, a churchman complained of the difficulty he had in persuading Indigenous people that one man was innately better than another, that a certain individual, by virtue of his possessions, mandated obedience from his fellows…. Indigenous people did not despise wage labour primarily because of the effort that it entailed. Rather, they thought the work demanded by capitalists stripped life of its humanity.”

Furthermore, First Nations people lived with the rhythms of nature, not the industrial workday, and there was no private land ownership, they had the wisdom to know that “… you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau).

There are many examples of counter-hegemonic narratives arising more recently too. The following list is skewed more towards examples from the global North because the global North represents the vast majority of the over-consumption and is therefore where cultural change is most needed. Such examples include:

, who appreciate the simple things in life, and find happiness in what they have rather than what they want. Seeking only ‘enough’ and not ‘more’ represents an affront to the dominant culture of dreams of the future being materially greater than today. This point is relevant only to those whose needs are already met. Of course, those who are living in conditions of deprivation should have access to ‘more’, until they too have ‘enough’.

People who choose to spend their time doing work that is traditionally undervalued and lacking in both career trajectory and pay increases, but is socially valuable, forgoing future surpluses (

 of the stay-at-home parents, childcare workers, teachers, nurses, carers, small farmers, those who work part-time voluntarily, and those who volunteer their time to worthy but under-funded causes).

 which seeks to value time and non-material items over ‘the grind’ and the accumulation of things as a reward for hard work. The 

 shows us that it is possible to enjoy living with less, including the freedom of a smaller mortgage.

 in the U.S.A. are taking back our right to be humans, not simply workers who devote more time than they would like to paid labour.

, enabling anyone who wants to work to do so. Job guarantees seek to remove the artificial scarcity of employment we see today, where the threat of joblessness looms ever large and we constantly need to better ourselves so that we can compete for work. Those who advocate for a 

 – an unconditional liveable wage for all – are fighting to remove the need for waged employment at all.

People organising for the community rather than the individual are prioritising others over their own interests, giving up the opportunity to build their own CVs in favour of the greater good, and there are some wonderful examples of such union building 

 challenges the dominant narrative that more time at work is better.

 empowers us to value rest over productivity.

The many activists calling out the harm caused by the carbon-intensive lifestyles revered by the dominant culture, such as Greta Thunberg (who beautifully articulated in her book, 

, that “we all have a responsibility to find quick ways of making that [extremely high-emitting] lifestyle socially unacceptable”), activists who 

 of cars on our streets. For these people, simply having the means to live a materially intensive lifestyle - regardless of the hard work involved in acquiring those means - isn’t enough to justify the harm it causes.

The locals of the Greek Island Ikaria, who do things in their own time, not that of the industrial workday. 

 fascinating paper describes “people arriving to appointments in ‘Ikarian time’, that is, a ‘few hours late’ or shopkeepers telling bewildered tourists that ‘the shop will open when it is time to open’”.

 show us that there are other ways of providing a community’s housing and land needs that don’t rely on private ownership.

There are, of course, many other wonderful counter-culture examples beyond this short list - this is merely scratching the surface - but the point is that we need to advance these, and those of the same theme, until they become the leading narrative.

Unpicking the dominant, growth-based worldview will mean closely analysing the stories we have been told (and who those stories might serve), and bravely and 

 assessing whether all of this growth really does bring us ‘

’. We will likely find that we can achieve ‘a good life’ (that is, harmony with ourselves, our community, and the physical world) by living simpler but more meaningful lives. Perhaps we will even come to realise the very wise words of English writer, Alan Watts: “the meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves”. The way that growth manifests in our minds, our thoughts, our dreams, and our souls is important to consider because if we can create a culture of sufficiency, we will have found the key to systemic change and avoiding ecological catastrophe. I’m sure we can all agree that this is a worthy task indeed.

A shorter version of this piece was originally published in the 

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

How Does Degrowth Apply to Our Minds?

Today’s dominant culture considers endless economic growth as a necessary component of “the good life”, but is this really the case? For economic growth to be providing “the good life”, one must be on the receiving end of the perceived benefits of that economic growth in the first place. Unfortunately, between 1995 and 2021, global economic growth was staggeringly unequally distributed, with the wealthiest 1% capturing 38% of total wealth growth while the bottom 50% captured only 2.3% of overall wealth growth.

Jennifer Harvey Sallin

Today’s dominant culture considers endless economic growth as a necessary component of “the good life”, but is this really the case? Firstly, and at the risk of stating the obvious, for economic growth to be providing “the good life”, one must be on the receiving end of the perceived benefits of that economic growth in the first place. Unfortunately, between 1995 and 2021, global economic growth was staggeringly 

, with the wealthiest 1% capturing 38% of total wealth growth while the bottom 50% captured only 2.3% of overall wealth growth. Despite decades of relentlessly chasing economic growth 85% of people in the world still earn under $30 a day, the 

 in a typical rich nation. The poorest 50% of the world’s population own just 2% of the 

 (an alarming statistic which is identical in the USA: 50% of the population holds just 2% of the 

 wealth). Economic growth isn’t providing “the good life” for the vast majority of people.

