Weaving Voices

Episode 1

The Economic Waters We Swim In

[00:00:00] Rebecca Burgess: Rampant growth in the clothing industry has pushed the ecological and social systems it relies upon, past their regenerative capacity. This uptick has led to soaring profits for the world's largest companies, but it's taking a toll on everyone and everything else it extracts from. We are producing roughly 100 billion garments per year globally.

[00:00:26] Rebecca Burgess: And within the United States and Europe, we have increased our consumption of clothing by 60%, just between the years, 2000 and 2014. More than half of that volume is plastic. Our wardrobes in the United States are so full that over 80% of our clothing will never see the light of day within a year of wearing. According to the European Environmental Agency,

[00:00:51] Rebecca Burgess: it's estimated that approximately half a million tons of plastic textile fiber are released into our oceans every year. [00:01:00] The fashion trade journals continue to parade growth figures of particular companies forward as badges of their true value versus a reflection of their devastating, environmental and social impacts.

[00:01:13] Rebecca Burgess: This consistent lust for growth or growth-ism is the fuel upholding this economic system. 

[00:01:20] Jason Hickel: Imagine being on an airplane, the, the only way it could stay in the air was to continue accelerating. I mean, this is deeply scary, right? 

[00:01:28] Rebecca Burgess: That's economic anthropologist and professor Jason Hickel, the first guest on this debut episode of weaving voices.

[00:01:36] Rebecca Burgess: And I'm your host, Rebecca Burgess.

[00:01:47] Rebecca Burgess: Weaving Voices is a Whetstone Radio Collective podcast that stitches textile system, traditions, economic philosophy, and climate science into a quilt of understanding. Designed to [00:02:00] transform our thinking and actions, both as citizens and material culture makers, and users. A little bit about me; I am a Northern California based author and educator.

[00:02:12] Rebecca Burgess: I have spent more than two decades working at this intersection of fiber systems, ecology and regional economic development. And in the process, I founded a nonprofit organization called Fibershed, which develops regional fiber systems that focus on the restoration of our soils protection and health of our biosphere and support of rural economies.

[00:02:39] Rebecca Burgess: In every community I have learned from, I have observed that these talented and wealthy with skill communities have faced very similar challenges.

[00:02:49] Rebecca Burgess: There's been this consistent set of erosive economic conditions that has really made maintaining textile, making processes challenging to uphold and pass [00:03:00] down to the next generation. The reality is that these traditions are more than a piece of cloth. They are ways of life that intricately reflect how the community engages with the landscape, how they feed themselves, how they produce language, music, architecture.

[00:03:18] Rebecca Burgess: And even their governance models. When we lose these diverse cultures, born of bioregional expertise, we lose a human toolkit, which is layers of experience that have been honed for centuries to help humans live in balance and sustain. 

[00:03:37] Rebecca Burgess: My vision in creating this podcast is to share conversations and stories that remind us of the path we've taken and the decisions made to get to this point where material culture has become a climate change inducing, human health, deteriorating, and labor exploit.

[00:03:55] Rebecca Burgess: My aim is also to bring forth the stories and narratives that remind us that it [00:04:00] has not always been this way. And this series is an invitation for all of us to join in, in conversation with many who share a deep creative urge to remedy and transform our textile system to be life giving versus life taking. We do know how to do this work because we've done it before. We may be in a slightly different tapestry of cultural and technological influences than we've experienced in the past, but the same ingredients needed for social and economic transformation have always retained their basic flavor. In this debut episode, we focus on the subject matter developed in Hickel's latest book, "Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World." 

[00:04:48] Jason Hickel: Nobody would deny that capitalism is incredibly productive and yet we still have social crises everywhere we look. We have poverty, we have hunger. We have other basic needs remain unmet. 

[00:05:01] Rebecca Burgess: [00:05:00] We'll explore Hickel's framing of the context and current issues generated from the design of our economic system.

[00:05:08] Rebecca Burgess: We're gonna sift through some solutions and help us understand and frame up textile cultures. And also the state of our planet. So together we are going to unpack some ways to balance the power deltas between the global south and the global north.

