The young people who are protesting in the streets of Europe to demand housing, education, and not to be used as cannon fodder don’t need us to tell them about Degrowth: they already know what it is. They are the first generation that is living worse than their parents; the first one that experiences the way down.
We don’t need to explain to them that they must cut useless consumerism to avoid wasting the resources of future generations and prevent climate change. That was useful 20 years ago: now is too late. They are already that future generation who will pay for the unconsciousness of their parents: resources have already been squandered, the climate is already altered, the war over resources has already begun.
What can the Degrowth Movement say to this generation? It occurs to me that it could just offer three humble ideas:
Firstly, we must denounce that, what they call economic growth, is no longer growth but rather misgrowth. We live in a system that allows young people to earn enough to maintain the illusion of consumerist fiction (cheap clothes, low-cost flights, showing off on social media…) but not enough to access the essentials, because housing, food, leisure time, social life and healthcare are becoming increasingly expensive and inaccessible. We must unmask this misgrowth: the promise of consumerist well-being is now nothing more than an empty shell.
The second idea is to realise that much of what is called technological progress is hardly progress at all. Today, very few technological advances are like penicillin, electricity or tractors, which, in their day, dramatically improved the lives of all humanity. Today, technological progress brings fewer and fewer benefits to fewer and fewer people; yet it continues to require vast quantities of energy, water, land, and human labour that might otherwise be needed for essentials such as healthcare, housing, education, and food. We must stop dreaming that technology will be the salvation from our ills. Right now, we need social, political and human progress far more than technical progress.
The third idea is to rediscover the full meaning of the slogan living better with less. Degrowth can only work if both aspects – less and better – are addressed simultaneously. We need to cause less harm to the planet that sustains us, but we also need to better meet people’s needs. What if, instead of growth or degrowth, we started talking about improvement – that is, optimizing the use of the resources we have (being conscious that they are dwindling by the day) to increase human well-being, whether or not the economy grows?
We must dispel the notion that environmentalism is a luxury reserved for the privileged few who can afford to cut back on consumption for the sake of the planet. At this juncture, environmentalism must focus on how to distribute resources more fairly. We must seek new ways of meeting essential needs without growth, because, in real terms, we have already stopped growing. We cannot expect growth to allow us to mask social injustices as it did in past decades.
This better distribution, this optimisation and this pursuit of human progress can only be built up gradually, on the basis of concrete demands. The protests currently filling the streets of Europe are essential to tackling the eco-social crisis we are experiencing. Although it may not seem so, these demands are an indispensable part of the ecological transition; they are one of the fundamental components of successful degrowth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Margarita Mediavilla is currently a lecturer in the Department of Systems Engineering and Automation at the University of Valladolid. She is a member of the Research Group on Energy, Economics and System Dynamics (GEEDS) and conducts highly interdisciplinary research based on System Dynamics. Her research focuses on the development of integrated assessment models for energy-economy-environment and the study of the energy transition in the context of fossil fuel depletion and climate change.
She has been one of the principal developers of the integrated assessment models WoLiM, MEDEAS and WILIAM, and her research has focused on the biological limits of the energy transition, land use and food systems, with the development of the WILIAM-TERRA model. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal 15/1515 and her non-academic publications are collected on her blog Habas Contadas.
|