Secondly, even if we could somehow blissfully ignore the plight of most of humanity, the question remains: For those of us in the small minority of people who do appear to benefit from economic growth, does this growth 

 enable us to live “the good life”? From a psychological point of view, “the good life” (i.e. a meaningful and fulfilling life) is built upon three foundational elements:

the quality of our relationship with our self

 – our sense of personal meaning, our self-esteem, our ability to care for our self

the quality of our relationships with others 

– our sense of community and belonging, our co-creativity, and our support network

 – our interdependence with the whole of the living world.

In this article, we look at how being a recipient of economic growth does – 

 – increase our quality of relationships and quality of life, and how degrowth practices might help us reclaim the life perspectives and practices that lead to a fulfilling life.

Our relationship with our self under growthism

The quality of our relationship with our self can be felt in our rooted connection to our own personal meaning and values and can be witnessed in our capacity to consistently act in ways that nourish us physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Without a healthy and caring relationship to our self, it’s hard to build a good life. Yet our personal meaning, values and capacity for self-care aren’t automatic producers of economic growth, and can even lead to economic loss (i.e. by taking a break from work because we need time for self-care, or by choosing not to do paid work because we’ve become a parent). In a growth-dependent paradigm, the fact that our relationship to our self isn’t inherently profitable to the system is a problem. Here are some ways the conflict manifests:

If what brings us meaning feels “pointless” or undervalued by the growth-dependent values of the system around us, it can be hard to believe that our personal passions and values matter. Similarly, if we need to spend most of our days doing work that we don’t find personally meaningful or fulfilling, in order to have access to food, shelter and healthcare, we have limited time to invest our energies in activities that do bring us personal joy and meaning. In either configuration, it’s hard to have high self-esteem. We might know deep down in our hearts that what we care about is important, but we’re very likely to keep that meaning hidden and to try to force ourselves to find meaning in something that is socially “approved” by the growth-paradigm. It’s a completely normal reaction to such a conundrum, but it can have serious side effects. Over time, not seeing our values mirrored and esteemed, and not having the time and support to cultivate them, can lead us to various forms and degrees of self-doubt, self-denial and other expressions of disconnection with the very core of who we are (i.e. depression, anxiety or existential depression).

The same applies to how we experience our body and our personality. Satisfaction with how we look and with who we are diminishes our profitability for the economy. In growthism, dissatisfaction with our looks and our personality generates profit as we seek out “solutions” to our self-dissatisfaction. In this sense, an economic growth imperative benefits most from our existence when we are constrained to see ourselves and our meaning as “never enough” or even an outright enemy of “reality” (as defined by the needs of the economy).

To that end, growthism also sets us up to have real physical problems that 

 require solutions. For example, by promoting overconsumption of unhealthy foods and creating artificial time scarcity (which we’ll define in more detail below), not to mention increasing air, soil and water toxicity from unnecessary industrial production, many of us find ourselves with environmentally- and so-called “lifestyle”- related health issues and struggle to adequately take care of our physical health. Ironically, our health problems are actually “good” for economic growth, because they generate consumption and revenue for the health sector, and a need for more innovation to solve the problems growthism has created for and even 

In contrast to the above dilemmas, degrowth releases us from the need to find meaning and income from activities that are in competition with healthy self-relating and self-care. For example, key degrowth policies include a government-led jobs guarantee with the potential to include caring roles (caring for nature, children, the elderly etc), a minimum basic income at a socially inclusive rate for those who are unable to do, or choose not to do, paid work, and reduced working hours to a three or four-day work week, giving people more time to do what they find intrinsically meaningful and consistent with their physical and mental health. Degrowth policies also aim to ensure that everyone has access to universal healthcare, education, high quality public transport and social housing, taking pressure off people to earn money in a job they do not find meaningful just to survive. For those readers who balk at the idea of people not working to earn their living, it’s worth remembering that the 

 is hardly consistent with how we define it today. Indeed, the notion that we should “earn our right to be alive” is a relatively recent construct. We can recommend Jason Hickel’s book 

As our economies re-localise in a degrowth model, a greater need for skilled and artisanal work emerges. These kinds of jobs are known to often create a state of 

 – a sense of contentment which is defined by an optimal balance between skill and challenge, where we are so actively engaged in the task at hand that we are no longer conscious of time. No longer will we be trappedin “

” simply because we have no other option for our physical survival.