[00:05:27] Rebecca Burgess: After the end of feudalism came the establishment of a very rich commons based in shared grazing lands and fisheries and farmland, land that was stewarded by former surfs. During this European golden era Hickel states that

[00:05:46] Rebecca Burgess: the average lifespan increased and the belief of life in all things or animism became the predominant ontology. After several centuries of this golden era, Europe experienced a kind of rubber [00:06:00] band effect, which he says included what is known as the most violent and bloody moment in human history; the years, 1500 to 1800. Within this period, the elite many former futile Lords sought to control and extract from well established, decentralized goods and service based economies.

[00:06:20] Rebecca Burgess: They aimed to extract from the commons. I asked Hickel to describe the key policies and philosophies that underpinned the resulting land theft that occurred in this historic moment, which then led to the periods of industrialization and colonization. Particularly the policies and the philosophies that the European nations utilized to consolidate power during this era. Hickel calls this the most fascinating part of the story.

[00:06:47] Jason Hickel: We have this assumption that there was feudalism and then there was capitalism right after it, and capitalism destroyed feudalism and that's the end of the story. In reality, historians tell us that things are much more complicated and much more interesting. So everybody knows, of [00:07:00] course, that feudalism was a brutal system where peasant farmers were exploited as surfs on the estates of wealthy landowners.

[00:07:07] Jason Hickel: What most people don't know is that peasants fought against that system in a series of extraordinary revolutionary uprisings, which were brutally attacked by the feudal Lords. But eventually the peasants revolutionaries succeeded in overthrowing feudalism in roughly about the late 1300s. And in its place, they established the seeds of what was a more egalitarian, more democratic society.

[00:07:32] Rebecca Burgess: He says that once the feudal Lords were through and done, standards of living improved, access to nutrition improved, wages went up and rents went down. It was a kind of golden age for European commoners. And he says it was also characterized by a dramatic ecological set of improvements. 

[00:07:54] Jason Hickel: Under egalitarian democratic conditions, such systems are less environmentally destructive than [00:08:00] hierarchical ones because they don't require this kind of extraction for the sake of elite accumulation.

[00:08:06] Jason Hickel: And so more democratic societies can share the yields of resources more, fairly, and meet their needs with lower total resource use, and also can make more rational decisions about what to do with things like forests and rivers, because they rely on them for their own existence and need to keep them in perpetuity.

[00:08:23] Rebecca Burgess: The crucial thing to understand is that the elites were not pleased with this turn of events because the rising wages meant they were no longer able to exploit cheap labor and pile up the profits that they enjoyed under feudalism. They desperately needed a way to push wages back down and they did so by engaging in a process that we now know as enclosure, a very critical word.

[00:08:50] Rebecca Burgess: This process of enclosure entailed forcibly removing peasants from their land and fencing off the commons for their own private use. [00:09:00] This is an extremely violent process, as you can imagine. Whole villages were destroyed. Crops were uprooted. Hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly displaced during this period in Western Europe.

[00:09:12] Rebecca Burgess: And it basically created a massive internal refugee crisis. 

[00:09:17] Jason Hickel: For the first time in history, we have a situation where people are literally fully cut off from the land and the resources they need to live. And they have no access to the means of survival except to sell themselves for wages at a cheap rates to the new kind of capitalist class.

[00:09:34] Jason Hickel: So this basically creates kind of this class of desperate landless workers and they flooded into the cities. Where they lived in slums and provided the cheap labor that fueled the industrial revolution. So the rise of capitalism in Europe depended on this brutal violence of enclosure. And of course the same thing was then perpetrated across the rest of the world

[00:09:54] Jason Hickel: during the period of European colonization. What colonization basically was, was a destruction of [00:10:00] subsistence economies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, in order to force people into the capitalist labor market so that they would work for cheap wages on capitalist plantations and in capitalist mines and capitalist factories

[00:10:13] Jason Hickel: and so on. 

[00:10:15] Rebecca Burgess: Instead of believing that capitalism arose through this kind of natural process, it becomes abundantly clear that it was imposed through a very violent intervention in the social order. And that violence lasted for the better part of 300 years.

[00:10:33] Jason Hickel: What's interesting here is that enclosure was essential from the perspective of capitalism to break down the barriers to elite accumulation.

