Lily Cole: Welcome to Who Cares Wins, with me Lily Cole.
Aja Barber: The piles of bags, from this one charity shop. It was like Prometheus getting his guts pecked out every night on the rock because there's no ending to it. It's just like bag after bag after bag every day. You're opening bags of clothing. And you're not going to be able to resell them all.
Andrew McAfee: We have learned the playbook for decoupling greater human prosperity from our planetary footprint. And we've talked about two of the forces, that’s intense competition and amazing technologies.
Merlin Sheldrake: Unmitigated competition and conflict are the driving forces in evolution. It’s an idea that's been around since the late 19th century that merit human views of social progress within an industrial capitalist system. The history of life is full of examples of intimate cooperation.
George Monbiot: We need political rewilding. We don't accept the principle of presumed consent in sex. Why should we accept it in politics?
Lily Cole: At the heart of every issue that intersects with the environment you find contradictions tensions and divergent perspectives, and these issues are complex and changing. Most of us want a happy life and a healthy planet. But many people have different ideas about the right way to travel towards it. In this new podcast series, I'll be sharing parts of my research from my book Who Cares Wins, interviewing some of the leading and conflicting voices in contemporary debates, such as technology, food, gender, politics and looking at how they intersect with our environment.
I see myself a bit like sellotape, ribbon or string holding together divergent voices and sort of asking, ‘who cares who wins?’
That music was made by Cosmo Sheldrake whose brother, the biologist Merlin, I speak to on this episode, as I explore the concept of growth. Anyone who believes that infinite growth on a finite planet is possible is either an economist or a madman. So said Kenneth Boulding, the economist and environmental advisor to president John F. Kennedy. Yet growth has been a dominant feature of our political, cultural and economic reality for longer than most of us can remember with no end in sight. Are we being led by mad men or is infinite growth actually possible? The answer to these questions seems to present a chasm in the environmental political landscape between those who've long argued that we need slow growth or even de-growth to stay within safe planetary limits. Or the more recent trend of thinkers who argue that economic growth itself is driving sustainability.
In this episode, I'll take you on a journey as I speak to people on both sides of the camp. I first came to the narrative of consumption and thinking about its potential positive and negative impacts when working in fashion. I started to try and unpick the way things are made. To understand the impacts of supply chains and the cultural, economic, and political forces that are driving mass consumption. For me fashion is just an example of every other industry of consumption, that given that garment workers are 80% female and predominantly nonwhite, issues and supply chains become ones, not just about economics, but also of race and gender.
I spoke with Aja Barber fashion consultant for Eco Age, who’s been on a similar journey trying to improve awareness of fashion's impact.
Aja Barber: I had a fashion blog. I began to actually think about my own damage that I was doing because of blogging. And I don't think that I was doing the whole practice of like buying an item just to wear on the blog and then never wearing it again. But I could tell that my consumerism was speeding up rapidly and I began to realise, well, wait a minute. This isn't just me. This is actually something that's happening within the world, not just within blogging, but within just average people. We were buying way more clothing than we had bought in the past.
And I began to realise that if this were the case, that we were creating an ecological disaster. And so that sort of fascinated me and then there was also the element of who makes the clothing, you know, I began to really consider how it could be possible that a brand could sell a dress that’s a rather challenging pattern for 20 pounds.
How is that possible and how is it that the person who's making the dress is, how are they surviving? How are they getting a living wage? It turns out in most cases, they aren't. And so once I began to sort of ask myself these questions, I began to really dive into sustainability. And I was pretty shocked by the things that I found.
My mother's favourite place to shop is our local charity shop. And I worked there one summer. And what I found was that the piles of bags that I was opening from this one charity shop, it was like Prometheus getting his guts pecked out every night on the rock because there's no ending to it. It's just like bag after bag, after bag, every day, you're opening bags of clothing and you're not going to be able to resell them all.
And I was thinking, okay, so this is one problem of one charity shop. Is this a problem with loads of charity shops? And what I found was that charities were only able to sell about 10% of the clothing donations they were receiving. The other 90% would get shipped off to different places. Some would become landfill, but the stuff that got shipped to different places would normally go to countries in the global South, where what we've inherently done is ruined a lot of local economies.
So someone who's a maker in a country where they're receiving secondhand clothing donations from the global North, can’t sell and do what they do because of the waste that we create in the dump on other countries. It's a real problem. On top of that, I began to realise that these fast fashion companies had billionaires at the tops of their company, but somehow they just couldn't get it together to pay the garment workers who were making their clothing. And I just think that is wholly unacceptable.
LC: And do you have much hope for sustainable fashion in the sense of new products being made in a more mindful, sustainable way? Or do you feel like sustainability needs to be about pre-owned and vintage first and foremost?
AB: My wardrobe is 50% secondhand, 50% sustainable ethical brands. For me personally, I understand that not every person can shop from ethical and sustainable brands. Now, I think price wise, people always complain about it being expensive. I think that's a bit of a myth. People have been tricked into thinking that the prices that exist on the high street are fair. They're not. A lot of the prices that we've been paying are exploitative prices. You might say that you can only afford the 10 pound dress, but also you're buying ten 10 pound dresses, which is a hundred pounds. So maybe instead of buying 10 pound dresses, maybe just get two 50 pound dresses from a sustainable maker then all of a sudden you can afford sustainable fashion.
