Climate Links 8/8/2017

Telling the Climate Truth. Gaius Publius, nakedcapitalism. July 21, 2017.

We need new Cassandras to warn us of new disasters, even though they’ll never be believed.
—Richard Clarke (paraphrased) 

We aren’t doomed — we are choosing to be doomed by failing to respond adequately to the emergency.
—Margaret Klein Salamon

excerpt from M.K. Salmon (also at Common Dreams): 

While I think both Mann and Holthaus are brilliant scientists who identified some factual problems in the article, I strongly disagree with their statements about the role of emotions — namely, fear — in climate communications and politics. I am also skeptical of whether climate scientists should be treated as national arbiters of psychological or political questions, in general. I would like to offer my thoughts as a clinical psychologist, and as the founder and director of The Climate Mobilization. 

Affect tolerance — the ability to tolerate a wide range of feelings in oneself and others — is a critical psychological skill. On the other hand, affect phobia — the fear of certain feelings in oneself or others — is a major psychological problem, as it causes people to rely heavily on psychological defenses. 

Much of the climate movement seems to suffer from affect phobia, which is probably not surprising given that scientific culture aspires to be purely rational, free of emotional influence. Further, the feelings involved in processing the climate crisis—fear, grief, anger, guilt, and helplessness — can be overwhelming. But that doesn’t mean we should try to avoid “making” people feel such things! Experiencing them is a normal, healthy, necessary part of coming to terms with the climate crisis. 

I agree with David Roberts that it is OK, indeed imperative, to tell the whole, frightening story. As I argue in The Transformative Power of Climate Truth, it’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings — not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings. 

Holthaus writes of people feeling deep anxiety, losing sleep, re-considering their lives due to the article… but this is actually a good thing. Those people are coming out of the trance of denial and starting to confront the reality of our existential emergency. I hope that every single American, every single human experiences such a crisis of conscience. It is the first step to taking substantial action. Our job is not to protect people from the truth or the feelings that accompany it — it’s to protect them from the climate crisis!
I know many of you have been losing sleep and reconsidering your lives in light of the climate crisis for years. We at The Climate Mobilization sure have. TCM exists to make it possible for people to turn that fear into intense dedication and focused action towards a restoring a safe climate.

...

Columnist Joe Romm noted that we aren’t doomed — we are choosing to be doomed by failing to respond adequately to the emergency, which would of course entail initiating a WWII-scale response to the climate emergency. Our Victory Plan lays out what policies would look like that, if implemented, would actually protect billions of people and millions of species from decimation. They include: 

1) An immediate ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure and a scheduled shut down of all fossil fuels in 10 years;
2) Massive government investment in renewables;
3) Overhauling our agricultural system to make it a huge carbon sink;
4) Fair-shares rationing to reduce demand;
5) A federally-financed job guarantee to eliminate unemployment;
6) A 100% marginal tax on income above $500,000.from

Gaius Publius: 

Why must we do this now? Because the climate crisis is starting now. Mass migration, in part due to climate change, is starting now. Deaths by weather extremes are increasing as we watch them. The three hottest years on record are the three immediately behind us. We’re so close to +2 degrees warming already, we can almost taste it. 

So what’s in the way? The answer is simple — we have ceded control of climate policy to the greedy and pathological, to climate sexagenarians and octogenarians like Charles and David Koch, who, through the politicians they control (looking at you, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump), are marching to their own graves in triumph, leaving a wrack behind.

'Dodgy' greenhouse gas data threatens Paris accord. Matt McGrath, BBC. Aug. 8, 2017.

Potent, climate-warming gases are being emitted into the atmosphere but are not being recorded in official inventories, a BBC investigation has found.

Air monitors in Switzerland have detected large quantities of one gas coming from a location in Italy.

However, the Italian submission to the UN records just a tiny amount of the substance being emitted.

Levels of some emissions from India and China are so uncertain that experts say their records are plus or minus 100%.

These flaws posed a bigger threat to the Paris climate agreement than US President Donald Trump's intention to withdraw, researchers told BBC Radio 4's Counting Carbon programme.

Bottom-up records

Among the key provisions of the Paris climate deal, signed by 195 countries in December 2015, is the requirement that every country, rich or poor, has to submit an inventory of its greenhouse-gas emissions every two years.

Under UN rules, most countries produce "bottom-up" records, based on how many car journeys are made or how much energy is used for heating homes and offices.

...

Another rare warming gas, carbon tetrachloride, once popular as a refrigerant and a solvent but very damaging to the ozone layer, has been banned in Europe since 2002.

But Dr Reimann told Counting Carbon: "We still see 10,000-20,000 tonnes coming out of China every year."

"That is something that shouldn't be there.

"There is actually no Chinese inventory for these gases, as they are banned and industry shouldn't be releasing them anymore."

China's approach to reporting its overall output of warming gases to the UN is also subject to constant and significant revisions.

Its last submission ran to about 30 pages - the UK's, by contrast, runs to several hundred.

Back in 2007, China simply refused to accept, in official documents, that it had become the largest emitter of CO2.

"I was working in China in 2007," said Dr Angel Hsu, from Yale University.

"I would include a citation and statistics that made this claim of China's position as the number one emitter - these were just stricken out, and I was told the Chinese government doesn't yet recognise this particular statistic so we are not going to include it."

A report in 2015 suggested one error in China's statistics amounted to 10% of global emissions in 2013.

The BBC investigation also discovered vast uncertainties in carbon emissions inventories, particularly in developing countries.

Methane, the second most abundant greenhouse gas after CO2, is produced by microbe activity in marshlands, in rice cultivation, from landfill, from agriculture and in the production of fossil fuels.

Global levels have been rising in recent years, and scientists are unsure why.

For a country such as India, home to 15% of the world's livestock, methane is a very important gas in their inventory - but the amount produced is subject to a high degree of uncertainty.

"What they note is that methane emissions are about 50% uncertain for categories like ruminants, so what this means is that the emissions they submit could be plus or minus 50% of what's been submitted," said Dr Anita Ganesan, from the University of Bristol, who has overseen air monitoring research in the country.

"For nitrous oxide, that's 100%."

There are similar uncertainties with methane emissions in Russia, of between 30-40%, according to scientists who work there.

"What we're worried about is what the planet experiences, never mind what the statistics are," said Prof Euan Nisbet, from Royal Holloway, University of London.

"In the air, we see methane going up. The warming impact from that methane is enough to derail Paris."

The rules covering how countries report their emissions are currently being negotiated.

But Prof Glen Peters, from the Centre for International Climate Research, in Oslo, said: "The core part of Paris [is] the global stock-takes which are going to happen every five years, and after the stock-takes countries are meant to raise their ambition, but if you can't track progress sufficiently, which is the whole point of these stock-takes, you basically can't do anything.

"So, without good data as a basis, Paris essentially collapses. It just becomes a talkfest without much progress."




Burning fossil fuels almost ended all life on Earth. Peter Brannen, Atlantic.com. July 11, 2017.

A road trip through the geological ruins of our planet's worst mass extinction.

Indonesian Borneo is Finished: They Also Sell Orangutans into Sex Slavery. Andre Vltchek, Counterpunch. June 2, 2017.

How destructive can man get, how ruthless, in his quest to secure maximum profit, even as he endangers the very survival of our planet? 

The tropical forests of Kalimantan (known as Borneo in Malaysia), the third largest island in the world, have almost totally disappeared. Coalmines are savagely scarring the hills; the rivers are polluted, and countless species are endangered or already extinct.

Flashbacks: NYT circa 1932, 1947, 1969

NYT 1932

NYT 1947

NYT 1969

Mike Lewis

Living the questions.

As one contemplates 2014, the wondrous, unique, tiny blue dot we dwell upon is in deep trouble. It is no news to anyone who knows me that I live between despair and hope. There are plenty of reasons for both. Alas, uncertainty is the only constant.

The personal question that continuously emerges from accepting this tension is where to put ones tiny repository of time and talent. If one is committed to making hope more concrete rather than despair more convincing, how do I concentrate my little bit? At the age of 61, this is the question I cannot seem to shake.

The fact that I am a Canadian exacerbates the restlessness this question provokes. I like to think I am a reasonable Canadian that has been shaped by the reasonableness of the country I grew up in. My problem is I am feeling more and more unreasonable. Is this because I am becoming a grumpy old man? Or, might it be my country is becoming more and more unreasonable?

As the gloomy evidence related to the catastrophic impact of human generated carbon becomes more and more unassailable our Federal government is doing all it can to accelerate the expansion of the Alberta tar sands, a province which if it were a nation, would be the highest per capita carbon emitter in the world.

