Prosperity, Urbanity, and Ecological Consciousness

The indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest—ranging from southern Canada to northern California—have long had a reverential relationship with salmon. It made frequent appearances in their myths and was often duplicated in the totemic structures of the Salish peoples. The embedding of salmon into tribal mythologies fulfilled an existential need among the indigenous peoples; salmon functioned as a psychological heuristic that represented a cosmic connection between tribal members, other tribes, and even the universe more broadly. Without this type of cultural artifact, the relationships of solidarity essential to survival during times of hardship would not have been possible. However, no matter how easy it is to be swept up in salmon as an artifact of “nature” in the abstract, specifically as it relates to its role in fulfilling needs for connection, it is important to recognize that such existential fulfillment is interwoven and dependent on the salmon as a source of wealth. 

Salmon played a crucial mythological role for the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest because it played such a critical economic role in people’s standard of living. Among the territory of the Yurok people—stretching from the Klamath Rivers to the large tributary called the Trinity—the ceremonial ritual of salmon harvesting was as technologically sophisticated as it was spiritually significant. According to Freeman House, each spring, the tribes of the Yurok, Hupa, and Karuk worked together to construct a large dam to concentrate the salmon into one area. At the close of the harvest season, the dam was destroyed, only to be rebuilt on an annual basis. Through this innovation, the indigenous peoples of the area were able to catch an estimated half a million to two million pounds of salmon each year. The ceremony served a political function as well. By institutionalizing the harvest through elaborate rituals, intertribal cooperation became possible, and grifting minimized. Tribal members, who fished for salmon before the ceremony began, were threatened with supernatural illnesses by shamans, and this, in turn, protected tribes against petty theft and the depletion of their commons. Additionally, the Salish peoples used salmon for trade and as a form of rudimentary currency. Totemic depictions of salmon not only expressed tribal piety but also prosperity. Arguably, no other resource was as central to the material well-being of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest as salmon.¹

The awareness that nature fulfills both material needs and higher order nonmaterial desires, such as social connection and wonderment of the universe, is a common theme within contemporary environmentalism. Problematically, what many environmentalists have gotten wrong—including social ecologists, who represent a more rationalist and humanistic faction of contemporary environmentalism—is the belief that these two needs exist within a somewhat antithetical relationship. Specifically, contemporary environmentalism, including social ecologists, have assumed that it is only through a renouncement of materiality—and with it the urbanization, certain technologies, and economic growth—that humanity can come to appreciate nature in a nonmaterial existential sense. Generally speaking, environmentalist have assumed that modernity alienates humanity from nature by its own material abundance. Under the imperative of constant economic growth, driven by large metropolitan centers, humanity loses its connection with the natural world. Therefore, adopting an ecological consciousness depends on degrowing the global economy, and, in terms of habitat, depopulating urban centers and replacing them with smaller and more rural ecocommunities. 

The problem with the assumption that modernity’s materiality—especially as it relates to advanced technologies and modern urbanity—alienates people from nature is that modern  material abundance is what provides the social conditions for humans to be concerned with the natural world in the first place. Just as the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest were only able to use salmon as a psychological heuristic for their own connections with the natural world because salmon endowed them with such great wealth, contemporary environmentalists are only able to embrace an ecological consciousness because they are living in a  modern society of material abundance. Reduce people to a position of absolute scarcity and their concerns will shift. They will no longer have time to worry about endangered species, the outcomes of distant waste streams, or the implications of current-day pollution on future generations. Instead, and understandably so, they will be mostly concerned with questions on how to escape their state of scarcity, i.e., survival. In this manner, an ecologically sustainable planet is dependent not on a degrowing of the global economy, but quite the opposite. For humanity to achieve a universal ecological consciousness, it is necessary to seek a rapid increase in economic growth and bring the world’s population to a state of post-scarcity so that the vast majority of the globe’s population can dedicate time and resources toward ecological concerns.  

The terms of a global post-scarcity economy require some explaining. As an environmental philosophy highly informed by Marxism, Social Ecology has long acknowledged that throughout human history scarcity has always existed in two dimensions. The first is material scarcity determined by the limits of nature. Nature blesses humanity with existence, but little else. Through technology, humans have been able to overcome the limits set by nature and escape the type of Malthusian traps that capture other species. Specifically, humanity’s uniqueness as a species is in its capacity to innovate the natural world and not simply adapt to it. Physical limitations to satisfying basic needs only remain physical in so far as humans fail to discover new means of transforming nature, and thus improving their lives. The second dimension of scarcity is determined by the social construction of society. Surpluses generated by natural abundances and technological advancements become scarcities, or at least scarcities for a particular class, if they are not distributed equitably throughout the population. Overcoming socially generated scarcities requires an active redistribution of resources, and by implication a transformation of a society’s power structures, to those individuals who have the least means. 

These two dimensions of scarcity might appear obvious, but what is less recognized—even within Social Ecology—is the dialectical relationship between them. Namely, material scarcities create social inequalities, and social inequalities lead to material scarcities. Despite the lofty proclamations of bourgeoise society that all humans are “created equal” the reality is that this is far from the case. Differences in physical and mental abilities, not to mention chance geographical locations, can create significant inequalities both within and among peoples. It is only through technological progress that these differences have become socially irreverent. Poor eyesight, which would have ensured an early death in earlier societies, are now rectified through a fashionable selection of affordable glasses. Simultaneously, social scarcities—that is scarcities as a product of vast inequalities—inevitably hinder technological progress and lead to stagnation. The irrational hoarding of wealth means that critical investments fail to go toward education and innovation and are instead wasted on the trivialities of an elite. 

For early socialists, especially Marx, who wrote during a time when material scarcity was part of their given social reality, the understanding of the dialectical relationship between these two scarcities was taken as a given. The appeal of socialism was that through a leveling of wealth it would accelerate technological progress far beyond the potentialities of capitalism. Lenin’s proclamation that “communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country” recognized that not only is material scarcity best overcome through equitable redistribution, but, at the same time, equitable distribution opens up new opportunities for material abundance through an unleashing of human potential.² By liberating the working class from wage-labor the full gifts of that class have an opportunity to be realized.

Nonetheless, in the context of the prosperity of the post-World War II era, and with it an awareness of environmental destruction, the dialectical relationship between the dual scarcities was questioned among New Left radicals, especially among members of the Frankfurt School who adopted a rather pessimistic view of scientific progress, economic development, and aspects of the European Enlightenment. Social Ecology joined these criticisms and turned its back on overcoming these dual scarcities, specifically as they related to the processes of urbanization and economic growth. Both urbanization and economic growth were seen as perpetuators of inequality and hierarchies, and therefore should be eschewed for more decentralized and simpler communities. 

This was a major theoretical mistake. Social Ecology claims to embody humanistic values, but as it proposes to shrink large urban centers in favor of geographically decentralized communities, along with its criticisms of economic growth as such, it tarnishes its otherwise humanistic core. In doing so, it unfortunately gives philosophical cover to the absurdities of degrowth advocates, and even some neo-Malthusians, which it supposedly actively opposes. Instead, radicals who are concerned with ecological sustainability should embrace overcoming all scarcities, and work to utilize the benefits of a prosperous and highly urbanized society to achieve a global ecological consciousness. Indeed, without a dramatic increase in urbanization and economic productivity, such a consciousness is unlikely to occur.  

