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Is America Ready for ‘Degrowth Communism’?

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Tuesday, May 28, 2024

Kohei Saito knows he sounds like a madman. That’s kind of the point, the Japanese philosopher told me during a recent visit to New York City. “Maybe, then, people get shocked,” he said. “What’s this crazy guy saying?”The crazy idea is “degrowth communism,” a combination of two concepts that are contentious on their own. Degrowth holds that there will always be a correlation between economic output and carbon emissions, so the best way to fight climate change is for wealthy nations to cut back on consumption and reduce the “material throughput” that creates demand for energy and drives GDP.The degrowth movement has swelled in recent years, particularly in Europe and in academic circles. The theory has dramatic implications. Instead of finding carbon-neutral ways to power our luxurious modern lifestyles, degrowth would require us to surrender some material comforts. One leading proponent suggests imposing a hard cap on total national energy use, which would ratchet down every year. Energy-intensive activities might be banned outright or taxed to near oblivion. (Say goodbye, perhaps, to hamburgers, SUVs, and your annual cross-country flight home for the holidays.) You’d probably be prohibited from setting the thermostat too cold in summer or too warm in winter. To keep frivolous spending down, the government might decide which products are “wasteful” and ban advertising for them. Slower growth would require less labor, so the government would shorten the workweek and guarantee a job for every person.Saito did not invent degrowth, but he has put his own spin on it by adding the C word.As for what kind of “communism” we’re talking about, Saito tends to emphasize workers’ cooperatives and generous social-welfare policies rather than top-down Leninist state control of the economy. He says he wants democratic change rather than revolution—though he’s fuzzy on how exactly you get people to vote for shrinkage.This message has found an enthusiastic audience. Saito’s 2020 book, Capital in the Anthropocene, sold half a million copies. He took a job at the prestigious University of Tokyo and became a regulator commentator on Japanese TV—one of the few far-left talking heads in that country’s conservative media sphere. When we met up in April, he was touring the northeastern U.S. to promote the new English translation of the book, titled Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, and planning to appear on a series of panels at Georgetown University to discuss his ideas. One day during his New York stint, we visited the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, where a young protester named Tianle Zhang spotted him and waved him over, telling Saito he’s the reason he’s applying to graduate school. They took a selfie together and Saito posted it on X.Saito’s haters are just as passionate as his admirers. The right-wing podcaster James Lindsay recently dedicated a three-hour episode to what he called Saito’s “death cult.” Liberals who favor renewable energy and other technologies say Saito’s ideas would lead to stagnation. On the pro-labor left, Jacobin magazine published multiple pieces criticizing degrowth in general and Saito in particular, calling his vision a “political disaster” that would hurt the working class. And don’t get the Marxist textualists started; they accuse Saito of distorting the great man’s words in order to portray Marx as the OG degrowth communist.It’s understandable why Saito provokes so much ire: He rejects the mainstream political consensus that the best way to fight climate change is through innovation, which requires growth. But no matter how many times opponents swat it down, the idea of degrowth refuses to die. Perhaps it survives these detailed, technical refutations because its very implausibility is central to its appeal.Economic growth, the French economist Daniel Cohen has written, is the religion of the modern world. Growth is the closest thing to an unalloyed good as exists in politics or economics. It’s good for the rich, and it’s good for the poor. It’s good if you believe inequality is too high, and if you think inequality doesn’t matter. Deciding how to distribute wealth is complicated, but in theory it gets easier when there’s more wealth to distribute. Growth is the source of legitimacy for governments across the political spectrum: Keep us in power, and we’ll make your life better.Japan has worshipped as devoutly as anyone. After the country’s defeat in World War II, GDP replaced military might as a source of national pride. Japan’s economy grew at a rate of nearly 10 percent until the 1970s and remained strong through the 1980s as its automotive and electronics industries boomed. So when the Asian financial bubble burst and the Japanese economy collapsed in the early 1990s, the country faced not just an economic crisis, but a crisis of meaning. If Japan wasn’t growing, what was it?