My Manifesto for a Post-Growth World
I have been an activist within the environmental sphere for over a decade. I am employed as communications manager for Sustainable Population Australia for just over four years now and I am host of Post-Growth Australia Podcast (PGAP) for just over a year and a half. During this time, I have been immensely fortunate to meet a plethora of amazing people with a diversity of perspectives on the big questions. How to scale back overshoot on a finite planet and how we can transition to more sustainable systems of living?
On the recent Christmas edition of PGAP, I had the opportunity to reflect on my own vision for a post-growth future and I would like to share a few of these perspectives. As with all personal perspectives, many of these are influenced by the amalgamation of articles, books, conversations and people over the years reconstituted through my life experience, specific interests and personal bias.
For me, the most critical starting point is this. As a global collective, we need to somehow rediscover the lost art of leaving the natural world alone.
To take a leaf from the book ‘The Economics of Arrival’, we need to know when to ‘S-T-O-P’. For almost all of us, and particularly for those of us in the global north, we should have put the brakes on the jobs n’ growth experiment decades ago (at the very least).
When most of us in the environmental movement think of stopping environmental destruction, the narrative is focused mainly around mining and fossil fuels. But it goes beyond this. One of the very first things we need to do, just as a starting point, is to stop any further major construction and development projects. NO MORE land releases. No more pouring concrete over farm land. No more major infrastructure projects.
Exceptions are for when new buildings are absolutely necessary. For example, public housing or eco-housing to replace existing stock. Or for the necessary infrastructure required to transition to low carbon communities and industries within a degrowth paradigm. Too much of Australia has already been given over to human activity such as agriculture, mining and increasingly shocking urban development, in spite of our lower population density (by global comparisons).
Without first halting the scale of what we are currently doing, everything else is academic. So what needs to be done — practically — to get there?
As an Australian citizen with a strong interest in urban planning, my practical recommendations are through these lens, although I would suggest that many of the ideas below could be applied to many situations worldwide.
Using Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as a tool, former construction, trades and timber workers could be redirected to (literally) greener pastures. Examples include the maintenance and repair of existing infrastructure, turning some of our burnt and dead forests into biochar and replanting new forests in damaged agricultural land. If a currency issuing government can’t go broke then expenditure towards post-growth friendly industries and job opportunities is critical. The main limiting factor is the availability and access to dwindling resources, not public budget deficits.
MMT could also assist in ensuring that every suburb has access to a community garden, meeting centre and tool shed, facilitated by experts, regardless of economic status in the community. We need to change our approach to housing and public amenities as shared public goods rather than opportunities for investment and speculating. This means that assets such as community gardens won’t be fetishized and lead to gentrification and soaring land prices within these communities.
In order to stop development occurring on an exponentially growing scale toward the pockets of exponentially shrinking owners of capital, fundamental changes need to be enforced on the way we do business. There need to be ceiling limits on tax concessions that any one person can corral from property speculation. There need to be ceiling limits of income to dampen wealth inequality and ceiling limits on the amount that banks are willing to lend so they can’t set the price on exponentially rising house prices. Public housing and government run rental arrangements need to be the norm and not the exception.
I believe the property developer sector is an underestimated contributor to many of the environmental and societal issues we face. I would like to see XR style protests directed toward property developer lobby groups with the same gusto that is directed toward big mining.
There need to be ceiling limits on the scale of commercial operations so we can avoid the societal pitfalls that comes with ‘big business’. Huge franchise or corporate agglomerations need to be broken down into smaller operations. This is to avoid the misuse of power and centralisation that comes with scale. This same trajectory should be applied to our nation states. Power should be taken away from the federal government and redirected toward local governments. I am aware that local councils aren’t always bastions of morality either, but this will mean that they are not starved of funding from the federal government and therefore forced to cooperate with private corporations and developers.
Over time, local government decisions would support more direct resident participation and accountability, enabling policy change. These may include land use decisions that benefit the long term sustainability of the local community rather than the profits of distant third party holders of capital. Even if local communities do not function well, the scale and magnitude of damage is mitigated as a function of the smaller size of the community.
I like the idea that investments for private projects can only be done at the local council scale. This puts an immediate ceiling limit on the scale of infrastructure projects. As I understand it, modern industrialised capitalism emerged as the scale of investment and returns increased, and one of the major reasons why the GDP is forced to exponentially grow (i.e. to pay back on exponentially growing investment projects).
Am I completely antithetical to globalisation? Mostly yes, however I do understand there are always exceptions. No one region of the world can produce everything. It would be very difficult for the manufacture of specialised, life-saving medications to persist without some form of globalisation, for example. We all need to be global participations to ensure that we don’t become to petty and insular and also to ensure that there is an integrated and shared response to addressing so many of the world’s issues.