LC: That’s something I run up against a lot is the question around isn't sustainable fashion prohibitively expensive. I feel that there's a kind of cognitive dissonance between actually what things should cost and what their real impact is when things are that cheap. And it also, for me, it speaks of kind of neocolonialism and the fact that a lot of the low prices in Western countries are able to be low because they're benefiting from wage gaps between richer and poorer countries.
AB: Absolutely. The amount of times I've heard, like a person in Northern Virginia be like, well, you know, those people make less money because they live in that country. And you know, that's a very good wage in that country. Well why do you think that that's a decent wage in that country? And also if these countries are resource rich, labour rich, and they have the factories to make the things that we actually need, why are they not economically wealthier?
Why is that? Let's look at that system and look at the fact that we feel like a poor brown or black person should be excited for a really crappy job so that they can make clothing for us. And so, yeah, it's a real nuanced conversation that a lot of people aren't super comfortable exploring, but I think we all need to explore it.
The current system we have is a castle made of crap. Unfortunately, I don't think that altruism and humanitarianism is going to be the thing that's going to change the big fashion brands. I think losing customers is what ultimately changes their minds about the way they're doing things.
LC: How much do you think we need to change and how much do you think this is happening in business models in fashion? And I use fashion as a metaphor for all other industries, but like consumption based businesses.
AJ: If you aren't exploring the idea of de-growth or prosperity without growth within your business, I think it's really time to explore that. And I think a lot of businesses would rather cut off their own arm than explore these ideas. I definitely just champion the resell market more than anything. I think that there's still stigma around secondhand clothing and we really have to work towards dealing with that stigma, because until that happens, there’ll be certain people that will never want to participate in buying things second hand, and that's a bit sad.
LC: Capitalism is going through an extraordinary transformation, as many companies work to make the supply chains more sustainable and circular. Some of this change is being driven by NGOs working on the front line, trying to pressure companies into positive change Greenpeace amongst them. I spoke with John Sauven, the UK director of Greenpeace about their work with corporations.
John Sauven: If you look at fast fashion, the quantity of fast fashion has been going up vertically. So people are buying more and using less. And that's the logic of the current system of capitalism that we have is just more and more consumption. It’s linear in its model.
How do we get better quality? How do we use things more? How do we get more enjoyment out of things? How do we look at life more in terms of quality rather than quantity? So ultimately, you know, why do people live? You know, they live because they, you know, they want love, they want happiness and so on. They don’t live cause they want consumption, but somehow we've been forced into that all consuming system backed up by an unbelievable advertising and marketing system. You know how much money is spent globally on advertising? Either $700 or $800 billion. It was nearly a trillion dollars.
There's always the one thing that companies cannot get their head around, you know, when you talk to these companies and they come out with all these sustainability plans and you say to them, yes, but what about growth? What about the fact that you're just producing more and more stuff and they say, Oh yeah, we can do everything but that. But that’s what the problem is.
LC: In my book, I interviewed many different entrepreneurs, scientists and designers who are trying to evolve capitalism into a greener version of itself. Amongst them I spoke with Lisa Jackson who has an interesting perspective on this transition and the role of the public and private sector within it. She was formerly the head of the EPA under president Obama. And now is the vice president of environmental policy at one of the largest companies in the world, Apple. Lisa told me why she feels the private sector is at the cutting edge of climate ambition. And a few weeks ago made announcements about the company's achievements and ambitions in this space, as they try to fundamentally reconcile economic growth in their business model with sustainability.
Lisa Jackson: By 2030, we plan to have net zero climate impact across our entire business, including our manufacturing supply chain and all product life cycles. This means that every Apple device sold from material collection, component manufacturing, assembly, transport, customer use, charging ,all the way through recycling and material recovery will be 100% carbon neutral. Taken altogether, the change we've made for iPhone 12, cut over 2 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually. It's like removing 450,000 cars from the road per year. This is huge. And we're really proud that Apple is taking the lead. We hope others will follow, making this impact even bigger for our planet.
LC: So does this mean we can shop our way out of crisis with electric cars, renewable recycled phones, lab grown meat, clothes made from recycled fishing nets or organic cotton, allowing us to reconcile many of our contemporary lifestyles with sustainability?
I spoke with Andrew McAfee, the author of More from Less who aligns with a group of thinkers called eco modernists, who argue that growth, capitalism and technology are tools that will help drive sustainability and that we can, and are beginning to, decouple human development from environmental impacts.
So I asked him, what does decoupling look like?
Andrew McAfee: When we talk about decoupling, there are a couple ways to talk about it. In general we want to lighten our environmental footprint over time. And there are two kinds of decoupling. There's kind of a weaker version and a stronger version. The weaker version is what you call relative decoupling. So you know, how many tons of steel do you need per million dollars of economic output? We want that tons of steel number to go down, even as the economic output goes up. That’s kind of relative decoupling.
Here's the tougher one, it's called absolute decoupling, which would say, look, no matter how our economy grows, we are using year after year, fewer tons of steel. We're emitting less carbon. We're taking less water from the environment. We are reducing the amount of acres that we need to do all of our farming. In other words, the footprint absolutely goes down even as growth continues, as output goes up.