[Read: Does the economy really need to stop growing quite so much?]Saito was born in 1987, just before the crash, and he grew up in a time of stagnation. As a student at a private all-boys secondary school, his politics were moderate, he says. He thought of problems like inequality and consumerism in terms of individual moral failings rather than as the consequences of policy choices. But the war in Iraq got him reading Noam Chomsky, college introduced him to Marx, and the 2008 financial crisis spurred him to question the capitalist system. Saito briefly enrolled at the University of Tokyo, but transferred to Wesleyan University, which he found insufficiently radical, on a scholarship. He graduated in 2009.The 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster at Fukushima pushed Saito to reconsider humanity’s relationship with nature. “Fukushima caused me to question whether technology and the increase of productive forces create a better society,” he said. “The answer was no.”Saito moved to Berlin and got his Ph.D. at Humboldt University, where he studied Marx’s views on ecology. In 2016, he published an academic treatise on Marx’s “ecosocialism,” the English translation of which won the prestigious Deutscher Memorial Prize for books in the Marxist tradition.Around that time, the idea of degrowth, which had been kicking around environmentalist circles for decades, was gaining steam in Europe. Saito started reading thinkers such as Tim Jackson, Giorgos Kallis, and Kate Raworth, all of whom argued that there are planetary boundaries we can’t exceed without causing mayhem. Thinkers since Thomas Malthus had been talking about limits to humanity’s expansion—sometimes with disturbing implications, as in Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, which described with disgust a teeming Delhi slum. But degrowthers identified the pursuit of GDP as the culprit, arguing that it fails to account for all kinds of human flourishing. Greta Thunberg amplified the degrowth message further when she mocked capitalist society’s “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”Japan was a ripe target for these ideas. For decades, the country had been mired in low and sometimes even negative growth. The problem was no longer new, and the government’s proposed solutions—negative interest rates; trying to boost worker productivity—were losing their appeal. “A lot of young people feel like, I don’t want to work endless overtime and give up my family life and all my hobbies just to serve a corporation until I die,” says Nick Kapur, an associate professor at Rutgers University at Camden who studies modern Japanese history. “For what? Just to grow our GDP?”  Saito saw an opening: to connect degrowth with the Marxist ideas that he had been studying closely for years. Degrowth on its own had bad branding, he told me between bites of Beyond Burger at Tom’s Restaurant in Morningside Heights. The solution, he said with a grin, was to add “another very negative term: communism.”When we met, Saito had traded his usual blazer and clean-cut look for an oversize denim jacket and a boy-band tousle. He has a disarming sense of humor: When he signs a book, he stamps it with a cartoon image of himself alongside Marx. But he’s serious about the need to embrace degrowth communism. He argues, not unreasonably, that degrowth is incompatible with capitalism, which encourages individuals to act selfishly and grow their riches. “Many people criticize neoliberalism,” Saito said. “But they don’t criticize capitalism. So that’s why we have ethical capitalism, sustainable capitalism, green capitalism.” Degrowth communism instead targets what Saito says is the root cause of our climate woes—capitalism itself—rather than just the symptoms, and prioritizes the public good over profit.While degrowthers and Marxists have plenty of intellectual overlap, the match has always been an awkward one. Marx is generally considered pro-growth: He wanted to leverage the productive tools of capitalism to bring about a socialist future in which the fruits of that production would be fairly distributed. Saito, however, rejects that “Promethean” characterization of Marx. In Capital in the Anthropocene, he instead argues that Marx converted late in life from productivism to, yes, degrowth communism. To make his case, Saito cites some of Marx’s lesser-known writings, including a draft of his 1881 letter to the Russian revolutionary writer Vera Zasulich and Critique of the Gotha Programme, which was published after Marx’s death.Saito’s book is a mishmash of political polemic, cultural criticism, and obscure Marxist exegesis. He calls individual actions like using a thermos instead of plastic water bottles “meaningless,” and mocks the UN Sustainable Development Goals, dismissing them and other market-friendly solutions as “the opiate of the masses.” Instead of relying on technology alone to save humanity, he argues, wealthy countries need to give up their consumerist lifestyles and redistribute their resources to poor countries to help them navigate the transition to a slower global economy. He advocates transitioning away from capitalism toward a “sharing economy,” and offers a mix of solutions both modest and bold. Workers should own their businesses. Citizens should control local energy production. Also: “What if Uber were publicly owned, turning its platform into a commons?” Saito argues that this arrangement would produce not scarcity but “radical abundance” as we freed ourselves from the obligation to generate ever-higher profits: “There will be more opportunities to do sports, go hiking, take up gardening, and get back in touch with nature. We will have time once again to play guitar, paint pictures, read … Compared to cramming ourselves into crowded subways every morning and eating our deli lunches in front of our computers as we work nonstop for hours and hours every day, this is clearly a richer lifestyle.”On a superficial level, Saito put a fresh young face on old environmentalist ideas. Well spoken and self-deprecating, he didn’t have the off-putting self-seriousness of many ideologues. After years of ineffective stimulus and grind culture, Saito’s ideas may have intrigued Japanese audiences looking for “the opposite of the status quo,” Nick Kapur told me. Saito’s analysis also offered a kind of tonic for Japan’s national neurosis around slow growth: What if this is good, actually? On a recent Saturday, Saito sat onstage at the People’s Forum, a community center