Ultimately, I believe in ‘think global and act local’ and ultimately humans work better when they’re not having to function within enormous and inhuman bureaucracies. It is better for democracy too. I think it is fair to say that democracy is a more real experience in smaller countries such as Luxembourg and Costa Rica, where politicians may be more accountable if they live over the road from you (although nowhere in the world is perfect). Compare that to USA, a country of 350 million presided over by one person (and his business donors) who may live thousands of kilometres away. How then can you have a fair democracy where all opinions are heard and weighted equally?
In Australia’s case a decolonised, Ecocentric future economy requires the acknowledgement of past injustices to First Nations people and deliberate (not tokenistic) mechanism to hand back control of stewardship and our governing system. This would be facilitated by a purposeful aim toward smaller societies and scales of operation so that land actually becomes available to hand back to traditional custodians. I believe that economic systems whichrevolve around the local council economy as the central hub may mean that direct conversations with traditional custodians may be more possible, without being subsumed by the systematic bureaucracies that inhibit change in larger, more brittle systems.
All these things I suggest require a change to population policy and the way in which we all approach population sustainability. Even in consideration of the other contributors to total human impact, such as the terrible and wasteful consumption patterns in the global north, the vast gulf of wealth inequality both between and within nations, and the persisting reliance on fossil fuels, I can’t see any way in addressing the issues I’ve mentioned above with the constant of an ever growing population.
Population is the great multiplier, population contraction the great catalyst if you will, that alone is insufficient in scaling back our mark on the planet but is a necessary prerequisite for any other system or behaviour change to have any real impact. Population growth is the ultimate fuel that drives the momentum of so many of our industries. Without more producers, financial institutions can’t invest in large scale projects, anticipating GDP growth that will allow borrowers to repay on interest. Without more consumers, the construction and property sectors are starved of the rocket fuel necessary to justify speculating on property value and concreting over fertile soil with no end in sight. In globalised societies, the externalities can be dispersed across the globe diffusing the everyday experience of planetary overshoot. But with smaller, more independent societies that rely on the immediate countryside to sustain themselves, overshoot becomes more immediately apparent, with overpopulation more felt.
So how to address population policy? On a global scale, to recognise that most people generally gravitate towards smaller families everywhere IF they have access to social, financial and logistical support to access contraception, family planning and reproductive health services. Global population will stabilise and even decrease of its own voluntary accord, if only we are prepared to close the gap on reproductive health care and not use first world guilt as an obfuscation.
Domestically, Australia’s population policy could be described as similar to the rest of the Anglosphere but on steroids. Scapegoat refugees and asylum seekers while cranking record high skilled, temporary and student migrations at the bequest of big business for narrow economic objectives. We need to have a mature approach to migration policy in Australia by being willing to cut through the dichotomy and divisiveness. We need to be open to a possible future of an older demographic, as this is the only way our population can degrow voluntarily. We need to take the decision making on population policy from big business lobbyists into citizen assemblies. There is a taboo and inertia on debating the issue openly which only serves the interests of those who pursue a migration program that is both huge in magnitude and hugely discriminating.
Beyond population, beyond consumption, beyond fossil fuels, we need a fundamental shift in consciousness. One that, ultimately, learns to fall in love with the natural world again. To allow ourselves to become humbled by our small role in a vast and interconnected web of life that expands in all directions and in all scales. That we don’t need to strive, work, and burrow our frowns to bend the land to our will. There is virtue to leaving things alone and to be okay with this. To relearn that the truth of existence dwells between the gaps of the crude labels we make through our words and that we’d do more good indulging in rituals that take us outside of language than sling words of arbitrary division at one another over social media.
To avoid repeating the mistakes of the past (and of the present) and replacing one ‘ism’ with another ‘ism’ requires a radical shift in perception and consciousness.
Do I think any of the above is possible? In theory yes, I believe many of ideas are logistically feasible. Do I think we have the collective will to make these changes before societal, economic and environmental collapse gives full embrace? Probably not, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to this point, and we’ve blown them all. Just ask COP26. However, it is better to strive for the good even when impossible, than to do nothing to prove that you’re right. I also always say that the post-growth movement doesn’t necessarily have to ‘stop’ collapse. It can be about building the mindset and the tools so we have a narrative and story to persist after collapse (whatever that may look like).
As in the popular movie quote, this is not ‘mission improbable.’ Nor are my opinions better or worse than anyone else’s. Ultimately, if we can all agree that it is impossible for human impact to grow infinitely on a finite planet, then how we get this is a new story in which each and every one of us is a vital and necessary co-author.
A version of this article’s script was broadcast for the Christmas edition of Post-Growth Australia Podcast (PGAP): ‘Michael’s Seasonal Manifesto’ which can be heard here. You can find out more about Michael on his new website here. Michael would like to give specific thanks to Dr Michelle Maloney from New Economy Network Australia (NENA) ‘for having a profound impact on my world view, particularly in introducing me to Ecocentric economic theory.’
