I was present this week at the launch of a new All Party Parliamentary Group that I’ve been involved in helping set up. This A.P.P.G. is the first ever on the limits to growth: http://www.cusp.ac.uk/event/appg-l2g-launch/ . The APPG is chaired by Caroline Lucas, and co-chaired by George Kerevan (of the SNP) and Daniel Zeichner (of Labour). These MPs were there, along with several others, and, as I’ll say more about shortly, they made some remarkable interventions, during the proceedings.

The meeting was successful and encouraging. The room was packed out (with a substantial waiting list): well over 100 people were there, with standing room only.

Here are five thoughts from the meeting, on why the idea of ecological limits to growth is one whose time has surely come, making the launch of this group so timely:

 

1) The critics of the original ‘The Limits To Growth‘ book — and they were savage, and many — tend(ed) to focus exclusively on its allegedly excessive pessimism regarding the availability of raw materials. This claim is debatable. However, even if one were to accept it, they — the critics — would have to accept something else, in return, something that world-renowned ecological economist Tim Jackson, who chaired the launch meeting, made very clear during his presentation: that the original report/book was if anything too optimistic in relation to pollution crises! When one looks back at the graphs in the original book, one is struck by the way that, in most of the scenarios, pollution doesn’t feature as a fatal limit to growth. But, since 1972, we have seen that it could be and in a way already is: as the hole in our ozone layer, and anthropogenic climate change, have shown. Other cases could be added: the plastic in the oceans, the health risks caused by growing air pollution, the growth of heavy metals in our food supplies; the list goes  on. Hopefully this APPG can monitor such cases, and help make this point as widely known as it deserves to be.

 

2) Thinking about raw material shortages is a good way to bring out and show the utter short-termism of the dominant narrative. It is appalling that, in arguing against those of who willing to speak out about the limits to growth, our opponents say things like, “We have enough gas now to last a hundred years!”; as if that were the kind of timescale that humans ought to be happy thinking on. For of course that translates into saying: in 6 generations’ time, there’ll be virtually no more natural gas left. How irresponsible.

This APPG will be a place that will seek to broaden the horizons of policy-makers beyond that of ordinary politics (where the ‘long term’ is typically figured as everything more than 20 years away…). The issue of the limits to growth sheds light on our responsibility toward the deeper future. Caroline Lucas stressed the importance of this point, during her comments at the launch: she argued that we desperately need a new way of politically including the future (Here’s my own proposal in this direction: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2012/jan/04/climate-politics-future-generation-justice ), and she added that “It’s not a question of just thinking outside the box; we need to throw away the old box and replace it with something else!”

 

3) Most of what typically gets celebrated, vis-a-vis the nowadays much celebrated ‘decoupling’ of carbon emissions from other impacts from economic growth, is actually only relative decoupling. If growth were to continue indefinitely, we would need robust, permanent and absolute decoupling. Which is vanishingly rare.

This point should be connected too to the rebound effect which we have reason to believe is a massively powerful effect that (we have reason to believe) makes decoupling (e.g.) of economic growth from carbon emissions into what is in any case a mixed blessing: for the benefits of such greater efficiency get fed back in to the economy in terms, most usually, of increased consumptive behaviour. (Consider: if someone saves money by putting in good green roof insulation, what do they then do with that money? If they use it to buy a new sports car or a holiday in the Caribbean, then the net effect of putting that insulation in has been to worsen man-made climate change.)… See on this Jonathan Essex’s ‘Green House’ report, which makes uncomfortable reading, in terms of setting out the scale of the challenge we face in this respect: How To Make Do And Mend Our Economy; see also the work of Samuel Alexander, e.g. Degrowth And The Carbon Budget. The rebound effect and allied phenomena bring home the point about how very difficult it is to meaningfully and consistently reduce material throughput. It requires serious thinking and co-ordinated action from Government(s), etc. This is part of what the APPG will shed light on and contribute to. The Co-Chair of the Club of Rome, Anders Wijkman, was present at the meeting, and he stressed the importance of this and the difficulty of the point. He remarked that “the human ability to dohas vastly outstripped the human ability to understand”…

 

4) These first three issues, suggest another perspective that is critically important; the need for government to take a view that is not confined to cost-benefit analyses, nor even to what the ‘evidence-base’ tells us. Namely, as Caroline explicitly remarked at the beginning of the meeting: the need for governments to act according to the Precautionary Principle. This Principle is (supposed to be) part of UK (and EU) law; meanwhile, it has been under sustained attack from some Parliamentary Committees in recent years (see e.g. The Precautionary Principle Must Be Retained ). When we consider the risk of potential future pollution crises (of which we may as yet have no evidence); when we consider the truly long-term; and when we consider the possibility of rebound effects etc., then arguably there is an in-principle Precautionary argument against further economic growth. Such growth fragilises us, it puts us more at risk. One can see this just by looking for instance at the things (especially on the pollution side) that the 1972 limits to growth report didn’t see coming, especially pollution-risks (1, above). (See on all this my recent piece with Nassim Taleb et al: The Precautionary Principle. See also http://www.blackswanreport.com/blog/2015/05/our-statement-on-climate-models/ ) The limits to growth issue suggests the need for a precautionary approach to actually be applied (arguably to growth itself, and certainly to ‘material throughput’): this will be a significant change that needs scoping, and that the APPG could lead on.