[00:10:41] Jason Hickel: Basically it made resources available for elite appropriation and it created this mass of cheap workers, but it was not enough on its own. These early capitalists also had to fundamentally change people's ideas about nature. And this is where the story really gets interesting. So for most of our [00:11:00] 300,000 year history, human communities had a very intimate relationship with a non-human world.

[00:11:04] Jason Hickel: And we know this from archeological evidence and from anthropological evidence as well. They fundamentally recognized a kind of interdependence between humans and non-human beings. They even thought of non-human beings as relatives or as kin. 

[00:11:18] Rebecca Burgess: This is often understood as animism, the idea that all creatures share in the same essential kind of being and have an underlying relatedness. Hickel says what's interesting is that the early capitalists in Europe saw animism as a problem because it posed a kind of moral barrier to the exploitation of nature.

[00:11:41] Rebecca Burgess: So they needed a new philosophy that would cast nature as an object. Something that's kind of fundamentally separate from and inferior to humans. So in this way, nature or what became nature could be easily exploited for human [00:12:00] gain. They saw animism as this obstacle to accumulation and they needed a new story.

[00:12:07] Rebecca Burgess: As European philosophers were creating this new category called, "nature," they broadened the category to include certain human beings who were closely tied with this new distinct and separate entity. Members of indigenous societies were placed in this new category. This is how colonization was established and the slave trade.

[00:12:30] Rebecca Burgess: They also did this with women across Europe and the rest of the world, claiming that women were somehow closer to nature, emotional and irrational, trying to paint them with this new category of nature. And with this justification, Hickel says, that this allowed the brutal exploitation of women who render extraordinary amounts of labor to the capitalist economy and are entirely unpaid for it.

[00:12:58] Rebecca Burgess: This dualistic thought is [00:13:00] basically leveraged to kind of cheapen nature and labor for the sake of capital accumulation. And that's basically a philosophy that remains more or less in place today. So even though science kind of took a turn and was able to retract some of that thinking, it had already become entrenched.

[00:13:20] Rebecca Burgess: There's so many aspects of capitalist science today in our system. This continuance to just grind out more and more material, more things, and we continue to leave out the process of unpacking our history. Much that goes on in these systems we've created are really false notions. And so it's valuable to debunk this. And this is why the history is so critical. I've heard this argument from people who are very big fans of capitalism, family members, [00:14:00] friends, they'll ask.

[00:14:01] Rebecca Burgess: What is really your issue? Isn't capitalism, just about the exchange of goods and services. Isn't it, a natural space in which we can develop markets. 

[00:14:13] Jason Hickel: Capitalism is a recent innovation and economic history only about 500 years old. So we have to be able to distinguish capitalism from previous economic systems.

[00:14:22] Jason Hickel: And this is very important to scholarship and economic history. There are basically a few key features that are important. The first is that under capitalism production is focused, not on youth value, but on exchange value. Now, what I mean by that is that the point of producing things is not primarily in order to meet concrete human needs, like the human need for clothing and housing or beauty, but rather to generate and accumulate profits.

[00:14:51] Jason Hickel: That's the core objective of a capitalist economy. So the result is that we end up with an economy that produces an extraordinary amount of stuff. I mean, nobody would deny that [00:15:00] capitalism is incredibly productive and yet we still have social crises everywhere we look. We have poverty, we have hunger. We have other basic needs remain

[00:15:09] Jason Hickel: unmet. I mean, even in the United States, something like 40% of people can't afford decent healthcare. So this is amazing. We have the system that produces so much and yet people still lack basic things to live decent lives. 

[00:15:22] Rebecca Burgess: He says that the second thing is that under capitalism, it's not enough to simply make the same amount of profit every year.

[00:15:30] Rebecca Burgess: Take a restaurant for example, that makes roughly the same amount of profit every year, which is then enough to pay the workforce, the rent, and for the owners to go take his or her family on vacation. That is not a capitalist business model. 

[00:15:46] Jason Hickel: A truly capitalist firm is organized around an ever increasing quantity of profit.

[00:15:50] Jason Hickel: So this is where we get into the corporate world. Facebook, Amazon. These companies are not content with the same amount of profit every year. It has to be an ever [00:16:00] increasing quantity of profit. And if they do not achieve an ever increasing quantity of profit, they collapse. And that's extraordinary if you think about it.