Bookchin’s Critique of Modern Urbanity

Social Ecology founder Murray Bookchin never identified as a degrowth advocate, and much of his work even contradicts the central premises of the degrowth movement, which appear to also borrow heavily from Deep Ecology, an ecological philosophy that Bookchin staunchly opposed.³ Indeed, Bookchin accurately acknowledged that scarcity was not only a material condition but also a social one, and for this reason, a post-scarcity society was essential for humanity to achieve freedom; it both liberated humans from the oppression of toil and allowed the free time necessary for self-governance. Nonetheless, the demarcation line for society’s transition from a state of scarcity to post-scarcity was the mid-twentieth century. As he explained: 

The last three decades, particularly in the late 1950s, marked a turning point in technological development,  a technological revolution that has negated all values, political schemes, and social perspectives held by mankind throughout all previous recorded history. After thousands of years of tortuous development, the countries of the Western world (and potentially all countries) are now confronted by the possibility of a material abundant, even toilless era in which most of the means of life  can be provided by machines… This technological revolution and the prospects it holds for society as a whole from the premises of radically new lifestyle among today’s young people, a generation that is rapidly divesting itself of the values and age-old work-orientated tradition of its elders.⁴

While the period of the mid-point of the twenty-first century represented a heroic use of humanity’s ingenuity to lessen toil, the period after that point should be regarded with suspicion as a deleterious and potentially disastrous overgrowth of material abundance. From that point forward, capitalism had projected onto people a barrage of frivolous needs as part of its ruthless drive for accumulation, and this was especially evident in the development of modern urbanization. According to Bookchin, modern urbanization existed within the confines of a capitalist paradigm that functioned under the principle of “growth for its own sake.”⁵ Because of this inherent feature, alleged gigantism—as in economies of scale—became an inevitable tendency in matters of productive output and humanity’s habitats. According to Bookchin, this constant pursuit of economic growth and gigantism is radically at odds with both human sociability and ecological sustainability. Eventually, with the success of an ecologically-conscious revolution, major cities would escape this gigantism and be broken up—in a sense degrown—factories would be abolished, and many industrial activities, particularly in agriculture, would be replaced with a decentralized system of artisanal and small-scale producers, that were open to modern industrial processes to lessen toil, but used them sparingly.  

In his first book Our Synthetic Environment, Bookchin railed against modern urbanity. He celebrated the fact that “millions of Americans have sensed the overall deterioration of modern urban life” as an indication that a new ecological consciousness was being born.⁶ For Bookchin, large sections of the population have “turned to the suburbs and “exurbs” as a refuge from the burdens of metropolitan milieu” because “megalopolitan life is breaking down—psychically, economically, and biologically.”⁷ Millions of people have acknowledged this breakdown by “voting with their feet: they have picked up their belongings and left.”⁸ In this new suburban environment, modern man was “trying to recreate a world that he can cope with as an individual, a world that he correctly identifies with the freedom, gentler rhythms, and quietude of rural surroundings.”⁹ According to Bookchin, this escape from the “megalopolitan life” was a way for humans to prevent themselves from succumbing to the capitalist inevitability of insatiable consumerism. In his essay, “Towards a Liberatory Technology,” Bookchin wrote:

in our own time, the development of technology and the growth of cities have brought man’s alienation from nature to the breaking point… Boxed into a sanitized urban milieu… modern man is denied even a spectator’s role in the agricultural and industrial systems that satisfy his material needs… He is a pure consumer, an insensate receptacle. It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that he is disrespectful toward the natural environment; the fact is, he scarcely knows what ecology means or what his environment requires to remain in balance.¹⁰

Bookchin’s assessment of modern urbanity, while evocative, is factually wrong. The idea that millions of Americans “voted with their feet” because they felt the “breakdown” of urban life and were motivated by a basic need for “humanly scaled” suburban and rural habitats is not supported by the evidence. Since the 1920s, urban populations have outnumbered rural populations in the United States and the difference between them has only expanded with each decade. There is little doubt that suburbanites enjoyed the pleasantries of large lawns and housing near treescapes, but their motivation to live in these areas was mostly the result of economic advantages, not social alienation. The Great Depression and the Second World War resulted in a significant slowdown in housing construction, leading to a serious housing shortage. To alleviate this problem, the federal government agreed to guarantee housing mortgages while the construction industry adopted mass-production methods. Between 1940 and 1950, the American suburbs grew in population by 36% (compared to central cities, which grew by 14%) and homeownership became a standard feature of America’s middle-class. People fled to the suburbs not because they wished to escape the “breakdown” of urban milieu, but because at this time it was more affordable and economically sensible to purchase a home on the outskirts of a central city, and use it as a source of equity, than to rent inside an urban core. Along with the affordability of single-family homes, a blooming automobile market and the construction of new highways made the movement out of central cities highly practical. The postwar exodus from urban cores was the result of postwar consumerism not a rebellion against it, while the “breakdown” of urban life was an outcome, not a precursor, to suburban flight. When middle-class families left inner cities, they took their wealth with them. This led to chronic underinvestment in urban cores, a phenomenon that—due to racially exclusive homeownership laws—hit African Americans particularly hard.¹¹

Furthermore, the “back-to-land” movement, which so captivated bohemians and radicals during the 1960s and 1970s, was a phenomenon mostly limited to a countercultural minority, not a general trend that involved “millions” of Americans. As much as participants in those lifestyle experiments would like to portray themselves as heroically prefiguring a new society, the reality was that they were able to engage in such experimentation through a mixture of postwar prosperity and cheap land, particularly in predominantly rural states like Vermont. Nor did the “back-to-land” movement necessarily represent a new phenomenon that acted as a harbinger of a new ecological consciousness. “Back-to-land” movements have been a common reoccurrence throughout the history of the United States. Sounding very similar to Bookchin’s writings from the 1960s, a writer for the Chicago periodical Prairie Farmer wrote in the 1850s that city life “crushes, enslaves, and ruins so many thousands of our young men, who are insensibly made the victims of dissipation, of reckless speculation, and of ultimate crime.”¹² Instead of participating in urban life, the author argues, people should return to agriculture because it “so connected with everything around us which tends to enlighten and enoble [sic] the mind, improve the condition of society, and promote the common welfare.”¹³ In the early twentieth-century, almost half a century before the publication of Our Synthetic Environment, Judd and Swanstrom describe “a “back-to-nature” movement, built on a romanticized version of nature and rural environments, [that] swept the country. Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls, Woodcraft Indians, and several other organizations sought to expose children to the healthy influence of nature study.”¹⁴

While some of the criticisms of urbanity made by the “back-to-the-land” movements have some validity, referring to the shortcomings of metropolitan life as a “breakdown” which requires dismantling and degrowing urban centers dramatically overstates the case, and is highly ignorant of the robust sociable and civic lives that people—often people of color and immigrants—who live in urban centers engage in. What all “back-to-the-land” movements reflect is not a response to urban “breakdowns,” but that a social class or demographic in American society has achieved a certain level of prosperity. People go “back-to-the-land” not because cities create a unique form of social alienation, but because they can afford to. Going back to “nature” and living “simply” requires that one first has some wealth to shrug off. The same is true for eschewing economies of scale for artisanal forms of production. It is only after people have an abundance of food that they can be more concerned with cuisine quality, including all its subjective and idiosyncratic features, over quantity. In this respect, ecological pining itself, especially for those aesthetic and nonmaterial aspects of nature, is an outcome a society’s wealth, and that wealth is rooted in the economic advantages that society has accrued through modern technology and large metropolitan centers.      