in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, along with three other panelists: a historian, a geographer, and a journalist from The New Republic. It was a friendly crowd, but each of the panelists cast gentle doubt on Saito’s pitch. The historian said he’d like to see more modeling of the impact of degrowth policies; the geographer wondered how a degrowth agenda would ever expand beyond small, local experiments; and the journalist, Kate Aronoff, suggested that degrowth had a branding problem.Saito had just begun his U.S. tour, and he was already encountering more resistance than he’d expected. “One thing surprising about American culture is they’re really anti-degrowth,” Saito told me after the event, as we walked along a chaotic stretch of 9th Avenue. When an American writer recently laced into him online, Saito’s European friends came to his defense. But here he was more isolated.The simplest case against degrowth is that it’s not necessary. The prospect of boosting GDP while reducing emissions—known as “decoupling”—used to look like a moon shot. But now it’s happening. In more than 30 countries, including the United States and much of Europe, emissions are declining while GDP climbs, even when you factor in the “consumption-based emissions” generated in places that manufacture goods for rich countries. Solar and wind are cheaper in the U.S. than fossil fuels. Electric vehicles, for all their struggles, will make up half of global car sales by 2035, according to one recent estimate. Decoupling still isn’t happening nearly fast enough to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, but green-growthers argue that we can speed up the process with enough investment. “It’s easy to say we need a socialist revolution to solve the climate crisis, but that’s not going to happen in the timescale,” says Robert Pollin, a progressive economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who co-authored a book with Noam Chomsky on the Green New Deal.Other detractors say that degrowth would be actively harmful. It’s one thing to ask billionaires to cut back, but what about everyone else? Are they supposed to abandon hope of raising their standard of living? Saito includes working-class Americans in his indictment of the “imperial mode of living” that he blames for carbon emissions. This was too much for Matt Huber, a professor of geography at Syracuse University, and the left-leaning climate journalist Leigh Phillips, who co-wrote an article for Jacobin accusing Saito of doing “capital’s work” by “dividing the international working class against itself.”Perhaps the most vicious reads of Saito target his interpretation of Marx. In the eyes of his critics, his reliance on a handful of passages in order to prove that Marx embraced degrowth communism amounts to a kind of fan fiction. One otherwise-sympathetic scholar wrote in a Marxist journal that the evidence Saito marshals is “simply not very convincing.” Huber and Leigh describe various claims about Marx’s views made by Saito as “wild,” “remarkable,” and “unsubstantiated.” Even John Bellamy Foster, the University of Oregon sociology professor who pioneered Marxist ecological studies in the 1990s and published Saito’s first book, told an interviewer that “no concrete evidence could be found of Marx actually advocating what could reasonably be called degrowth” and called Saito’s analysis “profoundly ahistorical.” (Saito responded in an email that Huber and Phillips “never read Marx’s notebooks that I investigate. Thus, they are not in a position to judge whether my claims are unsubstantiated because I am rereading Marx’s texts based on new materials.” As for Foster’s criticism, Saito wrote: “​​Marx never used the terms like degrowth, sustainability, and ecology. It is an attempt to push beyond Marx’s thought because there is no necessity to dogmatize Marx and he did not complete his work.”)The question of whether Marx was a degrowther is academic—and so is degrowth itself, unless it can find a viable political path. Right now, that path is murky at best. The next politician to win reelection by urging voters to accept a lower standard of living will be the first. In the U.S., policies like a carbon tax and a national cap-and-trade program are dead on arrival. Even in Europe, farmers are protesting environmental regulations that they say erode their livelihoods. In today’s politics, proposing sacrifice seems like an obvious form of political suicide that would only empower politicians who don’t care about climate change.Saito nonetheless insists that degrowth is politically possible. It starts small, he says, with workers’ cooperatives and citizens’ assemblies, and then spreads from city to city. Europe is already taking the lead, he says: Amsterdam recently banned building new hotels, while Paris restricted parking for SUVs. (One could fairly ask whether these are degrowth policies or just traditional forms of regulation.) The Spanish government has piloted a four-day workweek, Barcelona has introduced car-free “superblocks,” and the Spanish city of Girona has begun to explore how to implement “post-growth policies.” Saito says success is simply a matter of convincing a critical mass of citizens to push for degrowth. He cites the statistic popularized by the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth that it only takes 3.5 percent of the population protesting to enact change.Isn’t expecting rich countries to act against their own interests a little optimistic? “Oh, yeah,” Saito said. “But the capitalist alternative is much more optimistic.” For Saito, the long-term alternative to degrowth communism is not green growth but “climate fascism,” in which countries lock down, hoard their resources, and disregard the collective good. Faced with that prospect, humanity will make the