Going to War on Climate Change

by John Halle, Common Dreams: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/08/21/going-war-climate-change

"Those who heard Roosevelt’s speech were aware that confronting fascism would result in dramatic changes to their lives within months if not weeks." (Photo: Wikicommons)

With the federal government currently flooring the accelerator on the road toward the climate precipice, it is somewhat comforting to know that a likely majority believes in “avoid(ing) the apocalyptic future” by requiring a shift to renewable energy sources. At least, that is what Kate Aronoff, writing in The Intercept, suggests is the case.

Also contained in Aronoff's piece is an equally obvious though perhaps more controversial assertion from climate scientist Will Steffen: the only way that we will get there ”is to “shift to a 'wartime footing.'” Only a fundamental change in attitudes will allow us to "roll out renewable energy and dramatically reimagine sectors like transportation and agriculture . . . at very fast rates,” necessary to address the scale of the problem.

Steffen's view has, of course, few friends on a political right who, even if they do not view climate change as a hoax are philosophically committed to limited government. Somewhat surprisingly, it also has not circulated widely on the political left. A likely reason has to do with the militaristic imagery which has in the past functioned as a bludgeon to repress political dissent and to pre-empt questions about elites' fitness to rule.

But, as Aronoff notes, a war footing can also point in a very different direction. In particular, producing weapons of war requires that "the government play a heavy hand in industry, essentially shifting . . . to a centrally planned economy”-- anathema to the right which has always been at least rhetorically hostile to government intervention in the economy. Also, as Aronoff observes, insofar as these “interventions" have been permitted, they have "tend(ed) to be on behalf of corporations.” 

Our history shows that it doesn’t have to be that way: fighting Hitler wasn't a service to private corporations, it served a public united in its revulsion for fascism. Furthermore, doing so required a massive, centrally planned effort. No one raised questions about the cost of protecting ourselves when President Roosevelt appeared before congress on December 8, 1941. The same should apply to the massive investment which fighting climate change requires now.

Those who heard Roosevelt’s speech were aware that confronting fascism would result in dramatic changes to their lives within months if not weeks. Similarly, most of us are aware that equally dramatic changes will be required by our response to global warming. What these are are not yet clear, however the rough outlines are apparent to anyone who has thought about what needs to be accomplished.

In particular, many of these will be centered around the broad objective of achieving massively higher levels of energy efficiency, one component of which will be to meet strict zero emissions building standards. 

Doing so will involve millions of workers installing insulation, efficient heating and cooling systems, and where necessary, effecting structural and architectural alterations to support a sustainable lifestyle. Others will be involved in the procurement, production and distribution of necessary materials with many thousands of others involved in site assessments, planning and scheduling of work crews and associated logistics. 

Another component would achieve similar efficiencies in the transportation sector. This would likely have at its center rail electrification  targeting commercial freight currently powered by diesel fueled locomotives. Raw materials and product shipments will be shifted to rail with fossil fuel intensive trucking industry limited to short routes in electrified vehicles. 

Once in place, an electrified rail system would function as well as a conduit for excess electricity provided by intermittent renewable sources whose full incorporation will require a thoroughly  redesigned and reconstructed electrical grid, itself requiring the investment of many millions of man hours. 

On a roughly similar order of magnitude will be required investments in infrastructure improvements to address the effects of climate change, most notably in the protection of low lying areas vulnerable to floods and sea surges. 

All of these components of the climate initiative would require personnel with appropriate training in relevant fields provided at trade schools, junior colleges and colleges extending to the university level. Federal funding would encourage matriculation into these programs while discouraging the growth of academic majors (such as financial engineering) which channel technical talent away from where it is most needed. 

Similar priorities will also inform a major shift in goverment funding of basic and applied science research, a large fraction of which is presently consumed by weapons reserach undertaken at Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Oak Ridge and other national laboratories  These investments would be shifted to research institutions modelled on the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories which have gave rise to energy efficient technologies now in common use. The funding would underwrite a Manhattan project devoted to basic research in new energy sources and also in energy storage systems as well as atmospheric carbon capture and sequestration technologies. 

