Hickel, Jason. _Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World_. London: William Heinemann, 2020. # Progressive Summary Hickel identifies the main problem in the Anthropocene as capitalism, and in particular, the logic of growth that is built into capitalism. He rejects the narrative that capitalism freed people from centuries of feudalism. In fact, he points out that between 1350 and 1500, there were widespread peasant revolts that led to a re-distribution of wealth and power. From 1500 to 1800, the elites in Europe fought back through the enclosure movement. What happened there was devastating, but was dwarfed by what happened outside of Europe through colonialism. He sees in animism a resource for looking at the natural world as an equal partner, limiting our extractive tendencies. --- # Link between enclosure and colonialism > Colonisation was a response to the crisis of elite disaccumulation that had been caused by the peasant revolutions in Europe. It was a ‘fix’. Just as elites turned to enclosure at home, they sought new frontiers for accumulation abroad. In 1525, the very year that German nobles massacred those 100,000 peasants, the Spanish king Carlos I awarded the kingdom’s highest honour to Hernán Cortés, the conquistador who slayed 100,000 Indigenous people as his army marched through Mexico and destroyed the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. The congruence of these two events is striking. In the decades that inaugurated the rise of capitalism, enclosure and colonisation were intimately connected. Cotton and sugar fueled the Industrial Revolution. Cotton was the most important commodity in Britain's industrial rise. Sugar was a source of cheap calories for Europe's industrial workers. Both of these commodities had to be grown on external plantations in Brazil, the West Indies and North America, that were created by mass appropriations of land. 5 million Indigenous Americans were enslaved to work on these plantations. > Enclosure was a process of internal colonisation, and colonisation was a process of enclosure. --- Life expectancy plummeted with the Industrial Revolution. Simon Szreter has shown that the first century of the Industrial Revolution saw life expectancy fall to levels not seen since the Black Death in the 14th century. In Manchester, life expectancy fell to a mere 25 years. # Energy and growth In the 19th and 20th centuries, the discovery of fossil fuels (coal and oil) and the invention of the steam engine led to a 2nd wave of colonisation. A single barrel of crude oil can perform about 1700kWh of work. This is equal to 4.5 years of human labour. > A more holistic way of thinking about growth is to recognise that it is broadly equivalent to the rate at which our economy is metabolising the living world. # Indigenous wisdom and animism Animism is the idea that "the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others." (Graham Harvey). > As one Arctic shaman put it to the anthropologist Knud Rasmussen, ‘The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls.’ Indigenous communities solve this conundrum by creating relationships of reciprocity and gratitude. They live by a few simple rules: - Be grateful for what you take. - Take only what you need. - Give back more than you take. > The moral code at play here is not that you should never take (that would lead to a quick demise), but that you should never take more than the other is willing or able to give – in other words, never more than an ecosystem can regenerate. And you have to make sure to give back in return, by doing what you can to enrich, rather than degrade, the ecosystems on which you depend. Shamans play a crucial role in managing relations between humans and non-human beings. > Shamans grow to know these other beings intimately. In the Amazon, they communicate with them in trances and dreams, transmitting messages and intentions back and forth. Because shamans spend so much time interacting with their non-human neighbours, they have an expert’s grasp on how ecological systems work. They know exactly how many fish – and of what species – can be taken from a river in any given season while ensuring that plenty are able to spawn for the next year. They know how many monkeys can be safely hunted without harming a troupe. They know when a grove of fruit trees is healthy, and when it’s in trouble. They use this knowledge to make sure that humans never take more from their plant and animal relatives than the forest can safely provide. > > In this sense, the shaman operates as a kind of ecologist; an expert who understands and maintains the fragile interdependencies that constitute the jungle ecosystem, with knowledge of botany and biology that may far outstrip that which even the most prestigious university professors would dare to claim. One study found that 80% of the planet's biodiversity is found on territories stewarded by Indigenous peoples. Research shows that being around trees makes people happier and less aggressive. There are so many trees in Singapore. Yet we spend so much