[00:16:08] Jason Hickel: So this is where things become very dangerous because in order to achieve ever increasing profits across the whole economy like this, then you have to extract as much as possible from labor and from nature while giving back as little as possible in return, right? This is where profit comes from, the difference between what you're paying for your inputs and what you're achieving in your outputs.

[00:16:30] Jason Hickel: This is fundamentally why our system constantly generates crises of inequality and ecological crisis. 

[00:16:37] Rebecca Burgess: Under capitalism, you have to find ways of cheapening labor and nature. You cheapen labor through enclosure, which forces wages down. You cheapen labor through colonization. If you look at the wages paid to workers in the global south, they're a fraction of what is paid to workers in the USA for the same labor.

[00:16:59] Jason Hickel: So, this [00:17:00] is important to understand that capitalism is not a system of exchange. It's a system of accumulation. And once we understand that, then it becomes easier to look at it with a more critical eye. We want our economy to work, to meet human needs at a high standard and be in balance with our ecology.

[00:17:18] Jason Hickel: And that means we may have to talk about shifting away from a capitalist economy to a post capitalist economy, an economy that is not organized around accumulation, and around constant generation of profits and growth, but rather around again, meeting human needs and regenerating ecologies. And so that's kind of what we're calling for here is a kind of post capitalist shift.

[00:17:39] Jason Hickel: And to me, this is very exciting and we shouldn't be afraid of it. 

[00:17:44] Rebecca Burgess: Research conducted on what it would require for the human population to live sustainably,

[00:17:49] Rebecca Burgess: it's noted that we must not exceed 50 billion tons of the Earth's material growth per year. Meaning we should not be consuming more than 50 [00:18:00] billion tons of the Earth's material growth per year. Earth overshoot day is the day we exceed the 50 billion tons of Earth's material production. Earth overshoot day occurs earlier and earlier every year, this is the day we're exceeding that consumption rate

[00:18:18] Rebecca Burgess: and we begin to enter into ecological debt. Hickel quotes from scientists who said in 2017, we were consuming 92 billion tons of material production per year, which is far more than what's sustainable. And then here's where it really became interesting. Low income countries consumed two metric tons of Earth's material production per capita per year.

[00:18:44] Rebecca Burgess: Lower middle income countries consume four metric tons of the Earth's material production per capita per year. Upper middle income countries consumed 12 tons of material production per year. And high income countries consume 28 tons of material [00:19:00] production per capital per year. And then we get to the US.

[00:19:05] Rebecca Burgess: We are consuming 35 tons of material production per capita per year. Looking at it that way, we start to understand that consumption isn't equitable and it is this consumption that's driving the climate crisis, the extinction crisis, the fresh water crisis, the nutrient cycle crisis. 

[00:19:25] Jason Hickel: This crisis is being driven overwhelmingly by a small handful of rich countries.

[00:19:31] Jason Hickel: So that's really important to understand, like if you look at the material consumption of most of the global south it's well under sustainable thresholds. In fact, in many cases in lower income countries, it's clear that they need to increase their material consumption, to be able to build the infrastructure, to meet human needs, like education, healthcare, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:19:49] Jason Hickel: In high income countries, it's roughly four to five times over the sustainable threshold, which is extraordinary. And what that means is that if everyone consumed at the level of high [00:20:00] income nations, then we would need four or five planets to sustain us. If everyone consumed, like the average person in the rest of the world in the global south, then we would be under the sustainable threshold and we would not be in the condition of ecological crisis at all.

[00:20:13] Rebecca Burgess: Hickel's use of the term "growthism" is foundational in our understanding of how we can define and unpack our economic model. I found the term very helpful. And I wondered if he'd agree that this is a central pillar of capitalism and how as a term it defines what we're currently experiencing. 

[00:20:35] Jason Hickel: Growth-ism in fact a central pillar to capitalism.

[00:20:39] Jason Hickel: Capitalism is unique among all economic systems in requiring perpetual growth in order to stay afloat. It's the only intrinsically expansionary system ever in human history. So this is, this is really interesting. And it's crazy. If capitalism does not get growth, then it collapses in the crisis. And we see this happen every 10 [00:21:00] years or so with recessions, right?

