DRAFT - NOT FINISHED
I will follow for this and the remaining, the structure of key insights at the beginning and a detailed summary or notes from the readings from the week.
Key insights from the week
Huber (2021) dismissed
degrowth as a preoccupation of middle-class environmentalists in the
global North who feel “anxiety” about excess consumption. Such a
movement, he argues, can never hope to connect with the working class,
who are struggling to get by, and certainly cannot connect with social
movements in the global South, where mass poverty is widespread and
where, he claims, the concept of degrowth is largely unknown. These
claims constitute a significant misrepresentation of degrowth politics.
High-income countries are the
primary drivers of global ecological breakdown. The global North is
responsible for 92 percent of emissions in excess of the planetary
boundary (Hickel, 2020a), while the consequences of climate breakdown fall disproportionately upon the global South
. Crucially, these high levels
of consumption depend on a significant net appropriation from the
global South through unequal exchange, including 10.1 billion tons of
embodied raw materials and 379 billion hours of embodied labor per
year
In other words, economic growth in the North relies on patterns of
colonization: the appropriation of atmospheric commons, and the
appropriation of Southern resources and labour.
Just as Northern growth is colonial in character, so too “green
growth” visions tend to presuppose the perpetuation of colonial arrangements.
Transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy should be
done as rapidly as possible, but scaling solar panels, wind turbines and
batteries requires enormous material extraction, and this will come
overwhelmingly from the global South. Continued growth in the North
means rising final energy demand, which will in turn require rising
levels of extractivism.
Complicating matters further, decarbonization
cannot be accomplished fast enough to respect Paris targets as long as
energy use in the global North remains so high
Degrowth calls for rich nations to scale down throughput to sustainable levels, reducing aggregate energy use to enable a sufficiently
rapid transition to renewables, and reducing aggregate resource use to
reverse ecological breakdown. This demand is not just about ecology;
rather, it is rooted in anti-colonial principles.
Degrowth is, in other words, a
demand for decolonization. Southern countries should be free to organize their resources and labor around meeting human needs rather than
around servicing Northern growth.
throughput should decline in the North to get back within
sustainable levels while increasing in the South to meet human needs,
converging at a level consistent with ecological stability and universal
human welfare
For degrowth, the problem is
not ultimately the behavior of individual “consumers” (as in mainstream
environmentalist thought) but rather the structure and logic of the underlying economic system, namely, capitalism. We know that capitalism
is predicated on surplus extraction and accumulation; it must take more
from labor and nature than it gives back. As Marxist ecologists have
pointed out, such a system necessarily generates inequalities and
ecological breakdown. But many economic systems have been extractive
in the past; what makes capitalism distinctive, and uniquely problematic, is that it is organized around, and dependent on, perpetual growth.
In other words, capital seeks not only surplus, but an exponentially
rising surplus.
increase in commodity production, represented in terms of
price. This distinction between value and price is important. In order to
realize surplus value, capital seeks to enclose and commodify free
commons in order extract payment for access, or, in the realm of production, to depress the prices of inputs to below the value that is actually
derived from them. Both tendencies require appropriation from colonial
or neo-colonial “frontiers”, where labor and nature can be taken for free,
or close to free, and where costs can be “externalized”. In this sense,
capitalist growth is intrinsically colonial in character, and has been for
500 years
degrowth calls for the economy to be organized instead around
provisioning for human needs (use-value) through de-accumulation, deenclosure and de-commodification. Degrowth also rejects the cheapening of labour and resources, and the racist ideologies that are
deployed toward that end. In all of these ways, degrowth is about
decolonization
Degrowth scholarship and
activism is aligned with these movements, with demands directed specifically at the North. It is the sharp edge of anti-colonial struggle within
the metropole.
In other words, high-income nations could scale down
aggregate throughput while at the same time improving people’s lives by
organizing the economy around human needs rather than around capital
accumulation—that is, by distributing income and wealth more fairly,
while decommodifying and expanding public goods
What degrowth adds is the assertion
that growth in high-income nations is not required in order to achieve a
flourishing society. What is required is justice. Recognizing this is part of
building class consciousness against the ideology of capital
Ecosocialism without anti-imperialism is not an
ecosocialism worth having. And in the face of ecological breakdown,
solidarity with the South requires degrowth in the North.
This analysis proposes a novel method for quantifying national responsibility for damages related to
climate change by looking at national contributions to cumulative CO2 emissions in excess of the planetary boundary
of 350 ppm atmospheric CO2 concentration. This approach is rooted in the principle of equal per capita access to
atmospheric commons.
As of 2015, the USA was responsible for 40% of excess global CO2 emissions. The European Union (EU-28)
was responsible for 29%. The G8 nations (the USA, EU-28, Russia, Japan, and Canada) were together responsible
for 85%. Countries classified by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change as Annex I nations (ie, most
industrialised countries) were responsible for 90% of excess emissions. The Global North was responsible for 92%.
By contrast, most countries in the Global South were within their boundary fair shares, including India and China
(although China will overshoot soon).
These figures indicate that high-income countries have a greater degree of responsibility for climate
damages than previous methods have implied. These results offer a just framework for attributing national
responsibility for excess emissions, and a guide for determining national liability for damages related to climate
change, consistent with the principles of planetary boundaries and equal access to atmospheric commons.
When it comes to climate change,
however, what matters is stocks of CO2 in the atmosphere, not annual flows; so responsibility must be
measured in terms of each country’s contribution to
cumulative historical emissions
Using 1850 as the
base year, the USA and the EU-28 are about twice as
responsible as China, whereas India is responsible for
only a small fraction of historical emissions
No existing methods have attempted to quantify
responsibility for emissions in consumption-based terms,
in a manner that accounts for international trade.
High-income countries must not only reduce
emissions to zero more quickly than other countries,18
but they must also pay down their climate debts, which
are here conceptualised with respect to the planetary
boundary. It can be argued that damages sustained by
undershooting countries as a result of global warming
should be paid by overshooting countries in proportion to
their responsibility.
That phenomenon could be referred to as a
process of atmospheric colonisation. A small number of
high-income countries have appropriated substantially
more than their fair share of the atmospheric commons.
Should
post-colonial states be held responsible for territorial
emissions generated by colonial governments? Or should
responsibility for those emissions be allocated at least in
part to the relevant colonial power, on the grounds that
they were the primary beneficiaries of the underlying
industrial processes? The method presented above could
be adjusted accordingly in future research.
Human impacts on earth-system processes are overshooting several planetary boundaries, driving a crisis
of ecological breakdown. This crisis is being caused in large part by global resource extraction, which has increased
dramatically over the past half century. The following paper quantifies national responsibility for
ecological breakdown by assessing nations’ cumulative material use in excess of equitable and sustainable boundaries.
For this analysis, national fair shares are estimated on a sustainable resource corridor. These fair shares were
then subtracted from countries’ actual resource use to determine the extent to which each country has overshot its fair
share over the period 1970–2017. Through this approach, each country’s share of responsibility for global excess
resource use was calculated.