Now that seems like a magic act. It seems like it could never happen. And if you look at the first 170 years of the industrial era, you would become convinced that decoupling is kind of impossible because if you look from about 1800 up to about 1970, and you look at our planetary footprint and you compare that to our, the growth of our economies, you see kind of a perfect one-to-one relationship. The amount of energy that you need, the amount of resources that you need, the amount of pollution that you generate, they were all going up just as our economies grew. Just as our output went up.
So Lily, I think you're too young to remember this, I’m just barely old enough to remember the first earth day in 1970, when people took to the streets in America and around the world, and they said, stop you can't, we can't do this anymore. We cannot keep exploiting our planet more year after year. Because in 1970, there was no indication that we would ever get out of that bad habit.
And the reason I wrote More from Less, and the reason I've become kind of passionate about growth is that in the years since 1970, something profoundly weird has happened, which is that we, especially in the richest countries in the world, have started to achieve this decoupling that we would all love to see happen.
So for example, in America now year after year, we are using fewer acres for agriculture even as agricultural output goes up. We are using less water. For our cities, for our power generation, for our industry, even as all of those things continue to increase. So we've kind of accomplished this wonderful, wonderful decoupling phenomenon. And I just want to understand that and celebrate it and communicate it.
LC:: Can I ask about foreign emissions? Because quite often when these calculations are made, I know that this is the case in the UK, for example, around how much we've reduced our carbon footprint in recent decades, they don't include the kind of imported emissions of goods that we buy that are manufactured abroad. Is that true of that? The way that you've kind of analysed statistics?
AM: Even after you take that embodied carbon in imports into account, US carbon emissions are down from their peak. I believe their peak was in 2007 and I'm pretty sure we are down more than 10% since then. Now it's really important to say the following right away. That is not a fast enough decline. We should not be satisfied. We should not be complacent. Global atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to go up. And that continues to cook our planet. So this is, I'm not saying the US has nailed this, or we're not part of the problem anymore, but this is another example of decoupling. So the idea that a rich country can't decouple its environmental footprint from growth is just dead, flat, wrong.
LC: And why do you think that decoupling has been achieved? How?
AM: There are two forces at work here. And I very often talk with people who are not fans of capitalism, and I am a fan of capitalism and we disagree about a lot of things. But the one thing that everybody agrees with about capitalism, and that list is not very long, the one thing everybody agrees with is that capitalism is super profit hungry. That sounds like it's bad news for the environment and in some ways it is. And we have to be careful about it.
The reason it's good news is that if you are profit hungry, that almost automatically means that you are passionate about cost reduction. That goes hand in hand with making more money. And the other thing to keep in mind is that resources, materials, things from nature, generally cost money. You don't get a ton of steel for free. Nobody gives you a ton of phosphate for free. You don't generally get to take water for free from the environment. Although there are some exceptions to that.
So resources and materials costs money. And that makes companies focus on them as an opportunity to cut costs and increase profits. So that's kind of the motive. The opportunity out there is this amazing technological toolkit that we have that lets us trim the amount of aluminium that goes into a beer can or a soda can. That lets us do precision agriculture so we need less fertiliser and less water to grow our crops. That lets us design car engines that are simultaneously smaller, more fuel efficient, and more powerful than the previous generation.
So the way I talk about it in More from Less is that we've got this wonderful combination of forces. We've got capitalism, and if capitalism is a triggering word for you just sub-swap that out and put in ‘extreme cost reduction pressure’, combined with just astonishing technological progress. You put those two forces together and that helps me understand why in the decades since 1970, we have learned in this really powerful way, to lighten up on the planet. To take fewer resources from it.
LC: Capitalism wants profit and therefore wants to reduce material costs, but arguably, there are other factors at work, like for example, planned obsolescence and designed obsolescence. The incentives to make people consume more and over consumption, which is good for business, but ultimately means we use more and more resources. Is that not a problem in that, in that way of thinking?
AM: It absolutely is a problem if you're worried about our footprint on the environment, because like you say, I've been talking about costs. Companies also are passionate about revenue growth, and if they can make you buy a new smartphone every year, that's good for their bottom line.
If the dishwasher breaks in five years, as opposed to 20 years, and it's got a planned life of a five years, that looks like it's good for the bottom line and bad for the environment. We should keep in mind though, a dishwasher that you buy today is so much more energy efficient and water efficient than the one that existed 20 years ago.
So with every load that you do in that new dishwasher, man, you're lightening up on the planet compared to using the 20 year old dishwasher. So the efficiency overall of our devices, our appliances, everything else is actually getting much better over time because of that cost reduction pressure, and in some cases, some really smart regulation. And so that helps me understand how the cost reduction side of the balance sheet is swamping the revenue growth side of the balance sheet.
LC: There was an argument I always liked about how the modern smartphone combines 20, 40, a hundred potentially different devices in one. And therefore is by its own nature, kind of de-materialising our relationship to stuff.
AM: Yeah. Lily, do you want a fax machine?
LC: No, I don’t!
AM: You want a camcorder?
LC: I have a super eight camera.
AM: Wow. Do you still have a film camera?
LC: I do. I do. I love film.
AM: Oh, you do? Wow. Um, do you still have a telephone answering machine?
LC: I don’t, no.