This insight is true not only for the “back-to-the-land” movement, but for the birth of environmentalism as an organized social movement after the Second World War in general. The expansion of the welfare state and the rapid development of new technologies contributed to a dramatic increase in the standard of living for the majority of people in Europe and North America. Under these conditions the “realm of need”—in Marx’s lexicon—was increasingly being abolished in the West. In response, people shifted their concerns from immediate material existence to post-scarcity desires regarding quality-of-life. For many people, these quality-of-life concerns included a desire to connect with the nonmaterial aspects of the natural world. Nature, processed through modern technology and urbanity, was now able to easily satisfy material needs, and in response many people began to seek out the natural world to satiate nonmaterial needs for connection and meaning. Material abundance, far from alienating people from nature, created conditions where people were both able and willing to be closer to it. As Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have explained:

environmentalism and other progressive social movements of the 1960s were born of the prosperity of the postwar era and the widespread emergence of higher-order postmaterialist needs. As Americans became increasingly wealthy, secure, and optimistic, they started to care more about problems such as air and water pollution and the protection of the wilderness and open space… Environmentalists have long misunderstood, downplayed, or ignored the conditions of their own existence. They have tended to view economic growth as the cause but not the solution to ecological crisis.¹⁵

On this account, the degrowth of the global economy—whether through a significant reduction in goods, dismantling of economies of scale, and, as Bookchin argued for, the depopulation of urban centers—would likely result in an eventual loss of ecological consciousness. While it is not necessarily the case that “more” economic output is always better, it is true that scarcities compel societies to focus their attention on overcoming material needs. Only after material needs are to a large degree fulfilled do potentialities for nonmaterial needs, such as appreciating nature for its own sake, become possible on a societal level.   

The Sustainability of Modern Urbanity

The great irony of Bookchin’s attack on modern urbanization is not that he failed to recognize that the prosperity intrinsic to it was a precondition for the ecological consciousness that he was attempting to foster, but rather that he assumed that large metropolitan areas, which he referred to as “megapolises”—a phrase he borrowed from Lewis Mumford—were inherently ecologically destructive. In The Limits of the City, Bookchin argued that in order to “restore urbanity as a meaningful terrain for sociation, culture, and community, the megapolis must be ruthlessly dissolved and replaced by new decentralized ecocommunities, each carefully tailored to the natural ecosystem in which it is located.”¹⁶ Yet, decades of research into human habitats since Bookchin wrote these words has proven the opposite. If anything, large urban centers—or “megapolises”—have demonstrated to be one of humanity’s major ecological saving graces; their existence suggests a means by which humanity can have both material prosperity and ecological sustainability. However, to make this possible, environmental thinking must end its obsession with “back-to-the-land” lifestyles and acknowledge that the best way to save natural landscapes is to remove human habitats from them. As the renowned urban planner Jeff Speck explained:

it was the desire to somehow magically merge city and country that created environmental, social, and economic disaster that is sprawl. Still, it is common to come across architecture-school proposals and design competition entries that have us questing for a “new and unprecedented relationship between man and nature,” as if there is some undiscovered way to improve the city by diluting its best qualities. We know better. And we know that central among these qualities is the street life that is only possible in a truly urban environment, where there are more buildings than bushes.¹⁷

Counterintuitively, the more humans are willing to accept an environment of mostly buildings, the more able they are to conserve nature because they allow the area around them to be full of bushes. As an example, New England has been undergoing a process of dramatic reforestation for the last 150 years. Before the appearance of European settlers, old-growth forest covered the landscape of New England. The indigenous tribes of the region lived in a social structure that was somewhere in between hunter-gatherer and agriculturalists. While this mode of social organization had certain benefits, it also limited the productive capacities of the Indigenous peoples and demanded a somewhat transient society that migrated to new terrains once the resources of a particular region had been exhausted. When Europeans arrived with advanced agricultural practices, they dramatically changed the region’s landscape. To make room for farmland and settlements, they destroyed much of New England’s forests. What has saved New England’s forests from continual decline was the movement of the region’s population from a rural society based on agriculture to an urban society with a modern economy. Today, New England has a population of approximately 14.5 million people with roughly 80% of the area covered by forest. Out of the top five most densely populated states in the country, three of them—Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island—are in New England. That is a dramatic difference from the mid-1800s, where only 30%-40% of the land was forested and the population was around 2.7 million.¹⁸

The potential for reforestation and conservation is not the only ecological benefit to modern urbanization. Modern urbanization also dramatically reduces carbon emissions. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the state that has the highest carbon emissions per capita is rural Wyoming. A large state with fewer than 600,000 people, Wyoming produces 113 metric tons of carbon a year per capita. In comparison, the state of New York has a population of around 20 million, with the largest grouping of people living in New York City. Yet, New York produces only 8 metric tons of carbon a year per capita, far less than Wyoming.¹⁹ The reasons for this are twofold. The first is transportation; New Yorkers are more likely to walk, ride a bicycle, rideshare in a taxi, or use the subway system than drive a personal car. The density of New York City makes personal car use impractical and public transit more affordable. New York City’s MTA subway system alone transports approximate 5.5 million people every weekday.²⁰ According to the American Public Transit Association, when a person switches from a personal car to public transit during a 20-mile round trip, that individual reduces his or her carbon emissions by 4,800 pounds per year.²¹ The second reason is housing. The idea that a habitat should be “humanly-scaled” is sensible when it comes to transportation; above all else, walking should be the preferred mode of transportation. However, the idea should not apply to buildings. Large apartment buildings are far more efficient than any collection of single-family homes. Single-family homes built in the 2000s consume 10% more energy than homes built in the 1970s. In comparison, apartments built in the 2000s with 2-4 units have decreased their energy consumption by 5% when compared to their 1970’s counterparts. For apartments with 5 or more units, the drop is an even more dramatic 12% decrease.²² Overall, average residential energy consumption has decreased due to greater efficiencies in appliances and heating, but the largest reduction has been in large apartment complexes. Between 1980 and 2009, energy consumption in apartment buildings with 5 or more units decreased by 48%. For single-family homes, these gains have been offset by the fact that the average size of a single-family home has increased. Single-family homes built after 2000 use only 2% more energy than homes built before 2000, but the later homes are 30% larger.²³ Because of these factors, New York State has 6% of the U.S. population, but only consumes 1% of the country’s energy—the lowest per capita annual consumption of BTUs of any state.²⁴

Of course, nothing is more environmentally enriching than actually getting outside. The irony in attempting to create a hybrid zone between urban and rural areas is that when people live in is such an area, they very rarely take advantage of either of these worlds. The lack of density and diversity of activities in suburban areas means that people nearly always drive to their destinations. For all practical purposes, most of the outdoor activities in suburban environments that attempt to offer urban amenities with rural landscapes require that people do the majority of their traveling in personal cars. The necessity of this commute time leads to a dramatic decrease in overall activity, and is partially to blame for the nation’s declining health statistics. Because of the United States’ car dependent forms of development, which is inevitable if there is a dearth of tightly packed large buildings, walking among adults dropped 40 percent between 1977 and 1995.²⁵ Research in the area of geographic design and public health has concluded that people who live in urban areas with fewer car lanes and compact connected streets have lower rates of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease.²⁶ Not only do urban dwellers spend more time outside, but they are more appreciative of natural landscapes when they come in contact with them. Many urban parks are arguably over-utilized. New York City’s Central Park is visited by 25 million people a year, nearly three times the total population of the city.²⁷ Per acre, some smaller parks in the city are visited even more regularly.²⁸

In contrast to Bookchin’s excoriation of “megapolises,” modern urbanization is defined by forms of sharing of resources—such as public transit, public parks, apartment complexes, shared infrastructure, and open squares–that are unprecedent in history. As Frederic C. Howe proclaimed, “Man has entered on an urban age. He has become a communal being.”²⁹ Instead of depopulating urban centers, the inherent sharing of these resources has the potential to create dignified and livable habitats without continually destroying ecosystems. If anything, the ecological society that Bookchin sought to achieve is largely dependent on the modern city —characterized by large buildings, dense infrastructure, and material abundance—becoming more prevalent. In the process, modern urbanity has the potential to undo the damage done by the type of sprawl that inevitably results in a human habitat that attempts to combine urbanity and rurality instead of recognizing the important division between the two.    