High-income nations are responsible for 74% of global excess material use, driven primarily by the
USA (27%) and the EU-28 high-income countries (25%). China is responsible for 15% of global excess material use,
and the rest of the Global South (ie, the low-income and middle-income countries of Latin America and the Caribbean,
Africa, the Middle East, and Asia) is responsible for only 8%. Overshoot in higher-income nations is driven
disproportionately by the use of abiotic materials, whereas in lower-income nations it is driven disproportionately by
the use of biomass.
These results show that high-income nations are the primary drivers of global ecological breakdown
and they need to urgently reduce their resource use to fair and sustainable levels. Achieving sufficient reductions will
likely require high-income nations to adopt transformative post-growth and degrowth approaches
On the Environmentalism of the poor
A
recent article by Dunlap and York compared results from four large cross-national
surveys conducted in several nations with differing levels of average income. Results
showed that citizens of poorer nations were equally if not more concerned about the
environment than citizens in wealthier countries.
‘‘global environment and conservation movement’’ excludes many organizations dedicated to environmental justice
EJ movements combine livelihood, social, economic, and environmental issues
with emphasis on issues of extraction and pollution. They set their ‘‘moral economy’’ in
opposition to the logic of extraction of oil, minerals, wood, or agrofuels at the
‘‘commodity frontiers,’’ defending biodiversity and their own livelihood.
The poor, because of their direct reliance on natural resources outside the market,
are often careful environmental managers. The environment provides commodities
and amenities; it also provides the very conditions of livelihood and existence.
The environmental movements of
the poor must get into the sustainability mainstream beyond their participation in
‘‘community-based conservation’’ or co-management of natural parks.
This does not imply that poor people are always on the side of conservation,
which would be patently untrue. What it means is that in many conflicts of resource
extraction or pollution, the local poor people (indigenous or not) are often on the
side of conservation not so much because they are self-conscious environmentalists
but because of their livelihood needs and their cultural values
Social Metabolism
The is an increasing social metabolism of human economies
pushed by population and economic growth, the resulting ecological distribution
conflicts among human groups, and then the different languages of valuation
deployed historically and currently by such groups when they reaffirm their rights
to use the environmental services and products in dispute.
In
affluent societies almost nobody starves, and poor people (as in the United States)
are fatter on average than rich people, probably the first time this has happened
in human history. As regards the exosomatic use of energy, in the course of
history, humans have developed numerous artefacts and machines that use energy
for production or amusement
In poor countries, food energy is a substantial part of the total use of energy. In
other words, the exo/endo energy use ratio is 2 or 3. In the countries of the
European Union, the energy use per person per year is of the order of 200 to 300
GJ, and more in the United States where the exo/endo ratio reaches 100
The unequal exosomatic use of energy largely explains the differences in
the per capita production of carbon dioxide, which in turn explains the international
conflict over property rights on the carbon sinks (oceans, soils, new vegetation) and
the atmosphere as a temporary reservoir, a conflict that could have come into the
open when the science of the enhanced greenhouse effect was first established in
1895 by Svante Arrhenius.
Material and Energy Flow Accounting
MEFA is a set of methods for describing and analyzing socio-economic
metabolism. It examines economies as systems that reproduce themselves not only
socially and culturally, but also physically through a continuous exchange of energy and
matter with their natural environments and with other socio-economic systems.
The
‘‘human appropriation of net primary production,’’ or HANPP, is defined as the
ratio between the actual net primary production used by humans and what net
primary production would be without human intervention.
The HANPP has decreased slightly
in Europe since the 1950s, but it is growing in many regions of the world, signalling a
loss of biodiversity and an increase in social conflicts.
In practice,
water scarce regions may be exporting virtual water. For example, in Argentina, the
soybean frontier has reached the relatively dry region of Chaco. Seen from Europe, this
is considered an import of virtual water (as opposed to an import of real water, which is
generally too expensive). This relieves pressure on the importer’s own water resources
and shifts this demand to other countries, triggering eco-social distributional effects.
Ecological and Environmental conflict
At the global level, more fossil fuel extraction means more carbon
dioxide production, which creates a conflict over the distribution of responsibilities and
damages from climate change.
Increased use of energy also leads to conflicts regarding transport, such as those
created by oil spills. Even wind energy provokes new conflicts in Europe because of the
(‘‘post-materialist’’?) valuation of landscapes
agro-fuels are criticized because of their low EROI, because they increase HANPP
to the detriment of other species, and because of their ‘‘virtual’’ water content.
Neoclassical economists attribute ‘‘externalities’’ to so-called ‘‘market failure,’’ but from a
socio-historic point of view, externalities should be seen as ‘‘cost-shifting successes’’ that
are not always accepted quietly.
However, clear historical trends appear (including trends in
exports and imports) on the material flows, which suggests that they are likely to trigger
increasing conflicts.
In an ecological-economics theory of unequal exchange, attention is drawn to
physical measurements, focusing on the unequal amounts of energy (or exergy, i.e.
available energy), materials (in tons), or land used up. Then, the more of the original
exergy and materials that have been dissipated in producing the final products or
services (in the metropolis), the higher the prices that these final products or services
will have to be.37 Thus, ‘‘market prices are the means by which world system centers
extract exergy from the peripheries,’’
Given that the benefits from shrimp farming accrue in only
the first few years, while the benefits from the mangroves could be lost forever, it is
easy to conclude that the mangroves may be defended through cost-benefit analysis.
Much will depend on the rate of discount, the assumptions behind the figures, and
the methods of economic valuation. However, a pro-shrimp economist could easily
argue in favor of shrimp farming using a cost-benefit analysis along with a high
discount rate on the mangroves, and assigning lower replanting costs and a relatively
low value to the coastal defense function.
Another type of comparison between mangrove conservation and shrimp
farming development could be carried out using a multi-criteria evaluation, which
takes into account a variety of relevant incommensurable dimensions, all expressed in
their own quantitative units or qualitative descriptions (economic profitability,
employment, biodiversity, coastal defense, carbon uptake, landscape, genetic
resources, human livelihood, and local culture, which could include sacredness).
The word ‘‘valuation’’ does not only mean economic valuation.
Though
resources in open access are too often mismanaged, this does not mean that
resources in private property are managed well. The pressure of the interest (or
discount) rate encourages entrepreneurs to forget about the future, while the logic
of the market leads them to ignore the multi-functionality of the ecosystem.
Thus, under private property, we see rapid-growth tree plantations substituted for
forests, while mangroves are sacrificed to the monoculture of shrimp farming
We have always been ready to cope with everything, and now more than ever, but
they want to humiliate us because we are black, because we are poor, but one does
not choose the race into which one is born, nor does one choose not to have
anything to eat, not to be ill. But I am proud of my race and of being conchera
because it is my race that gives me strength to do battle in defense of what my
parents were, and [what] my children will inherit; proud of being conchera
because I have never stolen anything from anyone, I have never taken anybody’s
bread from his mouth to fill mine, because I have never crawled on my knees
asking anybody for money, and I have always lived standing up. Now we are
struggling for something which is ours, our ecosystem, but not because we are
professional ecologists but because we must remain alive, because if the mangroves
disappear, a whole people disappears, we all disappear, we shall no longer be part
of the history of Muisne, we shall ourselves exist no longer... I do not know what
will happen to us if the mangroves disappear, we shall eat garbage in the outskirts
of the city of Esmeraldas or in Guayaquil, we shall become prostitutes, I do not
know what will happen to us if the mangroves disappear...
