Chapter 14: On Degrowth - Who Is Wellness For?

On February 13, 1960, during the Algerian War, France conducted its first nuclear test, known as the Gerboise Bleue, in the Sahara Desert. General Pierre Marie Gallois, a French air force brigadier general and geopolitician, was instrumental in the constitution of the French nuclear arsenal, as well as the Gerboise Bleue—an atomic bomb that was four times the strength of Hiroshima—and was given the nickname of père de la bombe A (“father of the A-bomb”).^[1]

A total of seventeen tests were carried out, four of them atmospheric detonations, and thirteen were underground, and it is said that the radiation caused a reduction in livestock and biodiversity as well as the vanishing of certain migratory birds and reptiles. The tests even led to the movement of sand dunes.^[2] “These nuclear tests need to be seen in the context of a cruel and inhuman colonial experience that was synonymous with expropriation, genocide, racism and pauperisation,” explains Hamza Hamouchene, cofounder of Algeria Solidarity Campaign and Environmental Justice North Africa, the “nuclear waste remains in the region with the French state refusing to take action to—literally—clean up its (radioactive) mess.”^[3] The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) called on the French government to take responsibility for the long-term damage that it has caused. In a report last year, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning group highlighted that “the majority of the waste is in the open air, without any security, and accessible by the population, creating a high level of sanitary and environmental insecurity.”^[4] This is how colonial forces have not only contributed consistently to the unsafety of those they colonized, but the hubris that these nations carry without any remorse for their actions is a telling sign of the West’s incapacity for accountability.

I’ve realized time and time again while writing this book that there is a deep correlation between trauma and society, and how trauma exists and lives in society, within the most mundane social dynamics. It seeps into our literature, our art, and even in how we are governed. We are a species that has evolved to have little to no regard for each other, and as colonial forces prance around speaking about the indivisible superiority given their supposed democracy, they deny a history of inhumane decisions that subjugated more than half the global population. I think back to the words of W.E.B. Du Bois almost a hundred years ago: “Whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever.”^[5] As white supremacy threatens to plummet the entire world into ecocide, is it not the responsibility of the empires that have built myths of self-importance, that have conquered land, wildlife, and peoples, is it not now their time to appropriately step up and protect the planet? Or do “superior” people not care about anybody else? Is that how we see power? Is that what we’re all working toward? How long must the charade of white supremacy exist? All he brought us was an apocalypse.

“If there is any one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear,” Amitav Ghosh wrote in 2016, “it is that to think about the world as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide.”^[6] With Covid, this is even more apparent: “The societies most geared toward individual profit, and most worshipful of economic expansion, have proved least capable of saving themselves,” Ben Ehrenreich wrote in The New Republic during the pandemic. “Decades of almost unbroken GDP growth have piled up riches in a few gated compounds while leaving the vast majority of Americans poorer and more vulnerable to illness, imprisonment, homelessness, and the ghastly futures that we know all too well await us. Covid has charted a precise map of its variegated terrain, of who gets to live and who gets pushed out to die. The same map applies to the climate crisis, too.^[7] The most recent Emissions Gap Report from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)” encouraged the richest 1 percent to reduce “‘their current emissions by at least a factor of 30,’ which would allow the poorest 50 percent of the planet’s population to increase their per capita emissions ‘by around three times their current levels.’” “For the latter,” Ehrenreich writes, “a threefold jump in consumption is the difference between constant want and a life of basic dignity. Billionaires who drop to 1/30th of their fortunes are still multimillionaires.”^[8]

In Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All, he explains that neoliberalism, in the framing of the anthropologist David Harvey, is “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”^[9] This is all good in theory, yet the logistical question remains, always: Who gets to participate in this economy? And who has to be the labor force for the things we want? My mother would often chastise, “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” as I’ve grown older, it’s clarified, because neither does labor. Every Amazon box delivered, every sneaker made, every crop that harvests the organic kale, corn and sweet potato—someone’s labor went into that, so we could have, and attain, the lives we get to live. I keep thinking of President Charles de Gaulle, who, after detonating Gerboise Bleue in the middle of the Sahara, during a war, without any concern for the ecology or people of the desert, ecstatically exclaimed: “Hourra pour la France! Depuis ce matin, elle est plus forte et plus fière.” (Hurray for France! Since this morning, she is stronger and prouder.) How do we begin to move with intentionality, when the examples of that in our society are so limited and rare? Just a few days after the torrid bomb erupted, Morocco (which has dominion over the section of the Sahara where the bomb was detonated) withdrew its ambassador from Paris. Other African nations expressed their disappointment with France’s decision to test nuclear weapons in the Sahara, citing fears of radioactive fallout and the safety of their citizens. It’s evident that leaders like de Gaulle show an almost pathological disregard for those (and what) he (and the legion of other Western leaders) felt entitled to. As Silvia Federici writes so acutely in Enduring Western Civilization: “Indeed, many of our political rights were wrenched into existence against the resistance of the most typical ‘Westerners.’ The ‘Western Civilization’ ‘legacy’ metaphor also hides the role European and non-European workers (both were considered outside the pale of ‘civilization’) have played in building the wealth and culture of Europe and America. Typically, credit for technological development is laid at the doorstep of Greek Rationalism or is presented as the logical unfolding of a Promethean inner ‘Western’ predisposition; rarely is it asked ‘Who built the factories?’”^[10]

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In 2002, in a piece about the prolific Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali, Ghosh, a Bengali-Indian, quotes a line from Ali’s poem Farewell: “Your history gets in the way of my memory.”^[11] The poem itself reads as a plaintive letter from a Kashmiri pandit about Kashmiriyat—the centuries-old syncretic identity of Kashmir, which merged Hindu-Muslim culture, festivals, language, cuisine, and clothing—and came under assault in the early 1990s. There’s a metaphor lodged in the reality of Kashmir, as it is a huge point of contention between India and Pakistan to this day. Potentially because it remains as an artifact of a bridge between two worlds. A pre-colonial syncretic sensibility.

Instead, now we exist primarily in separation from each other and extraction of each other. According to Bitch Media, “the global Ayurvedic market alone is expected to be valued at $14.9 billion by 2026. Indian exports (especially herbs, spices, and medicines) made up a sizeable amount of this market in 2019, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has credited the Covid-19 pandemic with a 45 percent increase in exports of Ayurvedic products between September 2019 and September 2020,”^[12] products produced by the very farmers protesting. And, though nearly 60 percent of the Indian population works in either agriculture or an allied sector, Arundhati Roy writes, “Indians are too poor to buy the food their country produces.” What Winston Churchill said of Palestinians comes to mind here, as it’s applicable to every plight for self-determination against colonial power: “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians in America, or the Black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”^[13] Ah yes, I wonder if “worldly-wise” here is code for exhausting hubris. The aggressor makes the standard, and then everyone has to play by their violent rules.

There are many adept (and funny) memes that reckon with these ideas far more eloquently than I, but I shall attempt to point out the obvious: Do we ever stop and think about how our limited imaginations brought us here? How we literally could have devised anything on Earth and instead we decided to create scarcity, hatred, racism, and poverty? It’s not as if these things can’t be effectively eradicated—it’s as if people are uncomfortable to change, to believe in more. Isn’t racism largely fueled by a fear of scarcity? That what you deem as yours and only yours will be taken by some unknown stranger?

But what if we committed to looking at the facts? “To say that the United States is a colonialist settler-state is not to make an accusation but rather to face historical reality,” writes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.^[14] Healing personal traumas is similar to healing societal wounds. Behaviors are redeemable, but humans, it seems, are immensely lazy. It’s easier to just say you’re this and that instead of actually investing the time or energy to be this or that. Many of us have been compromised so many times that I imagine it has made us impenetrable. The hardness becomes a shield, but now, after many years of denying your feelings, you can no longer access a sincere emotion. Everything is rote or a reaction. Nothing feels grounded or like your own. This desensitization from yourself and your integrity continues the cog. It’s our collective confusion that further pulls dishonesty. The Red Nation writes in The Red Deal, “The cunning politics of injury has come to define our era, where state and corporate perpetrators of violence and genocide are asked to—or position themselves—as purveyors of ‘justice’ while entirely sidestepping the question of colonialism and imperialism.”^[15] The Navajo Nation is still one of the largest resource colonies for the United States—providing natural gas and supplying energy through coal, and yet many of its citizens still live without clean water or electricity.