AM: So even in your kind of weird case, there are a lot of devices made out of resources and materials and energy that you don't consume anymore because you carry around this very small, very lightweight smartphone.
So my thought experiment is always to compare my smartphone or my pile of smartphones over the past 10 years with the pile of devices that I would have bought over the last 10 years, if not for the smartphone. And then I take that and I multiply that by the billions of people, it’s now billions, around the world who have some variety of smartphone. And I really start to think that that phone is one of the world champions of decoupling, dematerialisation, taking better care of the planet.
LC: But do you think there should be some kind of regulation that doesn't completely stop innovation, but paces it?
AM: I get very wary about trying to get too clever with regulation. It's incredibly hard to write regulation that doesn't have unintended consequences, that the incumbents can't find interesting work around so that they still do what they want to do. Now, there are a couple of cool exceptions to that. I like this right to repair movement, which says, look, you can't have overly restrictive warranties that will keep me from trying to fix this thing myself. And if I can't fix it, I've got to buy a new one. I'm kind of, you know, temperamentally on board with the right to repair movement in some ways. So maybe that'll be an interesting thing to watch.
LC: If capitalism is so good at pushing towards dematerialisation, why do you think it's pushed so far in the opposite direction for so long, i.e. that in the last few decades is where we've, I think emitted half of the carbon emissions, you know, that humans have emitted historically have happened since I think 1970s, I read the other day.
AM: Oh, yeah, because we've added a ton of new people to the world and we've added a huge amount of economic growth to the world over the past 50 years. And we have not yet applied that pollution reduction playbook to greenhouse gas pollution. Carbon prices are either low, too low or nonexistent in most of the world. I love markets. Markets don't solve pollution generally on their own. They're an externality if you want to use the economist jargon. You need something else to solve that externality. So you need smart regulation.
LC: Okay. So it's not unrestrained capitalism you'd advocate.
AM: Exactly! And please, please, don't cut this out the final cut here. Unrestrained capitalism is a bad idea for the planet. Businesses will pollute if it's costless for them to pollute. It doesn't matter what the wonderful letter to shareholders in the annual report says. We cannot trust businesses not to pollute if it's costless for them to pollute. Great make it costly. We know how to do that. We have done it effectively in many parts of the world, for many kinds of pollution. Let's apply that playbook to the biggie out there now, which is greenhouse gas emissions.
LC: So when you say the playbook, can you just maybe list one of the kind of policy ideas you have in mind that you think are needed?
AM: We have learned the playbook for decoupling greater human prosperity from our planetary footprint. And we've talked about two of the forces that's intense competition and amazing technologies. The other two forces are public awareness and public demands for improvement and governments that listen to their people.
So when I look at any politician’s plan, my first best for if we're going to talk about greenhouse gases, my first best approach is a carbon dividend. My second best approach is increased research on and fondness for nuclear power. And then after that, my third best, I guess, is more research and more emphasis on other kinds of renewable energy.
I wish I saw more emphasis across the board and across countries on my first best and my second best. William Nordhaus shared the Nobel prize in 2018 in part for his work on a really cool variant of a carbon price or a carbon tax, which he called a carbon dividend. And what he meant by that was okay, put a price on carbon, make it high enough so that emitters will actually change what they do. But instead of the government keeping that money, which is a tax, rebate it immediately to people in the form of a dividend that will still cause the behaviour changes because relative prices change. Things that have a lot of carbon will become more expensive, so we will buy less of them. We'll still get the overall goal, but the economic burden will not be as heavily felt by low income people because they're getting a dividend. It's an incredibly clever idea. The greatest unanimity I've ever seen in the economics profession was around the wisdom of a carbon dividend.
LC: Yeah, I wrote about it in my book. I was fascinated by it because I tried to look at bipartisan, you know, largely bipartisan ideas that have wide consensus and that I found was one of them.
AM: And the sad thing is that that consensus, that bipartisan consensus, at least in my country, is just vanishing so quickly. In the 80s it was the Republican Reagan administration with a bunch of lefty democratic environmental groups that came together around a good idea and got important things done. We started to close the hole in the ozone layer I believe in, I think it was 1980 that the Montreal protocol was signed.
LC: I think it was 87 actually, because I think it was the year I was born.
AM: Oh, okay. Thank you. But again, we had consensus, we listened to the scientists. We listened to the evidence. We put in place measures that worked, man, I'm nostalgic for that time…
LC: How do you feel about inequality? And if you're a big fan of capitalism, do you see any issues with what seems to be accelerating inequality that it causes?
AM: It depends on what kind of inequality we're talking about. I am less bothered for example, about wealth inequality than a lot of people are. One of the reasons I'm not as bothered about it is when you look at the list of countries that have the highest number of billionaires per capita, it's kind of a list of great places to live if you're an average person.
So I'm not as worried about wealth inequality as a lot of people are. I am super worried, like a lot of other people, about equality of opportunity, equality of access, equality of rights, equality of dignity. Yes, yes. Yes. Let's go work on all those things and understand the root causes of those problems.
LC: Why do you think de-growth is a bad idea?
AM: Well, first of all, it's incredibly unpopular among human beings. Can you point to me the society that has voluntarily embraced de-growth? I can find individuals. I can find some pretty small communities. But when you look around, when you look at the data going back, pretty long periods of time, the universal human thirst seems to be for growth. I think people have almost universal desire for a higher standard of living, definitely for themselves, for their children. We've been trying that for about 50 years. The de-growth movement is about as old as the environmental movement, man, you have trouble seeing any success story there.