Degrowth Economics: Assumptions and Realities

Bookchin’s failure to recognize the potential that modern urbanity has for creating an ecological society is connected to his overall critique of capitalism. For Bookchin, modern urbanity is an outcome of capitalism’s insatiable drive for economic growth. The “megapolis” is a bloated product of this insatiable drive and it must be undone in order to restore a sense of ecological sanity. It is this critique of economic growth where social ecologists and degrowth advocates have considerable crossover. However, in both cases the critique is based on a series of erroneous economic assumptions. In the end, these erroneous assumptions become far more problematic for Social Ecology than the degrowth movement. Unlike Bookchin, degrowth advocates give very little acknowledgement to scarcity as a social condition, while Social Ecology’s theory of politics recognizes achieving a post-scarcity society as a precondition for direct democracy. Nevertheless, despite this acknowledgement, social ecologists in many ways undermine their own goal of universal post-scarcity by clinging to the notion that an economic system of continuous growth is de facto incompatible with ecological sustainability, and unfortunately given credence to some of degrowth advocates worse absurdities.    

According to Demaria et al, the word “degrowth,” a translation of the French word “dècroissance,” literally means to “reduce.” From this, Demaria et al define the degrowth movement as a project of “societal shrinking of production and consumption aimed at social and ecological sustainability.”³⁰ For degrowth advocates, “social” sustainability is only possible with the adoption of a societal commitment to a lifestyle of “voluntary simplicity.”³¹ Drawing on the works of Jacques Ellul, Bernard Charbonneau, and E. F. Schumacher, degrowth advocates—like Bookchin—have celebrated small decentralized communities against the “gigantism” of large urban centers. Sounding similar to Bookchin, Ted Trainer has argued that the degrowth movement seeks to “convert our presently barren suburbs into thriving local economies which produce most of the basic goods and services they need from local resources of land, labour, skill and capital. This will be enabled by the movement of many people from cities to presently dying country towns.”³² Lehtinen acknowledges that “the degrowth critique is generally sceptical toward programmes of urban compactness policy that promote forceful rebuilding,” while Giorgos Kalis has praised the degrowth debate for opening “up the discussion of selective downscaling of man-made capital” including the elimination of “high-speed transport infrastructures” and other large urban investments.³³

The hostility that degrowth advocates have toward modern urbanity is rooted in a general skepticism toward the idea of sustainable development. Armed with Georgescu-Roegen’s pessimistic entropy, degrowth advocates proclaim that the planet is currently or rapidly approaching its carrying-capacity; the only solution against this calamity is a planned economic recession, or as Giorgos Kalis describes it, a process of “sustainable” degrowth that somehow reduces economic output without creating a decline in living standards. 

There are several problems with these positions. First, degrowth advocates have a largely erroneous understanding of GDP and other economic metrics and this gives them a faulty understanding on the relationship between economic growth and development. For example, Joan Martínez-Alier et al claim that “a notable advancement in separating development from economic growth is due to the visibility of the Human Development Index,” with the misleading implication that the Human Development Index (HDI) can somehow measure development without economic growth.³⁴ This is impossible, and reveals a confused understanding of the relationship between GDP and HDI. All things being equal, a decline in a country’s GDP would inevitably result in a decline in its HDI because HDI incorporates GDP per capita, along with access to healthcare and education, into its overall metric. By doing so, the HDI provides an understanding not only of the overall wealth of a country, but that wealth relative to population. Hence, the United States has a higher GDP than Norway, but Norway has a higher HDI because the United States’ population is several times larger than Norway’s. In this regard, the HDI does not “separate” development from economic growth but provides a more comprehensive understanding of development by contextualizing growth on a per capita basis and measuring it alongside access to health care and education. 

The critical aspect of explaining this metric is in understanding that while economic growth is a necessary aspect of development it is not itself sufficient. Economic growth can occur without development, but development cannot occur absent economic growth.  Nevertheless, the degrowth movement appears to be in utter denial regarding the relationship between economic growth and development, and this leads them to extremely troubling views regarding global poverty. For example, Giorgos Kalis boldly claims that the “goal of sustainable degrowth is not to degrow GDP,” because such a decline in GDP will inevitably happen as economic growth comes up against ecological limits.³⁵ Instead, the purpose is to achieve “sustainable” degrowth that is able to manage this economic decline in a responsible manner. However, what Kalis understands as so-called responsible management of a declining economy is questionable. Kalis claims to have supported the supposed environmental benefits of the 2008-2009 global recession, because it resulted in a modest decline in greenhouse gases, and believes that such dramatic economic downturns provide “a window of opportunity for political changes that will make the inevitable degrowth of the economy socially sustainable.”³⁶ Referring to the misery of millions of people around the world as “a window of opportunity for political changes” rather than a tragedy to be avoided reflects a callous attitude toward the world’s poorest. At best it treats poverty-stricken people as social objects whose purpose is to confirm an ideology rather than as human beings who require immediate relief from their suffering. 

Second, degrowth advocates predict future resource depletions based solely on extrapolations from current practices without regard for changes in technology and design. The erroneousness of this assumption is made clear in light of the infamous Simon-Ehrlich wager. On September 29, 1980, Paul Ehrlich—a well-known biologist and co-author of the The Population Bomb—bet Julian Simon—a business professor and free-market advocate—that five different metals (chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten) would be much more expensive in a decade due to scarcities caused by population growth. Ehrlich was correct on the rapid increase in the global population; between 1980 and 1990, the global population increased by approximately 800 million. At the time, it was the largest population increase in a single decade ever. Nevertheless, by 1990 the price for all five metals (adjusted for inflation) had in fact dropped. The reason, as Julian Simon accurately predicted, is that technological innovation caused metal prices to decline steadily.³⁷

The Simon-Ehrlich wager remains a cautionary tale of naively assuming that future societies are merely an exaggeration of present trends, but it is also significant for its political implications. Simon was well known for using any and all debunking of environmental orthodoxy to make a case for a rather reckless free market economy. In doing so, he provided an ideological framework for an entire generation of global warming denialists. Degrowth advocates share some responsibility for the birth of this denialism; when it comes to assessing the future, frantic alarmism is more likely to breed unhealthy skepticism instead of thoughtful action. 

Similarly, and more significantly, there is an abundance of empirical economic research demonstrating that the relationship between GDP and environmental sustainability is curved rather than linear, thus further invaliding simplistic extrapolations between the two. In 1991, economists Gene M. Grossman and Alan B. Krueger first introduced the concept of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC).³⁸ Originally, the Kuznets Curve was a recorded phenomenon in developmental economics that recognized that the Gini coefficient—the measurement of inequality of a society—expanded as society initially began to industrialize, but lessened over time. In studying air pollution in Mexico, Grossman and Krueger witnessed a similar relationship regarding GDP and sulfur dioxide. As the GDP of an area increased, so did the levels of sulfur dioxide. However, after a certain tipping point, the trend reversed, and GDP became a predictor of decreasing levels of sulfur dioxide. These findings have been confirmed with other pollutants.³⁹ To be clear, the EKC does not guarantee that higher incomes—in and of themselves—will inevitably lead to more sustainable practices. There is a significant debate on the matter considering the factors analyzed, but the EKC indicates a fundamental aspect of economic reality that degrowth advocates tend to ignore. The deployment of sustainable technologies, at least in the short term, is often very expensive. The wealthier a society, the better able and willing it is to ensure newer and cleaner technologies will be deployed. This means that wealthier societies are better positioned to transition to a more sustainable economy than poorer ones.  

