blog — January 12

Stan Cox on Capitalism and Degrowth

"To celebrate the launch of Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth, a new book by environmentalist and former Land Institute fellow Stan Cox, we’ve unlocked a portion of the introductory chapter. In the book, Cox makes the case for embracing degrowth, posing it not only as a means for preventing climate collapse but also for our collective emancipation from other systemic ills. He writes that “we can free ourselves from the growth economy and its many harmful impacts by seeing true wealth as the collective pursuit of meaning, social justice, and beauty while living within ecological limits.” As you read these passages, we invite you to imagine what a degrowth future might look like for you and your community." —Irina Costache, assistant publicist

A rallying cry to save the Earth with an “anthropause”—a term that can apply to any broad rollback of economic activity that gives nature room to recover and flourish.

“An iconoclast of the best kind, Stan Cox has an all-too-rare commitment to following arguments wherever they lead, however politically dangerous that turns out to be.” —Naomi Klein

In Anthropause, Stan Cox writes that by embracing degrowth, we are not turning our backs on progress. Instead, we are redefining it. We can produce enough goods to satisfy everyone’s needs, Cox argues, while liberating ourselves from ecocidal economies and the injustices they impose. This book lays out a clear vision of what we will gain and how as we embrace this revolutionary transition.

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In spring 2020, a large share of the world’s people found themselves confined at home, either voluntarily or in response to lockdown orders. The goal, of course, was to slow transmission of the coronavirus causing Covid-19, but there were other consequences, and some of them turned out to be pleasant surprises.

After more than a century of exponential increase, global carbon emissions plunged 8.8 percent worldwide. Reductions were greatest in some of the highest-emitting regions: 13 percent in the United States and Europe, 12 percent in Brazil, and more than 15 percent in India. Walking and cycling increased dramatically. Air and noise pollution levels plummeted in large cities. Thanks to reductions in industrial activity and tourism, streams, rivers, and lakes became cleaner.

Even more striking was how animal life quickly filled spaces that humans had suddenly deserted. Enchanting photos flooded in from around the world. A herd of wild sheep and goats grazed alongside the expressway leading into Istanbul’s international airport. Mountain goats window-shopped on a main street in Wales; a deer strode through a striped crosswalk, Abbey Road–style, in Nara, Japan. Fallow deer grazed on lawns in East London. A herd of water buffalo took command of a major highway in New Delhi. A sea lion lounged on a Buenos Aires sidewalk, while a puma prowled through downtown Santiago, Chile. Raccoons romped in the surf at a public beach in Panama. Scientists who studied and documented this flourishing of nature in real time began referring to the phenomenon as an “anthropause.”

As animals roamed freely, the pandemic took a devastating toll on human life. Further hardship resulted from the very measures that were necessary to limit the number of people infected or killed. Alongside the misery, however, came some positive changes in people’s lives. A survey of more than three thousand adults under lockdown in Scotland found that many were enjoying more quality time and improved relationships with partners, family, and friends. Most had been exercising more than usual and paying better attention to their health. A whopping 83 percent had become “more appreciative of things usually taken for granted.”

In August 2020, with the second surge of the coronavirus underway, the Pew Research Center asked more than nine thousand US adults about their pandemic experience so far. As one would expect, a solid majority of the comments were negative, with 89 percent of those surveyed mentioning at least one unwelcome change in their lives. But 73 percent mentioned at least one unexpected positive change. Pew published verbatim quotes from some of the people they interviewed. The variety of responses is striking; furthermore, the lion’s share of people’s quotes, both negative and positive, referred not to the experience of the disease itself but to the measures they took to protect themselves from it.

To me, the positive side effects of efforts to suppress transmission of the coronavirus clearly suggest that if humanity adopts radical measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to near zero on an expedited schedule, many other problems might be ameliorated. To be sure, Covid-19 and climate change are very different kinds of problems. The former struck suddenly and hard, while the latter has unfolded slowly over decades, with dramatic impacts becoming clearly apparent only in recent years. Nevertheless, because affluent countries have procrastinated for three-plus decades and carbon has continued accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere, the need for forceful climate action is as immediate and urgent as was the need to suppress coronavirus transmission in spring 2020. The measures required to rein in greenhouse gas emissions are of much greater depth and breadth than those necessitated by the pandemic and will have an even broader range of consequences. But I anticipate that among those repercussions, we’ll find plenty of beautiful surprises.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UPSHOT

Over the past two centuries, industrial and postindustrial enterprises have been yanking societies back and forth between an improved and a degraded quality of life. Industry has developed preventatives and cures that increase lifespans but have also filled our world with toxic pollution, overmedication, and lethal weaponry, all of which shorten people’s lives. Industry has produced enough foodstuff per capita to keep everyone well fed—in theory—but billions suffer routine hunger while billions of others are oversupplied with unhealthful food. Corporations have made it possible—for privileged people at least—to move from place to place faster than any other organism on earth, but at a catastrophic cost to the environment and social justice. Big corporations have made intercontinental travel possible for hundreds of millions while providing the aircraft, ships, armored vehicles, missiles, and bombs that keep armed conflict raging somewhere on the globe every day of the year. They’ve developed systems that give us access to information from across the world in billionsfold greater quantities than before. Still, those systems have proven far more efficient in spreading disinformation, propaganda, and hate than in bringing us constructively together. All this economic production—the harmful, every bit as much as the useful—is aimed at keeping alive the impossible dream of exponential economic growth without end.

If we move boldly to prevent ecological collapse by deeply altering our values and curbing our material production and consumption, we will reap a host of other societal, ecological, and personal benefits that will enrich us with a more beautiful and meaningful life. In the process, I’ll show, we can free ourselves from a multitude of harms that plague us in today’s growth-at-any-cost society.