So one of I think Einstein's definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Why are we expecting people to voluntarily embrace de-growth now? And if we're not expecting them to voluntarily do it, are we going to start mandating it for them?
LC: And is your utopia, for want of a better word, that everyone on this planet will be able to live the equivalent of an affluent middle-class life, to have consumer goods, gadgets, dishwashers, phones, every year? Do you see that as possible? Do you see the earth having the ability to sustain that lifestyle for 8 billion plus people?
AM: Yeah, I think it's a wonderful question. That is my utopia. And I believe absolutely that it's possible. In fact, it's actually fairly conceptually easy and if we get these next decades wrong, we have no one to blame but ourselves. I'm trying to imagine a reasonable, alternative, an alternative where somehow we say to the currently low income people in the world, to the populations of Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, where we say to them, Hey guys, everyone for the sake of the planet, you need to stop where you are!
The one that does work for me is where we continue the trajectory that we are on, of very widespread, greater human prosperity. And it's not universal, but it's very widespread. Let's continue that trajectory. We know the playbook for improving human prosperity while taking better care of the planet.
It's not an accident that Brits and Americans have learned how to decouple their economies. It's not magic. It's not because we are more moral than Nigerians or Bangladeshis. As Nigeria becomes more affluent, as its people can afford to care more about the environment, they will. I always fall back on a quote that Indira Gandhi gave in a speech in Sweden, I think in 1972, where she essentially said poverty and need are the greatest polluters in the world.
LC: There are many environmentalists who do not believe in Andrew’s utopia. Indeed the mainstream environmental movement has focused on slow growth and de-growth as a way to drive prosperity and sustainability.
I spoke with the writer and environmentalist, George Mumbiot who presents a very different version of what true wealth might look like.
George Montbiot: Oh gosh. I'm so sorry. Someones’s come to the door.
Lily Cole: Don’t worry. Nice doorbell you’ve got.
GM: Um, I think that'll just cause a little disruption, so we might just let that determine… Okay, good.
LC: Do you think that conscious consumerism and the movement towards circular economies, more sustainable product design, is going to have a significant impact in terms of the climate crisis?
GM: I’m very wary of conscious consumerism. It's still consumerism. You know, the great effort that companies have made is to get us to buy green stuff. But actually the transition we need to make is to buy much less stuff. The economy is currently constructed based on growth. And it's deemed to fail if growth does not continue. And yet we live on a finite planet with finite resources and beyond a certain point, that growth, as has already happened in many cases, bursts through planetary boundaries and drives us towards disaster.
Unless you really tackle the root of this, which is this really quite carefully constructed drive towards growth, where central banks and governments and alongside industry and the private banking sector are constantly trying to ramp up economic growth. Unless you can stop that and switch to a different system, it doesn't really matter what sort of a consumer you are, whether you're buying more supposedly green products, like, you know, your solar powered waving queen or, um, renewable smartphone for your dog or whether you are buying products which don’t claim to be green. You're still buying products which require precious resources, use energy and are basically pushing us past the limits within which our life support systems can be sustained.
So it's about less, rather than different. The key task if you are an environmentalist or if you care in any way about the future of the living world and of humanity, is not so much to start doing good things, but to stop doing bad things.
LC: What would that look like from an economic perspective in your mind? You know, if consumerism ground to a halt, is there a version of that that you think would be kind of socially just i.e without causing a lot of the social fallout I guess, that a lot of people would be afraid of, if the economy was to essentially slow down.
GM: The current economy does not distribute wealth. It concentrates it. There's more wealth moving through the system than there was before. That's what economic growth does, but the great majority of it goes to the top 1% and those at the bottom see very little of it, very little indeed. In fact, there's some extremely stark figures showing just by how many times we would have to multiply the global economy for everyone to start living on no less than $5 a day. I think it's 11 times the current size of the global economy and far from creating universal prosperity, that creates universal ruin. It just destroys everything in the Earth’s systems that keep us alive. We're not going to make everyone rich by growth. We're going to make people prosperous by redistribution.
And at the moment, a very small number of people have grabbed almost everything for themselves. So that might be tracks of land. It might be rights to use the atmosphere. It might be the purchase of minerals or indeed meat or fish, anything which is basically depleting the world's natural treasury. We should be taxing very heavily when some very rich people have super homes all over the planet and super yachts and private planes to travel between them, a few million people living like that would completely destroy the Earth’s systems.
And so we should tax that sort of behaviour out of existence and use that money in progressive and redistributive ways. And Thomas Picketty talks about this patrimonial spiral of wealth accumulation, where, because you have wealth, you can use that to make more and make more and make more. And there's no internal break on that system.
It's only when governments step in and say, no, you can't take everything, and that's what happened for instance, during the 1940s, when the maximum income tax in the United States Rose to 94% in the United Kingdom Rose to 98%. And it was quite overtly to try to break that spiral of wealth accumulation and redistribute money more broadly. Just 80 years ago, we saw how that could be done.
LC: Do you think that we shouldn't have billionaires in the world?