 

5) Finally, we ought to bear in mind the question not just of whether further economic growth is possible or necessary or dangerous, but to the issue of whether it is desirable in the first place. Does growth make us happy? Insofar as it fosters inequality, as seems pretty clear (in recent years, virtually all the proceeds of growth have gone to the rich), doesn’t it rather (following the argument made by Wilkinson and Pickett, familiar to readers of this blog) make us unhappy? Moreover, much social and economic activity no longer gets counted as GDP, because it is free activity mediated by the internet; does this make it any less valuable?…Of course not. This 5th point is one that those on the Left ought to be much more aware of. It relates to one of the high points of the evening: George Kerevan MP’s agreeing with Caroline Lucas that the Treasury is a massive block to progress in this area and in many others, and his saying, therefore, that consideration ought to be given to the idea of abolishing it altogether! And Mr. Kerevan sits on the Treasury Select Committee…

 

[Thanks to David Burnham for research that contributed to this article. This is an expanded version of an article first published on Left Foot Forward.]

Originally published at greenworld.org

A  generation or two ago, there was a lot of talk about ‘the leisure society’. Where did all that talk go, and why? It was trumped by the march of consumerism and of economic growth. Society chose, in effect, to take the proceeds of affluence as stuff, rather than as time. We plumped for material wealth rather than for wellbeing.

We made a mistake.

That’s become increasingly obvious, as we have become richer (and more unequal, at the same time), without any improvement whatsoever in quality of life (in fact, quite the reverse). And as the level of pollution has risen, we’ve thus started to threaten our very future as a civilisation.

And perhaps that’s why talk of ‘the leisure society’ is returning.

A leisure society – where our sense of meaning comes more from the life we live than from labouring as much as possible to earn as much as possible – is clearly now necessary. Better still: it’s also possible. It’s possible that we could have a citizen’s income (see Caroline Lucas’s article on p.10) that would end wage-slavery forever. And we could have a working week that gets shorter every year. We could find meaning in our life from caring-activities we engage in on a volunteer basis, spending more time being citizens and less being consumers, and seeing family and friends. Spending time – rather than just money.

But to realise these possibilities, we are going to have to retake power from the one per cent – to stop being fobbed off with trinkets, and reassert our right to a life dominated by neither producing nor consuming and to defeat the hegemonic ideology of growthism and replace it with a post-growth common-sense that turns away from the culture of ‘more’, the culture of stuff.

There’s more than enough to go around already, if only we share it around better.

As we get all this sorted, we should demand that the leisure society becomes a reality. We should only have to work as much as we need to make each other collectively happy.

Don’t get me wrong, though: there is still going to be plenty of such work to do, forever. We need more people back on the land; we need to staff the NHS; and so on.

And in embracing a future society of leisure, we must be wary of the idea of ‘fully automated luxury communism’, which purports that robots are going to replace most human labour altogether, within our life-times, and that this is a good thing: the thinking goes that everything will be automated and that there will be common ownership of that which is automated.

This is a dangerous fantasy. Even if hyper-automation were controlled by people, rather than by profiteering corporations, it would still be dangerous.

Why? For the same underlying reason that we need the leisure society: because we’re breaching the limits to growth. ‘Peak Robot’ is a problem because robots are fantastically energy- hungry; their ‘bodies’ embody humongous amounts of energy and materials and their use accelerates the damage we do to the earth. Moore’s Law, which says that the number of transistors on a microprocessor chip will double every couple of years (meaning the parts get smaller and the computers become more powerful), is about to run into the buffers: within five years, computers’ working parts will become so small that they start to become vulnerable to quantum instabilities. (And remember: as they get smaller, they also become more impracticable to recycle.)

Fully-automated luxury for the 99 per cent is in this respect no different from fully-automated hyper-luxury for the one per cent: it’s a recipe for human self-destruction.
So: we need to create a leisure society in which most of the work that we still choose to do is done by us.

Let’s choose this future. For one-planet-living. And for our own wellbeing.

Professor Cathy Rowett and I are giving a talk next month on April 17th called ‘A Short History of Philosophy with a radical (green) edge’. Cathy was the Green Party candidate in South Norfolk, and I stood in Cambridge. It should be an interesting afternoon and its free to attend!

