Is degrwoth a good term to describe the transformation needed?

Hi Katja,

I find it difficult to warm to the term 'degrowth' simply because it focuses (because of the 'de'), on less of something, always a 'hard sell'. And with the danger that this sets up resistance to the idea.

Of course I realise it can be argued that less of a bad thing is good. But that feels like being drawn into considering (the wrong thing?) what's bad rather than choosing to spend one's energy on making the case for what's good, (the alternative?)

It can also be argued that growth as a concept is not a bad thing if its talking about the right things, eg human happiness, wellbeing , sustainability, etc.

A couple of alternatives:

'post growth':
perhaps sidesteps most of the above? Personally, the wikipedia entry for post growth, resonates more with me than the corresponding article for degrowth. For example: "it seeks to identify and build on what is already working, rather than focusing on what is not." But perhaps better than both of these:

"wellbeing economy':
Essentially, it seems to me, size is not the crucial thing. More its about how it works, what it is and does, which comes down to what it is for. 'Wellbeing economy' makes that explicit.

Yes, I guess my first reaction was also the same, but then I learned how diverse conversations are held under the degrowth term and it started to make more sense. I guess it is helpful to talk about degrowth as antithesis for a growth economy measured by the GDP. As long as the GDP growth dictates the decision making, and remains as a yardstick to measure progress, it is hard to build an economy within the planetary boundaries.

"Post growth" term fits well with the idea that "growth" might be needed first to meet the basic needs. Then when there is "enough" to meet the needs of everyone (build a social foundation that Kate Raworth talks about in doughnut economics) it is time for a post-growth economy. That distinction (from growth to post growth) is perhaps more appealing for the countries in Global South, who still struggle to have "enough" for all, or while at global scale there probably is already "enough" it boils down to discuss and agree on global mechanisms that work in distributing the wealth between the nation-states.

"Wellbeing economy" is also an interesting term, maybe it helps to contemplate whether we need states/nation-state and what other units there might be to create "working" economies.

Hi Katja

I think degrowth is vital in countries of the west that are using vast amounts of the worlds natural resources. Please check out https://enough.scot/ to connect with some helpful info and great people.

best wishes

Mark

Thank you, I especially like the slogan "there is enough", it is a positive argument and promotes further discussion on equality and how recourses and wealth are distributed. I will have a closer look at this...

I am not a fan of the term 'de-growth'. For one thing it will immediately make some large proportion of the population stop listening. For most people life is intimately connected with growth - the joy of the garden in spring, new buds unfurling...

I recently saw a definition of life (there are many of course) which had something novel and , in hindsight, obvious in its list of characteristics: ageing.

Any living system must be ageing - must be changing over time, must be learning, must be part of the evolution of the biosphere - the gaia. Any truly steady-state circular economy is not properly alive. Living things are not circular - they are driven systems; dissipators of energy flows at the 'edge of chaos' - this is what life is. Life is an agent of the second law - turning the heat energy of the sun more rapidly into entropy than would a barren rock.

It isn't that we must accept perpetual growth, but that we must accept perpetual wear-and-tear of all kinds - which either leads to death (in some cases appropriately) or requires external inputs. It also generates external outputs. Some of the food we eat is turned into methane and disappears into the atmosphere, the tyres on our bicycles are ground into dust by the road - these are externalised from our economy into a wider, deeper, slower system, and there's no point pretending anything else just because 'circular' and 'steady state' have a nice safe ring to them in these apocalyptic times.

I am no bigger fan of fairy stories about the new economy than I am of those about the current one. At the scale of operation of our civilisation, nothing but rigorous cleavage to the best model of actuality we can discover is acceptable. Our capacity to ruin everything is too great.

I also cannot understand life without growth. The biosphere, over the last 3.5 bn years, has expanded its sphere of influence by a conservative 10^25. Another definition of life is ; 'life creates the conditions for more life'.

This doesn't mean we accept insensate growth, growth for growth's sake - of course not. But the principal of growth is built in to life. Imagine spring without growth, a baby without growth, a species without young, an ecosystem where lions and antelopes were not in a dynamic equilibrium - each maximising their numbers as hard as they possibly can - but that instead each species operated in line with an algorithmic machine. These examples make no sense, and are counter to all my understanding of life - intuitive, experiential and scientific.

Life requires growth requires ageing which eventually leads to death, which seeds birth - but never has this been a stasis, and any increase in energy, or discovery of a process which increases entropy more rapidly will destabilise the system in the direction of growth (like the evolution of fungi, which could digest lignin, and so fold the externality that was otherwise to become oil and coal back into the biosphere - growing it massively) - which may or may not be sustainable (only time will tell, only evolution will correct).

Only humans find the predator/prey cycle disturbing (extra prey leads to burgeoning predator numbers leads to crash in prey leads to crash in predators leads to growth in prey...so inefficient, so sad...); the biosphere has enshrined it because it works to sustain and grow the biosphere. If we seek to impose stasis as a fearful over-reaction to insensate growth of a dead machine that we invented we will make an equal but opposite error.

Growth in carrying capacity of the biosphere. That sounds OK to me. We need to do it anyway - since we have shrunk it so much - that is the thrust of all the 'regenerative' agricultural innovations that are so encouraging - growing the biosphere (do you follow Beth Sawin? - she's wonderful).

We consider the carrying capacity of the biosphere to be the best deep metric with which to compare and choose between proposals.