GM: Yes, I strongly think that. The whole promise of capitalism is that everybody can aspire to private luxury. And that's why we acquiesced in this system because we're all, as someone said in the 20th century, we're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
We all think that we're going to be the person who comes out on top one day, if only we can win the lottery or something miraculous like that happens. But of course it's not actually possible for all of us to reach that level of private wealth because there's simply not enough ecological space. In fact, there's not even enough physical space.
If everybody in London had a vast house and a big garden with a swimming pool and a tennis court and their own art collection and their own playground for their kids, London would occupy half of England. England would occupy most of Europe. Europe would occupy the world. I mean, already, even though only a very small proportion of our population are billionaires, the UK has got an ecological footprint five times the size of our ecological capacity. So our wealth, our consumption in this country depends entirely on taking other people's resources. Its promise at the heart of capitalism is a lie. It's just impossible. And the only reason why some people can is that other people don't have it.
And so what do we do to create a world in which everybody has a good life? Everybody has prosperity. Well, instead of pursuing private luxury. We should pursue public luxury. Fantastic public parks, fantastic public tennis courts and swimming pools and art collections and playgrounds and public transport systems. And using our space, both our physical space and our ecological space to develop public luxury, we create space for everybody.
LC: Is there a way you can imagine society being organised? Whether it's more service-based economies or something that universal basic income, or how would you see us doing a slow growth agenda in a way that doesn't hurt some of the most vulnerable people in society?
GM: That does mean much better distribution, but it also means just much better design across the board. It means urban design. So we all have lovely places to live by investing in public luxury. And we employ large numbers of people to maintain that public luxury. And some of those people hopefully can be employed through communities, not by the state.
We start to rebuild the commons. And this is really the missing element of so much economic discourse. People say, Oh, I'm on the left or I'm on the right. They, you know, if they're on the left, they say, I want more state and less market. And if I'm on the right, I want more market and less state. But those are only two pillars of the economy. There's two others, which are just as important. One of them is a household, perennially neglected by economists, which means that women's work, which is still the majority of household work is perennially neglected. And the other one is the commons, which is basically resources and processes, which are owned by communities.
LC: Yeah, it reminds me more of kind of, I guess, indigenous management, right, of land and resources.
GM: Well, there was a time when the commons was the major element of the economy. That most of our resources were held in common and managed in common, and they were managed on the whole, much more sustainably as a result.
LC: I came into working on this book, and then now as a consequences this podcast because of the platform I set up many years ago that was trying to run a gift economy online. And I was really, really inspired for many years, reading about the sociology and psychology around gift economies as an alternative way of organising. And one of the things that comes to mind also when you're saying that is that these structures of the aspiration, what my friend James Suzman would call ‘the melancholy of aspiration’, of aspiring to better also create an incredibly competitive sociological and psychological landscape where we may not realise, but we're all sort of competing with one another in a very atomised way. And I think that that actually creates a much more impoverished experience of being alive than if we were to fundamentally shift to a more co-operative reality, that would be maybe more similar to what I understand indigenous communities to practice.
GM: I’m sure that intense and perpetual competition fuels the mental health crisis. There was a very interesting Belgium psychoanalyst called Paul Verhaeghe who wrote a book called What about Me, where he looks at how neo liberalism, which is really about extreme competition, it’s about measuring everybody by their competitive success and dividing society into winners and losers. He’s shown how it creates this world of extreme atomisation and alienation that feeds directly into the mental health crisis. And that really the only solution to it is creating community spirit, public spirit instead. And instead of fighting each other, like stray dogs fighting over a dustbin in order to grab resources for ourselves, which is basically a neo liberal world, we need to form strong communities, strong neighbourhoods, which work together to solve our common problems.
And what I find so interesting about this is that something which could start as an ecological quest, it's like we don't have enough for everyone to pursue private luxury so we must instead put our efforts into private sufficiency and public luxury, soon can turn into political transformation because I think it's actually only by coming together as communities using participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, that we can refresh politics and genuinely take back control.
LC: What I understand from a lot of my more conservative friends is that they are kind of reticent about the idea of big government and the kind of idea of a kind of big bureaucratic government. And I wonder when you talk about increasing taxes, if that implies big government?
GM: Well, I'm quite reticent about the idea of big government as well. I think, you know, we, we should be wary of an over-intrusive state. And what I want to see is government devolving powers to communities. Not all of its powers, of course. I mean, there's certain functions of government, which are absolutely essential. But there's a huge trench of government powers, which I don't think should belong to government. They should belong to us.
So for instance, setting the budget. We have seen certainly for the first 15 years of its existence in Porto Alegre in Brazil, how the entire city was transformed when citizens were allowed to set the infrastructure budget, rather than just allowing the city government to do it without reference to them. And 50,000 people a year took part in those deliberations and turned it from being really a place with pretty desperate conditions into the state capitol which was highest on the human development index in Brazil, with a massive transformation in sanitation and clean water, in primary health care, reduced maternal mortality reduced infant mortality, improved public transport. I mean, right across the board, they basically rested the budget out of the hands of a pretty corrupt government and the mafia like friends of the government, who a lot of the money went to and used it for general public benefits instead.
And I don't see why we can't do that everywhere and not just for the infrastructure budget. But with major portions of both the local and the national budgets, which are spent in our name. Do it with deliberative participatory politics, instead of this very top down system.