[00:21:02] Jason Hickel: When capitalism fails to grow as expected, then you get a recession which is deeply harmful. I mean, it plunges people into poverty, inequality, shoots up homelessness and hunger increase, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a deeply unstable system. It's like imagine being on an airplane, the only way it could stay in the air was to continue accelerating.

[00:21:21] Jason Hickel: I mean, this is deeply scary, right? It's kind of a nightmare. What we need to do clearly is shift to an economy that does not require perpetual growth. One that can meet human needs without perpetual growth, which would be much more stable. So this is basically what our research is calling for. 

[00:21:40] Rebecca Burgess: Our current dependency on growthism, as it is coupled to resource and energy use is the danger point. If growth was sort of plucked out of thin air, Hickel says, then it might not be an issue, but given the material reality of growth-ism, this does become an issue, which is not to say that [00:22:00] all growth is a problem, of course. Certainly growth can be important to improve economic capacity to meet human needs, but that's not what our system has been organized around.

[00:22:11] Jason Hickel: It's not as though once a human need is met, then we enter a steady state. No, the point is to continue growing, even if that means requiring sabotaging human needs again, say with advertising or whatever it might be. So growth has very strongly coupled to resource use and energy. And this is really a problem and it's recognized that growth is the major driver of ecological breakdown now, but the dominant response from our politicians has been to kind of hope for what they call green growth.

[00:22:37] Jason Hickel: The idea that GDP, gross domestic product, can continue rising indefinitely while resource use falls back to sustainable levels. And they've been saying this is going to happen for the past 50 years and it never has. And the idea has therefore been thoroughly rejected by scientists who point out that green growth is basically not a thing. 

[00:23:03] Rebecca Burgess: We know from empirical evidence Hickel points out that if we continue to pursue growth in high income nations, it will be impossible for us to bring resource use back down to sustainable levels. And it will be impossible for us to keep global heating under 1.5 to 2 degrees C as per the Paris Agreement. And the reason for this is simply because

[00:23:25] Rebecca Burgess: the more you grow, the more energy you use. If we're trying to meet ecological objectives while growing at the same time, it's kind of like running down an up escalator, he explains.

[00:23:38] Rebecca Burgess: We're making the task much more difficult for ourselves. Shifting to a post growth economy would make it much easier for us to accomplish our ecological objectives. Hickel says this really is the key factor. As we approached the design of the new system, I wanted to explore the work of scientists who've helped developed a concept known as the nine [00:24:00] planetary boundaries.

[00:24:01] Rebecca Burgess: I was curious as to Hickel's thoughts on these boundaries and what value they have. He calls the planetary boundary framework one of the most important developments in ecological science over the past few decades. 

[00:24:14] Jason Hickel: We're overshooting boundaries, not just in terms of emissions, but also in terms of land use change, which is one of the other planetary boundaries.

[00:24:20] Jason Hickel: And this is basically deforestation, habitat, destruction, and conversion of lands, primarily to industrial agriculture and primarily for industrial meat product. So that's one issue. There's also biodiversity collapse. Species are going extinct at an incredibly fast rate and on our existing trajectory, something like 30 to 50% of species will be wiped out by the end of this century,

[00:24:43] Jason Hickel: if we do not have a dramatic change, in course. I mean, that's extraordinary. Capitalism is actively sabotaging the web of life, which is deeply problematic. Another boundary is biochemical flows. This is mostly chemical runoff from industrial agriculture, such as pesticides and fertilizers and so on which depletes soils, it kills organic matter in soils and also runs off into Marine and freshwater ecosystems, creating dead zones where Marine life cannot exist and so on.

[00:24:54] Jason Hickel: And then another one that we've transgressed is what they call excess novel entities. These are basically human made chemicals that are released into the atmosphere as waste and pollution, such as plastic and other artificial pollutants. 

[00:24:54] Rebecca Burgess: I've been thinking a lot about novel entities, particularly in the case of plastics in the textile system, [00:25:00] plastics that we wear such as polyester, acrylic, and nylon.

[00:25:04] Rebecca Burgess: We know that our plastic clothing is shedding and it's shedding into our Marine ecosystems, into our soil. And it's finding its way into our bodies, our lungs, our blood. So Fibershed has been working with our state and international governments to a degree to help them understand that these plastics are affecting these Marine ecosystems and permeating them.