The public health policies of 2020 certainly had some beneficial side effects. Anthropologists, geographers, and other academics seemed especially inspired by an apparent resurgence of interest in humanity’s relationship with nature. A decades-long trend in which Americans had been spending more and more time indoors was reversed almost overnight. People took to gardening, hiking, bird-watching, cooking out, and playing backyard games. Whereas many national and state parks closed their gates, many urban parks and other communal green spaces stayed open, and they were in high demand.

In a 2020 study, 83 percent of US and UK survey subjects reported feeling an enhanced love of life and living things, an emotion that the surveyors, citing Edward O. Wilson, labeled biophilia, “the innate emotional affiliation that humans have with non-human life forms.” Even those respondents with the lowest interest in nature before the pandemic experienced a greater sense of biophilia during it.

Noting that the Global North’s retreat from “relentless consumerism and ‘always on’ economies” during the pandemic had immediate ecological benefits, a group of scholars wondered if the deadly pandemic might prompt the world’s privileged to pull back from the long-term damage we are doing to the earth and be better off for it. Urging that we take from the anthropause a lesson that a “fundamental scaling back of high-impact activities” can accomplish the kind of ecological healing that technology cannot, they argue that the “anthropause metaphor also implies that there are physical and spiritual benefits to slowing down, treading lightly, and limiting unnecessary human interventions in natural processes. We note that these associations are consistent with non-Western and Indigenous conceptualizations of human-nature relationships as requiring care, balance and reciprocity.”

Other academic observers hoped we would be prompted to “replace a sense of owning with a sense of belonging.”

HAPPY SUBTRACTIONS

The dramatic ecological transformation of society that’s needed to keep the earth livable for future generations would also yield some immediate environmental benefits. The 2020 anthropause illustrates some of those advantages: thriving biodiversity, reduced pollution, and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, of course, life in the early Covid-19 pandemic was a lousy example for the future. For many, it was a time of increased deprivation, hunger, alienation, and labor exploitation.

The most affluent 1 percent of households captured most of the global economic wealth generated between 2020 and 2022 as Covid-19 raged; indeed, their share was nearly twice as large as the total that trickled down to the other 99 percent. The 1 percent also produced disproportionately large quantities of greenhouse gas emissions. But they’re only 1 percent. It’s the wealthiest 25 percent or so who account for the bulk of global emissions. That includes most but not all of us in rich countries. Economically stressed and racialized communities within the United States are not only responsible for less environmental damage than others; they are also most harshly impacted — not only by that damage but also by the political, economic, and technological forces that cause the damage.

Our economy is among those that cause the greatest damage to the earth’s living systems. If it continues to expand, it is doomed to fail eventually, causing widespread collapse of the ecosystem and society as we know it. Degrowth, therefore, is rational and imperative. A frequent tendency among those imagining material restraint in affluent societies is to dwell on the need for sacrifice and focus on the desirable elements of our lives that we would be required to give up. Sacrifice is indeed necessary, but it’s not the subject of this book. I instead direct attention to some of the pernicious features of twenty-first-century American life that people at various points up and down the economic pyramid can gleefully leave behind as we and future generations reduce the quantities of energy and material resources flowing through society.

Most people who are already being clobbered by the impacts of ecological breakdown, from the small island nations of the South Pacific, to East Africa, to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, to the charred forest lands of North America, already know very well that the affluent world needs to rein itself in, and quickly. Nor do racialized US communities, targeted over and over with the worst environmental consequences of capitalism, need to be convinced that the privileged must be constrained. But among many people who have known at least adequate material, environmental, and economic security, there may be a widespread worry that if that system is replaced with one that is just and sustainable, much of their security will be lost. It will indeed be a very different country and world, but if we all are to have a livable future, we must step into it. For encouragement, we can look around us at the system we’re leaving behind, recognize the calamities it’s causing, and imagine a better life without it.

Degrowth will relegate to the past all sorts of everyday problems that impact us collectively as well as personally, problems that can’t be banished solely by individual behavioral changes (although they can help). That banishment requires collective mobilization, both locally and globally. And it must account for the well-established fact that the multiplying impacts of climate chaos, land abuse, and pollution are distributed lopsidedly among households and communities, both locally and globally. In line with degrowth principles, this mobilization must ensure that the loss of economic dominance and the burden of reining in the overproduction that’s causing ecological breakdown must fall on people, communities, and businesses that have privileged status economically, racially, ethnically, and geographically. In contrast, both the avoidance of environmental calamity and the subtraction from everyday life of the myriad ills spun off by the current growth economy will be enjoyed by all.

Either for fear of losing their audience or because of their own misplaced faith in technology, environmental activists and opinion leaders tend to steer clear of talk about limits, restraint, sacrifice, and the need to reject material overabundance. Could a focus on happy subtractions help make messaging about the need for ecological limitations more appealing? What if the movement adopts persuasive new talking points about the outrages, annoyances, and grave dangers that plague us and our communities right now but won’t be following us into a future that keeps within ecologically necessary limits?

The pursuit of degrowth will honor the living world around us with a new anthropause, one that eliminates our destructive interactions with the ecosphere while fostering healthy ones. In doing so, we can free our own species from the burdens that capitalism and economic growth impose on us every day.

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STAN COX is the author of seven books, including Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (2010), The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can (2020), and The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism,and the Next Pandemic (2021). His writing about the economic and political roots of the global ecological crisis have been published by the New York Times, Washington Post, the Nation, the New Republic, Al Jazeera, Yes!, the Progressive, and local publications across 43 U.S. states. In 2012, The Atlantic named Cox their “Readers’ Choice Brave Thinker” for his critique of air conditioning. He lives in Dearborn, Michigan.