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There is a phenomenon known as postapocalyptic stress syndrome, which is the result of an intense shock from which a culture never recovers. “The Europe that came out of the Black Death was not the same as the Europe that went in,” Dr. Larry Gross tells Tyson Yunkaporta in Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. We are facing an unprecedented time, and as Yunkaporta tells us, it makes sense for us to act fast so we don’t obliterate into extinction. “We need to start working with the land, rather than against it,” Yunkaporta warns us. “Our communities need to share knowledge with one another while maintaining their own unique systems grounded in the diverse landscapes they care for.”^[16]

Copyright is an American invention, my father explained to me over the years, and by introducing Vandana Shiva’s work to me, he helped me begin to understand how biopiracy^* has played an important part in the conversation about wellness. In Earth Democracy, Shiva explains how important the seed is. “The highest sin is to allow the seed to go extinct. In my region in the Himalayas, during the Gurkha war, there was starvation but in not a single hut were the seeds eaten. The seeds had been left untouched for future generations.”^[17] For Shiva, it’s the lack of respect that colonizers have for the land that has contributed to their craven extraction of everything. When people can’t be in right relationship with the Earth, if they can’t honor her and see her unique intelligence, how can they see humanity in others? “Everyone is panicking,” Shiva said recently in an interview with MOLD magazine,^[18] “But all you have to do is turn to the seed to learn how to address these mega problems: self-organization—becoming part of a living and generous Earth—and learning the economy of abundance rather than subscribing to the economics of scarcity.”^[19]

The charade of masculinity and the banality of domination is the undercurrent of our entire species. The patriarchy disdains what it believes is extractable, and thus weaker, because in its own conception there is only room for the aggressor and submitter. But isn’t masculinity itself an imagination that is propagated through performance and bravado? It’s not mysterious, there’s no liminality—that’s why masculinity is so boring. It’s a construction that remains unchallenged by most, as if it’s just fact. But we are not machines, we can choose our own destinies.

Shiva speaks of how when the British took control of India, they considered one third to half of the total area of Bengal Province as unnecessary wasteland because it wasn’t farmland—it was forest—and therefore yielded no revenue. I think of stories of the forest that I grew up with as a child, the lush groves that are home to the beautiful and sublime Bengal tiger. When I was younger, I would pretend I was there, a Rajkumari in the wilderness. But my home was stolen by a thief, a thief who deemed the forests of my unknown youth wasteland. By people who believe that only continued dominance can yield results.

Shiva does the due diligence of explaining the Indian concept of bhaichara meaning a custom (achara) of the brother (bhai)) that was common before British colonization. The basic understanding of bhaichara was that a family would only pay taxes on what was earned by them as a family and instead meet them halfway. “Colonialism reversed this disbursement ratio, with Britain leaving only 10 percent for local infrastructure to sustain the people and taking 90 percent to run the empire,”^[20] writes Shiva.

Many cultures were not built on aggression or on conquest and war, and it’s time we see value in other ways of being. “Humanity would not exist without caretakers. But caretaking is labor. It takes work to plant crops. It takes work to hunt. It takes work to raise children. It takes work to clean homes. It takes work to break down a buffalo. It takes work to learn the properties of traditional medicines,”^[21] writes the Red Nation. It’s true, the cultural attributes of the colonized were rarely seen as valuable. But land and resources weren’t the only things that were taken. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson states, “Sexual violence is an effective tool of conquest because of the overwhelming damage it inflicts upon families, lasting for generations and instilling shame and humiliation that discourages any efforts to resist.” In North America, sexual violence was also another way to disconnect Native people “from their source of strength—their families, cultures, traditions of resistance, and the land itself.” Throughout the boarding school era, “Native children were frequently subjected to sexual violence and physical abuse by teachers and school administrators, including Christian priests.”^[22] Then if you were a Native woman, you were constantly subjected to the fraudulence of the American healthcare system through a loss of complete agency “via forced sterilizations, lack of access to equitable prenatal and postnatal care, poor reproductive health services, poverty, assimilation, exotification, and objectification.”^[23] This violence is deep. But as Chief Seattle of the Suquamish and Duwamish nations reminds us: “All things are connected.”

*  *  *

“The fashion industry more broadly is believed to contribute between 4 and 8.1 percent of the world’s total carbon footprint,” writes Maxine Bédat, adding: “those in the environmental community tend to think of our climate impact as things that take place within our own borders. But this is deceiving. As we see with our clothing, our carbon footprint extends far beyond our borders and must be taken into account when developing carbon reduction policies.”^[24] Bédat explains the breakdown, how most garment workers make 0.4 to 0.5 percent of the retail costs of the clothes they produce, how the atrocious and inhumane working conditions, with an addition of limited pay, generates and sustains a loop of poverty. A study in Bangladesh found that a vast majority of garment workers suffer from malnutrition, 77 percent are anemic, and many are underweight. “It’s undeniably positive that unionized American workers have raised their voices for better conditions, but the lack of awareness about global labor pits US workers not only against themselves, but against the rest of the world in a cruel Robin Hood trade,” adds Bédat. “Without international labor standards included in our trade deals or enforced through our own domestic laws, the more ‘costly’ protections workers in the United States demand (whether it’s higher wages or benefits like health insurance and retirement plans), the more likely companies will be to seek labor that’s less costly, from workers across the border and overseas.”^[25] We have to begin to see this holistically, as all things are connected. We have to act with that in mind.