right choice. “As a philosopher,” he said, “I want to believe in the universality of reason.”Saito does propose a few concrete fixes: Ban private jets. Get rid of advertising for harmful goods and services, such as cosmetic surgery. Enact a four-day workweek. Encourage people to own one car, instead of two or three. Require shopping malls to close on Sundays, to cut down on the time available for excessive consumption. “These things won’t necessarily dismantle capitalism,” he said. “But it’s something we can do over the long term to transform our values and culture.”Of course, transforming values might be the heaviest lift of all. “Changing people’s preferences is really hard,” Dietrich Vollrath, an economist at the University of Houston who studies growth, told me. “You don’t need to change people’s preferences if you just make solar really cheap.” The Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman, who wrote The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, says people fundamentally care about raising their material living standards and always will. “Trying to reform humanity is not a project of much interest to economists,” he told me. “We talk about what to do, not how to wish for another form of human being.”Saito admits that he might be overshooting. He isn’t expecting countries to scale down in the next decade, but maybe after that. He’s not opposed to green-energy subsidies; he just wants degrowth to be part of the conversation. He emphasized that his ideas aren’t designed with realism in mind. “I’m not an activist,” he said. “I’m a scholar.” His job is to provide the theory behind the change. Making it work is up to others.Degrowthers like Saito seem to be caught in a double dilemma. They bristle at the suggestion that degrowth would take us back to premodern standards of living—yet in trying to dispel that notion, they narrow their vision so far that it resembles business-as-usual left-of-center politics. A typical rundown of degrowth policies looks like a wish list from the Democratic Socialists of America: health care for all, universal basic income, a smaller military, mutual aid, better public transportation, decolonization, and so on. Adherents reject the view that degrowth would require some authoritarian power to impose it, but have yet to articulate a political plan besides changing one mind at a time.“At bottom it’s not actually an evidence-based agenda,” Ted Nordhaus, the founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and self-described “eco-modernist,” told me. “It’s sort of a worldview and a vibe.”And yet, for many, the vibe hits. Degrowth captures a core truth of the fight against climate change: What we’re doing is not enough and might even be making things worse. Degrowth might fail too, but in the eyes of its supporters, at least it’s directionally correct. It’s the protest vote of climate activism.While in D.C., Saito co-headlined a workshop with a few dozen students at Georgetown, where they discussed degrowth. The group was mostly in favor, according to two students who attended. Fiona Naughton, a rising sophomore who studies international labor policy, told me she and many of her peers find Saito’s ideas inspiring. “A lot of us have felt such immense climate anxiety and considered whether or not we should have children,” she said. “Degrowth gives us hope for a future that we haven’t felt in a long, long time.”I also followed up with Tianle Zhang, the protester who’d taken a selfie with Saito at the Columbia rally, and asked him about how he’d discovered Saito’s work. Zhang said that as a kid in Indiana, he’d watched the news in horror as oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for months after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded. In college, he’d sensed a gap between the immensity of the problem of climate change and the attempts to address it. Saito was one of the few scholars he found who was trying to connect thinking about the environment with a broader theoretical critique of capitalism and society.Zhang said he was also deeply influenced by Paul Schrader’s 2017 film, First Reformed. The film stars Ethan Hawke as a troubled priest who descends so far into climate despair that he considers committing an act of terrorism. “For me, it was showing the failures of conventional morality to handle the issue of climate,” Zhang said.[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why the age of American progress ended]Degrowth’s appeal might be similar: not political, not even economic, but moral. In the climactic final scene of First Reformed, Hawke’s character wraps himself in barbed wire as he prepares to possibly do something horrifying and futile. This seems like a fitting metaphor for not only Saito’s proposals—Saito acknowledges that degrowth would require pain—but also their psychological appeal. We have been bad, and we must atone.Beyond its stark moral claims, the very fact of degrowth’s unreasonableness gives it weight. Degrowth advocates have called it a “missile word,” designed to provoke. There’s a reason we’re talking about degrowth and not the “steady-state economy,” which environmentalists have been pushing for decades. As the prominent degrowth thinker Jason Hickel has written, the term itself upends conventional wisdom: “It is only negative if we start from the assumption that more growth is good and desirable.” To this way of thinking, the inconceivability of degrowth only highlights how trapped we are in the growth-fetishist mindset.At the end of our dinner, Saito told me he’s working on his next book, about the role of government when it comes to implementing degrowth. “The state has to intervene, but how can we make a democratic transition?” he asked rhetorically. I asked if he had an answer. He said, “Not yet.”