Appealing to the common language of economic
valuation, trying to ascertain through extended cost-benefit analysis whether the
benefits from a project are large enough to compensate for the losses while
maintaining a net gain on top. The requirement for such an exercise is
commensurability of values. Social, cultural, economic, and environmental aspects
are all measured in money. This is technically difficult to achieve, as we have seen,
but not impossible. More importantly, the money-reductionism of cost-benefit
analysis harms the social legitimacy of values such as human rights, collective
territorial rights, sacredness, ecological, and aesthetic values. Some languages of
valuation (livelihood, indigenous rights, sacredness) that were powerful in the past
are slowly becoming worthless in this era of the generalized market system.
As in other environmental conflicts, political power appears
at two levels: first, as the ability to impose a decision, and second, as the power to
impose one particular decision-procedure and a standard of valuation. How this
power is exercised in different societies in different moments in history is indeed a
worthwhile topic of study for sociologists, political scientists, and social historians.
Mass poverty is real: more than half of the world population lives on less than what is required to meet basic human needs. People need livelihoods. They need houses. They need public services. How can these needs be met? According to the dominant economic framework, the answer is straightforward: growth
which developed their national productive capacity to supply domestic needs and built industries capable of competing effectively on the world market. This strategy requires protecting one’s economy with trade tariffs and nurturing it with subsidies, boosting wages and public investment, and nationalizing key resources and services. We know that this kind of industrial policy works. In fact, it was used successfully by progressive governments across the Global South in the decades immediately following decolonization.
But that path was closed off, beginning in the 1980s. Northern powers realized that the shift toward economic sovereignty in the South threatened access to the cheap labour, raw materials and captive markets they had enjoyed during the colonial era. So they intervened, using the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to impose structural adjustment programmes across the region (with the exception of China and a few East Asian countries), forcing governments to dismantle tariffs and subsidies, cut wages, and privatize public assets.
With their hopes of sovereign economic development crushed, most countries’ only options for growth now are either to export raw materials (petroleum, coltan, palm oil, beef, fish, whatever) or export cheap labour (in the form of sweatshop output) to supply transnational companies and global commodity chains that service Northern consumers.
Extractivism is ecologically ruinous and socially destructive
ow-income countries lack bargaining power in the world economy so have to sell their resources for extremely low prices
n order to please the barons of international capital and attract the investment required to get these projects off the ground, you have to cut environmental regulations, labour protections and corporate taxes in a brutal race to the bottom. Under these conditions, the yields of growth are mostly captured outside the country, and precious little trickles down to ordinary people.
in order to provide for their citizens’ most basic needs they have to offer themselves up to be exploited by rich nations and transnational companies, which of course inevitably works against the very goals they are trying to achieve
This is why we have the absurd situation where countries that are fabulously rich in labour and resources remain mired in mass poverty. It’s because their labour and resources are organized around the economic interests of the rich world.
rich countries rely on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the Global South, including 10 billion tonnes of raw materials, 800 million hectares of land, 23 exajoules of energy and 200 million person-years of labour per year. Let’s put these giant sums into perspective: that amount of land could be used to grow nutritious food for four billion people; the energy would be enough to provide electricity and internet for the entire population of Africa as well as powering infrastructure for healthcare, education and public transport for all. In other words, an extraordinary amount of the South’s productive capacity is used to supply food, tech gadgets and fast fashion to affluent Northern consumers, when it could be being used to meet local human needs.
This export-focused approach to ‘development’ will never work, because it is not designed to work. It is designed to maintain Northern access to cheap labour, raw materials, and markets in the Global South. This is why inequality between the Global North and South has exploded over the past few decades: our approach to development enables an extraordinary transfer of resources and profits from poor countries to rich countries. For people in the South, their incomes might increase by a little bit, but at an extremely slow rate – not nearly enough to bring people out of poverty measured by any meaningful threshold, and definitely not enough to compensate for the exploitation and environmental degradation they suffer in the process.
New Monetary Framework
n post-development and post-growth economics is to point out that what’s actually required to meet people’s needs is resources and labour. And there the South suffers no deficit. The problem, as Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla points out, is that they are either not being used (ie there’s mass unemployment) or they are not being used in a way that actually benefits the population (ie resources and labour are appropriated to service Northern consumption).
What Southern governments can do instead, then, is mobilize their resources and labour around meeting actual human needs and thus achieve their development goals directly.
As MMT economists have long pointed out, governments are not like households. They do not have to ‘earn money’ (through, say, taxing or borrowing) in order to spend. They can create money for public spending, simply by issuing currency and expanding the deficit. This is not a hypothetical scenario. It is how governments actually work. They fund public services and public employment by creating money. And they do not have to worry about ‘balancing the budget’, because they cannot become insolvent in their own currency.
Of course, there are limits to money creation. If you spend too much money into the economy, demand may overwhelm the country’s productive capacity, which risks driving excess inflation. But if this happens there’s a simple solution: you can use industrial policy to expand capacity where necessary, and you can tax excess money back out of the economy, starting with the richest in society.
According to MMT, the purpose of taxation is not to fund government spending – as governments can fund spending simply by issuing currency – but rather to reduce excess demand, and, as an important side effect, to reduce corrosive inequality.
To do this, governments can simply issue money and spend it on achieving four urgent goals:
i) Universal public services. Develop generous, high-quality universal public services. Not just healthcare and education, but also public transportation, affordable housing, water, electricity and internet.
(ii) Food sovereignty. Focus on regenerative agriculture and fisheries to produce healthy, organic food for domestic consumption, reducing imports while restoring soils, biodiversity and marine life.
(iii) Energy sovereignty. Roll out renewable energy infrastructure – solar panels and wind turbines – to replace fossil fuels and reduce energy imports. It doesn’t take much: high levels of welfare can be accomplished with minimal energy.
(iv) Public jobs guarantee. All of the above requires labour, so governments need to ensure that anyone who wants to can train to contribute to socially valuable projects – and be paid a living wage – such as building houses and infrastructure, staffing public services, expanding renewable energy, regenerating farmland etc.
This approach would ensure decent livelihoods for all, with universal access to clean energy, healthy food and public services. The age-old question of ‘how do we get enough GDP to end poverty and meet our development goals’ becomes much less relevant. Growth becomes an effect of development, rather than a precondition for it.
But it’s true that even countries with sovereign currencies face constraints because so many of them rely heavily on external finance: they are in debt to foreign creditors, in currencies (such as the US dollar) which they do not control. External debts have to be paid back, with interest, in foreign currency; and to get foreign currency governments have to organize their economies around the desires of foreign capital.