[00:25:30] Rebecca Burgess: We do see there is a power in having government begin to understand this and then begin to regulate and tax these systems by doing so we would see a potential source reduction in plastic textiles. And that would go a long way in curbing the overall volumes of textile production annually. 60% of what we wear by volume is plastic.

[00:25:56] Rebecca Burgess: So if you begin to regulate that particular part [00:26:00] of material production system, you will challenge the growth model in this sector. Hickel says that fossil carbons don't just show up in our textile systems as we know. This particular form of carbon has been the fuel for this iteration of capitalism. 

[00:26:19] Jason Hickel: The total volume of clothes produced every year is enough to cover the human need for clothing several times over.

[00:26:27] Jason Hickel: I mean, this is not an industry that's organized around, around meeting the human need for clothing, or again, even for art and beauty, which is also important. It's an industry that produces garments that are designed to be thrown away and to be replaced as often as possible through bombardments of advertising and so on to sort of keep turnover as quick as can possibly be achieved for the sake of corporate power and elite accumulation.

[00:26:53] Jason Hickel: Right? This is not a rational system. I mean, this is just simply an illustration of broader problems in our economy. But yes, it's a [00:27:00] volume problem. 

[00:27:01] Rebecca Burgess: The time is very ripe for making those agreements in a pre-competitive fashion and helping companies come together to develop caps as Hickel suggests.. It's being done in many aspects.

[00:27:13] Rebecca Burgess: We're seeing companies come together to make packs, to support regenerative agriculture. It's being done to some degree in agreement setting that's occurring for capping CO2 emissions. Having boundaries and agreeing on those boundaries collectively as the sector of the economy is healthy. And we're starting to see it happen.

[00:27:32] Rebecca Burgess: Hickel has mentioned the fallacy of green growth. So that's an important component. We need to make sure that our precompetitive agreements do address this fallacy and that we don't fall into the trap of assuming that this green growth is actually possible on a finite planet. 

[00:27:51] Rebecca Burgess: Hickel is very in favor of technology, but how it's utilized is another discussion.

[00:27:57] Rebecca Burgess: As Hickel writes this powerful quote in the book, [00:28:00] we can choose to keep shooting up the curve of exponential growth, bringing us ever closer to irreversible tipping points and ecological collapse and hope that technology will save us. But if for some reason it doesn't work, then we're in trouble. It's like jumping off a cliff while hoping that someone at the bottom will figure out how to build some kind of device to catch you before you crash to the rocks below, without having any idea as to whether they actually will be able to pull it off.

[00:28:28] Jason Hickel: If you imagine Coca-Cola for example, let's say they invent a way to create a can with half as much aluminum. In the short term that might lead to a reduction in their total aluminum use. But the savings that they make from this, they then plow into advertising campaigns or corporate takeovers or expansion to other countries.

[00:28:46] Jason Hickel: Getting people to buy more and more cans of Coca-Cola and therefore the absolute aluminum use of the corporation increases. And we see this over and over again where efficiency improvements drive these gains in the short term, but they're [00:29:00] outstripped by growth by the scale effect of growth. And so this is a problem.

[00:29:03] Jason Hickel: It's not that our technology is weak or that we don't have enough technological innovation. We have lots of it. The problem is that efficiency improvements are roped into expanding the process of production and consumption.

[00:29:14] Rebecca Burgess: He mentions that when it comes to the climate crisis, there's a huge problem we face, which is the assumption that all countries must continue to grow regardless of how rich they already are,

[00:29:25] Rebecca Burgess: even high income nations. This creates a problem because again, more growth means more energy use, more energy use makes decarbonization more difficult. In fact, it makes it impossible for us to stay within the 1.5 or two degree pathway. How do politicians square this contradiction? 

[00:29:44] Jason Hickel: They do it by relying on a particular technology called BECCS.

[00:29:48] Jason Hickel: It stands for Bio Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage. Now, the idea here is that sometime in the future, in the second half of the century, we will develop plantations three times the size of India, [00:30:00] which will grow enormous quantities of biofuel, that will suck carbon out of the atmosphere. We will then burn the biofuel in power stations and capture the emissions at the smoke stack and store the carbon underground.