In a degrowth work paradigm, being constantly “busy” is not seen as a badge of honour nor as a proof of our value, as it is in the growth-dependent model. Rest and rejuvenation are highly valued, freeing us from growthism’s 

of making every aspect of our relationships with our self profitable to someone, somewhere. Degrowth allows us to contemplate life outside of the dominant cultural paradigm, encouraging us to be content with who we are, what we look like, and what we value, and giving us the contextual safety to live in a manner that is sustainable for us. In this way, the “good life” arises from being our genuine self, acting on what we care about and what contributes to our health and well-being, rather than from trying to be someone else in order to become profitable to, and thus acceptable to, the system.

Our relationships with others in a growth-dependent framework

Fulfillment in our relationships with others is based in a sense of community and belonging, co-creativity, and having a strong support network. Again, none of this necessarily creates economic growth, and in a growth-dependent paradigm, that is a problem. The growth paradigm reacts by structurally redefining our relationships to require more economically profitable activity in order to be “satisfying”. And one builds on the other: if our sense of relationship with our self has become tied to eternal growth, it makes it easier for us to fall into the structural disconnectedness of growthism’s definition of externally meaningful relationships. Physician Gabor Maté’s new book 

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture 

painfully illustrates how the structural disconnectedness of life under Capitalism has constrained us to contexts that 

 our capacity to meet our basic human and relational needs.

Underlying all of this is the issue of the “social commons” – the common spaces and resources that would allow us as individuals to prioritise a life of community, personal and relational health and sustainability. As the commons have been systematically privatised over the last century by industry and private land ownership, we have been forced to prioritise earning in order to buy back our part of “the commons” (i.e. access to land, water, roads, and so on). This privatisation of the commons has created what is called “artificial scarcity” – a term which may sound paradoxical, as growthism seems to offer options in abundance. However, growthism’s options are centred on profit and consumerism rather than on sharing nature’s abundance and prioritising relationships. An outcome of this “artificial scarcity” is real “time scarcity”. Often the growth-based system makes it harder to spend time with those we cherish, because we’re all too busy working to keep our own privatised part of the commons.

And then there’s the issue of competition: limiting the available common resources forces us into competition with each other. When it looks like others have more than us, we often feel the need to have as much as they do, and this can give rise to envy and a feeling of needing to “keep up with the Joneses”. In this sense, we may prioritise earning not only for subsistence, but also for social status. For growthism, that is a good thing. The system requires us to feel as though we always need more and more material things in a never-ending cycle (without which the system would collapse), but the chronic comparisons, envy and competition that are inherent to such a system erode the quality and sustainability of our personal relationships.

At the same time, the growth paradigm paradoxically promotes consumption as the 

 of community itself: we’re told that if we earn enough money to buy the right clothes, house, furniture, cars, trips and gadgets, and go to the right bars, restaurants and places of entertainment, we will find love, belonging and meaning. This, again, plays back into our relationship to ourselves: without all these extras, growthism tempts us to believe we’re not worthy of love in the first place. But even the ultra-rich who benefit most from privatisation of the commons, and who have virtually no limits on what they can consume to bolster their “lovability”, can find it especially difficult to create loving and trusting relationships 

 states so eloquently, “… all that money really allows you to do is become dependent on people you don’t know instead of being dependent on people you do know”.

Relationships with others in a degrowth framework

 of degrowth offers a way out of this trap by re-expanding the commons and redistributing wealth so that people have access to the things they need to live well without needing to prioritise and compete for higher levels of income. This in turn resolves the “artificial time scarcity” caused by growthism. As 

 describes, “with more free time people would be able to have fun, enjoy conviviality with loved ones, cooperate with neighbours, care for friends and relatives, cook healthy food, exercise and enjoy nature, thus rendering unnecessary the patterns of consumption that are driven by time scarcity”.

Two terms are often used in degrowth literature to describe relationships in a degrowth society: 

. Both terms describe a kind of embodied present in which our relationships with others are based on real living, mutual aid, a sense of place and community care, and joy and collective meaning. These kinds of relationships, which can only emerge in the context of the relative abundance afforded by living sustainably, give us so much more than relationships based on time lack, superficiality, forced consumption and competition. We need a system which allows us to truly invest in our relationships, and degrowth offers us a path to such a system.

Our relationship to the whole of life under growthism

Not only are we dependent on our human community, we are interdependent with the whole of the living world, and our quality of life is directly tied to how we relate to the greater context which sustains us. Sadly, the view of the entirety of existence as potential profit has seeped into the very fabric of our psyche and distorted how we relate to everything that is bigger than us. As discussed above, the so-called “natural world” which we rely on for life has been commoditized, and a long-term result of that commoditization is that many of us struggle to even feel a connection to the natural world at all, outside of its possible use for creating growth. There is a phenomenon in environmental psychology called 