As much of the world is cutting back on burning carbon rich coal (good news), American industry and various governmental agencies in Canada are doing all they can to facilitate more and more thermal coal (the dirtier grades) to be transported from south of the border by longer and longer trains, in order to find a temporary home at a new port installation smack dab in the middle of the Fraser River delta. Why? In order to so it can be loaded onto bigger and bigger ships destined for Asian markets, where it can be burned to produce more and more carbon spewing electricity to further clog our overloaded atmosphere; that is why!

Continuous claims that all this activity is being managed by a ‘reasonable’ approach to balancing interests is buttressed by advertising campaigns designed to soothe us with a promise of renewal and prosperity and protection of our natural environment. Those with a contrary perspective are seen as unreasonable, unwilling dreamers with their heads up their back ends who do not seem to comprehend the reality that the world needs our oil, and quick. Those with a contrary perspective that dare to publically challenge government and industry elites pushing the fossil fuel agenda are labeled somewhat more harshly; they are the foreign financed radicals deemed to be bordering on terrorist activity.

So much for democracy; deception, lying, threats, self-dealing, denial and deflection of evidence – is this our lot, the new Canada, a managed citizenry controlled by a combination of threats and a constricting but economically grandiose vision of being the prosperous new energy super-power?

So, back to the question; here I am. I live on the only earth we will ever know. I am a Canadian. I live in westernmost province; the proverbial gateway to Asia. I am 61. I have six grandchildren. I am of a generation that is the biggest, though mainly unwitting beneficiary of fossil fuel induced economic growth. I want us to radically but systematically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, a goal that is premised on the best evidence available. Unfortunately, I am living in a country where a small cabal of powerful, ideologically bound, self-interested leadership are eschewing their responsibility to help Canadians make a positive transition to a low carbon economy.

Given such a miserable set of circumstance, what then are the options then for an aging lotus-land WASP to responsibly share his time, talents and spirit?

Is my consideration of heading for the front lines of civil disobedience ‘responsible’, or not? Would it be a relevant witness to all I care for and love or would I merely be a sop to my momentary lapses into despair and a yearning for more timely relevance? It is a good question; after all, I have been a primary beneficiary of the age of fossil fuels and economic growth, so now that I know better, do I not have a primary responsibility to add my weight to the growing numbers of young and old actively taking the risks necessary to change the course being set to accelerate the rush for the spoils we seem bent on in this country? Is this not reasonable thing to ask of myself?

Or, should I stay on my path of writing, researching, consulting, speaking and spreading ideas and innovations that represent resilient pathways to meeting our basic needs into the future? But is this a ‘reasonable’ approach? After all, I have been doing this for 40 years and have a good idea of how long it takes to advance innovations that have proven themselves. Might confining my attention to this domain be akin to hiding my head in the sand? After all, alternatives, no matter how successful, are not invulnerable to the gathering onslaughts of ever more volatile climate ‘events’. Would not focus on reducing the risks of carbon be a wiser choice for the use of limited time, talent and resources?

Or, perhaps, I should just stop all of it and just live day to day. Many good and wonderful people I know are on this path; love those you are with and have faith that hardened hearts will be softened through acceptance and active caring. After all, without a ‘change of heart’ we will not prevail in the bigger issues. But is this attractive variation on the Zen thematic not merely a somewhat convenient way of just hiding out from the rather inconvenient truth that out challenges are systemic, not merely matters of the heart or even individual behaviour. Change in both are necessary.

My problem, or perhaps better put, my challenge is that I want it all. I want to help stop the madness, be an active participant putting in place the practical and hopeful alternatives than pressing the ‘pedal to the metal’ on the path to the precipice, and, I want to be imbued with a spirit satisfied with loving and nourishing what is right in front of me day by day.

Hmmmmmm….. I did confess at the beginning of this missive that reflection seems a chore at times, “a sure indication it is time to stop long enough to see what bubbles up.” Well, at this point, my search for the ‘new found land’ (now January 2nd) is yielding a strange aroma. My “want it all” conclusion feels like a lot of work and would take some serious attitude adjustments on my part, God forbid.

But might this just be what constitutes a generative pathway forward? Resisting what is wrong-headed and damaging, spreading alternatives that make‘common’ sense, and daily loving the people and the processes one is connected to; is this not a gracefully militant and practical way to live?

Thus ends my serious but light hearted rambling reflection on the state of…….well, whatever. As you might surmise my next communication of this sort could just as likely emanate from a prison, a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a successful innovation transplanted or from my pen while on a silent retreat where I will no doubt be personally bent on getting focused and experiencing stillness, an outcome which could be an inordinately long process. Or????....

I believe it is time for a rum and the dregs of the egg nog. Sometimes such arduous bouts of contemplation and the clarity of action that falls out of such deep thinking can be helped along by such intoxicating aids.

Anything is possible. May each of you have a wonder full and meaning full 2014 and may you and yours be showered with blessings as we all live the questions and challenges of our time on this earth. Keep posted. Maybe I will yet make some progress bringing resistance, building alternatives and living gracefully together into a nice neat and tidy whole.

Joanna Macy

It looks bleak. Big deal; it looks bleak.

Ecobuddhism: How do you feel about the Sixth Mass Extinction?

Joanna Macy: It’s happening. It’s combined with so much else that promises wholesale collapse. How do we begin to deal with the plastic in the ocean that covers areas the size of countries? What are cell phones and microwaves doing to our biological rhythms? What exactly is in our food? How do we address genetic modification of crops? We are so hooked on all of this, on every level. How do we begin to contain it?

The most immediate level of crisis concerns the Earth’s carrying capacity. Many civilizations prior to ours, starting with Mesopotamia, could no longer support themselves because they exhausted their natural resources. Carrying capacity is the level most people talk about. It’s a defining aspect of the climate crisis. How will we grow the food we need given huge variations and extremities of weather? How will we handle the natural disasters and famines that will result from a chaotic climate?

The second and deeper level is that consequences will extend far beyond the collapse of this civilization. We are creating a lack of possibility for future generations and civilizations, because we are using up mineral and petroleum resources without a thought for them. When this civilization collapses, the future will have largely Stone Age possibilities.

The third level of crisis is the enormous increase in the rate of extinctions—shredding the fabric of life, creating a loss of biodiversity so extreme that we can glimpse the doom of complex life forms. It takes highly differentiated and integrated and diverse systems to produce life forms complex enough for consciousness.

The fourth level of crisis would be the destruction of everything more complex than anaeorobic life forms, because of the loss of our oxygen production in the oceans and on land.

At any rate, I take all of these crises seriously and don’t argue with them. At the same time, I spend my life and breath to open our minds, and to change our heart-minds.


Sunsets are beautiful too, not just sunrises

EB: From where do you derive the psychic resources to bear witness to all this, while keeping in touch with joy?

JM: There’s a lot of joy in it. I find myself very buoyed by the work I do. I call it the work that re-connects. It involves speaking the truth about what we are facing. I think it’s very hard for people to do that alone, so this work thrives and requires groups.

It needs to be done in groups so we can hear it from each other. Then you realize that it gives a lie to the isolation we have been conditioned to experience in recent centuries, and especially by this hyper-individualist consumer society. People can graduate from their sense of isolation, into a realization of their inter-existence with all.

Yes, it looks bleak. But you are still alive now. You are alive with all the others, in this present moment. And because the truth is speaking in the work, it unlocks the heart. And there’s such a feeling and experience of adventure. It’s like a trumpet call to a great adventure. In all great adventures there comes a time when the little band of heroes feels totally outnumbered and bleak, like Frodo in Lord of the Rings or Pilgrim in Pilgrim’s Progress. You learn to say “It looks bleak. Big deal, it looks bleak.”

Our little minds think it must be over, but the very fact that we are seeing it is enlivening. And we know we can’t possibly see the whole thing, because we are just one part of a vast interdependent whole–one cell in a larger body. So we don’t take our own perceptions as the ultimate. My world view has been so interwoven between the Buddhist teachings and living systems theory. They inform each other so powerfully.

“Beings are numberless, I vow to liberate them all”. This may be the last gasp of life on Earth, and what a great last gasp, if we realize we have fallen in love with each other. If you are really in the moment of experiencing our reality, you don’t say “Oh I won’t experience this because it’s not going to last forever!” You’ve got this moment. It’s true for now. We can have a reasoned concern about what is down the track, without necessarily getting hooked on something having to endure.

