In recent years, as the connections between consumer capitalism, global inequality, and environmental degradation have become ever clearer and more urgent, a cohort of economists, ecologists, and ethicists have been at work on a literature of degrowth, exploring correctives to a global economy founded on ever greater extraction, production, marketing, and waste as means to ceaseless growth.

During an interview for the 2019 documentary Anthropocene, Earth System scientist Will Steffen was asked whether the story of humanity appeared to him more of a comedy or a tragedy. “I would certainly view it as a tragedy,” he said. “If there were another species coming down from another planet, they may see it as a comedy, or they may see it as an incredible paradox—of a species that could learn to manipulate their planet so much, but didn’t have the wisdom to understand what that manipulation was leading to, in terms of its own well-being.” Steffen, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2023, had devoted much of his career to making people wise, and, like many other scientists in the early twenty-first century, had begun reconciling himself to the limits of his influence. He—they—saw clearly how precarious our situation had become, knew plainly how it had become so, and discerned exactly what would be required to set things right in the years ahead. But the task was very difficult, and the future was veiled with uncertainties.

To read through the expanding literature on the Anthropocene is to be resituated in a young world, a new civilization shedding the skin of past millennia and growing exponentially into and beyond its fullest potentials. Since about 1945, human beings have broken and discarded the physical limits that had governed their ancestors, dramatically escalating their extraction of natural resources, streamlining the refinement and manufacture of these into products, and extending their system of commerce across a global web of connections, powered all along by the shimmer and smoke of burning fossil fuels. Tapped in the eighteenth century and revolutionized in the twentieth, the ability to extract and exploit millions of years of subterranean energy transformed the relationship between humans and their planet, necessarily disrupting the ecological and atmospheric balances that had made humans possible in the first place. Steffen and his colleagues famously dubbed this rapid new metabolism “the Great Acceleration,” noting the direct correspondence between exponential increases in socio-economic trends—like global population, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and primary energy—and Earth System trends—like greenhouse gas emissions, surface temperature, and ocean acidification. All told, they produced twenty-four comparable hockey-stick graphs to demonstrate that the post-war decades have been unique in their outsized production and impacts around the planet. In light of these observations, the world we inhabit—that of four generations, or of a single human lifetime—is defined by the benefits and liabilities of rapid, anomalous, unsustainable growth.

Some of the most interesting and relevant work currently underway by economists, ecologists, ethicists, and policymakers has thus become squarely focused on what comes next—on what, if anything, will replace the relentless revolution of capitalist production, accumulation, exploitation, and waste. The partisans have formed ranks within several different categories, by turns advocating “post-capitalism,” “steady-state economics,” and “green growth,” among others. Perhaps the most energetic and provocative of these are the advocates of “degrowth,” the idea that economies should be purposely decelerated and reoriented to prioritize human flourishing rather than boundless expansion. Principally based in and around Barcelona, their work levels incisive arguments against consumer capitalism, supplemented, then, by varied visions of its eclipse. But if their critiques are to be accepted and their policies adopted, they must first persuade the public that the system can work. That is the project of the three books considered in this review.

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The Case for Degrowth, by Giorgos Kallis and several coauthors, advances several broad and candid claims. It argues, first, that infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet, and the drive for perpetual economic growth is responsible for unprecedented ecological damage that has now encroached upon or surpassed important planetary boundaries. Because environmental damage—especially greenhouse gas emissions—cannot be wholly decoupled from economic growth at scale and over long duration, continued growth necessarily implies continued damage at a time when it can no longer be absorbed by the planet without dire consequences for living beings. Second, the benefits of economic growth in the Global North have not been equally distributed, but have instead been appropriated and hoarded by the very wealthiest at the expense of the rest. These gains have been achieved via the aggressive extraction of natural resources and exploitation of cheap labor in the Global South, as governments and corporations in developed nations have preyed upon citizens and workers in the developing world, all while externalizing much of their waste output to the same places and peoples that are affected first and most tragically by the impacts of climate change. And third, while material quality of life has dramatically improved in much of the world since World War II, this improvement does not seem to have translated to a broad-based contentment. Instead, citizens even in wealthy nations report feeling more alienated, isolated, lonely, and frustrated than one would expect in such a materially successful polity. Rather than prioritizing the health, education, fellowship, and well-being of citizens, our economic models have remained singularly focused on ever-increasing GDP—an artificial metric indifferent to the happiness and satisfaction of the people it claims to attend. Therefore, because perpetual economic growth is impossible, undesirable, unethical, and unfulfilling, a new approach is needed to commence a controlled drawdown of economic activity that preserves the planet and serves the people in just and equitable fashion.