Kohei Saito’s theory of how to solve climate change is economically dubious and politically impossible. Why is it so popular?

Kohei Saito knows he sounds like a madman. That’s kind of the point, the Japanese philosopher told me during a recent visit to New York City. “Maybe, then, people get shocked,” he said. “What’s this crazy guy saying?

The crazy idea is “degrowth communism,” a combination of two concepts that are contentious on their own. Degrowth holds that there will always be a correlation between economic output and carbon emissions, so the best way to fight climate change is for wealthy nations to cut back on consumption and reduce the “material throughput” that creates demand for energy and drives GDP.

The degrowth movement has swelled in recent years, particularly in Europe and in academic circles. The theory has dramatic implications. Instead of finding carbon-neutral ways to power our luxurious modern lifestyles, degrowth would require us to surrender some material comforts. One leading proponent suggests imposing a hard cap on total national energy use, which would ratchet down every year. Energy-intensive activities might be banned outright or taxed to near oblivion. (Say goodbye, perhaps, to hamburgers, SUVs, and your annual cross-country flight home for the holidays.) You’d probably be prohibited from setting the thermostat too cold in summer or too warm in winter. To keep frivolous spending down, the government might decide which products are “wasteful” and ban advertising for them. Slower growth would require less labor, so the government would shorten the workweek and guarantee a job for every person.

Saito did not invent degrowth, but he has put his own spin on it by adding the C word.

As for what kind of “communism” we’re talking about, Saito tends to emphasize workers’ cooperatives and generous social-welfare policies rather than top-down Leninist state control of the economy. He says he wants democratic change rather than revolution—though he’s fuzzy on how exactly you get people to vote for shrinkage.

This message has found an enthusiastic audience. Saito’s 2020 book, Capital in the Anthropocene, sold half a million copies. He took a job at the prestigious University of Tokyo and became a regulator commentator on Japanese TV—one of the few far-left talking heads in that country’s conservative media sphere. When we met up in April, he was touring the northeastern U.S. to promote the new English translation of the book, titled Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, and planning to appear on a series of panels at Georgetown University to discuss his ideas. One day during his New York stint, we visited the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, where a young protester named Tianle Zhang spotted him and waved him over, telling Saito he’s the reason he’s applying to graduate school. They took a selfie together and Saito posted it on X.

Saito’s haters are just as passionate as his admirers. The right-wing podcaster James Lindsay recently dedicated a three-hour episode to what he called Saito’s “death cult.” Liberals who favor renewable energy and other technologies say Saito’s ideas would lead to stagnation. On the pro-labor left, Jacobin magazine published multiple pieces criticizing degrowth in general and Saito in particular, calling his vision a “political disaster” that would hurt the working class. And don’t get the Marxist textualists started; they accuse Saito of distorting the great man’s words in order to portray Marx as the OG degrowth communist.