EB: Even in Buddhism, where impermanence is a matter of course, there are no obvious concepts to deal with super-impermanence, in the sense that humans are now bringing an end to the Cenozoic era. In the best case, there may be an Ecozoic era to follow it. Continuing on our “business-as-usual” trajectory will acidify the oceans and trigger runaway global heating, epic mass extinction and a completely new cycle of geological time. A few climate scientists consider we may have already entered into runaway climate change.

JM: I suspect that they are right. Logically they are right: we don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. At my last workshop, people were saying “It’s too late” in the Truth Mandala that we do. And then they went out and got arrested at the White House, chained to the fence to protest the wars. So our acting with passionate dedication to life doesn’t seem to be affected. I would just as soon live that way. What keeps you going? Are you not fed by your work?

EB: Yes, it’s a powerful personal evolutionary demand that has to be lived. There is no choice.

JM: How lucky we are to be alive now—that we can measure up in this way.

EB: In the film about Jung’s life, A Matter of Heart, Marie-Louise van Franz reveals some visions he had towards the end of his life, where a large part of the planet was destroyed, but a small part endured.

JM: Certain Tibetan predictions and prophecies also indicate there will not be a total extinction of humans.

EB: James Lovelock asserts that America and China will continue to use fossil fuels and compete for the last resources till it is too late. Civilization and most of the great ecosystems will collapse. A human population of a few million might survive around the Arctic Circle.

JM: These are what the Buddha would call “views”. They are based on a lot of scientific evidence, so I take them very seriously. But what it comes down to is that we are here now. So the choice is how to live now. With the little time left, we could wake up more. We could allow this whole experience of the planet, which is intrinsically rewarding, to manifest through our heart-minds—so that the planet may see itself, so that life may see itself. And we can bless it in some way. So there is some source of blessing on us, even as we die. I think of a Korean monk who said “Sunsets are beautiful too, not just sunrises.” We can do it beautifully. If we are going to go out, then we can do it with some nobility, generosity and beauty, so we do not fall into shock and fear.

The work that I do we call The Work that Reconnects. I sensed from the time that I started it a little over 30 years ago, that on one level it was to help people be better activists – more resilient, more creative, more responsible, more effective. And on a more ultimate level, I recognized I was doing it so that when things fall apart, we won’t turn on each other.

EB: Lovelock considers humanity could become a disorganized rabble led by competing war lords.

JM: That is already happening! Look at America. We are at each other’s throat. We are steeped in delusion and lies.

EB: And that could well be a strategy of Disaster Capitalism. Perhaps a transpersonal movement in the collective unconscious could bring about a social tipping point.

JM: Or even in the collective consciousness. We can never say from our little point of view that it’s too late for that.


The Privatization of Practice

EB: In The Corporation, Joel Bakan asked a leading psychiatrist to examine corporate behaviour (externalizing all costs onto society) using standard diagnostic criteria. The doctor found he was looking at the profile of a psychopath. The dominant institution of our time has been created in the image of a psychopath, and it is legally mandated to behave as such.

JM: That’s right, they are required to! And no system where you try to maximize just one variable can avoid runaway. Indeed the bad news has gotten overwhelmingly bad since a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court gave corporations the right to make unlimited, secret political donations in Citizens United vs the FEC.

EB: We have a conjunction of “corporate psychopathy” with the immense power of fossil fuels–the most profitable business in human history. And though it’s potentially fatal for our species, it’s so difficult to hear the story. The American broadcast media is thoroughly controlled by corporate ownership or advertising revenue.

JM: They have reduced the population to a state of such stupidity. I don’t even watch TV. I suppose I should, if only to see what is happening to my country. It’s a terrible degeneration, a cultural nausea. Even listener-supported radio, which provides some oxygen, is under assault. In America now we live in a “national security state” with a debilitating element of mental servitude or mind control.

And as far as Buddhism is concerned, I find that Western Buddhists tend to privatize their practice, and look for what I call premature equanimity. They go for peace of mind and that is such an inadequate response.

EB: Spiritual practice as anaesthetic? If we can put a name to certain things, there’s a possibility of opening new space up for spiritual creativity. Just as the Australian Zen teacher Susan Murphy named something important when she wrote about The Untellable Non-story of Global Warming. Every week Australian farmers commit suicide because their land and their lives have been completely ruined by drought, while large mining corporations corrupt its politics and export its coal to heat China's blast furnaces.


Uncertainty, Despair & Positive Disintegration

JM: I find a lot of what I am drawn to in the teaching I do, the experiential work, is to help people make friends with uncertainty, and reframe it as a way of coming alive. Because there are never any guarantees at any point in life. Perhaps it’s more engrained in the American citizen that we feel we ought to know, we ought to be certain, we ought to be in control, we ought to be upbeat, we ought to be smiling, we ought to be sociable. That cultural cast has tremendous power to keep us benumbed and becalmed. So it’s been central to my life and my work to make friends with our despair, to make friends with our pain for the world. And thereby to dignify it and honour it. That is very freeing for people.

EB: I suppose it is to embrace the shadow as well.

JM: Yes, and it’s a big shadow. I find certain science fiction, the imagination, very helpful here. I like to be stretched. Olaf Stapledon wrote in the 1930s, before the nuclear age, with an incredible imagination that was also profoundly spiritual. In The Star Maker, the human mind of Earth in the head of a particular man starts to voyage through space/time and sees the drama that we are involved in here, recognizing our mutual belonging before we kill each other. He sees this basic drama in many different forms, and it’s so rich. Of course, there are planets where consciousness came that just failed. But the adventure as a whole is so big.

Living systems theory has been so helpful to me. I think there is a drive within living systems to complexify, to wake up—there is an evolutionary movement. I speak out of the love and excitement generated by my little work, which many people are doing with me. It does require being able to experience pain. It does require tears and outrage. It does require positive disintegration. Our whole culture needs positive disintegration. It has to die to itself. So my Christian upbringing is relevant there: Good Friday and Easter, the necessity for death and rebirth. We are going to die as a culture, and it’s better for us to do it consciously, so we don’t inflict it on everyone else.


The Death Wish & the Fourth Gem

EB: Are we going to die as a species too? Would the ego-death of our species precede or modify an extinction of our species?

JM: Well, I suppose one could make a deep ecology/activist case for a species-specific poison to be put into the system, to get rid of the humans for the sake of non-humans. But it’s too late for that because we have poisoned the planet with our radioactive materials and all our other toxins. Only we can know what they are, so we need to stay around to keep them out of the biosphere to the extent that we can. We don’t have the luxury of committing suicide as a species.

EB: Yet the famous evolutionary biologist Edward Wilson wrote that remarkable article, Is Humanity Suicidal?

JM: Well we are acting that way. We are acting as if we had a colossal death wish.

EB: Your workshops are obviously coming from the experiential side. If we look at Eco-psychology, all that Rozsak and colleagues have done, I wonder if there is a case to develop a certified practical training. Would that be useful?

JM: Oh my goodness, yes. But the academic institutions are not friendly to something that eludes the control of narrowly-defined disciplines. So there are probably some other places you can go.

Wherever I go with workshops, I find the readiness to experience a collective awakening. I’m astonished by how explicit this is. It’s a sense of wanting to belong to the Earth, aching for reverence for the Earth. Again and again, I believe that people would be ready to die for our world, to save the life process. There is something pressing within the heart-mind that is just huge. It’s happening very fast.

That’s one nice thing about being as old as I am. I am 81 and I’ve been watching the mindset of people through the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and the first decade of this century. I was doing doctoral work as late as the 70s. The changes since then are staggering.

A major change is the relevance people are now finding in native American teachings. There’s a deep respect for the wisdom that is there, and for the nobility of character that it fostered. I think that it is a precious addition to our triple gem—this fourth gem of our time—that the native peoples are speaking out.

Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy (b 1929) is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory & deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with four decades of activism. She has created a ground-breaking theoretical framework for personal & social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application. Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness & the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and contemporary science. The many dimensions of this work are explored in her 10 books. Many thousands of people around the world have participated in her workshops, which help people transform despair and apathy, in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, into constructive and collaborative action. They elicit a new way of seeing the world as our larger living body, that frees us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth. Joanna travels widely giving lectures, workshops & trainings in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia. She lives in Berkeley, California, near her children and grandchildren.

Edward O. Wilson, 1993

Is humanity suicidal?