Now what's very interesting is that politicians on the right are constantly saying, you know, we must shrink the state. We must reduce the size of government. Government is your enemy, the market is your friend. But all it wants to do is to transfer powers to people who have money, what it calls the market. The market is a euphemism for the power of money. But, you know, there is a way in which the state should be shrunk and there's totally legitimate way, which has to be shifting powers to the smallest possible political unit which can adopt those powers.
And we've seen with the use of all sorts of new political technologies, different forms of participatory politics, that actually you can devolve an awful lot of power to communities and communities will probably discharge it much better than any government does. I mean, you look at the way that government works at the moment. It's a total train wreck. It’s such an illegitimate system.
In the case of the UK, at the last election got 29% of the votes then forms the government and presumes consent for everything it does for the next five years, even if not a single person in the country actually wants it to do a particular thing, it says, well, you voted for us, whether you did or not. But you know, 29% of people voted for us four years ago, so therefore we're empowered to do this today.
Now we don't accept the principle of presumed consent in sex. Why should we accept it in politics?
LC: That’s a good, that's a good line. Have you ever spoken to Zac Goldsmith about this? Because I interviewed him on the podcast and it was interesting to hear that he's quite keen on direct democracy, has apparently tried to push through direct democracy initiatives through government.
GM: Well, that's interesting. Now I've spoken to Zac about a few things, but not about that. I mean, it is interesting actually, how, once you start showing an interest in ecology almost inevitably you're led down this path because you start to understand systems. Now, ecology is particularly rich in complex systems. I mean, an ecosystem is a phenomenally complex system within which many other complex systems are embedded. And as soon as you begin to understand that you can only really engage intelligently with the ecology by grasping its fantastic complexity, then you begin to see something very similar about politics.
That human society is a phenomenally complex system and yet governments try to treat nations as if they were simple systems, where they can be controlled from the centre with one person, a figurehead or not at the centre of that, pulling the levers; as if that person can understand all the needs of all those people and all those complex systems and can control them.
And that's why we've seen in ecology, a shift from conservation towards rewilding. And in rewilding, you basically try to sort of front load a few interventions, and then to the greatest extent possible stand back and let the ecosystems evolve under their own steam. And what I feel we need to see politically is the equivalent of that. We need political rewilding. We need to set up systems where we, the citizens, have a meaningful voice where we can participate week by week, rather than just once every five years. And then to the greatest possible extent, government should stand back and allow that ecosystem, that political ecosystem to evolve.
And it's through ecological interest that I feel I've seen that the way of turning our totally dysfunctional political systems into systems that actually reflect our choices.
LC: What do you think of the arguments made by thinkers like Steven Pinker? Andrew McAfee recently also put out a book, More from Less, who argued the dematerialisation of capitalism, for want of a better phrase, that it's possible to continue growing the economy whilst reducing carbon emissions towards zero.
GM: Yes, well, there is an energy decoupling. There's not a resource decoupling. So if you look for instance, at Jason Hickel’s work, he points out that the amount of resources that the systems can tolerate is about 50 billion tons being used by us every year. We're already consuming 70 billion tons. Business as usual would mean that we were consuming 180 billion by 2050, which is almost four times the sustainable limit.
But if we were to use maximum resource efficiency, the massive carbon tax is when some fairly optimistic assumptions, we could maybe reduce that to about 95 billion tons, which is still almost twice the sustainable limit.
So in other words, we could see some relative decoupling from what it would otherwise have been. It would still be a lot more material resource consumption than we have today, but basically economic growth just drives us forward into more consumption, even if it's not as much consumption as it would otherwise have been. And nowhere on earth, do we see the absolute decoupling that Steven Pinker is talking about, and I'm afraid, basically he's talking out of his rear end on this.
LC: I wanted to ask about greed and I think greed, particularly in the sense of self analysis, needing to protest against yourself. And I was interested to hear on a more personal level, if you feel like that's a narrative you’ve had to struggle against in order to be part of a broader change and bigger picture change.
GM: Well, the aspirations which we're all brought up, the fairy tale is that one day we'll be the rich man or the rich woman living in the castle, surrounded by high walls, detached from society, living in private luxury. And unlearning that is is a huge task because it's reinforced in so many ways. It's reinforced in all the stories and fairytales we’re brought up with. It’s reinforced by advertising all the time. Not only do you have to unlearn what you learned as a child, but you have to resist all the time, the dominant narratives that surround you. And that is pretty exhausting. I mean, even for me, I've got a sort of natural resistance to this stuff. I'm quite acetic by inclination. But even so there's this kink in my brain which says to me, Oh, that thing looks nice. Wouldn't your life be a bit better if you had that.
That is social conditioning. It's so powerful. Now what makes it less powerful is when you have large numbers of people who are fighting it together, And this is why I've been so supportive of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, where we see these, this mass mobilisation, particularly of young people who say, fuck this shit. We're not going to be sucked into this world, which is defined by consumerism. We're not going to be defined as consumers. We're going to be citizens and we're going to explore what being a citizen means in its fullest sense. We're going to carve it out against everything that governments and advertising and corporations and billionaires are trying to make us do and trying to make us be. And in carving out this new role, we're going to have far richer lives in the true sense than the lives that they've tried to lay out for us.