, which shows how we come to see the loss of the natural world as “normal” over generations. Growthism takes advantage of this trick of the mind by presenting our current and future world of disappearing nature as even desirable or “cool” – for example, that prioritizing the development of virtual reality and space colonization over caring for and restoring Earth are natural outcomes and healthy measures of “progress” (and reprioritizing Earth would be correspondingly uncool and unnatural). This has resulted in a societal shift away from prioritizing learning about and spending time in nature. At this point, people, especially children, increasingly 

 where their food comes from and some are even developing what is called 

And then there’s the moral burden those of us in 

 live with. Whether we like to think about it or not, we are to some degree or another aware that we are rapidly destroying the earth and its inhabitants, including most of the human population (the nearly 

 in ‘developing nations’). Within this general destruction is the insidious 

 we continue to perpetuate on the peoples of subjugated nations through climate colonialism and continued imperialist extractivist practices. Even more locally, we are also aware that we are in the long-term destroying the ecosystems of our own bioregion which sustain us and our neighbours, community, family and which are the potential future home of our children and their descendants. We are overconsuming, polluting our atmosphere and soils, and increasing the risks and severity of man-made natural disasters and epidemics. This is a huge emotional, mental and physical burden, one which has obvious effects on our relationship to our self and our relationship to others. Many of us understandably feel the need to dissociate from the reality of this through addiction, 

, and other ways of numbing; and yet dissociating from the problem doesn’t resolve it long-term, not even for ourselves.

Relating to the whole of life in a degrowth framework

Degrowth allows us a way out of this disconnection, amnesia and moral burden, as degrowth is focused on reconnecting us to the earth, its ecosystems and its inhabitants, and on righting our wrongs – giving back space and resources to the natural world, including the majority of humanity, allowing ecosystems to recover, and giving us limits that allow us to live in healthy reciprocity with the world. Degrowth is anticolonial and antiracist, refusing to allow us to continue to worsen the moral injustices that we in wealthy nations have (often unwittingly) unleashed. It forces us to reconnect with the larger world around us, to drop our “growthism glasses” and look around at where we live; it forces us to stop being entertained by growth fantasies long enough to get the clarity to see, experience and come to value the living world and our fellow beings in it. It requires us to take the time to know, understand and cultivate a meaningful connection to the natural world and our fellow beings, human and non-human alike. It requires, in other words, a kind of active 

, a love for nature. In this sense, degrowth facilitates our relationship to the whole. It is a kind of restorative justice which allows us to continue on, make amends, and rebuild our fundamental relationship to the whole which growthism has deeply damaged.

 through a community developmental lens, naming nine fundamental needs: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity, and freedom (notice that wealth and wealth accumulation are not on the list!). Crucially, he differentiated between types of “need satisfiers”: some satisfiers (like healthy self-esteem or healthy community) really meet our needs, but many others (like wealth that goes beyond meeting our fundamental needs) are actually “violators”, “pseudo satisfiers”, and “inhibiting satisfiers”. They claim to be satisfying our fundamental needs but are actually making it more difficult for us to do so, for example by oversatisfying one need at the cost of another.

Growthism is full of these kinds of false “satisfiers”, while degrowth is based on cultivating real satisfiers, and even “synergistic satisfiers”, which satisfy a given fundamental need while simultaneously contributing to the satisfaction of other fundamental needs. As an easy example, taking our streets back from cars gives us space to play and garden, improves air quality and encourages us to walk and be more active, in turn improving health, while also giving us spaces in which we can spend quality time with neighbours and connect with nature.

The small minority of us who do see an increase in wealth from economic growth need to seriously consider whether that increase is really satisfying our human needs, at all levels of relating. There are real costs to eternal growth, and while growthist ideology tends to treat those costs as mere externalities to be ignored or as a worthwhile trade-off, the erosion of our capacity to meet our most fundamental human needs certainly cannot be accepted as a negligible or distant loss or a reasonable trade-off.

A cultural revolution to unlock a systems revolution

As we come to see more and more of the shadow side of growthism, it is time for us to look carefully at the values we hold dear – those values that determine how we spend our time, what we prioritise and what we deem to be important. We need to cast a critical eye over the notion of “progress” because any progress that systemically contributes to the degradation of the living world and the quality of the relationships which form the foundations of our well-being is surely too 

 defined to begin with. We must reconnect with nature, our community and our personal meaning and values, and recognise that while our economy is a human construct of relative youth and is, by definition, malleable, the laws of physics and the foundations of our mental and physical health are not. The relationships that form our well-being must take priority over upholding an economic system that undermines those very relationships.

