On Degrowth and Deconsumption: the Only Way Forward

Everyone wants to "save the world", though few of us agree on how. Should we all eat vegan? Be solarpunk? Be anarchists? Be democrats? Be conservatives? Embrace social change, or try to recreate some perfect past period: be it the 1950s or 1200s? What even is the goalpost we're striving for? Are we looking for increasing birth rates, the end of world hunger, the world population shrinking to an ecologically supportable number, ecological regeneration, preservation, or something else entirely[1]?

There are likely millions of permutations of combinations of various "solutions" that exist, and it is likely that if you live in any country in the world heavily reliant on global capitalism that most of the solutions that you are capable of considering in some way preserve your existing way of life and justify your existence. It is also likely that the so-called "solutions" that you strive to utilize in your own life are those that, first of all, fit into your existing sense of identity and that of your peer group, and second, are those that are lowest-effort to implement and which alleviate any discomfort related to what job you have, your socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, etc.

I don't say this to be abrasive intentionally, though if this statement gives you pause, that's excellent. We should deeply evaluate our motivations! One of the things that we have learned over this past year and a half of constant hosting is that in general most humans (from everywhere with the affluence to travel and the ability to obtain a visa to the US, at least) lack deep values and simply adopt what is most convenient and socially supported in the moment. This appears to be true across various demographics, though I will say that those from more privileged socioeconomic upbringings seem more morally flexible than those from less privileged upbringings. Having a four year college degree also seems to strongly influence one's lack of attachment to values in a deep, embodied way, though I think this is more related to socioeconomic and cultural factors than college itself (though perhaps institutions which necessitate nebulous peer attachments and radical "acceptance" of everyone else's ideas could play some role). In general, though, most of our visitors from "lower" socioeconomic strata tend to have come from religious households, and despite their current affiliation with that religion or lack thereof, there seems to be a different level of willingness to simply adopt whatever value system is dominant in the room at that moment. While this may be seen as "less open-minded", I've been critically rethinking our exaltation of the value of "open-mindedness" as a culture rooted in a kind of liberalism that claims that all opinions are equally valid and must be equally respected, and that we should just agree to disagree, even about fundamental moral issues. We are currently living in a world where those ideas have run to their logical conclusion, and I think that it's at least worth entertaining that those ideals are perhaps not as "ideal" as we once thought.

I say this all because, ultimately, one of the things that we have come to understand is that things, today, on this earth, at least in the country and landscape we live in, are very very bad. Moreso, we've learned that they have been very bad and we are simply living in the outcome of the bad. It's not that "this isn't new" in the sense that history occurs in cycles and this crisis has appeared in one form or another and so we should just wait until the cycle leads us into another period of prosperity: I don't necessarily know that we aren't in a kind of ahistorical collapse with no precedent. But in this context, I mean that this isn't new because it's been coming for a long, long time.

Ultimately, we are taught from birth (most of us reading this, at least) that we are special individuals. That what we want matters more than just about anything else. This is reinforced by about half of the movies that Hollywood produces (the plot trope is: someone expects a kid to do something, kid wants something else, kid triumphs and is a raging success, etc.), as well as the way that we consider career tracks in school, cultural norms that insist that your happiness matters and your family's expectations are really not something to be concerned with, and so on and so forth. This manifests in a way where we believe, truly, that we deserve the things we want, regardless of their consequences. If we cannot see those consequences, all the better, we tend to just pretend they do not exist.

This cultural habitat that we exist within has led to a society where people can say "I really care about the environment" and "I'm here for the experience, if I want McDonald's I'm going to get some McDonald's" in, if not the same conversation, at least the same day, to the same people. It's not that the person saying these very contradictory things doesn't think that they truly believe both of them, but rather that they've been led to believe that they can believe both of them if they want to and the onus is not on them to prove that they actually believe either of them. In other words, as we are manipulated by advertisers, our peers, our academic institutions, and so on, to believe that we can have values without action, we use this basis for understanding what values actually are to manipulate others into thinking we are a kind of person that we are not.

But, whatever you think of yourself, there is no set rule that you are a good person. You probably think of yourself as a good person, though maybe you call yourself a bad person in a kind of self-deprecation that gets you what you want sometimes, but it's unlikely (at least based on my experience with people) that you have the lucid awareness that there is really no such thing as a good person or a bad person, anyway, and that we are all living with the consequences of both our own actions and those of others. And with that, that there is still a set of values that has a certain set of outcomes whether those values or those outcomes agree with what we've rationalized as justifying ourselves or not.