Colonial legacies
This arrangement is no accident. When the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s dismantled domestic industries, they rendered Global South countries dependent on imports, and therefore also dependent on foreign currency and creditors.
This is a problem not only because it requires them to render themselves exploitable but because it also limits their policy options. Foreign creditors require fiscal and monetary ‘discipline’; governments cannot use deficit spending because their creditors (and the ratings agencies) will punish them, capital will flee, and borrowing costs will rise.
Plus, deficit spending is against World Bank and IMF rules, so any government that is subject to multilateral debt has its hands tied.
And it’s a vicious circle: because you rely on foreign currency, you cannot use deficit spending; and because you cannot use deficit spending you are forced to rely on foreign currency. And that means opening yourself to exploitation by rich countries.
Today, the artificial scarcity is maintained by enforcing structural dependence on international capital, and enforcing fiscal and monetary discipline. All of this ensures that capital has access to cheap labour and resources, and maintains a steady flow of tribute from South to North.
How to break free
There is nothing to stop a Southern government from using its full monetary powers, within the limits of the economy’s productive capacity. But to do so, they have to break free from the power of international creditors. That means defaulting on external debt obligations (or at least defaulting on any creditors that prevent them from deficit spending).
f course, there would be consequences. Default might make it more difficult to borrow on international markets, at least in the short term (probably around a year). And angering international creditors is likely to cause currency depreciation, which in turn makes imports more expensive – specifically energy and food, which comprise the majority of Southern imports.
Relying on national currency instantly eases the need for foreign credit. And working toward self-sufficiency in energy and food goes a long way to reducing the need for imports. Tariffs and subsidies can be used to develop national industries, substituting imports and further reducing reliance on foreign currency and creditors. Northern trading partners will be upset, but since the aim is to be less reliant on them this shouldn’t matter as much as it does now.
The MMT approach to development therefore offers a solution to inflation (rather than creating a risk of inflation, as people often assume) by reducing dependency on foreign currency and imports. As for cases where imported goods cannot be substituted, we can minimize trade with Northern countries and opt instead to trade with Southern partners, where the terms of trade are fairer (‘de-linking’, as Egyptian economist Samir Amin put it, from unequal exchange with the North).
We can also impose capital controls to prevent finance from fleeing the country: rules that require investors, companies and rich people to get approval, and pay fees, before moving their profits or holdings abroad.
kind of unilateral decolonization; in other words, a throwing off of colonial power. They would expand economic sovereignty and enable us to build societies around human wellbeing and ecological regeneration, rather than around the interests of international capital
Research in the field of ecological economics has made it clear that if we are to have any chance of keeping global warming under 1.5 or 2°C and reversing ecological breakdown, rich countries will have to scale down their energy and material throughput – in other words, degrowth.
degrowth in the North entails a reduction in extractivism and liberates Southern labour and resources for other ends.
The South has the power to enforce degrowth in the North, by refusing to be used as a supplier of cheap labour and raw materials for Northern consumption. Ending this exploitative relationship would require Northern countries to either pay more for resource and labour imports from the South, or otherwise to rely on their own resources and labour. Both options would be more expensive, so Northern countries would have to consume less (ie find ways to meet human needs with more modest amounts of throughput), and the rate of capital accumulation would decline.
This requires a radical convergence in the global economy: resource use in the North needs to decline dramatically to get back to sustainable levels, while resources in the South must be reclaimed for meeting human needs, converging at a level that is consistent with universal human welfare and ecological stability. By leveraging insights from MMT to enable economic sovereignty in the South, we can take real steps toward realizing such a world. Full decolonization remains to be achieved – but it is not out of reach.
Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, in which it’s recorded that:
- The right to live and to exist;
- The right to be respected;
- The right to regenerate its bio-capacity and to continue it’s vital cycles and processes free of human alteration;
- The right to maintain their identity and integrity as differentiated beings, self-regulated and interrelated;
- The right to water as the source of life;
- The right to clean air;
- The right to comprehensive health;
- The right to be free of contamination and pollution, free of toxic and radioactive waste;
- The right to be free of alterations or modifications of it’s genetic structure in a manner that threatens it’s integrity or vital and healthy functioning;
- The right to prompt and full restoration for violations to the rights acknowledged in this Declaration caused by human activities.
The “shared vision for long-term cooperative action” in climate change negotiations should not be reduced to defining the limit on temperature increases and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but must also incorporate in a balanced and integral manner measures regarding capacity building, production and consumption patterns, and other essential factors such as the acknowledging of the Rights of Mother Earth to establish harmony with nature.
Developed countries, as the main cause of climate change, in assuming their historical responsibility, must recognize and honor their climate debt in all of its dimensions as the basis for a just, effective, and scientific solution to climate change. In this context, we demand that developed countries:
• Restore to developing countries the atmospheric space that is occupied by their greenhouse gas emissions. This implies the decolonization of the atmosphere through the reduction and absorption of their emissions;
• Assume the costs and technology transfer needs of developing countries arising from the loss of development opportunities due to living in a restricted atmospheric space;
• Assume responsibility for the hundreds of millions of people that will be forced to migrate due to the climate change caused by these countries, and eliminate their restrictive immigration policies, offering migrants a decent life with full human rights guarantees in their countries;
• Assume adaptation debt related to the impacts of climate change on developing countries by providing the means to prevent, minimize, and deal with damages arising from their excessive emissions;
• Honor these debts as part of a broader debt to Mother Earth by adopting and implementing the United Nations Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth.
The focus must not be only on financial compensation, but also on restorative justice, understood as the restitution of integrity to our Mother Earth and all its beings.
We similarly denounce the way in which the capitalist model imposes mega-infrastructure projects and invades territories with extractive projects, water privatization, and militarized territories, expelling indigenous peoples from their lands, inhibiting food sovereignty and deepening socio-environmental crisis.
We demand recognition of the right of all peoples, living beings, and Mother Earth to have access to water, and we support the proposal of the Government of Bolivia to recognize water as a Fundamental Human Right.
We demand the full and effective implementation of the right to consultation, participation and prior, free and informed consent of indigenous peoples in all negotiation processes, and in the design and implementation of measures related to climate change.
Thus, it is essential to carry out a global referendum or popular consultation on climate change in which all are consulted regarding the following issues; the level of emission reductions on the part of developed countries and transnational corporations, financing to be offered by developed countries, the creation of an International Climate Justice Tribunal, the need for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, and the need to change the current capitalist system. The process of a global referendum or popular consultation will depend on process of preparation that ensures the successful development of the same.
The single most important intervention is the one that so far no government has been willing to touch: cap fossil fuel use and scale it down, on a binding annual schedule, until the industry is mostly dismantled by the middle of the century. That’s it. This is the only fail-safe way to stop climate breakdown. If we want real action, this should be at the very top of our agenda.
A fair-share approach would require rich countries to eliminate most fossil fuel use by no later than 2030 or 2035, to give poorer countries more time to transition. Let that sink in.
A new campaign, endorsed by 100 Nobel laureates and several thousand scientists, calls for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to do just that: an international agreement to end fossil fuels on a fair and binding schedule. Why is it, then, that politicians are so unwilling to take this necessary step?