It does give me hope that these new movements. They are so exciting. Their determination, I mean, the clarity that that young people have got today and that sort of utter unfailing determination, we're just going to fight this all the way. It’s a beautiful thing to see.
LC: The de-growth in the eco-modernist positions seem to be underpinned by a different understanding of human nature and whether competition or cooperation are more powerful and useful tools in driving human prosperity. So, given that we are nature, I wondered what we can learn from our study of nature about the role of cooperation and competition in terms of species growth and success. So I asked the biologist and micologist Merlin Sheldrake, whose new book, Entangled Life, examines how fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures.
Merlin Sheldrake: If you put a block of wood with a wood rotting fungus, you put the block of wood on a dish, you can watch the fungus explore the dish, looking for new sources of food. And the fungus will grow out from this block of wood in all directions at once, forming a kind of fuzzy white circle. If you put lots of different types of organism in an environment where they had the foods and the conditions they needed, then they'll grow until they can’t. It's very rare that you find organisms that would voluntarily as it were stop growing when there was more growing to be done.
In natural ecosystems there's always, almost always, something to stop an organism growing out of control. There's usually these checks and balances, and this is biodiverse systems and organisations going to run up against something else doing its thing before too long.
LC: Which is usually another species, I guess right? And that's the balance between the species?
MS: Yeah, another type of organism entirely, you know, say a fungus, a tree, a bacterium, viruses, and there'll be interactions between these great larger divisions in the tree of life.
LC: When I was doing some research, my understanding of Darwin has often been coloured with the kind of survival of the fittest mantra that I've seen that gets thrown around a lot. And I was quite interested to discover that actually, you know, a large part of his work looks at cooperation in nature and the role of cooperation in evolution. And that struck me reading your book as well. That it seems to me, cooperation and symbiosis are instrumental parts of how you understand the natural world to work. Would that be fair to say?
MS: Unmitigated competition and conflict are the driving forces in evolution, is an idea that's been around since the late 19th century. It’s an emphasis that was placed largely by English proponents of evolutionary theory. And it mirrored human views of social progress within an industrial capitalist system.
Of course, competition is only one aspect. And we know it's only one aspect because the history of life is full of examples of intimate cooperation. And we ourselves are the outcome of intimate cooperation between many different organisms. We have more bacterial cells in and on our bodies than our own cells. And each of our cells has mitochondria inside, which were once free of living bacteria. So even on a cellular level, we’re the outcome of intimate associations between otherwise unrelated organisms.
Thankfully the picture has deepened and expanded in more recent decades. And now it's generally considered that yes, competition plays a part in evolution, but so does cooperation and to think about one and not the other is to skew the picture in an artificial way. So the way I like to think about it is that life is a process of collaboration and collaboration itself is an alloy of competition and cooperation.
And it's an idea that we’re familiar with, you know, you can have a functioning family unit and you can have competition and cooperation playing out in that family at once. You can have a touring jazz band that they can cooperate enough to give you an astonishing performance. And at the same time they can fight furiously and ceaselessly backstage. So these dynamics can coexist. And then, so I think it's best to step into a larger room where cooperation and competition can both take place and both be key forces.
LC: So if all species will grow until something stops them, what might the limits to human growth be? And have we already touched upon some of them? Is economic growth a blessing or is it the beating heart of the problem? Are the eco-modernists right? Can we really be going in the right direction? Don't the facts paint a very different picture, that a million species are threatened with extinction, that we have lost over half of our wildlife in the last few decades, and that there are now tens of millions of climate refugees with that number increasing every year. Aren't these facts, evidence that the system needs to change much more radically than it's been able to do so far? Can more regulation be enough to make it change?
I do hope that capitalism can be evolved into a fair and more sustainable version of itself. And there are many signs that that project is underway. Carbon taxes, dematerialisation, laws against planned obsolescence, but also shifts in the legal structure of capitalism itself, away from shareholder primacy. Might we want to consider how we measure economic growth and GDP? Indeed, when GDP was originally devised by Simon Kuznets in the 1930s, he warned that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.”
As many economies slow in 2020 because of COVID, perhaps we need to consider what exactly are we trying to grow? We could, for example, exclude activities that cause violence or degradation such as logging or armaments and include metrics that track mental and physical health, sustainability, community, and perhaps that most evanescent of things, happiness.
Fundamentally, I agree that we need much more cooperation amongst our species for our prosperity and perhaps survival, which might mean more sharing, more listening, more participatory democracy, and the empowering of communities. But with this logic in mind, we also need to cooperate with each other intellectually to look for solutions, which means that both the eco-modernists and the de-growthers have points to make, which we might learn from, to find our way through.
And finally, what might we learn from the oldest and most enduring indigenous human societies whose economies were not organised according to the logic of growth and who make up the majority of our human history? We’ll explore that question in our next episode.
So who wins or maybe there's no winner and that's the point? That there's something to learn from all these different perspectives as we try to figure out how to get to sustainability and happiness. You can hear more from Lisa Jackson, George Monbiot and other champions of de-growth, conscious capitalism and direct democracy in my book, Who Cares Wins, which is out now in hardback, e-book and audio book.
Join me on the next episode of this podcast, where I'm going to explore how our different social and environmental issues intersect.