Le Monde diplomatique
>
>
>
> December 2003
>
> WOULD THE WEST ACTUALLY BE HAPPIER WITH LESS?
>
> The world downscaled>
> What if the very idea of growth - accumulating riches, destroying the environment and worsening social inequality - is
> a trap? Maybe we need to aim to create a society that is based
> on quality not quantity, on cooperation and not competition.
>
> By SERGE LATOUCHE *
> ___________________________________________________________
>
> PRESIDENT George Bush told leading meteorologists last year:
> "Economic growth is the key to environmental progress,
> because it is growth that provides the resources for
> investment in clean technologies. Growth is the solution, not
> the problem" (1). That is not only a rightwing position: the
> principle is shared by much of the left. Even many
> anti-globalisation activists see growth as the solution for
> the world, expecting it to create jobs and provide for a
> fairer distribution of wealth.
>
> Fabrice Nicolino, an environment reporter, recently resigned
> from the Parisian weekly Politis (which is close to the
> anti-globalisation movement) after an internal dispute over
> pension reform, an issue that has dominated French politics
> (2). The debate that followed illustrates the left's malaise
> (3). As a reader put it, the conflict happened because
> Nicolino had "dared to go against an orthodoxy common to
> almost the entire French political class, which says the only
> way to happiness must be through more growth, more
> productivity, more purchasing power and more consumption"
> (4).
>
> After several decades of frenetic wastefulness storm clouds
> threaten. As our climate becomes increasingly unstable, we
> are fighting oil wars. Water wars will no doubt follow (5),
> along with pandemics and the extinction of essential plant
> and animal species through foreseeable biogenetic disasters.
> In these conditions the expansive and expanding growth
> society is neither sustainable nor desirable. We must
> urgently consider how to create a society of contraction and
> how to downscale as serenely and convivially as possible.
>
> The growth society is dominated and often obsessed by growth
> economics. It makes growth for growth's sake the essential
> aim of life, if not its only aim. This is unsustainable
> because it pushes the limits of the biosphere. Calculating
> the impact of our lifestyle on the environment in terms of
> how much of the Earth's surface each person's consumption
> uses reveals a way of life unsustainable in equal rights to
> natural resources and those resources' capacity for
> regeneration. The average person in the United States
> consumes 9.6 hectares, in Canada 7.2 and in Europe 4.5. We
> are a long way from planetary equality and even further from
> a sustainable civilisation which would require consumption
> levels below 1.4 hectares - even before accounting for
> population change.
>
> TO RECONCILE the contradictory imperatives of growth and
> environmentalism, experts think they have found a magic
> formula, "ecoefficiency" - the centrepiece of the argument
> for sustainable development and its only credible aspect. The
> idea is progressively to reduce the intensity and impact of
> our use of natural resources until it reaches a level
> compatible with the Earth's recognised maximum capacity (7).
>
> There have been improvements in ecological efficiency. But
> they have been accompanied by extreme growth, so that our
> overall impact on the environment has actually worsened. More
> products on the market cancel out the reduced impact of each
> individual item - the rebound effect. And though the new
> economy is relatively immaterial or anyway less material, it
> does not so much replace the old economy as complete it. All
> indicators show that our consumption of resources continues
> to rise (8). It takes the unshakeable faith of an orthodox
> free-market economist to believe that in future science will
> find solutions to all our problems and that nature can
> endlessly be replaced by artifice.
>
> The planned demise of the growth society would not
> necessarily be grim. Ivan Illich once wrote that it wasn't
> just to avoid the negative side-effects of an otherwise good
> thing that we had to renounce our current lifestyle, as
> though choosing between the pleasure of a tasty dish and its
> risks. The dish itself was intrinsically disgusting and we
> would be happier without it. We need to live differently to
> live better (9).
>
> The growth society causes inequality and injustice to rise;
> the well-being it does produce is often illusory; even for
> the rich, society is neither convivial nor agreeable, but an
> anti-society, sick with its own wealth. The high quality of
> life that most people in the North believe that they enjoy is
> increasingly an illusion. They may spend more on consumer
> goods and services, but they forget to deduct the costs of
> these things: reductions in the quality of life because of
> poor air and water and a degraded environment. These increase
> the costs of modern living (medicine, transport), including
> that of products made scarcer (water, energy, open spaces).
>
> Herman Daly has devised a measure, the genuine progress
> indicator, that adjusts a country's gross domestic product
> according to the losses from pollution and environmental
> degradation. In the US this indicator has shown stagnation
> and decline since the 1970s while GDP has risen continuously
> (10). "Growth" under these conditions is a myth, even in
> well-to-do economies and advanced consumer societies.
> Increase is more than compensated for by decrease.
>
> So we are heading fast and straight for the wall without an
> escape route. We need to be clear about this. Downscaling our
> economy is a necessity. It is not an ideal, not the only
> objective of a post- development society or of that
> alternative world we believe possible. Let us make a virtue
> of necessity and consider the advantages of downscaling (11)
> for people in the North.
>
> Adopting the word "downscale" will underline that we are
> giving up the senseless doctrine of growth for growth's sake.
> Downscaling must not be confused with negative growth, which
> is an oxymoron: it means progressing backwards. What the
> French call décroissance does not have an easy English
> equivalent since shrinkage, decrease and reduction all have
> negative connotations that décroissance, which means
> de-growth, does not. This says a lot about the psychological
> domination of free-market economics.
