Ev'rybody's talkin' 'bout de-growth, de-growth's a popular word... [Below: Warsaw graffiti, photo taken in early 2016]
Our pursuit of perpetual economic growth is a major cause of climate change. Businesses are expected by their leaders and shareholders to produce more goods, to offer more services, to increase revenues and profits; consumers are expected to consume more, to work harder to earn more money to buy more things; businesses and individuals are expected to pay more taxes so that governments can spend more and more on their countries' voters.
Now, increased efficiencies have brought incomparable improvements in living standards over the past century. We own more things than ever did before; we travel farther and more frequently than ever before; we use up more of the Earth's non-renewable resources faster than ever before; and there are more of us than ever before.
But now it is clear that this constant growth has come at a price - anthropogenic climate change, caused by greenhouse-gas emissions inexorably driving up average global temperature, leading to extreme weather events of increasing regularity and intensity. We may argue about the extent of the threat, but we cannot deny it.
Having reached a comfortable standard of living, having freed itself of want, the rich world now should draw back from the mad gallop for material possessions. We - the two billion inhabitants of the rich world - are all responsible. And we should reflect upon our own responsibility to stop climate change from becoming a runaway disaster from which there's no way back.
As a species, we need to slow down, we need to get off this escalating spiral of materialism. More and more politicians, ecologists and commentators are pointing to de-growth as the answer. Once you've reached comfort level, once you are truly independent financially - stop, think, realign your priorities.
I'm all for de-growth, but with one large and absolute caveat. De-growth should never be imposed top-down. A wealthy elite should not be preaching de-growth on poorer people struggling to get by. Instead, it should spread as a new cultural norm, an aesthetic, a meme, an idea that people adopt because they can see the sense, because they want to. It's something for me, something I choose to buy into.
SUV owner/drivers (much as I dislike them) should not become the new kulaks - scapegoated, hounded, then persecuted. In the USSR, the definition of 'kulak' soon expanded to mean "anyone with slightly more land than I have". I can foresee a 'green Stalin' and his commissars barking out orders to expropriate all luxury goods - this is no good for humanity. Remember Pol Pot and the Cambodian genocide carried out in the name of making Cambodia a self-sufficient agrarian socialist society. Between 1975 and 1979, it resulted in the deaths of around 1.8m people, nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population. Environmental protection cannot be conducted by coercion.
An ideal that becomes perverted and twisted back upon itself, imposed by a tyrant, destroying people it claims to be acting on behalf of, cannot be right. The hierarchical model is bad - just look at any other country in which one man has wrested total power for himself - North Korea, Russia, communist China.
De-growth should be led by example, not "do as I say, don't do as I do." The sight of fleets of private jets at Davos each January, where the global elite gather to wring their hands about global warming, makes me sick. Inflated egos, showing off to one another, entitled billionaire to entitled billionaire.
De-growth must come from within the conscience of the individual consumer. When I say 'consumer', I mean someone who works, spends and votes, and uses their labour, money and vote consciously to steer their personal direction of travel in a wiser direction. Multiply by a couple of million influencers, and a couple of billion might just follow.
But left to our own devices, have we the will to shape our own future?
Part II: my own recipe for de-growth here.
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Start Late, Finish Late - more on the Speed of Life
This time seven years ago:
Swans' way
This time eight years ago:
Sam Smith, Shepherd Neame and the Routemaster bus
This time 10 years ago:
Rainy night in Jeziorki - no flood this time!
This time 11 years ago:
Wide-angle under Pl. Wilsona
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Ranking a better life
This time 13 years ago:
Questions about our biology and spirituality
This time 14 years ago:
Paysages de Varsovie
This time 15 years ago:
Spring walk, twilight time
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