“The seed is a circular economy and that is the economy of abundance—it is the economy of sustainability; it is the economy of renewal; it is the economy of never getting exhausted,”^[26] Shiva explains. I wonder if the extractive ways in which Indian farming has evolved have created an even more harrowing situation. Against the backdrop of the Farmer’s Strike, the three farm bills were light-years away from the concept of bhaichara. Unsurprisingly, between 1995 and 2014, a reported 296,438 Indian farmers have committed suicide.^[27] We’ve come so far from our roots in an attempt to become more civilized, we’ve lost our very humanity. “In Eastern cultures,” Shiva laments, “we’ve always seen eating as an act that embodies our relationship with the earth—if it is a conscious act. A person who’s not a farmer can still be a co-producer with the farmer through the consciousness of what the farmer is doing and gratitude for farming with care.” We need to regain this esoteric connection we once had with each other. We need to reinstall the spirit of dependency, of care.

Back to Dadabhai Naoroji’s drain theory, three journalists for Al Jazeera recently wrote about how drain theory continues via poor wages, as workers from the Global South get, on average, one-fifth the level of Northern wages, meaning “that for every unit of embodied labour and resources that the South imports from the North, they have to export many more units to pay for it.”^[28] Incurring, again, a cycle of poverty for complete extraction. “Economists Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel described this as a ‘hidden transfer of value’ from the South, which sustains high levels of income and consumption in the North. The drain takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt violence of colonial occupation and therefore without provoking protest and moral outrage.”^[29] This has resulted in an estimated 152 trillion dollars from the Global South since 1960. We perpetuate a farce when we say “developed” versus “developing” without the context of how the West creates debt in order to cajole and suppress, and that control over the market—and whose dollar has more power, or again whose value is more valued—are all invisible gears that are churning a very old story.

This is where the stories of the farmers and garment workers intersect; it’s their labor we are taking, valuing capital more than bodies. “Rich countries have a monopoly on decision-making in the World Bank and IMF, they hold most of the bargaining power in the World Trade Organization, they use their power as creditors to dictate economic policy in debtor nations, and they control 97 percent of the world’s patents. Northern states and corporations leverage this power to cheapen the prices of labor and resources in the global South, which allows them to achieve a net appropriation through trade.”^[30] It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the laws are corrupt and so are the regulators, but we have to see that all of this is connected and that the tradeoff of destroying the Earth for the sake of profit is also no longer an option. We must insist on change at every level. It was a grassroots climate movement in the United States, Bédat explains, whose protest of pollution led to the Clean Water Act in 1972 and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This “created laws and an enforcement mechanism to limit pollution from the textile and energy industries.”^[31] Yet, as Bédat tells us, “when American companies moved their production to China (and elsewhere), these protections were disregarded.”^[32] Again, because human life, if it is not American, Western, or white, is seen as disposable, and this is apparent in every facet of our modern lives.

Giorgos Kallis, in his book Degrowth, contends that this “social metabolism” of our current age has led to “the growth paradigm: the idea that perpetual economic growth is natural, necessary and desirable.”^[33] This concept of “social metabolism” became the central tenet of the geopolitical world order from the 1950s onward, resulting in the “Cold War and the arms race, the end of colonialism and its indirect continuation under the guise of ‘development,’ and the failure of socialist projects for equality.”^[34] According to Kallis, no economic growth can be ecologically sustainable, and as we are facing planetary ecological breakdown, our time is limited to make the necessary changes to prevent complete catastrophe. I am haunted by the image Bédat creates of a black river in Bangladesh: “Three of Bangladesh’s rivers are now ‘biologically dead,’ supporting no forms of life.”^[35] This is an image of catastrophe, of death, of complete and total ecological collapse.