[00:30:11] Jason Hickel: So this is basically a negative emissions technology and politicians are basically saying we're going to delay emissions reductions now, and just hope this technology is going to save us in the future. This is literally part of the plan. And what's amazing is that most people don't know about this, that this sits at the center of most government's plans, but scientists have been raising the alarm about this for a long time,

[00:30:35] Jason Hickel: in the peer-reviewed literature over and over again. 

[00:30:39] Rebecca Burgess: He says, if it did work on this scale, it would have severe social consequences because you're taking land away from food production. We're talking about food security, mostly in the global south, where the land would be appropriated from. So here also we're talking about appropriation of other people's land.

[00:30:57] Rebecca Burgess: It would have severe ecological [00:31:00] consequences in terms of biodiversity collapse, water depletion, deforestation, and soil depletion.

[00:31:07] Jason Hickel: But most importantly, if for whatever reason, this technology can't be scaled and we have no proof that it can be. Then we're effectively locked into a hot house earth trajectory from which we cannot escape. Right. and so, and it's an extraordinary gamble with all of life on earth, all in order to protect growthism in the global north, this entire assumption is done in order to protect the claim that the global north, the rich countries of the global north should be able to continue to grow,

[00:31:34] Jason Hickel: despite the fact that they overuse resources beyond what is already necessary to meet human needs, even at a high standard. This is not a tenable assumption and we must be able to challenge it. 

[00:31:50] Rebecca Burgess: BECCS feels like an absolute extension of the history we've been discussing today, starting with the feudal era through colonization and the enslavement and [00:32:00] genocide that came with plantation agriculture.

[00:32:03] Rebecca Burgess: We tend to just keep white knuckling these attachments we have to growth and believing in this illusion that we need all of this. It's actually an elusory want. I think the Buddhist might call it the hungry ghosts, some kind of insatiable desire that can actually never be met. It can't really be fed at a certain point so at a critical moment, we hope, I hope, that we collectively begin to see that we need to apply our will to understand and unpack how we've been educated and what we've come to expect we deserve in the global north. It's going to require a massive change in our minds, a shift. Hickel points to this shift of paradigm rather beautifully.

[00:32:49] Rebecca Burgess: He says we've done this before, and there's really nothing new in this shift of thinking. Humans have successfully achieved these big changes. The book kind of transitions into this sigh of relief when Hickel reminds us [00:33:00] that we can flourish without growth. 

[00:33:02] Jason Hickel: In many ways, this is similar to the problem that medieval scientists faced when they thought about the stars and astronomy. They assumed that the earth was the center and this made it very difficult for them to solve mathematical problems with moving bodies in the skies. They had to come up with wild theories for what was governing the universe, just to make sense of this, this crazy assumption they started with.

[00:33:23] Jason Hickel: But once you realize that the earth revolves around the sun, then all of these mathematical problems become very easy to solve. And so it's very similar to the crisis we face right now. Once you remove growth from the center of our sort of mental universe and our economic universe, then these problems become much easier to solve.

[00:33:44] Rebecca Burgess: We know that past a certain point, which rich nations have long exceeded that the relationship between growth and human wellbeing completely breaks down. What actually matters when it comes to welfare and happiness and so on, is what we are producing as in, are [00:34:00] we producing things that people require to live well?

[00:34:04] Jason Hickel: So rich countries don't need more growth in order to improve these things. They can do it right now by reducing inequality, sharing income more fairly, and expanding access to high quality public services. 

[00:34:19] Rebecca Burgess: Perhaps as we wish it to be an economy where people produce and sell useful goods and services. An economy where people make rational, informed decisions about what to buy, where people get compensated fairly for their labor, an economy that's satisfies human needs while minimizing waste on an economy that circulates money to those who need it. An economy where innovation makes better, longer lasting products, reduces ecological pressure, frees up labor and time, improves human welfare and an economy that responds to rather than ignores the health of the ecology from which it depends. Many people [00:35:00] already exist in this framework, but they still self-identify as capitalists. So I think that's another piece of the imagination door we have to unlock, which is to help people understand that many of us in many ways already have the right ingredients or the right approach. We just need to tweak it a little. The next step Hickel says is to scale down on unnecessary forms of production, which we have a lot of, which also means actively scaling down things like fast fashion.