It’s understandable why Saito provokes so much ire: He rejects the mainstream political consensus that the best way to fight climate change is through innovation, which requires growth. But no matter how many times opponents swat it down, the idea of degrowth refuses to die. Perhaps it survives these detailed, technical refutations because its very implausibility is central to its appeal.

Economic growth, the French economist Daniel Cohen has written, is the religion of the modern world. Growth is the closest thing to an unalloyed good as exists in politics or economics. It’s good for the rich, and it’s good for the poor. It’s good if you believe inequality is too high, and if you think inequality doesn’t matter. Deciding how to distribute wealth is complicated, but in theory it gets easier when there’s more wealth to distribute. Growth is the source of legitimacy for governments across the political spectrum: Keep us in power, and we’ll make your life better.

Japan has worshipped as devoutly as anyone. After the country’s defeat in World War II, GDP replaced military might as a source of national pride. Japan’s economy grew at a rate of nearly 10 percent until the 1970s and remained strong through the 1980s as its automotive and electronics industries boomed. So when the Asian financial bubble burst and the Japanese economy collapsed in the early 1990s, the country faced not just an economic crisis, but a crisis of meaning. If Japan wasn’t growing, what was it?

[Read: Does the economy really need to stop growing quite so much?]

Saito was born in 1987, just before the crash, and he grew up in a time of stagnation. As a student at a private all-boys secondary school, his politics were moderate, he says. He thought of problems like inequality and consumerism in terms of individual moral failings rather than as the consequences of policy choices. But the war in Iraq got him reading Noam Chomsky, college introduced him to Marx, and the 2008 financial crisis spurred him to question the capitalist system. Saito briefly enrolled at the University of Tokyo, but transferred to Wesleyan University, which he found insufficiently radical, on a scholarship. He graduated in 2009.

The 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster at Fukushima pushed Saito to reconsider humanity’s relationship with nature. “Fukushima caused me to question whether technology and the increase of productive forces create a better society,” he said. “The answer was no.”

Saito moved to Berlin and got his Ph.D. at Humboldt University, where he studied Marx’s views on ecology. In 2016, he published an academic treatise on Marx’s “ecosocialism,” the English translation of which won the prestigious Deutscher Memorial Prize for books in the Marxist tradition.

Around that time, the idea of degrowth, which had been kicking around environmentalist circles for decades, was gaining steam in Europe. Saito started reading thinkers such as Tim Jackson, Giorgos Kallis, and Kate Raworth, all of whom argued that there are planetary boundaries we can’t exceed without causing mayhem. Thinkers since Thomas Malthus had been talking about limits to humanity’s expansion—sometimes with disturbing implications, as in Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, which described with disgust a teeming Delhi slum. But degrowthers identified the pursuit of GDP as the culprit, arguing that it fails to account for all kinds of human flourishing. Greta Thunberg amplified the degrowth message further when she mocked capitalist society’s “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”

Japan was a ripe target for these ideas. For decades, the country had been mired in low and sometimes even negative growth. The problem was no longer new, and the government’s proposed solutions—negative interest rates; trying to boost worker productivity—were losing their appeal. “A lot of young people feel like, I don’t want to work endless overtime and give up my family life and all my hobbies just to serve a corporation until I die,” says Nick Kapur, an associate professor at Rutgers University at Camden who studies modern Japanese history. “For what? Just to grow our GDP?”  

Saito saw an opening: to connect degrowth with the Marxist ideas that he had been studying closely for years. Degrowth on its own had bad branding, he told me between bites of Beyond Burger at Tom’s Restaurant in Morningside Heights. The solution, he said with a grin, was to add “another very negative term: communism.”

When we met, Saito had traded his usual blazer and clean-cut look for an oversize denim jacket and a boy-band tousle. He has a disarming sense of humor: When he signs a book, he stamps it with a cartoon image of himself alongside Marx. But he’s serious about the need to embrace degrowth communism. He argues, not unreasonably, that degrowth is incompatible with capitalism, which encourages individuals to act selfishly and grow their riches. “Many people criticize neoliberalism,” Saito said. “But they don’t criticize capitalism. So that’s why we have ethical capitalism, sustainable capitalism, green capitalism.” Degrowth communism instead targets what Saito says is the root cause of our climate woes—capitalism itself—rather than just the symptoms, and prioritizes the public good over profit.