Part of it is because they’re too cowardly to face down the fossil fuel companies and their army of lobbyists, who fight tooth and nail to prevent even the most moderate threats to their profits.
The tricky part is that once we accept this reality, we have to face up to the fact that scaling down fossil fuels fast enough to avoid catastrophe means fundamentally changing the economy. And I mean fundamentally.
Think about it. Imagine next year we cut fossil fuel use by 10%. And then the following year we cut it by another 10%. And so on the next year and the next. Even if we throw everything we have at building our renewable energy capacity and improving energy efficiency—which we must do as a matter of urgency—there’s no way we can cover the full gap. The truth is that rich countries are going to have to get by with less energy. A lot less.
How can we possibly manage such a scenario? Well, in the existing economy it would be sheer chaos. The price of energy would skyrocket. People would be unable to afford essential goods. Businesses would collapse. Unemployment would rise. Capitalism—which depends on perpetual growth just to stay afloat—is structurally incapable of sustaining such a transition.
First, we have to nationalize the fossil fuel industry and the energy companies, bringing them under public control, just like any other essential service or utility. This will allow us to wind down fossil fuel production and use in line with science-based schedules, without having to constantly fight fossil capital and their propaganda. It also allows us to protect against price chaos, and ration energy to where it’s needed most, to keep essential services going.
At the same time, we need to scale down less-necessary parts of the economy in order to reduce excess energy demand: SUVs, private jets, commercial air travel, industrial beef, fast fashion, advertising, planned obsolescence, the military industrial complex and so on. We need to focus the economy on what is required for human well-being and ecological stability, rather than on corporate profits and elite consumption.
And as unnecessary industrial production slows down, we need to shorten the working week to share necessary labor more evenly, and introduce a climate job guarantee to ensure that everyone has access to a decent livelihood—with a basic income for those who cannot work or who choose not to. This is the bread and butter of a just transition.
How do you pay for a social guarantee? Any government that has monetary sovereignty can fund it by issuing the national currency; think of quantitative easing, but this time for people and the planet. This is true for all high-income countries, although for EU countries it would have to be done in a coordinated fashion. The crucial thing is that to prevent any risk of inflation, we also have to reduce the purchasing power of the rich.
Third, we need to tax the rich out of existence. As Thomas Piketty has pointed out, cutting the purchasing power of the rich is the single most powerful way to reduce excess energy use and emissions. This may sound radical, but think about it: it is irrational—and dangerous—to continue supporting an over-consuming class in the middle of a climate emergency. We cannot allow them to appropriate energy so vastly beyond what anyone could reasonably need.
How can we do this? One approach would be to introduce a wealth tax. Make it tough enough that rich people will be incentivized to sell off assets that are surplus to actual requirements. We can also introduce a maximum income policy, such that anything over a certain threshold faces a 100% rate of tax. In addition to cutting excess consumption at the top, this approach will reduce inequality and eliminate the oligarchic power that pollutes our politics.
Fourth, we need a massive public mobilization to achieve our ecological goals. We need to build our renewable energy capacity, expand public transport, insulate buildings, and regenerate ecosystems. This requires public investment, but it also requires labor. There’s a lot of work to do, and it won’t happen on its own. This is where the climate job guarantee comes in. The job guarantee will ensure that anyone who wants to can train to participate in the most important collective projects of our generation, doing dignified, socially necessary work with a living wage.
Finally, we need a strong commitment to climate reparations. Rich countries have colonized the atmosphere for their own enrichment, while inflicting the majority of the costs onto the global South. This is an act of theft—theft of the atmospheric commons on which we all rely—and it needs to be repaired. We need to support our sisters and brothers in the South who already bear the overwhelming brunt of a catastrophe that they have done little to create. This should include a policy of debt cancellation, so poorer countries are no longer forced to devote their limited resources to servicing the demands of big banks and can instead focus on meeting people’s needs. And renewable technologies should be transferred for free to countries that cannot easily afford them, with patent waivers if needed, to facilitate the fastest possible energy transition globally.
We would feel the thrill and camaraderie of being part of something big, something transformative, something together. There would be a lot less needless commodity production, and a lot fewer bullshit jobs. Our society would be more equal, and poverty would be a thing of the past. Our economy would be organized around human needs and resilience rather than around endless capital accumulation. And most importantly, emissions would fall rapidly, year after year, in a dramatic break from the failure of the past several decades. Our planet would begin to heal.
It is unlikely, however, that any government will be willing to take the necessary steps alone, for fear of disadvantage. A few progressive countries might—and doing this would light the path ahead. But ultimately we need coordinated action, which is why the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty is so important. We know that the only way governments will get rid of nuclear weapons is for everyone to agree to do it together. So too with fossil fuels.
It requires doing the hard work of community organizing, building wall-to-wall solidarities strong enough to hold up against political attacks. It requires forging alliances between the environmentalist movement and the labor movement, and across national borders, sufficient to pull off coordinated strike action. This decade is the linchpin of history. We cannot afford to just sit back and wait to see what happens. We have to capture political power where we can, or otherwise force incumbents to change course.
- Despite population growth, 2050 global energy use could be reduced to 1960 levels.
- This requires advanced technologies & reductions in demand to sufficiency levels.
- But ‘sufficiency’ is far more materially generous than many opponents often assume.
We find that global final energy consumption in 2050 could be reduced to the levels of the 1960s, despite a population three times larger.
The annual energy use of late-Palaeolithic foragers is estimated to have been around 5 GJ per person annually (Smil, 2017) – the sum of food-energy metabolised plus biomass for cooking. By 1850, after nearly 10,000 years of agriculturally-supported expansion, average global primary energy consumption rose to over 20 GJ/cap (GEA, 2012). Today, after 150 years of fossil-fuelled industrial development, it has reached 80 GJ/cap (IEA, 2019a). In absolute terms, total global primary energy use has risen from around 1 PJ in the late-Palaeolithic to nearly 600,000 PJ today, driving changes in the composition of the atmosphere (warming) and oceans (acidification) leading to dangerous climate change (IPCC, 2018).
Some countries thus achieve high social outcomes with far lower energy consumption than others, but none currently manage to achieve high social outcomes while staying within planetary boundaries (O’Neill et al., 2018).
the final energy requirements for providing decent living standards to the global population in 2050 could be over 60% lower than consumption today. In countries that are today’s highest per-capita consumers, cuts of ~95% appear possible while still providing decent living standards to all.
aim to estimate the final energy needed to provide these material living standards to the full global population. In this process, our intention is to imagine a world that is fundamentally transformed, where state-of-the-art technologies merge with drastic changes in demand to bring energy (and material) consumption as low as possible, while providing decent material conditions and basic services for all. To this end, we take a bottom-up modelling approach.