Abstract
The world's fauna and flora has entered a crisis unparalleled since the end of the Mesozoic Era, with the extinction rate of species now elevated to more than a thousand times that existing before the coming of humanity. Scientists and policy makers are ill-prepared to moderate this hemorrhaging, because so little is known of the biology of the Earth's millions of species and because so little effort has been directed toward conservation thus far. With the vanished species will go great potential wealth in scientific knowledge, new products, ecosystems services, and part of the natural world in which the human species originated. The need for new research and improved management is thus urgent. If it is not met, humanity will likely survive, but in a world biologically impoverished for all time.


Is humanity suicidal? (first published in New York Times Magazine, May 30 1993)

Imagine that on an icy moon of Jupiter - say Ganymede - the space station of an alien civilization is concealed. For millions of years its scientists have closely watched the earth. Because their law prevents settlement on a living planet, they have tracked the surface by means of satellites equipped with sophisticated sensors, mapping the spread of large assemblages of organisms, from forests, grasslands and tundras to coral reefs and the vast planktonic meadows of the sea. They have recorded millennial cycles in the climate, interrupted by the advance and retreat of glaciers and scattershot volcanic eruptions.

The watchers have been waiting for what might be called the Moment. When it comes, occupying only a few centuries and thus a mere tick in geological time, the forests shrink back to less than half their original cover. Atmospheric carbon dioxide rises to the highest level in 100,000 years. The ozone layer of the stratosphere thins, and holes open at the poles. Plumes of nitrous oxide and other toxins rise from fires in South America and Africa, collect in the upper troposphere and drift eastward across the oceans. At night the land surface brightens with millions of pinpoints of light, which coalesce into blazing swaths across Europe, Japan and eastern North America. A semi-circle of fire spreads from gas flares around the Persian Gulf.

It was all but inevitable, the watchers might tell us if we met them, that from the great diversity of large animals, one species or another would eventually gain intelligent control of Earth. That role has fallen to Homo sapiens, a primate risen in Africa from a lineage that split away from the chimpanzee line five to eight million years ago. Unlike any creature that lived before, we have become a geophysical force, swiftly changing the atmosphere and climate as well as the composition of the world's fauna and flora. Now in the midst of a population explosion, the human species has doubled to 5.5 billion during the past 50 years. It is scheduled to double again in the next 50 years. No other single species in evolutionary history has even remotely approached the sheer mass in protoplasm generated by humanity.

Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. It was a misfortune for the living world in particular, many scientists believe, that a carnivorous primate and not some more benign form of animal made the breakthrough. Our species retains hereditary traits that add greatly to our destructive impact. We are tribal and aggressively territorial, intent on private space beyond minimal requirements and oriented by selfish sexual and reproductive drives. Cooperation beyond the family and tribal levels comes hard. Worse, our liking for meat causes us to use the sun's energy at low efficiency. It is a general rule of ecology that (very roughly) only about 10 percent of the sun's energy captured by photosynthesis to produce plant tissue is converted into energy in the tissue of herbivores, the animals that eat the plants. Of that amount, 10 percent reaches the tissue of the carnivores feeding on the herbivores. Similarly, only 10 percent is transferred to carnivores that eat carnivores. And so on for another step or two. In a wetlands chain that runs from marsh grass to grasshopper to warbler to hawk, the energy captured during green production shrinks a thousandfold. In other words, it takes a great deal of grass to support a hawk. Human beings, like hawks, are top carnivores, at the end of the food chain whenever they eat meat, two or more links removed from the plants; if chicken, for example, two links, and if tuna, four links. Even with most societies confined today to a mostly vegetarian diet, humanity is gobbling up a large part of the rest of the living world. We appropriate between 20 and 40 percent of the sun's energy that would otherwise be fixed into the tissue of natural vegetation, principally by our consumption of crops and timber, construction of buildings and roadways and the creation of wastelands. In the relentless search for more food, we have reduced animal life in lakes, rivers and now, increasingly, the open ocean. And everywhere we pollute the air and water, lower water tables and extinguish species.

The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. It is possible that intelligence in the wrong kind of species was foreordained to be a fatal combination for the biosphere. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself. This admittedly dour scenario is based on what can be termed the juggernaut theory of human nature, which holds that people are programmed by their genetic heritage to be so selfish that a sense of global responsibility will come too late. Individuals place themselves first, family second, tribe third and the rest of the world a distant fourth. Their genes also predispose them to plan ahead for one or two generations at most. They fret over the petty problems and conflicts of their daily lives and respond swiftly and often ferociously to slight challenges to their status and tribal security. But oddly, as psychologists have discovered, people also tend to underestimate both the likelihood and impact of such natural disasters as major earthquakes and great storms.

The reason for this myopic fog, evolutionary biologists contend, is that it was actually advantageous during all but the last few millennia of the two million years of existence of the genus Homo. The brain evolved into its present form during this long stretch of evolutionary time, during which people existed in small, preliterate hunter-gatherer bands. Life was precarious and short. A premium was placed on close attention to the near future and early reproduction, and little else. Disasters of a magnitude that occur only once every few centuries were forgotten or transmuted into myth. So today the mind still works comfortably backward and forward for only a few years, spanning a period not exceeding one or two generations. Those in past ages whose genes inclined them to short term thinking lived longer and had more children than those who did not. Prophets never enjoyed a Darwinian edge.

The rules have recently changed, however. Global crises are rising within the life span of the generation now coming of age, a foreshortening that may explain why young people express more concern about the environment than do their elders. The time scale has contracted because of the exponential growth in both the human population and technologies impacting the environment. Exponential growth is basically the same as the increase of wealth by compound interest. The larger the population, the faster the growth; the faster the growth, the sooner the population becomes still larger. In Nigeria, to cite one of our more fecund nations, the population is expected to double from its 1988 level to 216 million by the year 2010. If the same rate of growth were to continue to 2110, its population would exceed that of the entire present population of the world. With people everywhere seeking a better quality of life, the search for resources is expanding even faster than the population. The demand is being met by an increase in scientific knowledge, which doubles every 10 to 15 years. It is accelerated further by a parallel rise in environment-devouring technology.

Because Earth is finite in many resources that determine the quality of life - including arable soil, nutrients, fresh water and space for natural ecosystems - doubling of consumption at constant time intervals can bring disaster with shocking suddenness. Even when a non-renewable resource has been only half used, it is still only one interval away from the end. Ecologists like to make this point with the French riddle of the lily pond. At first there is only one lily pad in the pond, but the next day it doubles, and thereafter each of its descendants doubles. The pond completely fills with lily pads in 3o days. When is the pond exactly half full? Answer: on the 29th day. Yet, mathematical exercises aside, who can safely measure the human capacity to overcome the perceived limits of Earth? The question of central interest is this: Are we racing to the brink of an abyss, or are we just gathering speed for a takeoff to a wonderful future? The crystal ball is clouded; the human condition baffles all the more because it is both unprecedented and bizarre, almost beyond understanding. In the midst of uncertainty, opinions on the human prospect have tended to fall loosely into two schools.

The first, exemptionalism, holds that since humankind is transcendent in intelligence and spirit, so must our species have been released from the iron laws of ecology that bind all other species. No matter how serious the problem, civilized human beings, by ingenuity, force of will and - who knows - divine dispensation, will find a solution. Population growth? Good for the economy, claim some of the exemptionalists, and in any case a basic human right, so let it run. Land shortages? Try fusion energy to power the desalting of sea water, then reclaim the world's deserts. (The process might be assisted by towing icebergs to coastal pipelines.) Species going extinct? Not to worry. That is nature's way. Think of humankind as only the latest in a long line of exterminating agents in geological time. In any case, because our species has pulled free of old-style, mindless Nature, we have begun a different order of life. Evolution should now be allowed to proceed along this new trajectory. Finally, resources? The planet has more than enough resources to last indefinitely, if human genius is allowed to address each new problem in turn, without alarmist and unreasonable restrictions imposed on economic development. So hold the course, and touch the brakes lightly.

The opposing idea of reality is environmentalism, which sees humanity as a biological species tightly dependent on the natural world. As formidable as our intellect may be and as fierce our spirit, the argument goes, those qualities are not enough to free us from the constraints of the natural environment in which our human ancestors evolved. We cannot draw confidence from successful solutions to the smaller problems of the past. Many of Earth's vital resources are about to be exhausted, its atmospheric chemistry is deteriorating and human populations have already grown dangerously large. Natural ecosystems, the wellsprings of a healthful environment, are being irreversibly degraded. At the heart of the environmentalist world view is the conviction that human physical and spiritual health depends on sustaining the planet in a relatively unaltered state. Earth is our home in the full, genetic sense, where humanity and its ancestors existed for all the millions of years of their evolution. Natural ecosystems - forests, coral reefs, marine blue waters - maintain the world exactly as we would wish it to be maintained. When we debase the global environment and extinguish the variety of life, we are dismantling a support system that is too complex to understand, let alone replace, in the foreseeable future.