We must be brave and courageous in reclaiming the right to exist and relate in ways that nourish us but do not grow the economy. We have to believe that we are worth it, and that the countless other people and inhabitants that share our world with us are worth it too. We need a systems revolution, and for that to happen we need a cultural revolution. We need a new culture of care, one that no longer idolises consumerism, perfection, busyness, and billionaires – fake satisfiers – but rather idolises the things that not only make life “good”, but also make life possible – real satisfiers – the soil, clean water and air, healthy oceans, the myriad of life on earth without which we cannot survive, and quality relationships with ourselves and with others. The path to a good life is not what we own, or the places we travel, or what we individually achieve. It is living in harmony with ourselves, with the planet and all of its inhabitants, in finding joy in nature’s wonders and in our connection to ourselves and others. Our greatest hope is that, in re-evaluating our values in this way, together we can find our path to an even better life, starting a cultural revolution that unlocks the systems revolution we desperately need.

Degrowth: The Path to a Better Life

World leaders have in the past reacted to global emergencies such as the World War II and the COVID 19 pandemic with all urgency and seriousness. With the response to these emergency situations in mind, and at the conclusion of COP27, it is particularly disheartening to see that leaders still aren’t taking climate change – the greatest threat humanity has ever faced - seriously.

When the USA mobilised for World War II everything changed. American industry essentially stopped what it had been doing and instead turned their efforts to building tanks, planes and armaments. Private car manufacture 

 for 3 years. Millions of students, retirees, housewives and unemployed entered the active labour force. Essential goods were rationed and sacrificing certain items became the 

. CEOs who refused to assist with the wartime effort were forcibly 

Similarly, during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic governments around the world implemented policies previously considered impossible: closing schools, restricting movement, implementing lockdowns, mandating work-from-home for those who were able to and ordering the closure of non-essential businesses where people were likely to gather and increase the risk of transmission of the virus. In unprecedented times the unprecedented becomes not just possible, but necessary.

With the response to these emergency situations in mind, and at the conclusion of COP27, it is particularly disheartening to see that leaders still aren’t taking climate change – the greatest threat humanity has ever faced - seriously. This has been the case for decades and will continue to be the case until leaders make commitments - and implement them - to reduce fossil fuel use effective immediately, with 

, just and scientifically informed way” until we reach zero emissions, roughly by the middle of next decade.

The facade of action comprised of goals set in the future - for someone else to deal with - based on technology that either 

, is pure lip-service. But the figures don’t lie: greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are now 

 than they were when the Rio Earth Summit was held in 1992. As UN General Secretary 

 has said “[w]e are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”

How different could our predicament look if we dared to ask “how close to zero can we keep warming and how fast can we get there?” instead of prioritising 

 that favour inaction and uphold the status quo. How much brighter would the future be if we, like we have done for other events, treated climate change as a genuine emergency, and did all we could to avoid catastrophic warming?

Reducing fossil fuel use in a meaningful way is unthinkable in our current economic system. Over the last two decades the only time there has been a significant global reduction in GHG emissions was 2009, during the global financial crisis, and 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic (see chart 1), two events that are associated with recession and hardship. Under this economic system we can have ‘prosperity’ (real or perceived, associated with economic growth) or we can have reduced emissions, but we can’t have both.

The relentless growth in emissions means that all of the renewable energy deployed to date has not displaced fossil fuel use (see chart 2), it has simply added to our energy mix, and consequently has not led to a year-on-year reduction in GHGs. The focus on renewable energy deployment is misplaced. We need to focus on winding down fossil fuel use.

What can we learn from those two years in which global emissions dropped? Globally, ‘green-growth’ has never, not for one year, happened even in the 

 sense of the term which relates specifically to GHG emissions, our other ecological crises ignored. Reduction in economic activity - that is production and consumption - is necessary if we are to see global reductions in GHG emissions, particularly of the magnitude needed to keep warming “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” as per the 

. Scientists believe that 2°C of warming will activate tipping points in the Earth’s System that will lead to ‘

’: 2°C is not just a politically ‘nice’ target, it could well be the difference between a habitable planet and an uninhabitable one.

Reducing energy use as much as possible (

) will have the added benefit of making a renewable roll-out much more feasible. Conversely, continuing to grow the economy (and hence energy use) while trying to decarbonise the energy grid is, to quote economic anthropologist, 

, “like running down an escalator that’s accelerating against you”.

Because we have spent the last several decades growing our emissions rather than reducing them, we are now in a position where we do not have the luxury of time. Thirty years ago it would have been enough to stop new fossil fuel projects, but it isn’t enough anymore. We urgently need to bend the emissions curve and the trajectory needs to be steep. We need to stop fossil fuel use.

With this in mind, the question then becomes ‘how can we reduce economic activity in nations that are exceeding their 

 of the planetary boundaries, including climate change, while ensuring we meet the needs of all? How do we 

 so that we do not have to trade off ‘prosperity’ for emissions reductions? First of all, we need to nationalise the energy industries, so that the reduced energy that is available under the binding annual target goes where it will most contribute to human wellbeing and not where it is most profitable. Then we need to scale down the industries causing the most harm to nature but providing the least benefit to humanity: excess consumer goods, advertising, single use plastics, red meat, paper goods and food oils driving deforestation, over-sized new housing builds, aviation (especially private jets), SUVs, speculative finance, armaments etc.