Degrowth evolved as a critique of economic growth and was originally termed by Austrian French social philosopher André Gorz in 1972, who argued that global environmental balance, which is predicated upon non-growth (or “degrowth”), is not compatible with the capitalist system, which requires “accumulation for the sake of accumulation.” The defense of growth by nation-states is then used to argue that exponential growth is needed to overcome poverty and to create jobs. “This is bourgeois ideology in the sense that capitalism relies upon and produces the artificial scarcity to which we’re subjected,”^[36] writes Joseph Hickel, an economic anthropologist.

Human relations and enterprise have been around for millennia. I think of a young Prophet Mohammed working in the busy cosmopolitanism of Mecca for his first wife, Khadija, a businesswoman, divorcée, and fifteen years older than Mohammed. I also think of the wild majesty of the grand bazaars in Istanbul, Casablanca, the marketplace of the Silk Road—where goods were exchanged and valued, and which existed long before the introduction of capitalism. “Indeed, what we today understand as ‘economic’ activities were once embedded in social institutions in pre-capitalist societies like rituals, kinship networks, and state or religious mechanisms of redistribution. Market activities were subordinate to politics and values.”^[37] Now there’s no focus on the value of human life, and therefore upholding human values has dwindled. Capitalism has merged with the state and has become deeply embedded in it. Exploitation comes easy when there’s no barometer of what is moral, and there is no true objective regulator when all your courts can be bought.

The concept of degrowth asks society to head toward a “radical and egalitarian social transformation” by literally degrowing. Buying less, consuming less, using only what you need. But it’s an ideology for the privileged, not for the poor or homeless. We have to understand that there is a cost for our consumption, and yet we blame carbon emissions on the developing world, on the poor, without considering what created this division. “The wasteful and environmentally unsustainable consumption patterns of the working class are not produced by ‘personal’ choice but are system-induced. Every day, millions of workers in the U.S. commute to work in single occupant vehicles not because we ‘choose’ to drive. It’s because public transportation is so unreliable, jobs in the labor market are so unstable and temporary that few workers are actually able to live close to work,” writes Collin Chambers.^[38] Then of course the planned obsolescence of electronics—take Apple changing their chargers every few years so you’re forced to buy a new one—is a predatory way that capitalism encroaches upon you, forcing you to succumb to an unethical bind. But what if we built things to last? As it was for our parents? Why is “developed” synonymous to “surplus”? This waste that we’ve created is a deeply immoral pact we’ve made at the expense of the poor and of the Earth. Through actualizing degrowth, Kallis explains that it is possible to sustain well-being and improve living and ecological conditions in “an economy that unavoidably will contract.”^[39] This transformation will help us braid the economy back into society to ensure that nobody faces scarcity, which will inevitably mean creating limitations on how much we consume. Hickel advocates for “unilateral decolonization,” calling for the South to enforce degrowth in the North “by refusing to be used as a supplier of cheap labor and raw materials for Northern consumption.”^[40] Ending this exploitative relationship, Hickel tells us, would require “Northern countries to either pay more for resource and labor imports from the South, or otherwise to rely on their own resources and labor. Both options would be more expensive,”^[41] so Northern countries would naturally have to consume less.

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In the late 1980s in the state of Gujarat, India, a network known as the Honey Bee Knowledge was engineered to create safety and precautions against “knowledge asymmetry,” which is what occurs “when the people who provide knowledge do not benefit from the gathering and organizing of that knowledge.”^[42] The system is based on the metaphor of a honeybee that collects pollen from the flowers without damaging or exploiting, instead continuing the cycle of life, giving abundantly, openly.

In the Mpumalanga province in South Africa, eighty traditional healers whose health and medical training came from traditional apprenticeships, created a biocultural knowledge commons to both archive their ancient knowledge and better serve the health needs of the people actually living in their province. “An outcome of virtuous relationships with the land, the plants and animals,” they explain “is not property to be bought and sold. It is simultaneously cultural and spiritual and its movement and application promotes a kind of virtuous cohesiveness.” My favorite story is one of Paulo Wangoola, a Ugandan intellectual and civil society activist, who, after working in various parts of Africa and abroad for over two decades, returned home to the Kingdom of Busoga with this message: Take heed, this ancient knowledge cannot be lost. “You sent me out,” he told his elders, “to gain Western knowledge and to work in the structures and organisations of the Western world. I have been to their universities, have worked with their governments, have created Western style organisations here in Africa and now I have come home to share what I have learned.” His message was simple: “The children of Busoga Kingdom, the children of Afrika will never realize our full potential as people in our communities and as contributors to the global treasury of knowledge if we continue to depend wholly on the content and ways of knowledge of the European peoples. Our way forward must be linked to the recovery, replenishment and revitalization of our thousands of years old Indigenous knowledge.”^[43]

There is wisdom in trusting your instinct. Wangoola went on to establish the Mpambo Afrikan Multiversity,^[44] a higher education research institute for the revitalization and promotion of mother-tongue Afrikan scholarship, dedicated to protect the knowledge keepers, where he is currently president.