But if the global economy is to be replaced with something better—or even reformed into something less bad—the campaign must attend first to the common senses governing the judgments of the people who propel, depend upon, and so justify the workings of that economy. Though it dates back only to the 1930s, the crucial importance of GDP as a measure of economic success has gone largely undisputed in the Global North, such that a willingness to question its utility is liable to identify the asker as an ill-informed or unserious person. In this context, plans that propose to improve upon the status quo in any appreciable way are often dismissed as utopian dreaming. Thus any serious push for fundamental change requires engagement with these norms, and must ultimately replace them with alternative commitments to community, collaboration, and care as building blocks of human gratification. The shorthand for this is that some people must learn to live simply so that others may simply live. We in the developed world must forego the extravagance and inefficiency of so much personal accumulation and direct our efforts instead to holding important assets and resources in common, thereby sharing the cost and minimizing the waste attendant to their purchase, use, and maintenance. Examples are easy enough to find, even in the United States, insofar as we continue to fund public institutions and services, including public parks, pools, transit, libraries, and schools. Cheaper to develop and to maintain than their privatized equivalents, these public commons are also more environmentally sustainable and more conducive to healthy communities. Their development and maintenance, implemented at scale and enjoyed together, is a centerpiece of degrowth.

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For those unfamiliar with the economic and ecological problems to which degrowth responds, the diagnoses and prescriptions are likely to perplex. Are things really that bad? And if so, how did we get to this point? In his book, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, Jason Hickel provides an origin story for the entire mess, framing the economic and ecological crises of this moment as a culmination to five centuries of elite avarice. That story begins in the sixteenth century in western Europe, when the rural peasantry were excluded from the landscape via a process of enclosure that converted the commons into property of the elites. Denied their shared means of subsistence and faced with certain poverty, the European poor began their coalescence into a class of wage laborers, finding their means to survival in the employ of that same nobility that had consigned their ancestors to serfdom. Together, the widescale plunder of resources by the wealthy and the reconfiguration of workers into proletarians laid a foundation for the proto-capitalist edifice. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the machine became coal-fired.

Importantly, the consolidation of resources and wealth in western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries proceeded alongside the global expansion of these empires by way of proliferating colonies. In these years the English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese ruling classes carefully stratified their own societies even as they subjugated others in far flung places, administering their imperial governments according to various shades of brutality. So began a long and lucrative tradition of resource extraction and export, transporting metals, ores, sugars, spices, fabrics, and humans from the provinces to the motherland and back, for profit. Here, too, the technological innovations subsequent to James Watts’ steam engine supercharged a process already underway. Thus the history of capitalism as it arose and prospered in Europe and its colonies is a history constructed upon “commodities that were produced by enslaved workers, on lands stolen from colonized peoples, and processed in factories staffed by European peasants who had been forcibly dispossessed by enclosure” (53). This narration makes explicit a social justice concern braided throughout the degrowth argument, binding income inequality and ecological breakdown tightly against a postcolonial critique.

In fact, the throughlines connecting Francisco Pizzaro to the East India Company to Exxon and Amazon further emphasize the absurdity of so much economic activity today, when labor exploitation and environmental degradation are levied in pursuit of things far less tangible than land or gold or glory. Consumer capitalism is fueled by a particular conception of exchange value, whereby profits extracted from labor become capital to be reinvested in the generation of more capital, which is then reinvested again in the name of demonstrable, year-on-year growth ad infinitum. This is a very different model than that informing just about any small business in your town, for which a consistent and stable ten percent yearly return may be viewed as a success insofar as it allows the owners to earn a living, the employees to be compensated fairly, the overhead to be covered, and the whole enterprise to live to trade another day. Instead, the corporate model demands that a year at five percent be followed by a year at ten and the next at fifteen and so on, increasing exponentially forever or at least until it has cornered every market, consumed every rival, and reoriented its works toward space exploration, or something, all the while externalizing the waste, busting the unions, outsourcing the factories, and otherwise automating everything in the name of cost-cutting efficiency, making a handful of people extraordinarily rich but creating a host of interlocking problems for everyone else along the way. In this light, capitalism itself is disclosed as a utopian dream draped in realist garb, and feasible only if you ignore the destruction that it has wrought.

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Having considered Kallis and Hickel, curious readers will be well-prepared for The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism, by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan. At once cautiously pragmatic, rigorously critical, and unapologetically radical, this book characterizes degrowth as an array of perspectives in conversation with a variety of critiques, none of which is rigid and exclusive and all of which may collaborate on a big tent left politics opposed to the merciless churn of the capitalist cogs. There are many reasons to stand against consumer capitalism, and many angles from which to attack it. Together, assembled in tight but flexible formation, these form the center and the flanks of the degrowth advance.

If Hickel’s strength is his ability to situate degrowth persuasively within a long historical trajectory, Schmelzer, Vetter, and Vansintjan are most at home in the theoretical realm. Their critique of growth merges seven distinct others, culminating in a Venn diagram of points and evidences with comprehensive footnotes below. In a single chapter that ranges over one hundred pages of discussion, the authors identify and explain critiques of growth from vantages ecological, socio-economic, cultural, anti-capitalist, anti-industrialist, feminist, and otherwise oriented by the North-South divide. Recognized for their individual merits, these various critiques are then unified and aligned beneath the degrowth umbrella, embraced for their broad points of agreement, and set against those regressive arguments that may prepare the way for green fascism. Understanding that some dramatic economic change is now on the horizon, the authors suggest that the failure of a carefully charted leftward turn portends a jarring lurch to the right in the years ahead.