Third, degrowth advocates dramatically underestimate both the degree of global poverty and the degree that the global economy would need to decline to achieve a sustainable level. According to the World Bank, while extreme poverty has declined in the past decades, other forms of poverty have remained stagnant or gotten worse.⁴⁰ Currently, 46% of the globe’s population lives on less than $5.50/day, and even then, researchers have argued that number is too low to accurately reflect an international poverty line.⁴¹ Peter Edwards has advocated for using an Ethical Poverty Line and places the global poverty line at a minimum of $7.40/day. This puts the global poor well above 60% of the population.⁴² If it is assumed that people should live a life not just free from the harshest forms of poverty, but with a modicum of dignity, and the bar for the globe’s poor is raised to include everyone who lives on less than  $10/day, then the figure includes more than 70% of the world’s population.⁴³ To achieve global median income status, it is necessary for an individual off between $10-$20/day, which amounts to an annual income of about $14,600 to $29,200 for a family of four, a poverty level that would be considered absolutely dire by the standards of any highly developed nation.⁴⁴ Given these numbers, a mass campaign of “voluntary simplicity” appears grossly out of touch with reality. Of course, degrowth advocates justify their campaign for reducing economic output above all else on environmental grounds, but here too their understanding is far removed from reality. Robert Pollin, in an article for the New Left Review, took degrowth advocates seriously and calculated how much global economic activity would need to reduce in order to align with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) recommendations on carbon emissions. Over the next twenty years, global CO₂ emissions need to be reduced by 12 billion tons, from 32 billion to 20 billion. Pollin estimates that even with a 10% contraction in global GDP—an amount four times greater than the 2008-2009 Great Recession—global emissions would only fall by a little over 3 billion tons. Even if a contraction on par with the 1929 Great Depression is assumed—at 15% of global GDP—global emissions would still only fall a little under 5 billion tons. Achieving the 12 billion tons recommended by the IPCC would require the global economy to contract by 37.5%. That is a level of economic decline so immense that it becomes impossible to predict outcomes, other than the certainty that it would result in hundreds of millions of people being thrown into utter misery.⁴⁵ During the first year of the COVID19 pandemic, global emissions declined 6.3% year-to-year.⁴⁶ Nonetheless, the consequence of that sudden decline of economic activity meant that 71 million people were thrown into extreme poverty.⁴⁷  

In all fairness to degrowth advocates, many of them do concede that people in poorer nations do need a higher standard of living, but they are insistent that people in wealthy nations have overdeveloped economies. Their solution to this dilemma is to degrow the economies in the wealthy parts of the world while simultaneously undergoing a massive redistribution of wealth to the peoples in poorer nations. Unfortunately, this proposal demonstrates an extremely fallacious view of economics, one that fails to consider the inherent and dialectical relationship between economic growth and redistribution. 

Degrowth advocates have never come to a consensus as to what exactly constitutes the “right-size” for an economy. In a certain respect, they appear to revel in the ambiguity of their position. Serge Latouche famously claimed that degrowth was not a concept, but “a political slogan with theoretical implications,” rendering the term virtually meaningless.⁴⁸ Joreon C. J. M van de Bergh has identified five potential interpretations of the word degrowth, many of them conflicting.⁴⁹ The lack of specificity or concrete metrics for evaluating degrowth policies means that questions of the supposed appropriate size of a country’s economy are not only left unanswered but cannot be answered. The implications of this are that the degrowth movement has no real understanding of which nations should distribute what type of resource to which parts of the world in order to achieve their supposed “sustainable” degrowth. This creates obvious problems. The difference in the standard of living between the average American and the average Haitian might appear evident, but the question becomes more complicated when considering the difference between the average Costa Rican and the average Ukrainian. How are these differences factored out in the “right-sizing” of the economy, especially given the ambiguities of geography, trade, and historical development? In addition, the treatment of the wealthy and poor nations as homogenous entities ignores the very real class structures that divide these societies. It is easy to find a justifiable argument that the major CEOs in the United States should suffer heavy taxes so that farmers in Namibia can more easily get fertilizers, but that argument is less convincing when the tax system targets a single mother working two jobs living in Chicago’s Southside. 

Furthermore, the belief that any of these scenarios could ensure that the economy in one area of the world will shrink while another will grow assumes a level of economic control and isolation that does not exist. More so than at any other time in history, the global economy is highly integrated, with the growth of one area conditioned by factors in another. This is especially true for any scheme that considers a massive redistribution of resources to the world’s poorest. As Keynesian economics demonstrated, such distribution would inevitably unleash a tremendous amount of economic growth by increasing the purchasing power of those on the bottom. Indeed, prior to Keynes, the arguments against redistribution rested on the assumption that such policies would limit economic growth. Keynes’s work overturned this assumption. He believed that one of the main contributions of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was in eliminating “one of the chief social justifications of great inequality of wealth,” namely, that it social inequality was necessary for economic growth. Keynes proved the opposite. Contemporary economic conditions meant that economic stagnation was outcome of vast inequalities, and, by inversion, that a leveling of social classes through redistribution would lead to an increase in economic growth.⁵⁰

Advocates of degrowth appear to be perpetually confused by this aspect of Keynesian economics and often misrepresent it. For example, André Gorz, in his Ecology as Politics, wrote that “the standard objection [to degrowth] is that any effort to arrest or reverse the process of growth will perpetuate or even worsen existing inequalities, and result in a deterioration in the material conditions of those who are already poor. But the idea that growth reduces inequality is a faulty one—statistics show that, on the contrary, the reverse is true.”⁵¹ The statistics Gorz refers to is the work of economist Jacques Attali and Marc Guillaume. To be clear, Attali and Guillaume do not disprove the rather obvious conclusion that a general reduction in society’s resources would affect society’s poorest the most. What they do demonstrate is that despite continuous economic growth in France and the United States, inequality has gotten worse. However, Keynes never denied this possibility. For Keynes, it was not that growth reduces inequality, but that redistributive policies inevitably lead to greater economic growth by increasing aggregate demand; greater equality produces growth, but growth alone is not necessarily expected to reduce inequality. 

The significance of this point is that degrowth advocates cannot have it both ways. They cannot sincerely advocate for plunging the global economy into a planned recession—no matter how “sustainable” they claim it will be—and expect to eliminate poverty for the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. A perennial theme of modern capitalism is that major recessions have their roots in dramatic inequities. Escaping these recessions has often meant some form of redistribution or fiscal stimulus directed at a nation’s poor. Attempting to improve the standard of living for the overwhelming majority of people on the planet while also prohibiting economic output is not possible. One can have either a planned recession or redistributive policies, but not both. 

Misunderstanding Marx 

The failure of degrowth advocates to understand the relationship between wealth redistribution and economic growth is rooted in a more general misunderstanding of the nature of capitalism, and unfortunately, this is a misunderstanding that Bookchin shared. In his essay “What is Social Ecology?” Bookchin writes “our market-oriented society is unique in contrast without other societies in that it places no limits on growth or egotism,” with the implication being that limitless economic growth and egotism are inherently connected.⁵² Such phraseology is quite ubiquitous throughout his work. Bookchin’s The Modern Crisis begins with the declaration that “Most of the ‘isms’ we have inherited from the past—liberalism, socialism, syndicalism, communism, capitalism—are rooted in the crude notion that human beings act almost exclusively from self-interest… Even so libertarian a visionary as Mikhail Bakunin… echoes Marx and many radicals of his day when he militantly declares that ‘Wealth has always been and still is the indispensable condition for the realization of everything human…,’” with no qualifying remarks that Bakunin clearly meant such wealth in a collective rather than individual sense.⁵³ The intense association with all material abundance with an unbridled egotism led Bookchin to assert that capitalism, as an economic system premised on undeterred egotism, produces “growth for its own sake” and examples of this growth, such as modern urbanity, will inevitably outstrip the world’s resources. 

