I am a degrowther, but people keep telling me it’s hard to create media communications campaigns for degrowth and that advocating for it is “political suicide.” As if endless cancerous growth isn’t political suicide already. I’m told people want growth and we should use a different name for degrowth and that we should make it palatable to the public. But degrowth is quite literally a critique of growth. Without this critique, it’s just liberal wishywashing for a better future. So I’m at an impasse here. How do we talk about meaningfully talk about degrowth without watering down the message?
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Degrowth is a shit name.
Everything we do grows us and everyone around us grows, growth is evolution and change.
You may be thinking of it as a critique of unsustainable population demands, but the word growth means so much more beyond that. We grow as people, we watch nature and loved ones grow, we grow fond of new things, just to name a few.
As for a better name, iunno anything that focuses on what you want to see, sustainabile populations or something?
Donut economics is maybe a better term for what degrowth wants to achieve. Namely that would be limiting enviromental impact to stay within planetary boundaries while providing a good quality of life for everybody. Other terms are wellbeing economy and so forth trying to grow different more diverse indicators. That is certainly an improvment over using basically only GDP.
As for talking about growth, the key has to be to frame it in a different way. Instead of calling for lower consumption, call for less work instead. Obviously less work leads to lower production, which means lower consumption. However it shows a direct practical advantage which everybody feels directly in their life. In practical terms that would be calls for earlier retirment, shorter work weeks, more vacation time and so forth. That really falls into the problematic framing of the enviromental footprint and consumption. Obviously that is part of the problem, but it pretends that consumers have all the power, when in fact production is mostly controlled by capitalists.
Speaking of capitalists, we always see these statistics comparing countries and then blaiming the wealthy countries for destroying the enviroment. However the much indicator of enviromental damage caused by an individual is their income, rather then their country of origin. That is to say an Indian billionaire is worse for the enviroment then a French mechanic. Obviously wealthy countries have more rich people. However when you have 1% of the global population responsible for 16% of emissions, we know were to start. That is btw more then the share of emissions of the US at 14.6% and a bit more then twice as much as the EUs at 7.9% in 2019, for 77 million people. The top 10% are responsible for 50% of global emissions. Besides some micro nations not country has a majority of its population being a member of the global 10%.
I think people try to reframe degrowth as balance and sustainability in order to avoid political seppuku.
I think having the focus be about reducing unnecessary and wasteful production to be a more accurate description, as we don’t want to degrow everything. Sectors of the society providing human and social value/services will need to grow. It is only the wasteful production that needs to be degrown.