Space scientists theorize the existence of a virtually unlimited array of other planetary environments, almost all of which are uncongenial to human life. Our own Mother Earth, lately called Gaia, is a specialized conglomerate of organisms and the physical environment they create on a day-to-day basis, which can be destabilized and turned lethal by careless activity. We run the risk, conclude the environmentalists, of beaching ourselves upon alien shores like a great confused pod of pilot whales. If I have not done so enough already by tone of voice, I will now place myself solidly in the environmentalist school, but not so radical as to wish a turning back of the clock, not given to driving spikes into Douglas firs to prevent logging and distinctly uneasy with such world movements as ecofeminism, which holds that Mother Earth is a nurturing home for all life and should be revered and loved as in pre-modern (paleolithic and archaic) societies and that ecosystematic abuse is rooted in androcentric that is to say, male-dominated-concepts, values and institutions. Still, however soaked in androcentric culture, I am radical enough to take seriously the question heard with increasing frequency “Is humanity suicidal?” Is the drive to environmental conquest and self-propagation embedded so deeply in our genes as to be unstoppable? My short answer - opinion if you wish - is that humanity is not suicidal, at least not in the sense just stated. We are smart enough and have time enough to avoid an environmental catastrophe of civilization-threatening dimensions. But the technical problems are sufficiently formidable to require a redirection of much of science and technology, and the ethical issues are so basic as to force a reconsideration of our self-image as a species. There are reasons for optimism, reasons to believe that we have entered what might someday be generously called the Century of the Environment.

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, attracted more than 120 heads of government, the largest number ever assembled, and helped move environmental issues closer to the political center stage; on Nov 18, 1992, more than 1,500 senior scientists from 69 countries issued a "Warning to Humanity," stating that overpopulation and environmental deterioration put the very future of life at risk. The greening of religion has become a global trend, with theologians and religious leaders addressing environmental problems as a moral issue. In May 1992, leaders of most of the major American denominations met with scientists as guests of members of the United States Senate to formulate a "Joint Appeal by Religion and Science for the Environment." Conservation of biodiversity is increasingly seen by both national governments and major landowners as important to their country's future. Indonesia, home to a large part of the native Asian plant and animal species, has begun to shift to land-management practices that conserve and sustainably develop the remaining rain forests. Costa Rica has created a National Institute of Biodiversity. A pan-African institute for biodiversity research and management has been founded, with headquarters in Zimbabwe. Finally, there are favorable demographic signs. The rate of population increase is declining on all continents, although it is still well above zero almost everywhere and remains especially high in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite entrenched traditions and religious beliefs, the desire to use contraceptives in family planning is spreading. Demographers estimate that if the demand were fully met, this action alone would reduce the eventual stabilized population by more than two billion. In summary, the will is there.

Yet the awful truth remains that a large part of humanity will suffer no matter what is done. The number of people living in absolute poverty has risen during the past 20 years to nearly one billion and is expected to increase another 100 million by the end of the decade. Whatever progress has been made in the developing countries, and that includes an overall improvement in the average standard of living, is threatened by a continuance of rapid population growth and the deterioration of forests and arable soil. Our hopes must be chastened further still, and this is in my opinion the central issue, by a key and seldom recognized distinction between the nonliving and the living environments. Science and the political process can be adapted to manage the nonliving, physical environment. The human hand is now upon the physical homeostat. The ozone layer can be mostly restored to the upper atmosphere by elimination of CFC's, with these substances peaking at six times the present level and then subsiding during the next half century. Also, with procedures that will prove far more difficult and initially expensive, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can be pulled back to concentrations that slow global warming.

The human hand, however, is not upon the biological homeostat. There is no way in sight to micromanage the natural ecosystems and the millions of species they contain. That feat might be accomplished by generations to come, but then it will be too late for the ecosystems and perhaps for us. Despite the seemingly bottomless nature of creation, humankind has been chipping away at its diversity, and Earth is destined to become an impoverished planet within a century if present trends continue. Mass extinctions are being reported with increasing frequency, in every part of the world. They include half the freshwater fishes of peninsular Malaysia, 10 birds native to Cebu in the Philippines, half of the 41 tree snails Of Oahu, 44 of the 68 shallow-water mussels of the Tennessee River shoals, as many as 90 plant species growing on the Centinela Ridge in Ecuador, and in the United States as a whole, about 200 plant species, with another 680 species and races now classified as in danger of extinction. The main cause is the destruction of natural habitats, especially tropical forests. Close behind, especially on the Hawaiian archipelago and other islands, is the introduction of rats, pigs, beard grass, lantana and other exotic organisms that outbreed and extirpate native species.

The few thousand biologists worldwide who specialize in diversity are aware that they can witness and report no more than a very small percentage of the extinctions actually occurring. The reason is that they have facilities to keep track of only a tiny fraction of the millions of species and a sliver of the planet's surface on a yearly, basis. They have devised a rule of thumb to characterize the situation: that whenever careful studies are made of habitats before and after disturbance, extinctions almost always come to light. The corollary: the great majority of extinctions are never observed. Vast numbers of species are apparently vanishing before they can be discovered and named. There is a way, nonetheless, to estimate the rate of loss indirectly. Independent studies around the world and in fresh and marine waters have revealed a robust connection between the size of a habitat and the amount of biodiversity it contains. Even a small loss in area reduces the number of species. The relation is such that when the area of the habitat is cut to a tenth of its original cover, the number of species eventually drops by roughly one half.

Tropical rain forests, thought to harbor a majority of Earth's species (the reason conservationists get so excited about rain forests), are being reduced by nearly that magnitude. At the present time they occupy about the same area as that of the 48 conterminous United States, representing a little less than half their original, prehistoric cover; and they are shrinking each year by about 2 percent, an amount equal to the state of Florida. If the typical value (that is, 90 percent area loss causes 50 percent eventual extinction) is applied, the projected loss of species due to rain forest destruction worldwide is half a percent across the board for all kinds of plants, animals and microorganisms. When area reduction and all the other extinction agents are considered together, it is reasonable to project a reduction by 20 percent or more of the rain forest species by the year 2020, climbing to 50 percent or more by mid-century, if nothing is done to change current practice. Comparable erosion is likely in other environments now under assault, including many coral reefs and Mediterranean-type heathlands of Western Australia, South Africa and California.

The ongoing loss will not be replaced by evolution in any period of time that has meaning for humanity. Extinction is now proceeding thousands of times faster then the production of new species. The average life span of a species and its descendants in past geological eras varied according to group (like molluscs, echinoderms or flowering plants) from about 1 to 10 million years. During the past 500 million years, there have been five great extinction spasms comparable to the one now being inaugurated by human expansion. The latest, evidently caused the strike of an asteroid, ended the Age of Reptiles 66 million years ago. In each case it took more than 10 million years for evolution to completely replenish the biodiversity lost. And that was in an otherwise undisturbed natural environment. Humanity is now destroying most of the habitats where evolution can occur. The surviving biosphere remains the great unknown of Earth in many respects. On the practical side, it is hard even to imagine what other species have to offer in the way of new pharmaceuticals, crops, fibers, petroleum substitutes and other products. We have only a poor grasp of the ecosystem services by which other organisms cleanse the water, turn soil into a fertile living cover and manufacture the very air we breathe. We sense but do not fully understand what the highly diverse natural world means to our esthetic pleasure and mental well-being.