The issue with top-down approaches, however, is they assume that relationships between social outcomes and ecological impacts will remain broadly similar to those currently existing. Current socio-political organisation, economic provisioning systems, and the highly unequal wealth and income distributions that exist, all influence the efficiency with which energy- and resource-use supports human well-being; inefficiencies in the system tend to become embedded within the conclusions of top-down modelling studies. Only rarely do studies look into reducing social inefficiencies that stem from consumption that doesn’t satisfy human needs, or even inhibits need satisfaction. Far from cultivating well-being, consumption is often driven by factors such as private profit; intensive and locked-in social practices; employment-related stress and poor mental health; conspicuous- or luxury-consumption; or simply over-consumption in numerous forms.
Our choice to consider final energy is novel but essential: final energy better reflects the energy requirements of society and economic activity (Alessio et al., 2020). Primary energy assumes a portfolio of existing energy sources, whose losses during conversion into final energy – e.g. coal into electricity, or oil into gasoline – are included in total consumption. However, renewable energy sources like solar or wind have no primary energy equivalent, and this means arbitrary assumptions are often made when comparing them to fossil fuels. Such misleading comparisons can leave fossil fuels appearing to outperform renewables (Brockway et al., 2019). These issues are avoided by focusing on final energy.
In comparison to other studies estimating future final energy demand, our DLE estimates are remarkably low, with global final energy consumption at 149 EJ in 2050 (Fig. 2; or 15.3 GJ/cap/yr). This is over 60% lower than current consumption (despite the 2050 population being ~30% larger than the present day); 75% below the International Energy Agency’s 2050 Stated Policies estimate – the expected trajectory if todays’ commitments are met and maintained – and 60% below their most ambitious Sustainable Development Scenario (IEA, 2019b); and around 40% lower than 2050 consumption in the Low Energy Demand scenario of Grubler et al. (2018) (245 EJ).
To avoid catastrophic ecological collapse, it is clear that drastic and challenging societal transformations must occur at all levels, from the individual to institutional, and from supply through to demand. From an energy-use perspective, the current work suggests that meeting these challenges does not, in theory, preclude extending decent living standards, universally, to a population of ~10 billion. Decent living is of course a subjective concept in public discourse. However, the current work offers a response to the clichéd populist objection that environmentalists are proposing that we return to living in caves. With tongue firmly in cheek, the response roughly goes ‘Yes, perhaps, but these caves have highly-efficient facilities for cooking, storing food and washing clothes; low-energy lighting throughout; 50 L of clean water supplied per day per person, with 15 L heated to a comfortable bathing temperature; they maintain an air temperature of around 20 °C throughout the year, irrespective of geography; have a computer with access to global ICT networks; are linked to extensive transport networks providing ~5000–15,000 km of mobility per person each year via various modes; and are also served by substantially larger caves where universal healthcare is available and others that provide education for everyone between 5 and 19 years old.’ And at the same time, it is possible that the amount of people’s lives that must be spent working would be substantially reduced.
What sort of political-economy could create a world with both low throughput and high livings standards and the levels of equality that achieving these requires? What sort of culture would accept and support the necessary policies and institutions? Where, from the individual- to institutional-level, are potential leverage points for moving towards such changes
Currently, only 17% of global final energy consumption is from non-fossil fuel sources (IEA, 2019a). But in absolute terms this is nearly 70 EJ, and hence nearly 50% of our DLE estimate for 2050 of 149 EJ. Indeed, by 2050, even in the IEA’s Stated Policies scenario, ~130 EJ of final energy is provided by non-fossil-based sources – very close to the DLE requirement of 149 EJ. That non-fossil energy sources could meet our DLE requirements, even under business-as-usual, is highly significant.
the economic and socio-political changes necessary to address the magnitude of present ecological challenges are enormous, while the technological solutions already exist. What we add is that the material sacrifices are, in theory, far smaller than many popular narratives imply. And quite the opposite is true for the ~4 billion currently living in poverty (that is, on less than $7.40 PPP per day), for whom life could, conceivably, be substantially improved.
The papers we review have little to say about
how societies can collectively define limits or how they may organize for degrowth, but much
to say about collective responses in the context of economic stagnation or contraction
In Limits to Growth, the message is that we should limit ourselves before nature limits us.
In the degrowth literature, in contrast, the emphasis is on the desire for socially and
ecologically just limits
Gorz criticized the idea that limits are something out there that is to be determined by
experts, a posture he characterized as anti-democratic. For Gorz, ‘self-limitation,
governance of the metabolism with nature and regaining control over production are
intrinsically linked’
there is a need for a political struggle to limit growth and capital
because they have disastrous consequences
Limits to resource use or consumption are not relevant for those who live below limits,
but often the vulnerability of such populations is the outcome of the limitless expansion of
extractive economies and the dispossessions and expulsions that come with this expansion
We were interested in
how are degrowth ideas socially produced, performed and organized spatially at different
scales, what sorts of places and territories these ideas produce, and how new spatial
subjectivities may be constructed
In all cases, new types of common territories and institutions are produced
through struggle in and through a situation of disaster. These are not smooth ‘transition
town’ or ‘slow city’ initiatives – they are sites where the economy has subsided, the state has
retreated and capitalism intensifies its enclosures.
Nowtopian territories
territorial processes of regeneration that
involve non-wage labour and are motivated by a desire to produce an alternative future, today.
The retirees of West Sussex respond to two types of crisis, Gearey argues: a personal one,
with the end of their professional life and the need to find new roles for themselves; and a
social one, with dramatic cuts in public services in a context of intensifying flood events.
Living under ‘austerity localism’, she observes, ‘many of these elders have undergone a
personal, if not political, epiphany and have turned to forms of environmental activism to
articulate their agency and demonstrate solidarity’.
‘Nowtopianism doesn’t sit comfortably
with people living in poverty with few if any choices facing them’, she recognizes. This echoes
a critique against the extant degrowth literature that while Eurocentric, it claims a universal
theoretical applicability similar to that of the economistic discourses of growth and
development that it confronts. Nirmal and Rocheleau (p.443) dislike ‘the continuing
dominance of Western/Northern economic and political theory at the intellectual heart’ of
the degrowth academic movement and point to the limits of ‘its focus on economistic
categories and measures, and its apparent acceptance of the continuing primacy of
economics and politics in the capitalist-colonial one-world-world’
The North
versus South dichotomy is counterproductive insofar as it glosses over the fact that a
substantial part of the elites and the growing middle classes in the South live a Western,
growth-oriented mode of living. More importantly, it underplays linkages between wealth
and poverty. Poverty and underdevelopment are not growth waiting to happen, but the ugly
sides of growth and ‘development’.
Rather than asking then who should grow and who
should degrow, a more instructive question would be how growth produces poverty, how
people challenge on the ground destructive and extractive processes of growth, and what
tentative alternatives do they create along the way. Degrowth, in this sense, is not a material
process of lowering consumption, an irrelevant demand for those who live within conditions
of poverty, but a sustained critique or resistance – intellectual and practical – to growth and
its consequences.