We need to reduce the working week to 4 days to share the remaining jobs around, and provide a federal jobs guarantee to ensure work is available for everyone, with a minimum basic income for those unable or unwilling to work. We need to provide universal services to all: high quality healthcare, public transport, and education, beautiful and abundant parks, libraries and other shared facilities, and quotas of water, electricity and internet. We need to end planned obsolescence, move from ownership to sharing, adjust the way we provide finance, address income and wealth inequality and provide a 

. Fundamentally we need a cultural shift to admiring “sufficiency” and living within the means of the planet, rather than idolising excess wealth and planet harming behaviours.

We’ve known for decades that GDP isn’t a useful measure of 

 in wealthy nations for decades), we’ve known for just as long that there are 

, and that if we continue to ignore those limits we risk the collapse of civilisation as we know it. There is empirical 

 to social outcomes, rather the level of universal services provided. Given this, why do we persist with this destructive and harmful economic system? In a nutshell, because it enables the 

 we’ve been led to believe growth is in our best interests too. For the vast majority of us, this is 

Given all that is at stake, there is an obvious path to take here. How do we morally justify being able to reach zero emissions significantly earlier because energy use has been halved, but not taking it?

There might be a morally obvious path here, but for now we lack the social will to get there. The 

 lies in growing the number of people who care in ever increasing concentric circles – as opposed to watering down our not-negotiable needs (by virtue of the laws of nature being fixed) in a misplaced desire to appeal to those who are furthest away from us ideologically. Engaging people in this way will enable us to reach a ‘

’ where action becomes inevitable. Whatever you do, you have a role to play in activating this social tipping point so that we are finally taking climate change seriously. What will you do to raise awareness of the urgent changes we need and how we can bring them about?

Illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

We are still not taking climate change seriously

Excerpts from Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert.

Reading the book Bright Green Lies had a profound impact on me. It changed my perspective on industrial civilisation, the living world, the various deliberately inadequate interpretations of the term ‘sustainability’ and most of the climate movement. Here, with the authors’ permission, I share some excerpts from the book that I found particularly powerful, in most cases because we hear these kinds of statements very little, and the ‘bright green lies’ the authors make a case against, much more frequently. These excerpts are in full, with the only alteration being the endnote references, to keep them in numerical order. A word of warning: some people may find these excerpts confronting and/or upsetting.

Bright Green Lies decentres industry, which is so often at the heart of climate ‘solutions’ and asks “what is best for the planet and ALL its inhabitants? What is true sustainability?” What becomes clear is that we cannot simply continue with business as usual. We must degrow our energy use and start defining “the good life” by less material and consumerist wants and more by connection, nature, joy, culture, art, music and conviviality.

 taking us to a steady state economy, such as that proposed by Kate Raworth’s 

, even this is a very human-centric approach, with the planetary boundaries that we must operate within implying there is an acceptable level of biodiversity (that is, entire species) we can lose, oceans we can acidify and warming of the climate we can tolerate in the name of maintaining some of the luxuries of industrialisation. This steady state economy also relies on finite materials, so while we may be able to sustain a degrown, steady state economy for longer than the current growth-based economy, it is, by definition, not sustainable. Far from being the most we can do, Degrowth is the bare minimum we must do to avoid an unplanned and harmful collapse of civilisation. True sustainability will require even more change.

Bright Green Lies is nearly 500 pages long, and so these few excerpts do not do justice to the huge amount of work and information the authors, Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert, have brilliantly pulled together to make the case that industrial civilisation is the root cause of our ecological crises and therefore the solution lies in its dissolution, and not in technologies that attempt to continue it for as long as possible, causing more harm along the way. Nevertheless, I hope you find these excerpts as thought-provoking and as galvanising as I did, and that we can focus our energies on working towards what comes next, so that the inevitable transition causes the least amount of harm and protects as many human and nonhuman lives as possible.

– Erin Remblance, Sydney-based writer and activist.

The Spectrum of Environmentalism (p. xi):

The living planet and nonhumans both have the right to exist. Human flourishing depends on healthy ecology. To save the planet, humans must live within the limits of the natural world; therefore, drastic transformations need to occur at social, cultural, economic, political, and personal levels.

Environmental problems exist and are serious, but green technology and design, along with ethical consumerism, will allow a modern, high-energy lifestyle to continue indefinitely. The bright greens’ attitude amounts to: “It’s less about nature, and more about us.”

We have a lot of numbers. They keep us sane, providing a kind of gallows’ comfort against the intransigent sadism of power: We know the world is being murdered, despite the mass denial. The

numbers are real. The numbers don’t lie. The species shrink, their extinctions swell, and all their names are other words for kin: bison, wolves, black-footed ferrets.