Scientists are unprepared to manage a declining biosphere. To illustrate, consider the following mission they might be given. The last remnant of a rain forest is about to be cut over. Environmentalists are stymied. The contracts have been signed, and local landowners and politicians are intransigent. In a final desperate move, a team of biologists is scrambled in an attempt to preserve the biodiversity by extraordinary means. Their assignment is the following: collect samples of all the species of organisms quickly, before the cutting starts; maintain the species in zoos, gardens and laboratory cultures or else deep-freeze samples of the tissues in liquid nitrogen, and finally, establish the procedure by which the entire community can be reassembled on empty ground at a later date, when social and economic conditions have improved. The biologists cannot accomplish this task, not if thousands of them came with a billion-dollar budget. They cannot even imagine how to do it. In the forest patch live legions of species: perhaps 300 birds, 500 butterflies, 200 ants, 50,000 beetles, 1,000 trees, 5,000 fungi, tens of thousands of bacteria and so on down a long roster of major groups. Each species occupies a precise niche, demanding a certain place, an exact microclimate, particular nutrients and temperature and humidity cycles with specified timing to trigger phases of the life cycle. Many, perhaps most, of the species are locked in symbioses with other species; they cannot survive and reproduce unless arrayed with their partners in the correct idiosyncratic configurations. Even if the biologists pulled off the taxonomic equivalent of the Manhattan Project, sorting and preserving cultures of all the species, they could not then put the community back together again. It would be like unscrambling an egg with a pair of spoons. The biology of the microorganisms needed to reanimate the soil would be mostly unknown. The pollinators of most of the flowers and the correct timing of their appearance could only be guessed. The "assembly rules," the sequence in which species must be allowed to colonize in order to coexist indefinitely, would remain in the realm of theory.

In its neglect of the rest of life, exemptionalism fails definitively. To move ahead as though scientific and entrepreneurial genius will solve each crisis that arises implies that the declining biosphere can be similarly manipulated. But the world is too complicated to be turned into a garden. There is no biological homeostat that can be worked by humanity; to believe otherwise is to risk reducing a large part of Earth to a wasteland. The environmentalist vision, prudential and less exuberant than exemptionalism, is closer to reality. It sees humanity entering a bottleneck unique in history, constricted by population and economic pressures. In order to pass through to the other side, within perhaps 50 to 100 years, more science and entrepreneurship will have to be devoted to stabilizing the global environment. That can be accomplished, according to expert consensus, only by halting population growth and devising a wiser use of resources than has been accomplished to date. And wise use for the living world in particular means preserving the surviving ecosystems, micromanaging them only enough to save the biodiversity they contain, until such time as they can be understood and employed in the fullest sense for human benefit.


♦ Edward O. Wilson is a double winner of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. He is widely known for his illustrious career as a scientist, advocacy for environmentalism, and secular-humanist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters. He is Professor of Entomology and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

Genevieve Azam

From growth to degrowth: a brief history.

The notion of economic growth as a regular, ongoing, self-sustained process no longer holds up to critical analysis. Even during what’s been called “The Glorious Thirty” – the years between the end of World War II and the 1974 oil crisis – growth occurred almost solely in industrialized countries and involved a minority of the world population; it was built on the senseless waste and pillaging of limited natural resources, access to cheap fossil fuels, dependency on killer technologies and the creation of global inequalities and imbalances that would prove to be unbearable and unsustainable.

When it became evident that geophysical limits could bring growth to a halt, the concepts of durable or sustainable development were proposed. The 1987 Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, advocated for “clean” growth that guarantees ecological sustainability, development and social justice all at the same time. This proposal became the backbone of the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit. However, the explosion of inequalities and the fact that we have gone beyond the ecological limits of the planet have rendered hopes for sustainable development obsolete.

With economic and financial globalization, the integration of the world markets is said to be what will achieve development, which often involves countries assuming massive debts and making huge payments to service them. These, in turn, drive forced growth to guarantee repayment. It is thus no longer about balancing the three pillars of sustainable development – growth, social justice and the sustainability of the planet – but rather entrusting the task of caring for society and the Earth to the economy and the market.

In time, the “green economy” and “green growth” replaced the sustainable development goals. The green economy seeks to optimize resource management and incorporate nature into the large cycle of production, manufacturing and market valuation.

But this is not what’s happening. For the old industrialized countries, growth must be stimulated by demand from emerging countries, which did, in fact, experience astronomical growth rates in the 2000s. Having adopted the same economic model as the over-developed countries – based on unbridled acceleration of industrial production – they are now the ones being violently confronted by the limits of growth. The case of Brazil is emblematic: after having experienced a staggering increase in economic activity and having promoted social policies based on growth, the process came to a sudden halt and the country was plunged into a serious social and political crisis. Once again, growth generates the need for more growth in order to ease the frustrations caused by promises that are difficult or impossible to keep.

In growth-based societies, the cessation of growth means prolonged economic recessions, an explosion in poverty, an intensification of productivist or extractivist activities and setbacks in democracy. But social progress, prosperity and living well are possible without economic growth; in fact, they require a shift towards post-growth or degrowth societies.

The origins of the debate on growth

The public debate on growth began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of the strongest critiques came from the 1972 report for the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth (Meadows, 1972). This report led to the questioning of the foundations of industrial society in light of the biophysical limits of the Earth and exponential population growth. The report concluded by proposing zero growth. For methodological and political reasons, this report was the subject of much debate among right-wing, left-wing and Third World scholars. The latter perceived it as having been produced by rich countries with the goal of crystallizing inequalities so as to maintain their access to resources or as a resurgence of Malthusian theories.

But the report reminded all that growth depends on the extraction of non-renewable raw materials. After updating the report in 1992 and 2004, Dennis Meadows wrote in 2012 – forty years after the first version – that it was no longer possible to slow the system to zero growth because its ecologic footprint had increased beyond sustainable levels. According to him, that is why it is now necessary to reverse growth.

Also around that time, the works of Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen showed how thermodynamics and the laws of living beings are inseparable from the economy and society (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971 and 2006). Infinite material growth is unsustainable due to the irreversibility of the transformation of energy into matter. The economy is a system embedded in the biosphere: a bioeconomy. Even with recycling, no technical process will be able to totally eliminate the entropic aspects of the extraction and transformation of resources, as industrial societies absorb gigantic injections of polluting and non-renewable energy.

Georgescu-Roegen’s bioeconomics approach subordinates the economy to the geophysical limits of the Earth and the fair distribution of resources, and therefore involves profound changes to economic systems and their underlying values. Georgescu-Roegen’s best-known disciple and the founder of ecological economics, Herman Daly, defended a steady-state economy. Georgescu-Roegen rejected this proposal and affirmed that the economy must contract to return to the situation that existed prior to the point where the planet’s bio-capacity was exceeded (Daly, 1997).

Another source of inspiration for degrowth was the critique of development as the “Westernization of the world,” in the words of Serge Latouche (2006). This reflection was inspired by the works of Ivan Illich and, a little later, by André Gorz and Cornelius Castoriadis. They led to the questioning of industrial societies, which give machines a central role and rely on consumerism and its seductive imagery.

The debate has been taken up again in the past decade due to the impacts of globalization and the acceleration of the ecological disaster. The abundance, prosperity and peace promised by globalization and growth are becoming a nightmare: persistent and growing poverty and inequality, resource depletion, climate change, loss of biodiversity, reduced sense of well-being and an accelerated occurrence of environmental disasters and industrial accidents. The ideology of growth is beginning to crack under the ever more present signs that make its promises seem more remote and threats feel more imminent. Global warming provides clear evidence of this failure.

The term “degrowth” is provocative and almost blasphemous in nature. It is a watchword that prods people’s consciences in a world dominated by the cult of growth for the sake of growth – or, in other words, the pursuit of profit for the sake of profit.

One of its limitations is that it is often narrowly understood as promoting “negative growth” and as a result, it may obscure the issues of civilization at stake. This is why some critics of growth prefer to use the terms “post-growth,” “a-growth,” “anti-growth,” or, as Ivan Illich put it, “breaking the addiction to growth.”

Degrowth is not, in fact, the opposite of growth or negative growth, nor is it an economic concept, even though it refers to and originated in studies in economics. It means:

• Reducing consumption of natural resources and energy in accordance with the biophysical constraints and the renewal of the capacity of ecosystems. This involves exiting the productivist cycle of production and consumption; 
• Inventing a new political and social vision opposite to the one that underlies the ideology of growth and development; 
• Building a pluralistic and diverse social movement in which various currents of thought, experiences and strategies to build autonomous and frugal societies converge. Degrowth is not an alternative, but a matrix for alternatives; 
• Diverse ways to move beyond growth and reject immoderation; 
• A movement that raises the political and democratic question, “How can we live together and with nature?” instead of “How can we grow?” 

Degrowth and the way out of a growth economy

What economists call growth is the expansion of the quantitative measure of output, expressed in terms of gross domestic product (GDP). In other words, growth is the process that allows ever increasing consumption and capital accumulation. In the history of capitalism, this process is ongoing, with variations depending on the period and geographical location. Growth may be slow, as was the case during the 19th century and in the old industrial nations since the 1980s. “The Glorious Thirty” has often been taken as a model for strong and balanced growth that is conducive to social progress. Far from being a model, this period is actually an exception in the history of capitalism. It was only possible due to easy access to cheap natural resources in the Global South, severe pressure on the environment and the massive de-skilling and rationalization of labor. In return – and to deal with the Communist bloc and social protest – some social and economic rights were granted to the population.