of our time inside buildings. We don't allow ourselves to enjoy the benefit of the trees around us. Scientists in Canada found that just having 10 more trees in a city block had as much positive impact on cardio-vascular health as having an extra $20K. And it improves our sense of well-being equivalent to earning $10k more or being 7 years younger. When the science started coming out about plant intelligence, people rejected the science, because it was too uncomfortable to think that we might be committing murder when we harvest crops. But Indigenous cultures have arrived at a solution to this dilemma after generations of thinking about this. There is nothing wrong with taking from nature, as long we do it with gratitude and reciprocity, as long as we don't take more than we need, and give back as much as we take. > Capitalism ultimately relies on a single, overarching principle: take more than you give back. We’ve seen this logic in action for 500 years, beginning with enclosure and colonisation. In order to accumulate surplus, you have to extract uncompensated value from nature and bodies, which must be objectified and rendered as ‘external’. We already give legal personhood to fictions like corporations, which sanctify accumulation and profit over life itself. Why not flip things around and give personhood to natural endowments, such as forests and rivers? In 2017, New Zealand declared the Whanganui River, the 3rd longest river in the country, to be a legal person. The Maori have been fighting for this since 1870. Following this, the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India were given legal rights. Columbia gave legal rights to the Amazon River. # Conclusion > Degrowth stands for de-colonisation, of both lands and peoples and even our minds. It stands for the de-enclosure of commons, the de-commodification of public goods, and the de-intensification of work and life. It stands for the de-thingification of humans and nature, and the de-escalation of ecological crisis. Degrowth begins as a process of taking less. But in the end it opens up whole vistas of possibility. It moves us from scarcity to abundance, from extraction to regeneration, from dominion to reciprocity, and from loneliness and separation to connection with a world that’s fizzing with life. > > Ultimately, what we call ‘the economy’ is our material relationship with each other and with the rest of the living world. We must ask ourselves: what do we want that relationship to be like? Do we want it to be about domination and extraction? Or do we want it to be about reciprocity and care? > What are we doing here? Where are we going? What’s it all for? What is the end, as it were, of human existence? Growthism prevents us from stopping to think about these questions. It prevents us from reflecting on what we actually want our society to achieve. Indeed, the pursuit of growth comes to stand in for thought itself. We are in a trance. We slog on, mindlessly, unaware of what we’re doing, unaware of what’s happening around us, unaware of what we are sacrificing … who we are sacrificing. > > Degrowth is an idea that shakes us out of the trance. ‘Sit, be still, and listen,’ Rumi wrote in one of his poems: ‘for you are drunk, and we are at the edge of the roof.’ > > This is not about living a life of voluntary misery or imposing harsh limits on human potential. On the contrary, it is exactly the opposite. It is about flourishing, and about reaching a higher level of consciousness about what we’re doing here and why. > > But the trance is powerful. To escape it requires escaping the ruts grooved into our minds, the assumptions baked into our culture, the ideologies that shape our politics. That is no easy task. It requires courage and discipline. For me, it has been a long journey, and I still have many miles to go. At every step along the way I have relied on the grace of fellow travelers who have pulled me out of ruts and opened me to new ways of seeing the world. > I finished writing this book during the coronavirus lockdown in London. I will always remember it as a strange and eerie time. We all suddenly realized what parts of the economy really matter – and whose jobs we depend on most. For me, this was inescapably clear. My partner, Guddi, is a doctor in the NHS. In those early weeks I would watch her walk out the door each morning on her way to what amounted to a warzone, hoping that my eyes didn’t betray the fear I felt for her. And when she came home each evening, exhausted from work vastly more important than my own, she would still ask to read my drafts. We used our allotted exercise time for walks, during which she would help me work through ideas and sharpen arguments and find narrative arcs, while we watched grey winter give way to the tender leaves and blossoms of spring. This book – and especially its final chapter – represents a shared intellectual journey. I am endlessly grateful for her wisdom, insight, companionship, and her unflagging ability to see through every ruse that our culture has going. She sharpens me every day.