Insurgent territories
‘a profoundly material strategy of recovery, renewal, and
resistance (resurgence) through practices of re-rooting and re-commoning’, practices that
they, like Gearey (p.429) call ‘re-growth’ – regeneration against, or in the absence, of
capitalist growth. The challenge for them is how to ‘regrow localized interdependent
networks, and degrow colonial, dependent global networks’
The Zapatistas, Nirmal and Rocheleau show, reconstituted their lives not by growing the
amount of land under cultivation, but by restoring ranches and plantations to produce food.
Those who reworked the land slowly brought their own consumption to levels of sufficiency,
while growing solidarity networks with cooperatives and collectives in urban centres. The
Zapatista resistance to growth is focused not on local consumption but on opposing
externally conceived and managed, growth-driven projects, putting their bodies against
public entities, corporations and narco-capitalists and the megaprojects they bring or
follow
The concept of degrowth
may make sense from a Southern perspective, not as an umbrella term that will
encompass the variety of alternatives practiced there, but as an attempt to deconstruct
and undo in the West a Western imaginary that has been at the heart of colonialism and
that domestic elites use in the Global South to justify inequalities and eradicate more
egalitarian alternatives
Liminal territories
decolonization of the imaginary from growth and
development was not a metaphor, since for him development was ‘a concrete continuation of
the colonial project’. Varvaroussis notes how indebted Greece during the ‘memorandum
years’ of austerity was subjected to processes of neocolonial domination, rife with
reproduction of dualisms characteristic of colonial thinking, such as those of superiority–
inferiority or hard-working Northerners versus lazy Southerners.
The decolonization of the imaginary is ‘not a gradual and smooth
process, enabled through a moral demand for a different future, but a process enabled
through and because of crises and the stage of suspension they usher in’. Crises are
important because they ‘open up a stage of suspension—a liminal stage—in which the rise
of new social practices can facilitate the emergence of new social imaginary significations and
institutions’.
The State and (de)growth
for the modern nation-state, growth is much
more than an economic necessity. Growth functions, she explains, ‘as a (connected)
political project as it allows the ruling class to portray itself as a neutral actor’, fully
differentiated (as ‘the state’) from the society, charged with the pursuit of the general
interest of the society. Growth is a keyword for creating the illusion of a collective
interest, in the name of which ‘the state’ is legitimated. It justifies the claim to rule and
‘it serves to unite the internally fragmented sphere of the social and brush aside (classbased) distributional conflicts’, while enabling ‘the distribution of material concessions to
subordinate classes without threatening the status of upper classes’. The hegemony of
growth then stems ‘less from the short-term needs of capital accumulation and more
from those of the reproduction of state hegemony’.
Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in the 2011 electoral campaign
was ‘Let Stability Last, Let Turkey Grow’ – not only telling in the direct reference it makes
to economic growth, Akbulut argues, ‘but also in the explicit links it draws between growth
and stability (of political rule)’. No surprise then that questioning growth is considered an
unpatriotic act in Turkey.
it requires ‘a reorientation of state–
society relationships around a non-growth collective interest, and a reorganization of
economic relations in a way that will mitigate the need that material concessions
From transformation to releasement
‘all human-induced transformations require further non-humans to be transformed ... and
the more transformative action there will be, the more matter-energy is required’.
Heikkurinen takes issue with the ‘will to transform’, this ‘insatiable urge to endlessly
transform’ the world which he finds central to growth society and behind the obsession
with technology
But what the Earth needs ‘is precisely less human
action (not only better action)’.
defending the case for sitting back and thinking, against the pseudo-activist
temptation to act frantically to save the world
One may be tempted to respond that the Zapatistas, the Adivasi or the Kurds may not
have the luxury of Zˇizˇek to sit back and think, watching their livelihoods being destroyed.
But that would be a facile dismissal of an anthropological critique of a Western mode of
being that should not be taken lightly (not to mention that the Zapatistas or the Kurds
produced an astonishing amount of intellectual output while fighting). Heikkurinen’s
critique is reminiscent of one of the fundamental philosophical debates of the ‘antiutilitarian movement’ of thought, in which Serge Latouche and other French degrowth
intellectuals cut their teeth. Sociologist Onofrio Romano (2012) has called for a degrowth
‘strategy of absence’, imagining an anthropological subject that does not take itself too
seriously, even to the point of uselessly expending its resources, rather than directing them
productively in the service of accumulation.
Heikkurinen arrives to a similar point but from the different route of Heidegger, advocating
a posture of ‘releasement’ – ‘a willing not to will’. Humans should refrain from using always
the power that they have – they should learn to let go, Heikkurinen insists, echoing the idea of
self-limitation, a conscious choice to not do everything that can be done, or pursue everything
that can be pursued
Ending his piece provocatively, he
encourages us to stop trying to make an ever-bigger impact on the world, and ‘wait instead for
the unexpected’ while ‘preparing for the expected’, ‘the collapse of civilization’, after which ‘the
world will unfold differently’.
Muradian’s (2019) critique that the degrowth discourse is limited to
questions speaking to the concerns of green European intellectuals has some basis, in so
far as the extant literature has failed to engage convincingly with issues of race or gender
Like gender, important questions here involve the
differential impacts of growth-driven development along lines of race or class, the racialized
assumptions built in growth discourses, as well as the reproduction of race prejudices or
exclusions in seemingly alternative or nowtopian efforts and politics.
The cultural geography of small islands provides fertile context for degrowth.
•‘Southern thought’ revalorizes what otherwise would be seen as backwardness and under-development.
We follow Franco Cassano’s thesis of ‘Southern thought’ – a critique of Western developmentalism, prioritizing instead values of slowness, moderation and conviviality.
We entertain the idea here that there is a seed in Mediterranean societies of alternative cultures – largely akin to ‘degrowth’ (Romano, 2012). This seed, called ‘Southern thought’, is a cultural imaginary centred around values of slowness, moderation and conviviality found in the Mediterranean but widespread in the world’s ‘Souths’ more generally
In Ikaria we show how, over time, a spirit of alterity akin to degrowth emerged and was embodied in local economic practices and institutions. In Gavdos, we focus on how the remoteness of an insular location is mobilized to animate imaginaries and practices of a frugal, communal living.
As we will illustrate with the two empirical cases developed here degrowth marks a cultural or even ontological shift, not just a shift in economics or policy.
South is not an incomplete ‘not-yet’ North, nor thinks of its pathologies as a consequence of a lack of modernity. Cassano invites one ‘not to think of the South in the light of modernity, but rather to think of modernity in the light of the South’ (Cassano, 2012: 1). Central to this is reclaiming ‘southern’ values of slowness, moderation and conviviality. The South here is not a strict geographical demarcation (Greece for example is in southern Europe, but north of the equator), but a condition, a spirit and posture opposed to Occidental values of utility, perpetual advancement and growth.
Cassano (2012) points to continuous swings between representations of the Mediterranean as a tourist paradise and an archaic underdeveloped hell, calling for a balance where the pathologies of the Mediterranean are not essentialised but its wounds (sic) ‘are discussed’ (pp. 136). The challenge, he writes, is ‘not archaeological but political’ (pp. 53). He stops short of attending to the political production (and destruction) of Mediterranean’s alterity and the social struggles involved in defending and renewing it. As Lawler (2016) notes, in the international press, one can find articles about longevity and living well on the Greek islands side by side with those celebrating policies of austerity that target precisely this ‘lazy’, ‘underdeveloped’ mode of living.
