Fearlessly Embracing Contraction

You will notice one common attribute across the main survival strategies of civilisations: they were all growth-based, which is of course why they would not be applicable today as part of an economic contraction plan.  We cannot grow ourselves out of problems, when the problem itself is growth.  What goes up must come down. Growth leads to collapse. As tragic and unlikely as civilizational collapse may sound, it has happened before to every single human civilization.  It is the most natural, predictable and most probable outcome for an exponentially overgrown economic system, simply being brought back down to size by its own physics. 

But scaling back our presence on the planet is an action contrary to everything our civilization has stood for, during the entirety of our history.  Our skills, our intuition, our brain, are all geared towards “building” themselves out of problems: our knee-jerk reaction has always been the same: inventing, constructing, innovating technologies. This highlights the impossible conundrum we find ourselves in: how do we contract without “making stuff”? How can we learn to take a step back from time to time?

The answer would seem obvious, but somehow the message is not getting through to the right people. Many are still thinking of degrowth in “growth” terms, because they simply cannot process the concept of doing less. It is a taboo in our work-obsessed, growth-obsessed psychonomy. It is counter-intuitive not only to the mainstream business paradigm, but to our entire civilisation as we have come to know it since its beginnings. Denial of what real degrowth means is rife, pointing to challenges that have much less to do with our current economic system, and much more to do with our mindset.  The concept of contraction simply does not seem to compute for most people. Hint: it is not meant to. We are not balancing books here, we are saving the planet. Contraction may not have immediate benefits to humans in terms of GDP or making the tycoons richer. It has benefits to the entire planet however, and its 8 million species, which include humans. Economic contraction is the biggest investment humanity can make right now. It dwarfs any technological development or invention, because it safeguards the very existence of all of the above.

George is an author, researcher, chemist, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons or enjoy his books