Global growth not only draws on labor and capital; it also requires energy and natural resources. These resources are limited and cannot be replaced by technical capital, contrary to the affirmations of neoclassical economic models. Therefore, the capitalist process of production-consumption feeds on the expropriation and destruction of livelihoods and forms of life that escape market valuation. Since the 1980s, economic and financial globalization has accelerated the commodification of natural resources and living organisms, as well as the extraction of natural resources. However, the capitalist economy can only grow by escalating irreversible socio-environmental destruction and concentrating the wealth produced in the hands of a minority.

This is why degrowth is not the same as negative growth, or zero growth, or a stationary state: degrowth is not a shift towards downward economic fluctuations, nor a recession. It is a political choice that leads to a voluntary and planned reduction in the use of energy and resources, to redefining our needs and choosing “frugal abundance.”

In green capitalism, it is claimed that reducing pressure on resources can be achieved through the use of new technologies that improve technical and economic efficiency. But as long as the principles of growth and accumulation are not called into question, an increase in efficiency will be absorbed by an increase in the volume of production: past improvements in the energy efficiency of cars, for instance, were offset by an increase of average car power and the overall volume of production. This “rebound effect,” described by economist William Jevons in the 19th century, is why green growth is not a solution to coping with the limits of natural resources: it is merely a means of perpetuating growth and capital accumulation.

Green technologies have also given rise to the hope of “decoupling” economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions. It is argued that due to energy efficiency gains made possible by growth, emissions will eventually decrease. But this does not take into account the increase in the production volume that will negate any gains in efficiency and productivity. Growth remains the problem.

The same can be said of the so-called “immaterial” growth that is based on services and a knowledge economy. To expect a dematerialized growth economy to emerge is to ignore the very material basis of many services. Software may be essentially made of “grey matter,” but the production of hardware and computer chips uses raw materials, energy and large amounts of water.

Lastly, in industrialized countries, the strong, accelerated growth of the “Glorious Thirty” was only possible thanks to the extraction of cheap resources from colonized countries dominated by the North. The countries of the Global South, some of which are currently experiencing strong growth, will see this growth dry up much faster than it did in industrialized countries: they will be confronted with an explosion in the demand for natural resources and most will be forced to extract these resources in their own countries. They could always attempt to grab these resources in other countries, but they would have to wade into war to control these natural resources.

In the field of economics, Herman Daly (1997), Tim Jackson (2011), and many others are developing new theories on macroeconomics and prosperity without growth. However, degrowth is also a strong critique of economism and it is inconceivable without a degrowth society.


Degrowth and the way out of a growth-based society

Growth is not related only to the economy. It is a vision of society that makes “progress” a historical norm for all human societies. In capitalism, this norm is economic growth measured in terms of GDP. Thus, growth has become a political goal, a compulsory civic virtue, the only way to achieve a free and just society and the road to democracy. This ideology reduces society to a collection of workers and consumers deprived of any political dimension. Social conflicts are reduced to mere tensions around the distribution of wealth, regardless of the nature of this “wealth” and how it was obtained.

Neoliberalism has accelerated this process at the global level. The neoliberal policies of the 1980s can be understood as a reaction to the slowdown of growth in industrialized countries, which occurred in the 1970s. Free trade and the increased financialization of corporations have been the driving forces behind a desperate search for new sources of growth.

In the social-democratic tradition (of all stripes), growth is seen as a necessary condition for social justice. It is a question of making the pie bigger so that everyone gets a bigger piece, without worrying about what recipe and ingredients are used. Yet, social justice cannot be reduced to the redistribution of the results of growth: it is about recognizing the equal dignity of all humans and it is inseparable from the preservation of the material conditions that are required to guarantee this dignity. It was precisely the illusion that free trade agreements and competition can restore growth that has led large numbers of social-democratic politicians to convert to neoliberal policies since the 1980s.

This is why degrowth is not an economic concept: it involves the whole of society, its representations and values. It questions the Western norm of progress and its imposition on the entire planet. Degrowth is based on the relocalization of activities, the redistribution of wealth, recovering the meaning of work, convivial and soft technologies, slowing down and giving power back to grassroots communities.

Degrowth is the expression of several currents of critical thought: the critique of the market and globalization; of excess; of technology and techno-science; of anthropocentrism and instrumental rationality; of homo economicus and utilitarianism.

Degrowth is embodied by the social movements that reject acceleration, economic and financial globalization, the massive extraction of natural resources, the blind headlong rush on energy issues, advertising and consumerism, and social and environmental injustice.


Degrowth and development ideology

Faith in a universal kind of growth is now being shaken in societies of the Global South. Critical views on growth and progress remained limited to Western societies for a long time and began to appear well before the post-war boom in the works of W. Benjamin, H. Arendt, G. Anders, J. Thellul and the Frankfurt School, among others. They are now gaining ground in the Global South, whose populations are still widely considered candidates in need of growth. This is why critics of growth, particularly those in left -wing circles, are often portrayed as denying the humanity of the peoples of the South. This amounts to saying that growth is founded in nature and constitutes the only way humans can free themselves from a sub-human condition. The dehumanization of Western societies expose, in part, the fallacy of such arguments.

The call for degrowth will only make sense and influence public policies in the Global South if the process that has been initiated in industrialized countries, is accompanied by the redistribution of wealth and outlines what a desirable future looks like. Only then will Gandhi’s saying, “Live simply so others may simply live,” take on its full meaning.

Degrowth is a debatable option for societies of the Global South. They are not or not yet growth-based societies, their ecological footprint is low and the basic needs of the population have not yet been met. However, degrowth can be taken as a call not to enter a growth-based society, to break free from the economic and cultural domination of the Global North and to regain a sense of self-restraint and moderation that is often already present in their traditional cultures.


Degrowth and social movements

The ideology of growth was built over several centuries and its deconstruction will necessarily take a long time. It requires adopting social practices and making political choices that allow us to both deal with the pressing challenges of our time and lay the foundations for new ways to live together and inhabit the Earth.

Several social movements are part of the degrowth matrix, even though they do not necessarily claim the notion as theirs: the ones focusing on North-South relations and the pillaging of resources; farmers movements that reject productivism and promote “peasant agriculture”; movements fighting to cancel the debt that forces countries to export excessive amounts of raw materials at the expense of ecosystems; movements to reclaim land; the commons movement; movements for access to water; environmental justice movements; resistance to unnecessary large-scale projects (megadams, airports, highways, high speed trains, giant shopping centers); movements to decentralize energy and in favor of transition towns, Slow Food, Slow Science, Slow Cities, low tech instead of high tech, deglobalization, local food and the broader localization movement.

These resistance struggles and experiences are already tracing the path to other possible worlds. They are initiating a kind of change from below without which no social and political transformation is even thinkable. Is that enough? Where can we find leverage for broader transformations? While it is relatively simple to understand and agree on the need to change our vision, it is difficult to imagine what the transition towards a post-growth society looks like. This raises numerous questions. Degrowth of what, where and how? What kind of diversified policies and on what scale? How do we envisage solidarity and justice without economic growth? What are the milestones? What steps should we take? How can we organize industrial reconversion?

The alternatives to growth and productivism must be complementary at all levels: individual, local, national and global.

To move forward, it will be essential to achieve breakthroughs in the Global North for several reasons: 

• Capitalism and productivism were invented in countries of the Global North, as was productivist socialism. 
• This model was then exported from the Global North, as it found allies in the South. 
• This is where the illusion that unlimited growth of wealth is the necessary condition of happiness and justice is most deeply rooted. 
• In the countries of the Global North, the deterioration of ecosystems hits the poorest (food, health, housing, leisure) and economic and financial globalization destroys jobs, labor and nature. 

In the Global South, many resistance movements and concrete experiences are seeking to redefine the relationship between societies and the environment while challenging neoliberalism and productivism. These movements are generally long-standing and they are linked to what Juan Martínez Alier calls an “environmentalism of the poor” (Martínez Alier, 2002). They help to silence the pseudo-compassionate discourse about the countries of the Global South and those that claim that environmental concerns are only a luxury of rich countries and of the richest of the rich.

This reflection cannot be left in the hands of an enlightened elite composed of distinguished individuals and experts. We know that such a vision would only bring new forms of totalitarianism. Concrete social relationships and experiences must be the basis for our reflections.