We are in a race against time to achieve scientific breakthroughs but also to apply existing technologies which are able to drastically reduce our carbon footprint.

Asking the question whether we can afford these is a waste of time-a distraction from investing ourselves both intellectually and emotionally in what will be required.

The right question is exactly that which Alexandria Ocasio Cortez famously asked a couple of weeks ago. 

“Why is it our pockets are only empty when it comes to education and healthcare for our kids and 100 percent renewable energy that is going to save this planet? We only have empty pockets when it comes to the morally right things to do, but when it comes to tax cuts for billionaires and unlimited war, we seem to be able to invent that money fairly easily.”

We did not ask “can we afford it” when we invested a full one quarter of our economy into producing the infrastructure which was required to beat back the axis powers.

Adopting a war footing to confront the even more dire spectre of climate catastrophe would seem to be the rhetorical framework which allow us to move forward in doing what needs to be done.

Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

by Ben Goldfarb, Daily Good:  http://www.dailygood.org/story/2068/eager-the-surprising-secret-life-of-beavers-and-why-they-matter-ben-goldfarb/

This excerpt is from Ben Goldfarb’s new book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher www.chelseagreen.com

Close your eyes. Picture, if you will, a healthy stream. What comes to mind? Perhaps you’ve conjured a crystalline, fast-moving creek, bounding merrily over rocks, its course narrow and shallow enough that you could leap or wade across the channel. If, like me, you are a fly fisherman, you might add a cheerful, knee-deep angler, casting for trout in a limpid riffle.

It’s a lovely picture, fit for an Orvis catalog. It’s also wrong.

Let’s try again. This time, I want you to perform a more difficult imaginative feat. Instead of envisioning a present-day stream, I want you to reach into the past—before the mountain men, before the Pilgrims, before Hudson and Champlain and the other horsemen of the furpocalypse, all the way back to the 1500s. I want you to imagine the streams that existed before global capitalism purged a continent of its dam-building, water-storing, wetland-creating engineers. I want you to imagine a landscape with its full complement of beavers.

What do you see this time? No longer is our stream a pellucid, narrow, racing trickle. Instead it’s a sluggish, murky swamp, backed up several acres by a messy concatenation of woody dams. Gnawed stumps ring the marsh like punji sticks; dead and dying trees stand aslant in the chest-deep pond. When you step into the water, you feel not rocks underfoot but sludge. The musty stink of decomposition wafts into your nostrils. If there’s a fisherman here, he’s thrashing angrily in the willows, his fly caught in a tree.

Although this beavery tableau isn’t going to appear in any Field & Stream spreads, it’s in many cases a more historically accurate picture—and, in crucial ways, a much healthier one. In the intermountain West, wetlands, though they make up just 2 percent of total land area, support 80 percent of biodiversity; you may not hear the tinkle of running water in our swamp, but listen closely for the songs of warblers and flycatchers perched in creek-side willows. Wood frogs croak along the pond’s marshy aprons; otters chase trout through the submerged branches of downed trees, a forest inverted. The deep water and the close vegetation make the fishing tough, sure, but abundant trout shelter in the meandering side channels and cold depths. In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean captured the trials and ecstasies of angling in beaver country when he wrote of one character, “So off he went happily to wade in ooze and to get throttled by brush and to fall through loose piles of sticks called beaver dams and to end up with a wreath of seaweed round his neck and a basket full of fish”(1).