>
> We have seen how even a slowdown in the rate of growth
> plunges our societies into disarray, causing unemployment and
> destroying social, cultural and environmental programmes that
> maintain at least the basics of a decent life for most
> people. So what would happen if the growth rate were actually
> negative? Like a work-based society without work, there would
> be nothing worse than a growth society without growth. The
> mainstream left will remain trapped within this thinking
> unless it can radically revise its most deeply held beliefs.
>
> Downscaling can only be thought about in the context of a
> non-growth society, which we should attempt to define. The
> policy could start by reducing or removing the environmental
> impact of activities that bring no satisfaction. Many areas
> are crying out for downscaling: we could review the need for
> so much movement of people and goods across the planet and
> relocalise our economies, drastically reducing pollution and
> other negative effects of long-distance transport. We could
> question the need for so much invasive, often corrosive,
> advertising. We could ask ourselves how many disposable
> products have any real reason to be disposable, other than to
> feed the mass production machine.
>
> Decrease does not necessarily mean a reduction in well-being.
> In 1848, when Karl Marx declared that the time was ripe for
> social revolution, he believed everything was in place for
> the communist society to be one of abundance. The astonishing
> overproduction of cotton fabric and manufactured goods was
> more than enough to feed, house and clothe the population, at
> least in the West. Yet there was far less material wealth
> then than there is now - no cars, planes, plastic, computers,
> biotechnology, pesticides, chemical fertilisers or nuclear
> energy. Despite the unprecedented upheavals of the industrial
> revolution, the needs of mid-19th century society were
> modest, and happiness, or at least the material basis of
> happiness, seemed within reach.
>
> To imagine and construct a downscaled society that works, we
> must go beyond the economy. We must challenge its domination
> of the rest of life, in theory and in practice, and above all
> in our minds. An essential element will be the imposition of
> a massive reduction in working hours to guarantee everyone a
> satisfying job. As early as 1981 Jacques Ellul, one of the
> first thinkers to propose downscaling, suggested that no one
> should work more than two hours a day (12).
>
> Another starting point could be the treaty on consumption and
> lifestyle drawn up by the NGO forum at the 1992 United
> Nations Earth summit in Rio, which proposed the Six Rs
> programme: re-evaluation, restructuring, redistribution,
> reduction, reuse and recycling. These objectives could lead
> to a virtuous circle of cooperation and sustainability. We
> could add more to the list: re-education, reconversion,
> redefinition, remodel ling, rethinking and relocating.
>
> THE problem is that values currently domin ant, including
> selfishness, the work ethic and the spirit of competition,
> have grown out of the system, which in turn they reinforce.
> Personal ethical choices to live more simply can affect
> trends and weaken the system's psychological bases, but a
> concerted radical challenge is needed to effect anything more
> than limited change.
>
> Will this be dismissed as a grandiose utopian idea? Is any
> transition possible without violent revolution: or rather,
> can the psychological revolution we need be achieved without
> violent disruptions? Drastically reducing environmental
> damage does mean losing the monetary value in material goods.
> But it does not necessarily mean ceasing to create value
> through non-material products. In part, these could keep
> their market forms. Though the market and profit can still be
> incentives, the system must no longer revolve around them.
> Progressive measures, stages along the way, can be envisaged,
> though it is impossible to say whether those who would lose
> from such measures would accept them passively, or even
> whether the system's present victims - drugged by it,
> mentally and physically - would accept its removal. Perhaps
> this summer's heatwave in Europe will go further than any
> arguments to convince people that small is beautiful.
> ________________________________________________________
>
> * Serge Latouche is emeritus professor at the Université
> Paris-Sud and author of The Westernisation of the World
> (Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 1996) and 'In the Wake of an
> Affluent Society - an Exploration of Post-Development' (Zed
> Books, London, 1993)
>
> (1) February 2002, Silver Spring, Maryland.
>
> (2) Le Monde, 16 February 2002.
>
> (3) Politis, 8 May 2003. Nicolino described social movements
> as a festival of corporatist whingeing and made derisory
> comments about people who wanted to retire at 50.
>
> (4) Politis, 12 June 2003.
>
> (5) Vandana Shiva, Water Wars, Southend Press, Cambridge,
> Massachusetts, 2002.
>
> (6) Gianfranco Bologna, ed, Italia Capace di Futuro, WWf-EMI,
> Bologna, 2001.
>
> (7) "The Business Case for Sustainable Development", World
> Business Council for Sustainable Development: Earth Summit in
> Johannesburg, August-September 2002.
>
> (8) Mauro Bonaiuti, ed, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen:
> Bioeconomia, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, 2003.
>
> (9) Le Monde, 27 December 2002.
>
> (10) C Cobb, T Halstead, J Rowe, "The Genuine Progress
> Indicator: Summary of Data and Methodology, Redefining
> Progress", and "If the GDP is Up, Why is America Down?" in
> Atlantic Monthly, no 276, San Francisco, October 1995.
>
> (11) This aim does not really apply to the Southern
> countries: though they are affected by the growth ideology,
> they are not, for the most part, growth societies.
>
> (12) See "Changer de Revolution", cited by Jean-Luc Porquet
> in Ellul, l'homme qui avait (presque) tout prevu, Le
> Cherche-Midi, 2003. See also Jacques Ellul on Religion,
> Technology, and Politics: Conversations with Patrick
> Troude-Chastenet, Scholars Press, Atlanta, 1998.
>
>
>
> Translated by Gulliver Cragg
>