Degrowth: The Wisdom of Letting Go

A lesson which humans have yet to learn from nature is to let go of self-destructive desires.  Each autumn across the north and south hemispheres, deciduous trees let go of trillions of leaves.  In doing so, they ensure their survival for another year.  Had they attempted to hold on to those leaves, the trees would have surely perished.

Leaves are the energy and food production engines of the tree, representing well over 90% of the tree’s GDP output.  This is where it all happens: photosynthesis, growth, reproduction.  During the spring and summer months, leaves provide the tree with a surplus of nutrients that they produce and distribute through the Phloem superhighways all the way up and down and tree, and into the roots.

But the days of surplus come to an end once autumn approaches.  As both light intensity and the number of sunlight hours decrease, the light-capturing process of photosynthesis slows downs dramatically, and overall production output within leaves drops down to dangerous levels.  To compound things, the fall in temperatures makes all economic activity within the leaf incredibly sluggish.  Enzymes fall outside of their optimal operating temperature.  Juices thicken and struggle to move through the phloem.  Supply of food dwindles, just as the tree, and the leaves themselves, need more energy to sustain themselves during these low temperatures.  The leaves themselves are at risk of changing from being overall producers, to overall consumers.  This would be the ultimate calamity for the tree.

As if things couldn’t get worse, autumn presents a number of other extreme risks, some of them existential.  As dangerous UV levels fall and humidity spikes, fungi become abundant during autumn and winter.  They look for vulnerable, soft structures to attack, and leaves with a weakened immune system are the perfect match for them.  Frost and thaw cycles can damage the soft tissues of leaves during winter, making them easier for fungi to digest. Not only have leaves now become unproductive and expensive to the tree.  Suddenly they are existential threats to the entire organism, becoming potential entry points for systemic fungal infection. 

Desperate times call for desperate measures.  Over thousands of millennia, deciduous trees belonging to countless species have all managed to turn what would appear to be unsurvivable conditions, into an opportunity to thrive.  They do this by having a hard look into their overall economy and balancing their books way before they go bankrupt. What is left at the end of this process is a much smaller, but still profitable economy which will sustain them through winter until better days return. The great economic restructure of autumn is in full swing.

When we see trees throw their leaves to the ground, we usually think that they “get rid of them”, like corporations throw thousands of employees on the street.  But autumn is not an exercise in waste, or death.  It is an ingenious process of downsizing, upcycling, recycling and reusing – the very activities which our self-destructive capitalist necrosystem looks down upon, as it grows itself to death.

to be continued

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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