Accordingly, The Future is Degrowth guides readers forward with careful and cautious attention to practicalities. Here again, the writers are plainly sensitive to the utopian smear and meticulous to show that their plan can work in the real world. Nodding toward the late Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright, they acknowledge that any credible alternative to capitalism must satisfy at least three criteria—desirability, viability, and achievability—and the final third of the book is devoted to explaining how degrowth fares in each case. Degrowth is desirable because it is necessary, confirmed at exhaustive length by the preceding critiques and demanded by grim economic and ecological forecasts. It is viable because many of its components have worked already, as evidenced by the success of large-scale programs like social security, universal healthcare and higher education, as well as those of small-scale solidarity economies in various European collectives and cooperatives. The achievability question is, as yet, unanswered, because a degrowth vision for the global economy still has not been realized. In that sense, the future of degrowth still waits to be established by the thinkers, writers, organizers, activists, and politicians who will see it through to completion, or not. Having categorized and dissected the relevant social, economic, and ecological theories pertaining to degrowth, the authors invite their readers to engage at any or all points, drawing their own conclusions and making their own way into an emergent movement desirous of a great many participants, drawn from a diversity of backgrounds, and willing to wear a variety of hats.

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Supposing that the arguments against growth are, on balance, correct, what specific alternatives do these writers propose? Framing degrowth as an inclusive movement amenable to a range of progressive critiques and proposals, these works endorse a variety of ideas that may serve as bridge policies to an orderly and managed degrowth of the economy. These include Green New Deals that develop large public works projects to address socioeconomic and ecological problems at one stroke, Universal Basics programs that provide services (UBS) or income (UBI) to ensure a baseline quality of life for all citizens, commoning activities like reclaiming public lands or developing customer-owned utilities, reducing production and expanding leisure time via a four-day workweek, and public financing from green projects, like the implementation of a carbon fee and dividend that charges polluters for each ton of carbon they emit, and then redistributes the funds to all citizens. Others include prohibiting planned obsolesce, placing severe restrictions on advertising, creating public institutions based on shared usership rather than private ownership, dramatically reducing food waste, and scaling down ecologically destructive industries, like fossil fuels, automotive, and factory farming, to name a few.

Because they have already devoted the past two centuries to coal- and oil-powered development and now enjoy the advantages, developed nations must take the lead on these measures. All rely on public, democratic approaches to counter the private, elitist impulses committed to endless growth, and all concur that these alternatives will create the conditions for happier, more fulfilling and more neighborly lives. Working in concert, a slate of policies like these would slow economic growth substantially without subjecting people to the penalties and qualms of an economic recession. Indeed, degrowth proponents argue that recessions are particular to growth-based economies, meaning that degrowth offers the best way to protect against recessions, depressions, and panics going forward. Freed from the growth imperative, economies should also become more stable.

The degrowth critique of capitalism is compelling, and it confirms the urgent need for radical action in response to the braided environmental, economic, and ethical crises of the century. And yet, having established the gravity of the problem, these works have not yet proven degrowth capable of overcoming the formidable rhetorical obstacles to its implementation at scale. For this reader, parsing these volumes here in the Pennsylvania Coal Region, the feasibility of the program remains very much in question, at once recommended and imperiled by its explicitly democratic orientation. The authors emphasize that degrowth will be a project orchestrated and executed by the people, reclaiming power from the wealthy elites, returning it to the middle- and working classes, and prioritizing the needs of the Global South along with all of those who have been trodden upon and forgotten about during the decades of capitalist ascendence. In theory, such a framing should be attractive to American populists, who have nothing but praise for the common man and nothing but scorn for the global elites. And yet, it is among the more persistent and perplexing facts of twenty-first century American political life that populist energy has been most successfully stoked and channeled by the far right. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which radical leftist ideas make sufficient headway to turn the political-economic tide.

Thus the question of whether degrowth policy ideas will work in practice is preceded by the more fundamental question of whether they will work in persuasion, and on that point the smart money remains doubtful—at least in the United States. One needn’t be an American Exceptionalist to concede the exceptional contribution this nation has made to global greenhouse gas emissions, and the leading role it must therefore play in scaling everything down. If degrowth ideas are to succeed, their reception and adoption in this part of the world will be vital to that success. This is cause for concern. Degrowth authors trust that the people are persuadable, that with the right arguments and appeals they may yet be enlisted in the global movement for a happy, viable, and somewhat more equitable future. Delivered by compassionate and committed citizens, working among rather than above their neighbors, the severity of the crises and the urgency of the moment may yet be made clear despite clouds of mis- and disinformation. Received upon a warming world, among increasingly serious environmental impacts, the boundaries of realism and utopianism may begin to drift, until their positions have swapped entirely. And as citizens begin to realize their agency, starting at the local level and proliferating outward, there is still opportunity to slash greenhouse gas emissions, slow the exploitation of nature, right five centuries of historic injustice, and prevent the looming humanitarian tragedy. I very sincerely hope that they are right. But right or wrong, I am persuaded that their cause is worthy and their thinking wise.