Despite the influential nature of Bookchin’s work, his assertion that capitalism produces “growth for its own sake” is based on a critical misreading of Marx. Bookchin often referenced Marx’s observation in Capital that the capitalist “ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake.”⁵⁴ For Bookchin, the concept of “production for production’s sake” strongly suggested that capitalism not only has an inherent capacity for continuous growth, but under the contemporary form of welfare state capitalism such growth would lead to vast social alienation and ecological degradation. In a footnote in Post-Scarcity Anarchism, he wrote that “it is worth noting here that the emergence of the “consumer society” provides us with remarkable evidence of the difference between the industrial capitalism of Marx’s time and state capitalism today. In Marx’s view, capitalism as a system organized around “production for the sake of production” results in the economic immiseration of the proletariat. “Production for the sake of production” is paralleled today by “consumption for the sake of consumption,” in which immiseration takes a spiritual rather than an economic form—it is starvation of life.”⁵⁵

Degrowth advocates such as Ted Trainer echoes Bookchin’s ideas of capitalism as a system of inherent economic growth by stating that “it would be possible in a stable economy for a few to still own most capital and factories… [but] they would not be entrepreneurs constantly seeking profitable investment outlets for ever-increasing amounts of capital. Thus the core defining principle of capitalism, accumulation, would not exist.”⁵⁶

However, this reformulation of “production for the sake of production” to “consumption for the sake of consumption”—and the confusing of capital accumulation through private ownership with all forms of accumulation, even potentially cooperative ones—fundamentally misreads Marx’s work. It wrongly equates consumption by laborers of commodities with the consumption by capitalist of labor and thus obfuscates the class division between the two. Marx did not believe that capitalism sought economic growth for its own sake, that is accumulation as such, but rather for the sake of extracting surplus-value. As he constantly reiterated, capitalism’s primary catalyst is the “valorization of value,” not its ability to generate economic growth.⁵⁷ Rather, the “valorization of value” occurs through the legal authority of private property rights. Economic growth was a byproduct of market competition, but under conditions of monopoly capital, capitalists could still extract surplus value regardless of the degree of growth in the economy. This means that, at times, capitalists’ pursuit of surplus-value will drive the entire economy into prolonged periods of economic decline without necessarily threatening their class position. In the essay “Crisis Theory,” Marx clarifies that his “crisis of over-production” did not mean capitalism did or could ever over-produce, only that the production of goods, at critical junctions, would outstrip an economy’s money supply and lead to a prolonged recession. Marx wrote that “so long as the most urgent needs of a large part of society are not satisfied, or only the most immediate needs are satisfied, there can, of course, be absolutely no talk of an over-production of products–in the sense that the amount of products is excessive in relations to the need for them. On the contrary, it must be said that on the basis of capitalist production there is constant under-production in this sense.”⁵⁸ Thus, capitalists constantly strive for greater production, but only in so far as such production can contribute to greater surplus-value. If it fails to do so, which is often the case, then capitalism will in fact under-produce. If anything, according to Marx, capitalism—far from being an engine of economic growth—perpetually struggles with maintaining long term economic growth as the irrational drive for surplus value causes perpetual downturns in the business cycle and recessions. In this regard, Bookchin and other degrowth advocates have not only misunderstood Marx’s use of the phrase “produce for production’s sake,” interpreting it far too literally, but the reformulation of it as “consumption for consumption’s sake” leads to the erroneous conclusion that economic growth is an inherent characteristic of capitalism, and as such the source of all environmental problems. 

This oversight led Bookchin to a critical misstep in aligning Social Ecology, partially, with aspects of the environmental movement that eschewed Social Ecology’s radical humanism. Even when he was aware of problematic aspects of the Malthusian leanings of certain environmentalists—degrowth advocates in particular—Bookchin would temper his criticisms of them with a general acknowledgement of the need to limit economic growth, especially as it related to modern urbanization. In his book Re-enchanting Humanity, Bookchin ends his devastating critique of neo-Malthusianism with the reminder that he is “not trying to argue that urbanization on the massive scale it is occurring today is desirable or ecologically sound. [His] own books on this subject have long argued that we need new types of communities—towns and cities—that are scaled to human and ecological dimensions.”⁵⁹ However, what Bookchin assumes to be scaled to “human and ecological dimensions”—which would depopulate and degrow large urban centers—fails to consider that modern urbanization’s massive scale has made it far more sustainable than alternative human environments. Spreading the populations of New York City across a vast landscape for the sake of having people live in cities approximating the size of Burlington, Vermont would be an ecological disaster of sprawl and waste. Furthermore, despite his protestations, Bookchin’s concession to degrowth advocates has meant that social ecologists have fail to recognize that many degrowth advocates openly call for “a radical bottom up neo-Malthusianism” that naively assumes poor people will someday embrace their own poverty.⁶⁰ In doing so, social ecologists negate their overall commitment to a post-scarcity society and the liberating potential that such a society brings.        

Furthermore, Bookchin’s insistence that the real immiseration of contemporary capitalism is “spiritual” rather than “economic” utterly betrays the fundamental humanism and rationalistic outlook that Social Ecology supposedly shares with Marxism. If anything, it appears as an arguably misguided retreat into a vague Hegelianism, and by implication gives up on the ability of the working class to fundamentally change society in favor of counter-cultural forces. Within Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Bookchin writes “Capitalism, far from affording “privileges” to the middle classes, tends to degrade them more abjectly than any other stratum in society. The system deploys its capacity for abundance to bring the petty bourgeois into complicity with his own oppression—first by turning him into a commodity, into an object for sale in the marketplace; next by assimilating his very wants to the commodity nexus.”⁶¹ The believe that the middle classes within the developed world are the most “degraded” class in society, worse off than any other stratum, should be considered obviously wrong, if not completely callous to the billions of people who will never be able to achieve that lifestyle. Indeed, the uniqueness that Bookchin grants to the middle classes within capitalism—that they are a stratum of society that is both without power and complicit in the domination of others—is true of all classes within capitalism who are not part of the elite. By the sheer scarcity of employment opportunities, all members of the working class are brought into the complicity of the oppression of their fellow members, in that anyone who accepts a job implicitly excludes another person from potentially taking the same job, and thus increases the likelihood that person will face greater hardships and poverty. However, unlike the middle classes, it is only the working class, and various other subalterns in their orbit, who are denied nearly any possibility of abundance, even though they are still nonetheless forced to turn their labor into a commodity and compelled to compete with each other within the market.  