And it’s not just fishermen and wildlife who benefit. The weight of the pond presses water deep into the ground, recharging aquifers for use by downstream farms and ranches. Sediment and pollutants filter out in the slackwaters, cleansing flows. Floods dissipate in the ponds; wildfires hiss out in wet meadows. Wetlands capture and store spring rain and snowmelt, releasing water in delayed pulses that sustain crops through the dry summer. A report released by a consulting firm in 2011 estimated that restoring beavers to a single river basin, Utah’s Escalante, would provide tens of millions of dollars in benefits each year (2). Although you can argue with the wisdom of slapping a dollar value on nature, there’s no denying that these are some seriously important critters.

To society, though, beavers still appear more menacing than munificent. In 2013 I lived with my partner, Elise, in a farming town called Paonia, set high in the mesas of Colorado’s Western Slope. Our neighbors’ farms and orchards were watered by labyrinthine irrigation ditches, each one paralleled by a trail along which the ditch rider—the worker who maintained the system—drove his ATV during inspections. In the evenings we strolled the ditches, our soundtrack the faint gurgle of water through headgates, our backdrop the rosy sunset on Mount Lamborn. One dusk we spotted a black head drifting down the canal like a piece of floating timber. The beaver let us approach within a few feet before slapping his tail explosively and submarining off into the crepuscule. On subsequent walks we saw our ditch beaver again, and again, perhaps half a dozen times altogether. We came to expect him, and though it was probably our imaginations, he seemed to grow less skittish with each encounter.

Like many torrid romances, our relationship acquired a certain frisson from the certain knowledge that it was doomed. Although our beaver showed no inclination to dam the canal—and indeed, beavers often elect not to dam at all—we knew the ditch rider would not tolerate the possibility of sabotage. The next time the rider passed us on his ATV, a shotgun lay across his knees. The grapevine gave us unhappy tidings a few days later: Our ditch beaver was no more.

That zero-tolerance mentality remains more rule than exception: Beavers are still rodenta non grata across much of the United States. They are creative in their mischief. In 2013 residents of Taos, New Mexico, lost cell phone and internet service for twenty hours when a beaver gnawed through a fiber-optic cable (3). They have been accused of dropping trees atop cars on Prince Edward Island (4), sabotaging weddings in Saskatchewan (5) and ruining golf courses in Alabama—where, gruesomely, they were slaughtered with pitchforks, a massacre one local reporter called a “dystopian Caddyshack” (6). Sometimes they’re framed for crimes they did not commit: Beavers were accused of, and exonerated for, flooding a film set in Wales (7) (the actual culprits were the only organisms more heedless of property than beavers: teenagers). Often, though, they’re guilty as charged. In 2016 a rogue beaver was apprehended by authorities in Charlotte Hall, Maryland, after barging into a department store and rifling through its plastic-wrapped Christmas trees (8). The vandal was shipped off to a wildlife rehab center, but his comrades tend not to be so lucky.

Although our hostility toward beavers is most obviously predicated on their penchant for property damage, I suspect there’s also a deeper aversion at work. We humans are fanatical, orderly micromanagers of the natural world: We like our crops planted in parallel furrows, our dams poured with smooth concrete, our rivers straitjacketed and obedient. Beavers, meanwhile, create apparent chaos: jumbles of downed trees, riotous streamside vegetation, creeks that jump their banks with abandon. What looks to us like disorder, though, is more properly described as complexity, a profusion of life-supporting habitats that benefit nearly everything that crawls, walks, flies, and swims in North America and Europe. “A beaver pond is more than a body of water supporting the needs of a group of beavers,” wrote James B. Trefethen in 1975, “but the epicenter of a whole dynamic ecosystem” (9).

Beavers are also at the center of our own story. Practically since humans first dispersed across North America via the Bering Land Bridge—replicating a journey that beavers made repeatedly millions of years prior—the rodents have featured in the religions, cultures, and diets of indigenous peoples from the nations of the Iroquois to the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest. More recently, and destructively, it was the pursuit of beaver pelts that helped lure white people to the New World and westward across it. The fur trade sustained the Pilgrims, dragged Lewis and Clark up the Missouri, and exposed tens of thousands of native people to smallpox. The saga of beavers isn’t just the tale of a charismatic mammal—it’s the story of modern civilization, in all its grandeur and folly.