I recently put on a series of public lectures at UEA on the philosophy behind the ‘Precautionary Principle’.

If you are interested in what I think is a fundamentally essential part of green philosophy, then you can access full audio podcasts of the lectures here:

https://www.uea.ac.uk/philosophy/news-and-events/guest-lectures-spring-2016

The Guardian recently reported that two fifths of the NHS budget is currently going towards medical care for the over-65s. This comes at a time when the state retirement age is set to incrementally increase for the foreseeable future. The cruel irony of this is that those who are expected to work longer are often pushed into unsuitable, low skilled and precarious work, which often exacerbates and causes those very health problems that are increasing. It seems clear that government’s insouciant drive to supress the unemployment figures is failing older people.

Increased life expectancy need not lead to those who are clearly unable to work 40 hour weeks being forced down this route. Instead, we need to be enabling people to take up optional voluntary work that empowers them to help leave a legacy, undertake fulfilling activities, and provide a benefit to society. Due to the government’s austerity programme, the voluntary sector is perhaps now more important than it has been for a long while. Clearly we must adopt a set of policies that help to alleviate this situation. The attached piece is one such suggestion of how this might be done, authored by the ever-bright-idea’d Kim Sanders-Fisher:

Mentorship Diplomacy

FILM AND THE ENVIRONMENT – Symposium Programme

Wed 6^th and Thurs 7^th April 2016 

This two-day workshop aims at exploring the current philosophical and ethnomethodological investigations of society. This workshop is organised around two hours session per speaker, with at least half of it dedicated to discussion and exchanges with participants.

PROGRAM

DAY 1 – 6^th April 2016

13.30 Welcome and registration

13.50 : Introduction to the workshop

14.00-16.00 Joint Session: Metaphors that frame and pictures that restrain. Cognitive Linguistics, Wittgensteinian Philosophy and the Pitfalls of Neglecting the Metaphilosophy? Phil Hutchinson (MMU) and Rupert Read (University of East Anglia)

16.00-18.00 (Mis)communication in interaction Chi-He Elder (UEA)

DAY 2 – 7^th April 2016

10.00 – 12.00 Is there any such thing as social science evidence? Martin Hammersley (Emeritus Professor of Educational and Social Research, The Open University, Milton Keynes)

13.30 – 15.30 Sociology as a mismatch between problems and attempted solutions – Leonidas Tsilipakos, Greece.

16.00 – 18.00 Joint Session: Open Session / Wes Sharrock (University of Manchester) and Bob Anderson (University of Nottingham)

18.00 – 18.30  Conclusion and Perspective

Venue:

Seminar Room 5.02 – New Business School

Manchester Metropolitan University

Department of Interdisciplinary Studies

Dr Phil Hutchinson

Free of charge, mandatory registration: marie.chollier@stu.mmu.ac.uk

On Sunday 28^th of February the Green Party of England & Wales became the first UK-wide political party to vote ‘Rights of Nature’ into their policies. The motion was passed overwhelmingly by the conference floor.

Rights of Nature is a growing environmental movement calling for new legal tools to be developed to defend nature’s ecosystems. Central to this is the rejection of market valuations of nature and the recognition that nature will only be protected if we respect its innate value in law.

The proposer, Atus Mariqueo-Russell said:

‘With the adoption of Rights of Nature, the Green Party is once again at the forefront of advocating for exciting new ecological laws.’

‘In 2012 our conference passed a motion supporting the development of an international law of ecocide, and rights of nature is very much in the same vein as this.’

The co-proposer Rupert Read, a philosopher of science and ecology at the University of East Anglia, and Green candidate for Cambridge in the 2015 General Election, said:

‘Rights of Nature is a new way of conceptualizing our relationship with nature. What we are looking at here is no less than a fundamental paradigm shift away from the toxic perception of nature as an object to be consumed’.

Molly Scott-Cato, Green MEP for South West England and green economist, said:

‘It’s very exciting to see our Party leading the way as usual: Rights of Nature, as the people of Ecuador and other radical South American democracies know from first-hand experience, is an idea whose time has come.’

My letter published in the Observer, 24th Jan 2016.

Investing in clean air will save us money – both now and in the future. The Conservative austerity programme starves local councils of funds while we continue expanding our roads, thus wasting millions on increasing air pollution. New investment should cut air pollution instead through backing pedestrian and cycle schemes. This will save the government money three times over. First, it will cut air pollution, a major killer in the UK. Second, it will lead to healthier lives in general, reducing costs to the NHS – and help us shift to more sustainable living into the bargain. But third, the savings will also be seen in the initial investment made, as there is typically a far better return on investment in walking, cycling and local public transport in the first place than on the new road schemes and HS2 that dominate our transport investment.
Dr Rupert Read
Chair, Green House thinktank
Norwich

Green Pol & Left flyer