Additionally, in an infatuation with the supposed “spiritual” immiseration of the middle classes brought about by a “flatulent consumerism that pacifies but never satisfies,” Bookchin ends up misunderstanding the fundamental components of Marx’s theory of alienated labor and its relationship to nature.⁶² Bookchin assumed that with the development of welfare state capitalism, including its many technological advantages, the traditional notions of alienated labor, where the worker is in a situation where “the greater his activity… the less he possesses” had become obsolete.⁶³ The welfare state’s immense productive and organizational capacities, along with the innovations in cybernetics and automation, had created a post-scarcity society. However, post-scarcity capitalism created a new form of alienation, namely that of consumerism. Because consumerism is heavily implicated in society’s cultural milieu, its alienating effects need to be overcome first through a cultural rebellion in favor of “natural diets,” “tribalism,” and “community,” and then eventually through the organization of revolutionary movements. As Bookchin explained:

Not surprisingly, [within contemporary capitalism] subcultures begin to emerge which emphasize a natural diet as against the society’s synthetic diet, an extended family as against the monogamous family, sexual freedom as against sexual repression, tribalism as against atomization, community as against urbanism, mutual aid as against competition, communism as against property, and, finally, anarchism as against hierarchy and the state. In the very act of refusing to live by bourgeois strictures, the first seeds of the Utopian lifestyle are planted… Taken as an end in itself, this lifestyle is not utopia; indeed, it may be woefully incomplete. Taken as a means, however, this lifestyle and the processes leading to it are indispensable in remaking the revolutionary, in awakening his sensibilities to how much must be changed if the revolution is to be complete.⁶⁴

To his credit, Bookchin would later distance himself from this counter cultural emphasis. In his work Lifestyle Anarchism or Social Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm, he would criticize an infatuation with subcultural motifs and rebellious aestheticisms as not only woefully incomplete, but an utter retreat—and a potentially reactionary one—from social struggle.⁶⁵ Nevertheless, his criticisms of “lifestyle anarchism” never compelled a revision (at least not in print) of his original idea that the contemporary immiseration of capitalism was mostly “spiritual” brought about by consumerism rather than “economic” brought about through poverty. 

Like Bookchin, Marx believed that capitalism’s alienating characteristics permeated out of the production process into all of society, including people’s consumption habits. However, unlike Bookchin, Marx did not seem to believe that there was any authentic manner of consumption that could be embodied within a particular subculture. Rather, the alienation of everyday life, referred to as “species-being” alienation by Marx, occurred through the petty competition and striving for trivial social status as expressed in consumption habits, but not because of consumption habits. For Marx, it is this anti-social behavior regardless of particular consumption patterns, that could occur regardless of the cultural milieu—arguably even among degrowth advocates, communist, anarchist sects, or whoever—that produced alienation. Indeed, while a hollow flaunting of wealth among the bourgeoisie signaled to others one’s social status, a rejection of wealth equally signaled one’s moral commitment to the capitalist notions of thrift and prudence. According to Marx, while the morally ideal capitalist spends lavishly and is considered a “job-creator” by doing so, the morally ideal worker is supposed to be an ascetic. For the working class, capitalism’s

principal thesis is the renunciation of life and of human needs. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the public house, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc. the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, and the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.⁶⁶

The idea that “the more you have, the greater is your alienated life” could appear in nearly any degrowth text or criticism of consumerism. However, Marx intends it in a different context and as a mockery of capitalism’s ethos. For Marx, poverty is just as alienating, if not more so, than the ability to engage in unbridled abundance. Indeed, within capitalism these are two sides of the same coin, but undergirding both is a system of intense competition that alienates humans from each other, and in the process alienates humanity from nature. The rectifying of this situation is not an end to economic growth, but the aligning of growth with human needs, which Marx has full confidence includes such ecological aspects as “fresh air,” “light,” an “[un]putrefied nature,” and freedom from being “poisoned by the pestilential breath of civilization.”⁶⁷

Conclusions: Prosperity and Ecology

What Bookchin and degrowth advocates failed to consider is that economic growth has not only a quantitative but also a qualitative dimension. The fundamental issue is not growth as such, but the type of growth that is supposed to occur, and long-term economic growth—by definition—is ecological. As the example of modern urbanity demonstrates, intense economic growth is not only congruent with, but necessary for, upholding ecological principles. Capitalism’s incompatibility with the natural world is not due to Bookchin’s “growth for its own sake” imperative. Instead, it is the result of Marx’s usual culprits, namely, the anarchy of production and the existence of hierarchical and class divisions. Within capitalism, all productive forces in society are subjugated to the accumulation of privately appropriated surplus-value, and this subjugation results in numerous inefficiencies, the creation of massive levels of waste, and the inability of economic systems to rapidly incorporate new technologies. There is no reason for a rationally planned society to have multiple firms competing with each other to produce the same product, and even less so for countries to invest in their own food and energy production because the borders of nation-states inevitably make any global trading and distribution system insecure. Neither of these extreme diseconomies would occur in a global society that rationally planned its economies and was absent intense class divisions. It is not “growth for its own sake” that is the problem, but “hording for its own sake,” which can occur absent economic growth, and, as Keynes recognized, often leads to economic contractions instead of growth. The hording of resources by a select class means that investments in living standards and ecologically sustainable technologies and practices do not occur. Class society forever locks up humanity’s potential, both in terms of our ability to be better to each other and to the earth. 

The phenomenon is not merely theoretical but is noticeable within the economic data. Since the 1950, Kubiszewski et al have tracked the relationship between global per capita GDP and per capita Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which includes the value created by GDP but subtracts the value of detrimental externalities on quality of life and the environment. Their research shows that though per capita GDP always remained higher than GPI globally, the two were relatively correlated, where increases in per capita GDP matched increases in per capita GPI. However, after the rise of neoliberalism in the late 1970s the two separated. As a result of the deregulatory anarchy and vast inequalities created within neoliberalism, per capita GDP continued to increase while per capita GPI became relatively stagnant.⁶⁸ The rational conclusion from this data is not attempting to decrease economic output, but to use economic output to serve social and ecological ends as it more approximately did when the world’s most developed economies accepted some degree of the Keynesian consensus. It is only through the directing, rather than limiting, of economic output that overall prosperity can increase without destruction to the environment.    

The solution to current ecological devastation is not a degrowing of the global economy, or an end to modern urbanization, but the use of rational economic planning and equitable distribution to fully utilize modern urbanity, and with it, economies of scale, the agglomeration of industries, and the promotion of urban designs and technologies that improve living standards while benefiting the environment. Fundamentally, the solution to contemporary problems involves not a rejection of modernity, and with it the constitutive social phenomena of industrialization and urbanization, nor a belief that modernity can be transcended, as if we can somehow maintain a certain level of modern abundance while all living in small-scaled and evenly dispersed societies that run solely non-dispatchable energy sources, but a fuller embrace of modernity. Indeed, “modern capitalism” should be understood as oxymoronic, as notions such as private property and inheritance harkens back to blood-lineal conception of relational bonds that are antithetical to a cosmopolitan universalism. Similarly, “ecological modernism” should be recognized as a redundant term, in so far as modernity has unleashed humanity’s creative potentialities, so too does that include the creative need to be a steward and aficionado of the ecological world. 

It is only through rational economic planning and equitable distribution—scientifically informed and procedurally democratic—that humanity will be able to simultaneously increase the standard of living for billions of people while also expanding ecological protections. The two goals, far from being mutually exclusive, can be mutually reinforcing. As people’s standards of living improve, they will become better educated and able to devote time and energy to servicing and appreciating the natural world. Through modernity—including its major accomplishments of technology and urbanity—nature, as materiality, can provide every person on the planet with a post-scarcity lifestyle. A post-scarcity humanity has a far greater potential to appreciate nature on a nonmaterial basis—seeking its conservation and protection for its own sake—than a humanity where the compulsion of scarcities causes people to use whatever resources they can. In such a situation, nature is no longer recognized merely as a source of raw materials, since such material needs have become sufficiently satiated, but can be recognized for its ability to represent humanity’s interconnections—socially, ecologically, and cosmically. Just as the salmon became the basis for intertribal unity for the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, appreciation for the ecosystems of the earth have the potential to provide the basis for a genuinely socially and ecologically united planet, as long as people have the material means and the willingness to overcome misguided ideologies in order to make it so.   