While degrowthers and Marxists have plenty of intellectual overlap, the match has always been an awkward one. Marx is generally considered pro-growth: He wanted to leverage the productive tools of capitalism to bring about a socialist future in which the fruits of that production would be fairly distributed. Saito, however, rejects that “Promethean” characterization of Marx. In Capital in the Anthropocene, he instead argues that Marx converted late in life from productivism to, yes, degrowth communism. To make his case, Saito cites some of Marx’s lesser-known writings, including a draft of his 1881 letter to the Russian revolutionary writer Vera Zasulich and Critique of the Gotha Programme, which was published after Marx’s death.

Saito’s book is a mishmash of political polemic, cultural criticism, and obscure Marxist exegesis. He calls individual actions like using a thermos instead of plastic water bottles “meaningless,” and mocks the UN Sustainable Development Goals, dismissing them and other market-friendly solutions as “the opiate of the masses.” Instead of relying on technology alone to save humanity, he argues, wealthy countries need to give up their consumerist lifestyles and redistribute their resources to poor countries to help them navigate the transition to a slower global economy. He advocates transitioning away from capitalism toward a “sharing economy,” and offers a mix of solutions both modest and bold. Workers should own their businesses. Citizens should control local energy production. Also: “What if Uber were publicly owned, turning its platform into a commons?” Saito argues that this arrangement would produce not scarcity but “radical abundance” as we freed ourselves from the obligation to generate ever-higher profits: “There will be more opportunities to do sports, go hiking, take up gardening, and get back in touch with nature. We will have time once again to play guitar, paint pictures, read … Compared to cramming ourselves into crowded subways every morning and eating our deli lunches in front of our computers as we work nonstop for hours and hours every day, this is clearly a richer lifestyle.”

On a superficial level, Saito put a fresh young face on old environmentalist ideas. Well spoken and self-deprecating, he didn’t have the off-putting self-seriousness of many ideologues. After years of ineffective stimulus and grind culture, Saito’s ideas may have intrigued Japanese audiences looking for “the opposite of the status quo,” Nick Kapur told me. Saito’s analysis also offered a kind of tonic for Japan’s national neurosis around slow growth: What if this is good, actually?

On a recent Saturday, Saito sat onstage at the People’s Forum, a community center in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, along with three other panelists: a historian, a geographer, and a journalist from The New Republic. It was a friendly crowd, but each of the panelists cast gentle doubt on Saito’s pitch. The historian said he’d like to see more modeling of the impact of degrowth policies; the geographer wondered how a degrowth agenda would ever expand beyond small, local experiments; and the journalist, Kate Aronoff, suggested that degrowth had a branding problem.

Saito had just begun his U.S. tour, and he was already encountering more resistance than he’d expected. “One thing surprising about American culture is they’re really anti-degrowth,” Saito told me after the event, as we walked along a chaotic stretch of 9th Avenue. When an American writer recently laced into him online, Saito’s European friends came to his defense. But here he was more isolated.

The simplest case against degrowth is that it’s not necessary. The prospect of boosting GDP while reducing emissions—known as “decoupling”—used to look like a moon shot. But now it’s happening. In more than 30 countries, including the United States and much of Europe, emissions are declining while GDP climbs, even when you factor in the “consumption-based emissions” generated in places that manufacture goods for rich countries. Solar and wind are cheaper in the U.S. than fossil fuels. Electric vehicles, for all their struggles, will make up half of global car sales by 2035, according to one recent estimate. Decoupling still isn’t happening nearly fast enough to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, but green-growthers argue that we can speed up the process with enough investment. “It’s easy to say we need a socialist revolution to solve the climate crisis, but that’s not going to happen in the timescale,” says Robert Pollin, a progressive economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who co-authored a book with Noam Chomsky on the Green New Deal.

Other detractors say that degrowth would be actively harmful. It’s one thing to ask billionaires to cut back, but what about everyone else? Are they supposed to abandon hope of raising their standard of living? Saito includes working-class Americans in his indictment of the “imperial mode of living” that he blames for carbon emissions. This was too much for Matt Huber, a professor of geography at Syracuse University, and the left-leaning climate journalist Leigh Phillips, who co-wrote an article for Jacobin accusing Saito of doing “capital’s work” by “dividing the international working class against itself.”