What I'm saying is that whether or not you think you have real values or whether or not you think those values make you a good person or not, or whether or not you think your actions make you a good person, your beliefs and your actions are leading to a set of outcomes. We can either take responsibility for the outcomes that result from our beliefs and our actions wholly and with grace, or we can selectively believe that the outcomes we don't like are perpetually the fault of others, not the obvious logical consequences of our own actions. Most people do the latter, because ultimately most of Western society has adopted a kind of Christian morality where there are good people and bad people and no one wants to believe that they've done wrong, even when they have. But if you aren't actually Christian anymore you have no one to ask for forgiveness, and so instead of going through life with shame, most people just lie. To themselves, to others. They convince themselves that all of their actions lead to good outcomes, and they are always making the right choices (unless it is brutally obvious that they haven't), and therefore they are good[2].

But what does any of this have to do with degrowth?

If you are someone who subscribes to, say, a vegan diet, or you recycle via your municipal recycling program, or you have a little compost heap in your backyard, and you say "Okay, this is my little part of changing the world. I'm doing my part! What more can you ask of me?" and then you go ahead and work your job and you buy all the things and you say "I deserve this, I'm a good person.", you are subscribing to a dangerous fallacy.

What fuels the deforestation of the Amazon and the continued displacement of Indigenous peoples there (not to mention the mass slaughter of every organism living there)? Do you think you're not complicit because you bike to work instead of drive? Is it purely Exxon's fault? Who helps them turn a profit? Think not just about primary consumers, but other points in the supply chain: the cargo planes that need fuel to ship the shit you buy online. The delivery driver who dropped off your pizza. The container ships that bring your imported goods across the sea to a grocer near you.

Do you buy cashews, or bananas? Do you know about the actual wars that were fought so that you can eat bananas in North America? Not to mention the continued presence of the US in parts of South America, for fruit and oil exports. How many violent coups has the US government caused to overthrow their socialist leaders each time they've (multiple countries) attempted to elect one? What about Indonesia's notorious trash problem: do you think all of the waste in the ocean comes from other people?

But what if we go all electric, all renewable? Well, someone has to mine the lithium and forge the steel, for example, both of which are reliant on extractive and ecologically devastating mining practices. Your phone, my computer, our information economy relies entirely on such practices. Your remote job, our remote job. Even plastics that are supposedly biodegradable rely heavily on industrial production methods and synthetic chemicals to produce.

In short, we are all complicit. Our lives themselves beget harm. But do not dare throw at me that platitude "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" and continue to behave like there is nothing more to do, to say. To do so is a manipulation. We believe that it is imperative that we do not simply play lip service to our values, but that we truly engage deeply with what it is to believe in something, to care. If we "care" about the environment in which we live, we should be willing to make it better, even if we are only capable of making it better an incremental amount. We should be willing to make sacrifices to do so, or we do not really care about it at all.

This brings us to the idea of degrowth.

Degrowth is the idea that in order to make any progress in terms of restoring both ecological balance and human justice, in terms of removing oppressive systems, we must stop "progress" in the capitalist economic sense. Now, this is not without consequence, as you can imagine. Degrowth is not something a single individual could carry out on their own, or something that can really even necessarily be rooted for without a completely lucid awareness that we would be optimizing for a shot at a liveable future world while accepting a severe trade off of the loss of life and comfort now for many, many people. Degrowth is more of an ideal that strives for things like the removal of all paved roads, radical ecological regeneration, moving away from reliance on electrical power or vehicles at all and back towards using animal power and, say, alternative modes of heating, cooling, food preservation, and so on. As an ideal, degrowth evaluates what it takes for your car, your refrigerator, your garlic smasher thing, your plastic carpet, your stone countertop, your mass-produced clothing, your daily cup-of-coffee-in-a-paper-cup and it says: we've gone too far, and if we continue to pretend innovation is the way out of this mess, we'll only go farther. Degrowth is not necessarily anti-civ[3], though I'm sure there are some proponents of degrowth who are also proponents of anti-civ anarchism and other similar political ideologies. Ultimately, degrowth is kind of an apolitical ideology, if it can be called an ideology at all, rather than a simple idea. It really attempts to question daily life more than social structure and the distribution of resources, and therefore it is, to us, more of a lens through which to radically evaluate our lives than an ideology to attempt to carry out in the here and now.