Despite the fur trade’s ravages, beavers today face no danger of extinction: Somewhere around fifteen million survive in North America, though no one knows the number for certain. In fact, they’re one of our most triumphant wildlife success stories. Beavers have rebounded more than a hundredfold since trappers reduced their numbers to around one hundred thousand by the turn of the twentieth century. The comeback has been even more dramatic across the Atlantic, where populations of a close cousin, the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber), have skyrocketed from just one thousand to around one million (10). Not only have beavers benefited from conservation laws, they’ve helped author them. It was the collapse of the beaver—along with the disappearance of other persecuted animals, like the bison and the passenger pigeon—that sparked the modern conservation movement.

But let’s not pat ourselves on the backs too heartily. As far as we’ve come, beaver restoration has many miles farther to go. When Europeans arrived in North America, the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton guessed that anywhere from sixty million to four hundred million beavers swam its rivers and ponds (11). Although Seton’s appraisal was more than a bit arbitrary, there’s no doubt that North American beaver populations remain a fraction of their historic levels. Will Harling, director of the Mid Klamath Fisheries Council, told me that some California watersheds host just one one-thousandth as many beavers as existed before trappers pursued them to the brink of oblivion.

That story, of course, isn’t unique to California, or to beavers. Europeans began despoiling North American ecosystems the moment they set boots on the stony shore of the New World. You’re probably familiar with most of the colonists’ original environmental sins: They wielded an ax against every tree, lowered a net to catch every fish, turned livestock onto every pasture, churned the prairie to dust. In California’s Sierra Nevada, nineteenth-century gold miners displaced so much sediment that the sludge could have filled the Panama Canal eight times (12). We are not accustomed to discussing the fur trade in the same breath as those earth-changing industries, but perhaps we should. The disappearance of beavers dried up wetlands and meadows, hastened erosion, altered the course of countless streams, and imperiled water-loving fish, fowl, and amphibians—an aquatic Dust Bowl. Centuries before the Glen Canyon Dam plugged up the Colorado and the Cuyahoga burst into flame, fur trappers were razing stream ecosystems. “[Beavers’] systematic and widespread removal,” wrote Sharon Brown and Suzanne Fouty in 2011, “represents the first large-scale Euro-American alteration of watersheds” (13).

If trapping out beavers ranked among humanity’s earliest crimes against nature, bringing them back is a way to pay reparations. Beavers, the animal that doubles as an ecosystem, are ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront. Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. Concerned about sedimentation, salmon populations, wildfire? Take two families of beaver and check back in a year.

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Excerpted from Ben Goldfarb's book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018). Reprinted with permission from  Chelsea Green Publishing, publishers of renewable energy, sustainable living, organic gardening, and progressive books since 1984.

Ben Goldfarb is an award-winning environmental journalist who covers wildlife management and conservation biology. His work has been featured in Science, Mother Jones, The Guardian, High Country News, VICE, Audubon Magazine, Orion, Scientific American, and many other publications. He holds a master of environmental management degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and is the author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018). Follow him on Twitter @ben_a_goldfarb.

The U.S. Government Tried to Stop These Kids' Lawsuit Over Climate Change - It Didn't Work

by Annie Reneau, Upworthy: https://www.upworthy.com/the-u-s-government-tried-to-stop-these-kids-lawsuit-over-climate-change-it-didn-t-work?c=upw1

Since 2015, 21 young people aged 8 to 20 have been engaged in Juliana v. the United States, a lawsuit over climate change.

The plaintiffs argue that the federal government has not taken sufficient action to battle catastrophic climate change and that the dire future of the planet infringes on their constitutional right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

They contend that the government has known for decades how carbon dioxide pollution and the greenhouse effect affects the Earth, yet has failed to take action to save future generations from those effects.