Degrowth, as Kallis explains, is inevitable, but it’s the path that we choose forward that is most important—one that integrates the vastness of colonial rule and how insidious these structures have been. It’s as if colonizers wanted our complete subservience for time immemorial. These days, it feels like there’s no escaping the root of white supremacy; a people that are this hateful must hate themselves so much. I’m not being facetious. As a rational person, and as a writer and thinker, to me the construction of whiteness is baffling in many ways, like masculinity before it. Capitalism next to it is an obnoxiously cruel system, and yet it continues. But there’s a shift happening, and as the Earth speaks louder and louder, there will be fewer chances to look away.

In Suicide, Émile Durkheim writes that “people who are more tightly bound by ties of family, religion, and local community have lower rates of suicide. But when people escape from the constraints of community they live in a world of ‘anomie’ or normlessness, and their rate of suicide goes up.”^[45] What if all people were held? What if we all felt wanted? What if some families weren’t just surviving through trauma? “In the United States, suicide is the second leading cause of death for people between the ages of 15–35, a reality that closely parallels statistics for the rest of the world, where suicide is the second leading cause of death for people aged 15–24,” writes the Red Nation.^[46]

As a person living in those demographics, this doesn’t surprise me. It’s a sense of fatalism that is evident as we hurtle toward darker and more difficult times. I’ve never understood nihilism, and its abjectness seems like just another facet of whiteness and the mythology that sustains it. Because, frankly, it’s boring that a people who divided, conquered, slaughtered, and plummeted the world on fire has the arrogance to think life has no meaning. It had meaning for the people that were forcibly removed from their cultures, their homelands, their families. It’s been interesting to write this book during a pandemic, to consider what wellness is now, because all the answers point us to a time before the construction of these horrifying systems.

In one of my favorite Toni Morrison talks, she expresses the power of goodness. “Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it’s not a compelling idea. It’s predictable. It needs all this costume to get anybody’s attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance—those things are more compelling intellectually, if not spiritually.”^[47] I spit in the face of nihilism. My ancestors survived an apocalypse, so many of ours did, and yet here I am, writing to you. To me, real human conviction, the courage to be good—even when all you’ve faced is bad—is magic. It’s to learn how to alchemize, to make shit into gold. How else can I explain being here? Other than that I tapped into an infiniteness that had been quashed and shattered, but I never surrendered to the pain and the anger of that hurt. To me, goodness is far more interesting, because it is harder. Society should change, and it should evolve even if it’s harder work. If governments are failing us (which they are), we have an option to completely rewrite the script so that nobody faces scarcity.

I’ve been part of the New York chapter of Degrowth for a year and a half now. Every meeting I’m humbled by the work, I’m moved by the desire and grace to want to change things. I don’t have the answers, but I’m willing to learn how to move forward. I know in order to participate in the future I want to live in, it’s my responsibility to act, to consider, to change for good. In a meeting with Kallis at the end of 2021, he told us to shift toward an “environmentalism of the poor” mentality, a method that encourages and challenges the elite to change, first. The elite are the most resourced and thus have a duty and responsibility to act. We have to learn how to engage in society equally, for a collective effort and benefit for all. More of us need to stop pipelines from being built and encourage governments and their leaders to dissolve NATO, for example. We have the power—and if you have a lot of money . . . then you really do. Rich people have the ability to completely change the world, they just choose not to. It’s unconscionable and it makes me sad.

Kallis told us that if you have a major platform it’s imperative now you use your voice to rally against corporatization and encourage true sustainable methods of being with the land and each other. In a climate apocalypse, what else do we have but this? Building toward one another, without the apparatus of fictious power. Degrowth might be our only option.

Footnotes

* According to Merriam-Webster, biopiracy is defined as: “The commercial development of biological compounds or genetic sequences by a technologically advanced country or organization without obtaining consent from or providing fair compensation to the peoples or nations in whose territory the materials were discovered.”

“Biopiracy,” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/biopiracy.