Deconsumption is another, related idea that gets more to the meat of things we can start to do today. It is the gradual removal of oneself from consumption of the goods produced by an unethical capitalist system. This means constantly critically evaluating all of the cascading consequences of any given thing we could buy and attempting to not buy something as much as that is an option. It also means setting up infrastructure so that we and others can avoid needing to make that purchase in the future. Deconsumption is not an end in itself: we can purchase less, but our existence here still begets harm. We still live in a house, on a concrete slab, which we did not choose to build but which we did buy and which definitely displaced vegetation and living beings to exist, and which only can exist because of the gold rush and the highway and the mass genocide of the Indigenous people here (complicated, given the ancestry of one of us, but that's for another time). We still have a job, just one between the two of us, which fuels our economic system. Some things we are not willing to sacrifice: food, for instance. We are not going to let our family starve, or go completely without shelter, or to live in shelter so unorthodox as to jeopardize our childrens' safety in the society that we live in. We are, however, growing more and more of our own food, not seeking to expand our shelter in any way that continues to make harmful impact, and the ultimate goal is to not have a job that fuels our economic system. In this way, the way that we orient to deconsumption is iterative. We seek to constantly reduce our footprint until, one day, we hope to be able to leave our children a sustaining farmstead, to give them the freedom and basis for going further in the direction of teaching others, doing more for the surrounding land, and so on (should they hopefully choose to continue this work).

This is why I chose to discuss deconsumption and degrowth today: on the heels of a season which drives you to consume, what did you buy that you did not need to buy?

As another exercise, look around your home. What is a recurring expense that you could just stop doing the next time you run out? Consider what you could replace by making it yourself, eventually, what you could replace with a small-scale local option, and what you could just not replace at all but which might be frivolous. This is harder than it looks, but once you get in the habit of it, you'll realize you can live without a lot of the things you currently think you cannot live without.

For example, I looked around my bathroom yesterday and realized I needed to purchase more q-tips. We've long since switched to a totally biodegradable brand, so that's good, right? Well, kind of. I guess. But then I was thinking about what I really used them for. Ear cleaning? You really aren't supposed to be sticking those things in your ears, anyway. We actually have no other uses for them, so I really don't think we need them at all.

We have children, and for my first child and then the first nine months or so of my sons' lives we bought baby wipes. Again, we purchased a supposedly compostable kind, but they came in these single-use plastic bag dispenser things, and they're quite expensive. What would my great-grandmother have used for her children? Well, I'm sure just a cloth that had to be laundered. Gross? Maybe. But why are we so accustomed to these comforts that we see anything that is not single use as dirty? So about six months ago or so, we stopped buying baby wipes, and started saving a lot of money. My children remain clean and healthy even without the single use option, and I have yet to die from wiping a child's rear end with something made of cotton and made wet with water from the tap and soap from the bathroom instead of plastic full of water from the tap at some factory and detergents that may or may not be good for baby skin, anyway.

These are just examples to make the point that there are a lot of things that we take for granted as "necessary" simply because someone (an advertiser, and then our friends and families as proxy, and eventually culture as a whole) has told us they are.

The outcome of believing in the necessity of things that are not necessities is that, for one, we consume a lot more than we need to. Not only does that keep us spending valuable financial resources on nonsense, and therefore locked into an economy where we must work a job for a company that likely is doing something terrible simply to afford these things, but it orients us emotionally in the wrong direction. I've had WWOOFers come and lament our lack of paper towels, in an extremely dramatic fashion, as though it were traumatic to need to use a clean dish towel from the closet instead of something that can be thrown away. We've had guests act like it is the greatest indecency for us to use a reusable washcloth for washing dishes instead of a plastic sponge, or like we are suffering because we do not have whatever kitchen gadget would make a single, specific task 30 seconds faster.

How many of the things you see as necessary (but which aren't) do you consider that, if removed from your life, would make you extremely uncomfortable? What would it take for you to remove them from your life? And at what cost to the world is your comfort worth?