Conclusion

Degrowth challenges both capitalism and socialism, and the political left and right. It questions any civilization that conceives freedom and emancipation as something achieved by tearing oneself away from and dominating nature, and that sacrifices individual and collective autonomy on the altar of unlimited production and the consumption of material wealth. Capitalism has brought further ills such as the expropriation of livelihoods, the submission of labor to the capitalist order and the commodification of nature. This project to establish rational control over the world, humanity and nature is now collapsing.

Degrowth – or, better said, post-growth or “breaking the addiction to growth” – outlines the paths to meet the aspirations of the movements that fight for the rights of Mother Earth, for deglobalization, and all broader struggles for true democracy.

William Rees

Staving off the coming global collapse.

‘Overshoot’ is when a species uses resources faster than can be replenished. We’re already there. And show no signs of changing.

Humans have a virtually unlimited capacity for self-delusion, even when self-preservation is at stake.

The scariest example is the simplistic, growth-oriented, market-based economic thinking that is all but running the world today. Prevailing neoliberal economic models make no useful reference to the dynamics of the ecosystems or social systems with which the economy interacts in the real world.
What truly intelligent species would attempt to fly spaceship Earth, with all its mind-boggling complexity, using the conceptual equivalent of a 1955 Volkswagen Beetle driver’s manual?

Consider economists’ (and therefore society’s) near-universal obsession with continuous economic growth on a finite planet. A recent ringing example is Kaushik Basu’s glowing prediction that “in 50 years, the world economy is likely (though not guaranteed) to be thriving, with global GDP growing by as much as 20 per cent per year, and income and consumption doubling every four years or so.”

Basu is the former chief economist of the World Bank, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor of economics at Cornell University, so he is no flake in the economics department. But this does not prevent a display of alarming ignorance of both the power of exponential growth and the state of the ecosphere. Income and consumption doubling every four years? After just 20 years and five doublings, the economy would be larger by a factor of 32; in 50 years it will have multiplied more than 5000-fold! Basu must inhabit some infinite parallel universe.

In fairness, he does recognize that if the number of cars, airplane journeys and the like double every four years with overall consumption, “we will quickly exceed the planet’s limits.” But here’s the thing — it’s 50 years before Basu’s prediction even takes hold and we’ve already shot past several important planetary boundaries.

Little wonder. Propelled by neoliberal economic thinking and fossil fuels, techno-industrial society consumed more energy and resources during the most recent doubling (the past 35 years or so) than in all previous history. Humanity is now in dangerous ecological overshoot, using even renewable and replenishable resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate and filling waste sinks beyond capacity. (Even climate change is a waste management problem — carbon dioxide is the single greatest waste by weight in all industrial economies.)

Meanwhile, wild nature is in desperate retreat. One example: from less than one per cent at the dawn of agriculture, humans and their domestic animals had ballooned to comprise 97 per cent of the total weight of terrestrial mammals by the year 2000. That number is closer to 98.5 per cent today, with wild mammals barely clinging to the margins.

The “competitive displacement” of other species is an inevitable byproduct of continuous growth on a finite planet. The expansion of humans and their artefacts necessarily means the contraction of everything else. (Politicians’ protests notwithstanding, there is a fundamental contradiction between population/economic growth and protecting the “environment.”)

Ignoring overshoot is dangerously stupid — we are financing growth, in part, by irreversibly liquidating natural resources essential to our own long-term survival.

And things can only get worse. Even at today’s “lacklustre” three-per-cent global growth rate, incomes/consumption would double in just 20 years and produce — in this century — dramatic climate change, widespread extinctions, the collapse of major biophysical systems, global strife and diminished prospects for continued civilized existence.

But even this threat isn’t enough to move the world community to act sensibly to save itself. Like a mind-altering drug, the compound myth of perpetual growth and continuous technological progress obscures reality. Economists thicken the fog by insisting that the economy is “decoupling” from nature — another illusion resulting from faulty accounting, modelling abstractions and the fudging effects of globalization (for example, wealthy countries “offshoring” their ecological impacts onto poorer countries and the global commons).

The biophysical evidence — that is, reality — shows that material consumption and waste production are still increasing with population and GDP growth. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide is accumulating at accelerating record rates in the atmosphere and the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 sequentially shared the distinction of being the warmest years in the instrumental record.

There is little question that the immediate drivers of overshoot are overpopulation and excess consumption, so there is widespread support for the idea of “clean production and consumption.” What only a few realists are willing to state out loud is that this must soon translate into less production/consumption by fewer people.

But this raises another problem. Thirty per cent of the world’s population are still considered to be “very poor” (living on less than $3.10 per day, purchasing power adjusted) and deserve to consume more.

Meanwhile, ours is a world of chronic gross social inequity. Oxfam recently reported that the world’s richest eight billionaires possess the same wealth as the poorest 50 per cent of humanity — more than 3.5 billion people). The richest fifth of people take home about 70 per cent of global income compared to just two per cent by the poorest fifth.

Such inequality deepens the hole we are digging for ourselves. There may be enough of everything to go around, but greater incomes enable the citizens of high-income countries to consume, on average, several times their equitable share of global economic and ecological output. Meanwhile the poor scrounge for crumbs at the bottom of our Earthly barrel. Even within prosperous nations, a widening income gap is known to undermine population health and erode social cohesion, the contemporary United States being an outstanding example.

Our growth-based, winner-takes-all economy has become egregiously unjust as well as ecologically precarious. Perversely, the world community prescribes still greater material growth as the only feasible solution!

How might a clear-sighted neutral observer interpret our predicament? First, she or he would point out that on a finite planet already in overshoot, it is not biophysically possible to raise the material standards of the poor to those of the rich sustainably — that is, without destroying the ecosphere, undermining life-support functions and precipitating global societal collapse. In a non-deluded world, governments would no longer see economic growth as the panacea for all that ails them; in particular, they would acknowledge that enough is literally enough and cease promoting growth as the primary solution to both North-South inequity and chronic poverty within nations.

Instead, a rational world would focus on devising institutions and policies for co-operative redistribution — ways to share the benefits of development more equitably. The goal should be to enhance the material well-being of developing countries and the poor and improve life-quality for all while simultaneously reducing both aggregate material consumption and world population.

Ensuring a socially just, economically secure and ecologically stable global environment requires: a) that rich nations consume less to free up the ecological space needed for justifiable consumption increases in poorer countries; and b) that the world implement a universal population management plan designed to reduce the total human population to a level that that can be supported indefinitely at a more-than-satisfactory average material standard. This is what it means to “live sustainably within the means of nature.”

Fortunately, various studies suggest that planned de-growth toward a quasi steady state economy is technically possible, would benefit the poor and could be achieved while improving overall quality of life even in high-income countries.

Considering the human suffering that would be avoided and number of non-human species that would be preserved, this is also a morally compelling strategy.

The foregoing diagnosis is anathema to the prevailing growth ethic, the naive fallacy that well-being is a continuous linear function of income, and politically correct avoidance of the population question. Many will therefore object on grounds that the suggested policy prescription is politically unfeasible and can never be implemented.

They may well be correct. The problem is that what is politically feasible is likely to be ecologically irrelevant or downright dangerous. Accelerated hydrocarbon development, better pipeline regulations and improved navigational aids for tanker traffic on B.C.’s coast, for example, don’t cut it as sustainable development in a world that should be abandoning fossil fuels.

The data show clearly that we are at a crucial stage of a slow but accelerating crisis. To be effective and timely, sustainability policy should already be consistent with the real-world evidence. Nature can no longer endure the consequences of “alternative facts.”

Failure to implement a global sustainability plan that addresses excess consumption and over-population while ensuring greater social equity may well be fatal to global civilization. Indeed, adherence to any variant of the growth-bound status quo promises a future of uncontrollable climate change, plummeting biodiversity, civil disorder, geopolitical turmoil and resource wars.

In these circumstances, should not elected politicians everywhere have an obligation to explain how their policies reflect the fact of global overshoot?

Denying reality is not a viable option; self-delusion can become all-destroying. If our leaders reject the foregoing framing, they should be required to show how the policies they are pursuing can deliver ecological stability, economic security, social equity and improved population health to future generations. Ordinary citizens should assert their right-to-know as if their lives depend upon it.

It is worth pointing out that B.C.’s recent provincial election campaign and Canada’s 2015 campaign ran with no reference to the key issues outlined here or any explanation of the omission (and the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign was even more other-worldly).

Are you worried yet?

[MW: yeah, I am; I despair; I despair for my children's uncertain unstable and dangerous future]