Before me (Lierre) is the text of a talk I’ve given. The original version contains this sentence: “Another 120 species went extinct today.” The 120 is crossed clean through, with 150 written above it. But the 150 is also struck out, with 180 written above. The 180 in its turn has given way to 200. I stare at this progression with a sick sort of awe. How does my small, neat handwriting hold this horror? The numbers keep stacking up, I’m out of space in the margin, and life is running out of time.

This way of living cannot last. And when it is over it would be far better that there be more of the world left rather than less. This is why our actions now are so important. What we do now determines what life is like—or, indeed, whether it exists at all—for those humans and nonhumans who come after us.

Chapter 2: Solving for the Wrong Variable 

Once upon a time, environmentalism was about saving wild beings and wild places from destruction. “The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind,” Rachel

Carson wrote to a friend as she finished the manuscript that would become Silent Spring. “That, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.”[1] She wrote with unapologetic reverence of “the oak and maple and birch” in autumn, the foxes in the morning mist, the cool streams and the shady ponds, and, of course, the birds: “In the mornings, which had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, and wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marshes.”[2] Her editor noted that Silent Spring required a “sense of almost religious dedication” as well as “extraordinary courage.”[3] Carson knew the chemical industry would come after her, and come it did, in attacks as “bitter and unscrupulous as anything of the sort since the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species a century before.”[4] Seriously ill with the cancer that would kill her, Carson fought back in defense of the living world, testifying with calm fortitude before President John F. Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee and the U.S. Senate. She did these things because she had to. “There would be no peace for me,” she wrote to a friend, “if I kept silent.”[5]

Carson’s work inspired the grassroots environmental movement; the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); and the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Silent Spring was more than a critique of pesticides—it was a clarion call against “the basic irresponsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the natural world.”[6]

Today’s environmental movement stands upon the shoulders of giants, but something has gone terribly wrong. Carson didn’t save the birds from DDT so that her legatees could blithely offer them up to wind turbines. We are writing this book because we want our environmental movement back.

Mainstream environmentalists now overwhelmingly prioritize saving industrial civilization over saving life on the planet. The how and the why of this institutional capture is the subject for another book, but the capture is near total. For example, Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and Earth Policy Institute—someone who has been labeled as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers” and “the guru of the environmental movement”[7]—routinely makes comments like, “We talk about saving the planet.… But the planet’s going to be around for a while. The question is, can we save civilization? That’s what’s at stake now, and I don’t think we’ve yet realized it.” Brown wrote this in an article entitled “The Race to Save Civilization.”[8]

The world is being killed because of civilization, yet what Brown says is at stake, and what he’s racing to save, is precisely the social structure causing the harm: civilization. Not saving salmon. Not monarch butterflies. Not oceans. Not the planet. Saving civilization.

Brown is not alone. Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, more or less constantly pushes the line that “Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people…. Conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to people.”[9]

Bill McKibben, who works tirelessly and selflessly to raise awareness about global warming, and who has been called “probably America’s most important environmentalist,” constantly stresses his work is about saving civilization, with articles like “Civilization’s Last Chance,”[10] or with quotes like, “We’re losing the fight, badly and quickly—losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.”[11]

We’ll bet you that polar bears, walruses, and glaciers would have preferred that sentence ended a different way.

In 2014 the Environmental Laureates’ Declaration on Climate Change was signed by “160 leading environmentalists from 44 countries” who were “calling on the world’s foundations and philanthropies to take a stand against global warming.” Why did they take this stand? Because global warming “threatens to cause the very fabric of civilization to crash.” The declaration concludes: “We, 160 winners of the world’s environmental prizes, call on foundations and philanthropists everywhere to deploy their endowments urgently in the effort to save civilization.”[12]  Coral reefs, emperor penguins, and Joshua trees probably wish that sentence would have ended differently. The entire declaration, signed by “160 winners of the world’s environmental prizes,” never once mentions harm to the natural world. In fact, it never mentions the natural world at all.

We get it. We, too, like hot showers and freezing cold ice cream, and we like them 24/7. We like music at the touch of a button or, now, a verbal command. We like the conveniences this way of life brings us. And it’s more than conveniences. We know that. We three co-authors would be dead without modern medicine. But we all recognize that there is a terrible trade-off for all this: life on the planet. And no individual’s conveniences—or, indeed, life—is worth that price.

The goal has been shifted, slowly and silently, and no one seems to have noticed. Environmentalists tell the world and their organizations that “it’s about us.” But some of us refuse to forget the last spotted owls in the last scrap of forest, the wild beings and wild places. Like Rachel Carson before us, there will be no peace for us if we keep silent while the critters, one by one, are disappeared. Our once and future movement was for them, not us. We refuse to solve for the wrong variable. We are not saving civilization; we are trying to save the world.