[00:35:30] Jason Hickel: Most people would agree with this proposition. It is clearly a more rational approach to the economy in an era of ecological breakdown, but they will ask, what about jobs? What about the jobs in the SUV sector? What about the jobs in the fast fashion sector, et cetera, et cetera. And the solution that ecological economists propose to this is very straightforward.

[00:35:51] Jason Hickel: They say, as our economy requires less labor in order to produce the things that people need, then we can shorten the working week [00:36:00] and distribute necessary labor more evenly, therefore ensuring full employments. And you can do that with living wages to ensure that everybody has access to the incomes they need to purchase the things that the economy produces that they require.

[00:36:13] Jason Hickel: You can also decommodify key goods. So healthcare, education, public transportation, energy, water, even housing. We can make sure that these are taken out of the market to ensure that everyone can access the resources they need to live flourishing lives. And this takes us back to the core principle from prior to the enclosures that no one should be cut off from the resources necessary for survival.

[00:36:36] Rebecca Burgess: We also need to distribute income more justly. Hickel says people often ask him if there will be enough income in a degrowth scenario for everyone to live well. And the answer is by definition, yes, there will be because income is simply the opposite of prices. Of all the prices of the things you produce in the economy, there's always by definition enough income to [00:37:00] buy what we produce. So if we're only producing what we need, then there's always enough income to buy it. The only question is, is it distributed fairly? Big question. 

[00:37:11] Jason Hickel: This is basically an economy that is reducing energy use, allowing us to achieve decarbonization consistent with staying under 1.5 degrees, stopping the climate crisis, which no other existing plan allows us to achieve.

[00:37:24] Jason Hickel: Right? This is extremely hopeful. It also reduces resource use and pulls back pressure on all the other planetary boundaries, reverses biodiversity loss, reverses soil depletion, and so on. So it's very powerful in terms of ecology. It's also very powerful in terms of human wellbeing. Because we now have a system where production is organized around human needs, rather than around corporate expansion.

[00:37:47] Jason Hickel: We're delivering high levels of human wellbeing for all, with much less resource and energy use than anywhere before people no longer feel the threat of economic insecurity, because unemployment is no longer a question. Access [00:38:00] to healthcare and education and housing is no longer a question. We have more free time to spend with our family and our friends and our community, being involved in local politics, maintaining things in our houses, et cetera, cetera, not needing to buy new ones and so on. Our products last longer and are more repairable. 

[00:38:18] Rebecca Burgess: I wanted to know if Hickel had any guiding language for those who work in government, designing policy around land use, or for those who are making shifts to regenerative agriculture.

[00:38:29] Rebecca Burgess: In terms of agriculture Hickel would point people to the work of a massive global network of small farmers called La Via Campesina, which has been working for a very long time to challenge the existing models and has been calling for a significant shift in principles. 

[00:38:45] Jason Hickel: This transition will not happen on its own, and we need to realize that rather brutal and important fact. Our system has an incredible amount of inertia.

[00:38:55] Jason Hickel: And this is a problem. Given the fact that we have to achieve a transition very [00:39:00] quickly, like this decade quickly. And so it's going to require political mobilization. It's going to require that we build alliances across social movements, that we develop a common language, that we build solidarities that are going to be required for us to push those in power to change course very quickly.

[00:39:21] Jason Hickel: Or to take power from them if they refuse through the democratic process. 

[00:39:28] Rebecca Burgess: This work will require working together to make things whole, to make our lives whole. The practical steps are there for achieving this more balanced and flourishing world.

[00:39:53] Rebecca Burgess: This episode is made possible because of all the people who work behind the scenes on it. I'd like to thank my [00:40:00] producer, Jennifer O'Neill, audio editor, Bethany Sands, and intern Maha Sanad. I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder, Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone head of podcasts, Celine Glasier, sound engineer, Max Kotelchuck, music director, Catherine Yang, associate producer, Quentin Lebeau, production assistant Shabnam Ferdowsi and sound intern, Simon Lavender.

[00:40:25] Rebecca Burgess: The cover art by Whetstone art director, Alex Bowman. You can learn more about this podcast at whetstoneradio.com on Instagram and Twitter @WhetstoneRadio and subscribe to our YouTube channel Whetstone Radio Collective for more podcast, video content. You can learn more about all things happening at Whetstone at whetstonemagazine.com.