1. Freeman House, Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).
2. ed., Robert C. Tucker, The Lenin Anthology (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975), 494.
3. Karl Georg Hɸyer and Petter Naess, “From ecophilosophy to degrowth,” in Ecophilosophy in a World of Crisis: Critical realms and the Nordic contributions, edited by Roy Bhaskar, Karl Georg Hɸyer and Petter Naess (New York: Routledge, 2012).
4. Murray Bookchin, The Murray Bookchin Reader (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1999), 107.
5. Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 15.
6. ed. Janet Biehl, The Murray Bookchin Reader (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1999), 14.
7. ibid 14.
8. ibid 14-15.
9. ibid 15.
10. ibid 26.
11. Dennis R Judd and Todd Swanstrom, City Politics: The Political Economy of Urban America, 8^th Edition (Longman: Pearson, 2012).
12. Quoted from Charles N Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America, 2^nd Edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc,1976), 49.
13. ibid.
14. Dennis R. Judd and Todd Swanstrom, City Politics: The Political Economy of Urban America, 8^th Edition, 154.
15. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007), 6.
16. Murray Bookchin, The Limits of the City (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986), 161.
17. Jeff Speck, The Walkable City: How Downtowns Can Save America One Step at a Time (New York: North Point Press, 2013), 251.
18. David R Foster et. al, “New England’s Forest Landscape: Ecological Legacies and Conservation Patterns Shaped by Agrarian History,” in Agrarian Landscapes in Transition: Comparisons of Long-Term Ecological and Cultural Change, ed. Charles L. Redman and David R. Forster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also Colin Nickerson, “New England Sees a Return of Forest, Wildlife” Boston Globe (31 Aug 2013). https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/08/31/new-england-sees-return-forests-and-wildlife/lJRxacvGcHeQDmtZt09WvN/story.html.
19. US Energy Information Administration, “Energy Related Carbon-Dioxide Emissions at the State Level, 2000-2013” (Washington DC: US Department of Energy, 2015).
20. The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority. “Introduction to Subway Ridership.” http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/.
21. American Public Transit Association, “The Benefits of Public Transit.” http://www.apta.com/resources/reportsandpublications/Documents/greenhouse_brochure.pdf.
22. US Energy Information Administration, “Apartments in buildings with 5 or more units use less energy than other home types,” 18 June 2013. http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11731#.
23.  US Energy Information Administration, “Newer U.S. homes are 30% larger but consume about as much energy as older homes” (12 Feb 2013). http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=9951&src=%E2%80%B9%20Consumption%20%20%20%20%20%20Residential%20Energy%20Consumption%20Survey%20(RECS)-f2.
24. US Energy Information Administration, “Rankings: Total Energy Consumed per Capita, 2014.” https://www.eia.gov/state/rankings/.
25. Dashka Slater, “Walk the Walk,” New York Times Magazine (20 April 2008). http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20Act-t.html?_r=0.
26. Russell P Lopez and H Patricia Hynes, “Obesity, physical activity, and the urban environment: Public health research needs,” Environmental Health (Vol. 5, No. 25, 2006).
27. New York Parks Department, “Central Park.” https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/central-park.
28. David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009).
29. Frederic C. Howe, The City: The Hope for Democracy (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1967), 4.
30. Federico Demaria et al, “What is Degrowth? From an Activist Slogan to a Social Movement” Environmental Values Vol. 22(2) (April 2013): 191-215, 192.
31. ibid.
32. Ted Trainer, “De-growth: Do you realise what it means?,” Futures (Vol. 44, No. 6, 2012), 590-599, 595.
33. Ari Aukusti Lehtinen, “Degrowth in city planning,” Fennia: The International Journal of Geography (Vol. 196, No. 1, 2018) 43–57, 44;  Giorgos Kallis, “In Defense of Degrowth,” Ecology Economics (Vol. 70, No. 5, 2011), 837-880, 875.
34. Joan Martizen-Alier et al., “Sustainable de-growth: Mapping the context, criticism and future prospect of an emergent paradigm” Ecological Economics (Vol. 69, No. 9, 2010), 1741-1747.
35. Giorgos Kallis, “In defense of degrowth,” Ecology Economics (Vol 70, No. 5, 2011), 874.
36. ibid.
37. Paul Sabin, The Bet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
38. Gene M. Grossman and Alan B. Krueger, “Economic Growth and the Environment,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (Vol.110, No. 2, 1995), 353–377.
39. Nemat Shafik, “Economic Development and Environmental Quality: An Econometric Analysis,” Oxford Economic Papers (Vol. 46, 1994), 757-773.
40. Lant Pritchett and Charles Kenny, “Promoting Millennium Development Ideals: The Risks of Defining Development Down,” The Center for Global Development Working Paper 338 (August 2013).
41. The World Bank, Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle (Washington D.C.: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank, 2018).
42. Peter Edwards, “The Ethical Poverty Line: a moral qualification of absolute poverty,” Third World Quarterly (Vol 27, No. 2, 2006), 377-393.
43. Rakesh Kochhar, “Seven-in-ten people globally live on $10 or less per day,” Pew Research Center (23 September 2015). https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/09/23/seven-in-ten-people-globally-live-on-10-or-less-per-day/.
44. Rakesh Kochhar, “Are you in the global middle class? Find out with our income calculator,” Pew Research Center (21 July 2021). https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/21/are-you-in-the-global-middle-class-find-out-with-our-income-calculator/.
45. Robert Pollin, “De-Growth vs A Green New Deal,” New Left Review (Vol. 112, July/Aug 2018), 5-25.
46. Z. Liu, et al., “Global patterns of daily CO₂ emissions reductions in the first year of COVID-19,” Nature Geoscience (Vol.15, 2022), 615–620.
47. The World Bank, Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2022: Correcting Course (Washington D.C.: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank, 2012).
48. Serge Latouche, “Degrowth,” Journal of Cleaner Production (Vol 18, No. 6, 2010), 519-522, 519.
49. Joreon C. J. M van de Bergh, “Environment versus growth—A criticism of ‘degrowth’ and a plea for ‘a-growth,'” Ecological Economics (Vol. 70, No. 5, 2011), 881-890.
50. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964), 373.
51. André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 13.
52. Murray Bookchin, The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986), 49.
53. Ibid 1-2.
54. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 739.
55. Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 2^nd Edition (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986), 59.
56. Ted Trainer, “De-growth: Do you realise what it means?,” Futures (Vol. 44, No. 6, 2012), 590-599, 593.
57. Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (London: Penguin Classics, 1976).
58.  ed. Robert Tucker, Marx and Engels Reader, 2nd Edition (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978), 459.
59. Murray Bookchin, Re-Enchanting Humanity (London: Cassel, 1995), 82.
60. Federico Demaria et al., “What is Degrowth? From an Activist Slogan to a Social Movement,” Environmental Values (Vol. 22, No. 2, 2013), 191-215, 205.
61. Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 2^nd Edition, 13.
62. ibid 21.
63. Karl Marx, Early Writings, translated and edited by T. B. Bottomore (New York: MacGraw/Hill, 1964), 122.
64. Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 2^nd Edition, 18.
65. Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (Chico: AK Press, 1995).
66. Karl Marx, Early Writings, 171.
67. ibid 169-170.
68. Ida Kubiszewskia, et al., “Beyond GDP: Measuring and achieving global genuine progress,” Ecological Economics (Vol 93, No. 5, 2013), 57-68.