Island gentrification refers to a marked shift upwards in the income and class of those who live (temporary or permanently) on an island, with increased investment in the built environment catering primarily to the needs of the incoming ‘gentry’, displacing lower class inhabitants and/or the practices and economies that sustain them (Clark et al., 2007). Gentrification is driven by rent-seeking, money invested to ‘under-valorised’ properties and land (Clark & Pissin, 2021) and by the socio-cultural processes that increase the potential value of previously unvalued or undervalued land and property.
Island gentrification refers to a marked shift upwards in the income and class of those who live (temporary or permanently) on an island, with increased investment in the built environment catering primarily to the needs of the incoming ‘gentry’, displacing lower class inhabitants and/or the practices and economies that sustain them (Clark et al., 2007). Gentrification is driven by rent-seeking, money invested to ‘under-valorised’ properties and land (Clark & Pissin, 2021) and by the socio-cultural processes that increase the potential value of previously unvalued or undervalued land and property.
First, Ikaria has a diverse and low intensity economy oriented towards sufficiency. Our research observations and site visits for interview attest to a presence of many households combining incomes from tourism, public sector jobs or pensions, with practices of self-subsistence or informal production for local exchange networks. Subsistence practices include vegetable and fruit harvesting, vineyards, olive and almond trees, together with husbandry of pigs and chickens (see also Chrysochoos, 2010). There are extended networks of exchanging favours and goods or producing food directly for restaurants, festivals or grocery stores.
This sensation was said to involve slower, more humane rhythms, conviviality, and an ethos of sufficiency and equality – all core significations of degrowth.
Villagers collectively organize these all-day all-night events. Meat and produce comes from the village and revenue stays local re-invested into public works: improving roads, public squares, schools and churches. For Bareli (2007) the paniyiri is an ‘institutionalized exchange system’, a Maussian gift-exchange/potlatch; a social commons sustained by the island’s resource commons, where community is performed and renewed
We emphasise the role played by a local folk thought akin to Southern thought that re-valued what from an Occidentalist perspective could be seen as a sign of backwardness, to a point of pride.
The transition to capitalism started in the 19th century, but it did not fully upend the classlessness of pre-capitalist Ikaria. This may possibly be because the lack of sufficient plains prevented large-scale agriculture and the emergence of propertied land elites, as occurred in nearby Samos.
More recently, the lack of calm sea waters prevented the mass tourist development seen in other Aegean islands .
Ikariots were not only de-growthers before degrowth, but ‘communists before communism’, an interviewee told us (I#3). In fact the Greek government started sending exiles to Ikaria in the 1930s because the island was already considered irredeemably leftist
prioritises low-profit agriculture over tourism (I#23). Communists and leftists have put up obstacles to developmental projects that would face little opposition elsewhere.
Real-existing degrowth was an unintentional result, but one that can be explained. Such real-existing degrowth is now sustained, tentatively, through the reproduction, and renewal, of supporting beliefs, practices and institutions. Crucial here is the role of a new wave of incomers inspired by alternative imaginaries
Gavdos
There is no bank or gas station on the island, no cash machines until 2018 and no credit cards accepted. The island is only partly powered by an electricity grid and its water supply system stops running in the summer. There are new groundwater boreholes, although many people still collect rainwater in the winter to drink in the summer. We can speak of real-existing degrowth here in terms of lifestyles based on very low monetary incomes and resource and energy use, compared to the mainland, and a lack of the modern infrastructure that one associates with developed economies.
Gavdos’s extreme remoteness was exploited by right-wing governments to create one of the worst places of exile, ‘the death island’ as exiles called it (Gritzonas, 2000). Its harsh conditions and lack of infrastructure forced the exiles to self-organize into a ‘collective’ to manage everyday life, organize cooking, cleaning, education, work, and cultural events, establishing a libertarian school and introducing a community currency
All building materials are collected in situ; the import of wood, plastic and other materials is highly discouraged, while the use of cement and other chemicals is not acceptable. As one interlocutor put it: ‘we don’t build, we just reshape nature’
Our research shows that the majority spends between 100 and 200€/month, and in extreme cases less than 500€/year. Their diet is extremely frugal, with little fish or meat, and meals are often shared. Slowness is a flagship trait among beach-dwellers. Comparisons between the speedy rhythms of city life and the slowness of the island are common. As one interviewee said: ‘Life is not a sum of seconds but a sum of moments. It’s not linear but it flows like a song. Sometimes quickly and sometimes almost in stillness’
Myths, histories, local traditions, and alternative practices, combined with the island’s geography and lack of economic or infrastructural development, create in Gavdos a state of a-development or, what we call here, real-existing degrowth. By this we do not mean that the Gavdos beach communities offer an example of degrowth that could, or should, be transposed elsewhere. They do show how, in line with Cassano’s call to turn the negative sign of the South into a positive one, what from a ‘Northern gaze’, could be seen as the dire and backward or undeveloped state of the island, was turned into one with an identity of pride and possibility.
Interestingly, Gavdos’s otherness also takes a political form. Whereas free-camping is discouraged or prosecuted by other local authorities around Greece, it is encouraged in Gavdos. In its official webpage, the municipal authority denounces the government’s law that prohibits free-camping as ‘pretentious’.
‘what happens here could not be done on the mainland. It is the limit of the sea that feeds our desire for self-sufficiency and it’s the bounded nature of the island that unfetters our experimental mood’
As a Gavdiot elder put it: ‘I don’t like things that come from the city, I haven’t seen an apartment block in all my life because I am not travelling outside Gavdos. All these things look fake to me. What is real is only nature, our temple’
we understand degrowth as a positive transition towards seeing and living differently what might otherwise be feared as a catastrophe
We learn from our case-studies that remoteness and distance from the ‘more developed’ core (the capital, Athens) is important. So too is the ability of the islands to divert resources from the core, while staving off pressure to pay them back with ‘development’.
This resonates with
Romano's (2012) observation of remote areas in southern Italy and Albania living parasitically off metropolitan centres, and avoiding thus a full assimilation by the development process. Nonetheless, while remoteness keeps Ikaria or Gavdos out of the main circuits of capital and modernising development, this alone does not explain their difference, given that neighbouring islands have suffered conventional fates, being drawn into accelerating tourist capital flows. Remoteness, after all, is relative - make a new airport, add daily flights and it vanishes.
It is in the interaction between geography, historical contingency and the production and assimilation of a localized and ‘indigenized’ mode of thought, prevalent in the South and often in the form of myths about the island’s past and its inhabitants, that productive possibilities emerge.
Without favourable structural change at higher scales (e.g. a changing political economy in Greece as a whole), this would be impossible. What cannot be underestimated is that they have resisted, and that the reasons for their difference are not mere co-incidences.
An important point not explored here is the power of ‘islands’ to change ‘the city’ (so to speak), through the life-changing experiences of returning visitors.
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