In fact, these kids say, the government has actually taken actionable steps to make climate change worse and has "failed to protect essential public trust resources."

As Earth Guardians — a youth-led environmental group and organizational plaintiff in the lawsuit — states, "We're holding the federal government accountable for putting our future at risk and refusing to act on climate change."

The government, under both Obama and Trump, has made multiple attempts to get the lawsuit tossed out.

Juliana v. U.S. was filed during the Obama administration and has carried over into Trump's tenure. Both administrations have attempted to have the lawsuit dismissed before it reached trial, and unsurprisingly, fossil fuel industries have attempted to join in the effort.

However, the court system rejected the government's appeals to drop the case in April 2016, November 2016, and June 2017. A judge also issued an order in June 2017 that removed the fossil fuel defendants from the case.

Still, the government persisted, with a "drastic and extraordinary"attempt to have higher courts intervene in those judges' decisions. Though ultimately unsuccessful, their actions succeeded in delayingthe original scheduled trial date of Feb. 5, 2018.

However, an appeals court again ruled in favor of the kids, finally giving them their day in court.

In a final plea in summer 2018, the government tried again to get a higher court to intervene and put a swift end to the lawsuit, claiming that letting the case go to trial would be too burdensome on the government and would unconstitutionally pit the judicial and executive branches of government against one another.

View image on Twitter

Our Children's Trust@youthvgov

BREAKING: Ninth Circuit Rules in Favor of Youth Plaintiffs Again, Denies the Trump Administration’s Second Petition for Writ of Mandamus in Juliana v. United States. Read the full press release here: https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/s/20180720-Press-Release-on-Ninth-Circuits-Second-Decision.pdf … #youthvgov

3:17 AM - Jul 21, 2018

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But on July 20, three judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously voted to allow the case to continue, stating that such arguments were better decided in court. The kids and their lawyers are scheduled to begin trial on Oct. 29 in a federal court in Eugene, Oregon.

Once again, young people are engaging in civic action to make change in their world. Hallelujah!

Suing the federal government may seem like an extreme move, but climate change is an undeniably urgent reality — one this young generation will bear the brunt of.

Thankfully, kids and teens keep proving over and over that they are ready and willing to take collective action to protect their future, no matter what obstacles lie in their path. It takes gumption and diligence to speak truth to power, and these youth seem to have plenty of both.

Go, kids, go. Millions of your fellow citizens will be rooting for you in October.

Share image: Our Children's Trust/Facebook.

It Takes a Village: Saving the South-Eastern Red-Tailed Black Cockatoo is a Community Ambition

by Daniella Teixeira, Remember the Wild: http://www.rememberthewild.org.au/it-takes-a-village-saving-the-south-eastern-red-tailed-black-cockatoo-is-a-community-ambition/

The Red-tailed Black-cockatoos of Victoria’s south-west are a distinct sub-species, known as the South-eastern Red-tailed Black-cockatoo. Image: Daniella Teixeira

In Victoria’s far south-west, the Red-tailed Black-cockatoo survives in a fragmented landscape of stringybark forests within a matrix of agricultural lands. The birds here are a distinct subspecies of Red-tailed Black-cockatoo, Calyptorhynchus banksii graptogyne or the South-eastern Red-tailed Black-cockatoo, isolated from others of their kind by thousands of kilometres. Their life history is inextricably tied to the landscape of this region, which includes the adjacent areas of South Australia. They feed almost exclusively on the small fruits of stringybark and Buloke, to which their relatively small bills are starkly adapted. They nest most often in the large, deep hollows of very old River Red Gums, many of which were ringbarked in the early 1900s.

Like its fellow Forest Red-tailed Black-cockatoo in Western Australia, the South-eastern Red-tailed Black-cockatoo is endangered. Unlike its counterpart, however, the South-eastern Red-tail hasn’t adapted to any novel food sources, thanks (at least partly) to its small bill. With the population now at about 1,400 birds, the South-eastern Red-tailed Black-cockatoo is one of Australia’s most endangered Black-cockatoos. In terms of having a small population, it is second only to the Kangaroo Island Glossy Black-cockatoo, which sits at around 400 birds (and growing, thanks to an intensive recovery program).