I have a very, very hard time quitting coffee, for instance. We are about to run out of cacao powder and not buy more chocolate products for the indefinite future, and that will be difficult for me (though not for Starlight who does not like chocolate anyways), but definitely feasible. However, I've been off of coffee for two weeks now and I am having an incredibly hard time. These are not the things to start with!

Start with the things in your life, like q-tips, or toothpaste in a plastic tube (I'm not suggesting foregoing dental hygiene, we make our own tooth powder and save loads of plastic), or your plastic shaving razor, or peanut butter, or coconut products, or buying new clothes every time you see something you like, which you won't really miss. Start gradually, and just practice putting on the lens of deconsumption every time you walk into a store. Try to put the lens of deconsumption on each time you find yourself thinking you'll buy yourself something new "as a treat" – try really thinking through the entire chain of resource accumulation, human labor, shipping, stocking, and advertising that went into that thing existing for you to buy, and think about whether you really deserve that or not.

If you choose to do this, you will find that eventually you feel overwhelmed and assailed by the amount of goods for sale everywhere you go that are completely unnecessary, that you save lots of money, and that you feel better. One side effect may be that your health or mental health improves: if one of your consumption habits is candy, for instance, and you find you can no longer stomach the plastic waste (or consuming plastic in the candy, in most cases) and wish to make yourself sweets at home, instead, you'll likely eat a lot less sugar in general. If you switch from cane sugar to local honey, also, you'll find yourself feeling better. Wearing more sustainable fabrics is often better for our skin than plastic threads, and owning less things often makes us care for the things we do own better in order to make them last longer. If we find ourselves shopping for comfort, perhaps we can find another way to spend our time and de-stress (a hike in the woods, maybe). If we buy less, we may find that we clean less, because we have less things to clean and less clutter overall. We may also find ourselves becoming more creative for gift-giving holidays: repurposing things, offering something that once was ours in a thoughtful way, and this may make us feel more connected with our friends and family than just buying them something in a haphazard way.

Whether or not you think you need to consume less, we urge you to consider it. Better still, if you find yourself considering how to set up systems to help others consume less! That is the ultimate goal. For most of human history people made most of what they needed at a small scale and traded with others who made other things. If you are a good gardener, and your neighbor is great at crocheting, and your other friend is great at animal care, and someone else in your community nerds out about tanning leather or making their own paper – this is the way in which a real economy is formed. This is the way we can hope to begin to accomplish degrowth, not in a catastrophic way, but in a slow, socially led way.

But first we need to get down to the bottom of what we really need in our lives, and stop buying so much stuff. We need to become lucid about the reality of what it takes for us to have the things we have. Not so we can feel guilty for it, but so we can really weigh the options. We need to stop pretending we can just say "fuck it, I'm craving it, I deserve it" at the expense of other humans, the planet,and the future.

Notes

1. I'm not arguing for any of these "goalposts", specifically, but naming a few intentionally contradictory ones to express the ways in which our disagreements often stem from optimizing for entirely different goals.
2. Obviously this is all really silly to do, but most people don't do this consciously. Almost no one considers themselves a liar, in the same way that almost no one considers themselves a "bad person", or in the way that almost no one considers themselves someone who is chronically doing wrong. Whether you believe in universal morality or not, there is really no arguing that our beliefs and actions have a set of outcomes: this is a truth that, while I'm sure a better philosopher than myself could argue it, is generally acceptable by most of us. What follows is whether or not we should make a moral judgement on those outcomes. I think that this is also kind of a waste of time. We can categorize the outcomes into good or bad, but again, it depends on what we're optimizing for, and ultimately English does a poor job of conveying the kind of cosmic morality I am generally considering when considering my own actions, so I'll deal with this whole discussion more in a later post. For now, if we just accept the basic premise of causality (which is useful in a human reality if not a cosmic truth), we can move on to the rest of the post.
3. I could not find a concise link to explain what anti-civ thought or anti-civ anarchist ideology is, but in short, anti-civ describes an ideology which radically critiques civilization, claiming that "civilization" (as opposed to small, self-governing tribal units) is inherently based on oppressive hierarchies and dominion over nature. This is a broad overview. Anti-civ anarchism is closely related to anarcho-primitivism, though it is a little different in that anarcho-primitivism specifically advocates for creating a future which dismantles large-scale societies and advanced civilizations and anti-civ thought is more a general critique, though many of those who call themselves anti-civ anarchists are somewhere closer to anarcho-primitivists.