The global economy is a sticky web. My (Derrick’s) niece and her family recently visited. My niece’s

husband is from China. He’s in his mid-thirties. During the visit he complained to me about Walmart: “All these Americans buy all these cheap consumer goods made in China, and that has been good for the Chinese economy, but not good for the air. In my lifetime I have seen the sky in China go from blue to gray to black. All so Americans and others can have cheap goods. I understand this is the price we have to pay so a country can develop its economy, but I don’t like it.”

He also said he has old friends who’ve been forced by the economy to become de facto slaves in these factories, to work standing for 12 hours at a time without breaks. He told me of friends who work in high-rise factories with nets around the buildings to prevent workers from jumping to their deaths, and friends whose coworkers have joined together anyway to kill themselves, anything to end the ceaseless torment of their slave labor.

China is by far the world’s biggest user of coal, both extracting and using almost 50 percent of all coal consumed. The U.S. and other countries get cheap consumer goods; and the Chinese get black skies, emissions, slave labor, a completely devastated natural world, and a financial surplus. It works for governments in all these countries. For the real world, not so well.

Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) systems normally take one of two forms. In parabolic trough systems, a series of curved mirrors concentrate sunlight on a small tube containing a “working fluid”— often synthetic oil—heated to temperatures above 750°F. The other major type of CSP system is a solar power tower, in which a field of mirrors uses motorized mounts to track the sun from dawn to dusk and reflect light onto the apex of a tall central tower, heating a fluid inside of the tower to 1000 to 2000°F.[13]

An example of the latter type is Ivanpah, a 377 MW solar energy harvesting facility built in southeastern California and financed by BrightSource Energy, Bechtel, NRG Energy, the federal government (of course), and Google.

Before the project was installed, this 3,500-acre swathe of federal land was described by Mojave advocate Shaun Gonzales as “pristine desert.” It’s no longer pristine. Instead, it effectively no longer exists. The Ivanpah facility is so large it can be seen from space, and each of the three fields of mirrors surrounding each tower is more than a mile across.

Construction of the Ivanpah facility killed rare plants and destroyed habitat for threatened desert tortoises. The federal government claimed about 30 desert tortoises lived in the area, but eventually more than 170 tortoises were forcibly removed from their homes and relocated. It is believed that dozens more were killed during construction when underground burrows collapsed under the heavy equipment. Many of the relocated tortoises tried to go home, but found their way blocked by a chain-link fence. Outside this fence they paced back and forth, back and forth, until they died of heatstroke.

The Ivanpah project was originally set to destroy 4,000 acres (more than six square miles), but after environmentalists challenged the plan because of harm to wildlife, the site was reduced by about 13 percent. Joshua Basofin, an activist with Defenders of Wildlife, responded, “This reconfiguration is pretty minimal. It hasn’t really addressed the core issues on the impact on desert tortoise and rare plants.”[14]

Ivanpah also kills insects and birds. Insects seem to be attracted to light from the mirrors. Birds follow the insects, and predatory birds follow the insectivores. The concentrated sunlight burns and melts every creature who flies over. MacGillivray’s warblers, bluegray gnatcatchers, peregrine falcons, Wilson’s warblers, mourning doves, yellow-rumped warblers, verdins, house finches, and others have been immolated, their wings burned off.[15]

Iron ore is the main raw precursor to steel and is mined around the world. Five of the 10 largest iron ore mines are in Brazil. Because iron ore mining is big business, worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually just in Brazil, the government does all it can to streamline mining permits, sidestep environmental regulations, and mute community opposition.

The world’s largest iron-ore mine is the Carajás mine, located in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. More accurately, the mine is located in what used to be the Amazon rainforest. Now, it’s located in the center of a wasteland, a clearcut, an industrial chasm. Every year, more than 2,400 square miles of forest around Carajás are cut down, mostly to make charcoal used for smelting iron ore.[16] Yes, you read that number correctly. And yes, that’s annually. The latest $17 billion mine expansion project has already destroyed mile after mile of rainforest, and threatens a unique part of the Amazon, a savanna around two lakes, home to more than 40 endemic plant species found nowhere else on earth.

Toxic “tailings” sludge from these mining operations is impounded behind huge earthen dams, two of which have failed in recent years. A 2015 collapse near Mariana, Brazil destroyed two villages, killed 19 people, polluted water supplies for 400,000, and released more than 43 million cubic meters of toxic waste into 400 miles of rivers of streams and the Atlantic Ocean. According to a United Nations report, “Entire fish populations—at least 11 tons— were killed immediately when the slurry buried them or clogged their gills.” The same report describes that “the force of the mudflow destroyed 1,469 hectares (3,630 acres) of riparian forest.”[17]

The report uses the term “eliminating all aquatic life” to describe what has happened to more than 400 miles of river. The Mariana tailings dam failure has been called the worst environmental disaster in Brazil’s history.

You can’t miss it!

Erin Remblance

Erin Remblance

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