The decline of good quality feeding habitat is thought to be the red-tail’s most significant threat. Buloke has suffered the most severe loss through direct clearing, but the roughly 58% of stringybark that remains in Victoria continues to be threatened by fire. With no sign that the birds can eat anything else, and Buloke being too slow-growing to be planted for short- to medium-term gains, the protection of stringybark is vital to the red-tail’s survival.

I began studying this population of red-tails in early 2016, as part of my PhD research. My project came from the need for better methods to directly monitor breeding, because long-term data collected by the recovery team (a collaboration of scientists, government, non-profit groups, farmers and other stakeholders) suggested a decline in the number of juveniles in the population. Direct nest monitoring by humans had proved unfeasible.

I set out for my first field trip in the spring of 2016 to find as many red-tail nests as I could, my ultimate goal being to develop a way to monitor breeding with nothing but standalone sound recorders. If it worked, this would mean, in practice, that sound recorders at nests could provide us data on breeding behaviour and nest success. To do this, I needed to understand how red-tails behave and vocalise at nests – which meant that I first needed to find lots of nests.

I had planned for months of looking for nests in forests, but I quickly learned that with the help of the farmers who are familiar with red-tails, all my work at nests could be done on private property. In fact, this proved a much more effective approach since almost all known red-tail nests are on private land, because that’s where the big, dead River Red Gums still stand. Engaging with landowners, as it turned out, became the most important tool in my nest-monitoring arsenal. So, while every PhD student dreams of fieldwork in pristine wilderness, I found myself working not in forests but on livestock farms.

Skip forward to 2018 and I have data from nests on farms across a large part of the red-tail’s range. What’s more, the farmers keep an eye on things for me when I can’t be in the field. It’s the collaboration – and enthusiasm – of the farmers along with me and the recovery team that has allowed this project to move forward.

In a broader context, community involvement is key to this bird’s recovery. While conservation actions are guided by the scientists and stakeholders that form the recovery team, the on-ground work relies on the dedicated investment from community members. Each year, volunteers get together to find red-tail flocks so that the recovery team can collect data on population size, demographics, and the flocks’ locations in the landscape that year. This provides the most important long-term monitoring data that we have for the red-tails. Landowners also volunteer their properties for food habitat revegetation and artificial nest hollow installations.

The situation seems bleak for the South-eastern Red-tailed Black-cockatoo. We know that food habitat is being impacted by fire, and we know that natural nest hollows are collapsing. While there is serious cause for concern, optimism arises from the impressive dedication that I’ve witnessed in the red-tail community. If we can better understand how well red-tails breed and where, and then use that knowledge to take actions like revegetation and installing artificial nest boxes on private land, we will have a good chance of promoting better breeding in this endangered population.

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Daniella Teixeira’s research was recently featured on an episode of ABC’s Off Track. Make sure you give it a listen here.

Is it Time for a Post-Growth Economy? The growth-driven economic model we have adopted is killing our planet.

by Jason Hickel, Al Jazeera: 

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/time-post-growth-economy-180715141049984.html

The crowds of protesters that confronted US President Donald Trump during his visit to London last week have channelled the world's outrage at all that he represents. But despite this opposition, Trump's base is expanding. Even those who baulk at his regressive positions - his racism, misogyny, divisiveness - are willing to hold their noses and line up behind him. Why? Because of his promises to deliver growth.

Politicians rise and fall on their ability to grow the GDP. It doesn't matter what it takes, whether it's ripping up environmental protections, gutting labour laws, or fracking for cheap oil: If you achieve growth, you win.

This is only the beginning. As we bump up against the limits of growth - market saturation, resource depletion, climate change - politicians will become increasingly aggressive in their pursuit of it. People like Trump will proliferate because everyone knows that we need growth: if the economy doesn't keep expanding by at least two percent or three percent a year in developed countries, it collapses into crisis. Debts can't be repaid, firms go bust, people lose their jobs. 

The global economy has been designed in such a way that it needs to grow just to stay afloat. We are all hostages to growth, and hostages to those who promise it. 

This is a massive problem because growth is tightly linked to environmental degradation. Growth of three percent may not sound like much, but it means doubling the size of the economy every 20 years - doubling the number of cars, smartphones, air miles... i.e. doubling the waste. Scientists tell us that we have already exceeded key planetary boundaries, and we can see the consequences all around us: deforestation, biodiversity collapse, resource wars and climate change.

The good news is that it doesn't have to be this way. We can choose to create an economy that doesn't require endless growth and thus take the wind out of the sails of politicians like Trump. In fact, it's already happening: scholars and activists around the world are building the foundations for post-growth economics.

WATCH

25:20

Turning the tide on plastic: Creation and art from waste

The first step is to challenge the myth that growth is required by society. Economists and politicians tell us that we need growth in order to boost people out of poverty. But of all the new income generated by growth, only five percent goes to the poorest 60 percent of humanity. Growth is an extremely inefficient and ecologically insane way of improving people's lives. We can end poverty much more quickly, without any growth at all, simply by distributing existing income more fairly.

This is the core principle of a post-growth economy: Equity is the antidote to growth. There are lots of ideas about how to get there. We could introduce a global minimum wage and strengthen international labour laws. We could put a maximum cap on income and wealth. We could encourage and even subsidise worker-owned cooperatives so wealth and power are distributed more equally.

But we also need to do something about our structural dependence on growth.

For example, capitalism has a built-in incentive to increase labour productivity - to squeeze more value out of workers' time. But as productivity improves, workers get laid off and unemployment rises. To solve this crisis, governments have to find ways to generate more growth to create more jobs.

There are proven ways to escape this vicious cycle. We could introduce a shorter working week as Sweden has just done, sharing necessary labour so that everyone can have access to employment without the need for perpetual growth. Or we could ease off on the labour requirement altogether by rolling out a universal basic income,funded by progressive taxes on carbon, resource-extraction, and financial transactions.

WATCH

25:24

Fighting insectageddon: Why bugs matter

Another reason our economy has to grow is because of debt. Debt comes with interest, and interest is a compound function. Individuals, companies and states have to grow their output simply in order to pay down their debts. We can escape this cycle by cancelling unjust or unpayable debts - maybe usingcitizen debt audits - which would help liberate us from the growth imperative. We could also shift tonew monetary systems that don't have debt and interest built into them from the very start.

In order to help us get back within planetary boundaries, we could introduce new rules that limit the total amount of resources that we consume and waste we produce - much like we have done with CO2 emissions - so that we never extract more than the Earth can replenish or pollute more than our ecosystems can safely absorb.

And of course, we can choose to get rid of GDP as our primary indicator of economic success and embrace saner, more holistic measures, like the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which accounts for the negative ecological and social impacts of economic activity.

Countries as diverse as Bhutan, Scotland, Slovenia, Costa Rica and New Zealand are already embracing alternative measures. When politicians are told to pursue something like GPI instead of GDP, they are incentivised to maximise social goods and minimise ecological "bads". 

All of these ideas would help us transition away from the "growth-at-all-costs" model, and overthrow the tyranny of growth-obsessed politicians. We have a choice to make as a civilisation: either we prioritise growth or we prioritise life. We cannot do both. If we are going to survive the Anthropocene, it will be because we create post-growth economies that allow us to flourish in harmony with this beautiful and generous planet we call home.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

WITNESS

Illegal Deforestation: Death by a Thousand Cuts

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jason Hickel

Dr Jason Hickel is an academic at the University of London and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.