Perhaps the most vicious reads of Saito target his interpretation of Marx. In the eyes of his critics, his reliance on a handful of passages in order to prove that Marx embraced degrowth communism amounts to a kind of fan fiction. One otherwise-sympathetic scholar wrote in a Marxist journal that the evidence Saito marshals is “simply not very convincing.” Huber and Leigh describe various claims about Marx’s views made by Saito as “wild,” “remarkable,” and “unsubstantiated.” Even John Bellamy Foster, the University of Oregon sociology professor who pioneered Marxist ecological studies in the 1990s and published Saito’s first book, told an interviewer that “no concrete evidence could be found of Marx actually advocating what could reasonably be called degrowth” and called Saito’s analysis “profoundly ahistorical.” (Saito responded in an email that Huber and Phillips “never read Marx’s notebooks that I investigate. Thus, they are not in a position to judge whether my claims are unsubstantiated because I am rereading Marx’s texts based on new materials.” As for Foster’s criticism, Saito wrote: “​​Marx never used the terms like degrowth, sustainability, and ecology. It is an attempt to push beyond Marx’s thought because there is no necessity to dogmatize Marx and he did not complete his work.”)

The question of whether Marx was a degrowther is academic—and so is degrowth itself, unless it can find a viable political path. Right now, that path is murky at best. The next politician to win reelection by urging voters to accept a lower standard of living will be the first. In the U.S., policies like a carbon tax and a national cap-and-trade program are dead on arrival. Even in Europe, farmers are protesting environmental regulations that they say erode their livelihoods. In today’s politics, proposing sacrifice seems like an obvious form of political suicide that would only empower politicians who don’t care about climate change.

Saito nonetheless insists that degrowth is politically possible. It starts small, he says, with workers’ cooperatives and citizens’ assemblies, and then spreads from city to city. Europe is already taking the lead, he says: Amsterdam recently banned building new hotels, while Paris restricted parking for SUVs. (One could fairly ask whether these are degrowth policies or just traditional forms of regulation.) The Spanish government has piloted a four-day workweek, Barcelona has introduced car-free “superblocks,” and the Spanish city of Girona has begun to explore how to implement “post-growth policies.” Saito says success is simply a matter of convincing a critical mass of citizens to push for degrowth. He cites the statistic popularized by the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth that it only takes 3.5 percent of the population protesting to enact change.

Isn’t expecting rich countries to act against their own interests a little optimistic? “Oh, yeah,” Saito said. “But the capitalist alternative is much more optimistic.” For Saito, the long-term alternative to degrowth communism is not green growth but “climate fascism,” in which countries lock down, hoard their resources, and disregard the collective good. Faced with that prospect, humanity will make the right choice. “As a philosopher,” he said, “I want to believe in the universality of reason.”

Saito does propose a few concrete fixes: Ban private jets. Get rid of advertising for harmful goods and services, such as cosmetic surgery. Enact a four-day workweek. Encourage people to own one car, instead of two or three. Require shopping malls to close on Sundays, to cut down on the time available for excessive consumption. “These things won’t necessarily dismantle capitalism,” he said. “But it’s something we can do over the long term to transform our values and culture.”

Of course, transforming values might be the heaviest lift of all. “Changing people’s preferences is really hard,” Dietrich Vollrath, an economist at the University of Houston who studies growth, told me. “You don’t need to change people’s preferences if you just make solar really cheap.” The Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman, who wrote The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, says people fundamentally care about raising their material living standards and always will. “Trying to reform humanity is not a project of much interest to economists,” he told me. “We talk about what to do, not how to wish for another form of human being.”

Saito admits that he might be overshooting. He isn’t expecting countries to scale down in the next decade, but maybe after that. He’s not opposed to green-energy subsidies; he just wants degrowth to be part of the conversation. He emphasized that his ideas aren’t designed with realism in mind. “I’m not an activist,” he said. “I’m a scholar.” His job is to provide the theory behind the change. Making it work is up to others.

Degrowthers like Saito seem to be caught in a double dilemma. They bristle at the suggestion that degrowth would take us back to premodern standards of living—yet in trying to dispel that notion, they narrow their vision so far that it resembles business-as-usual left-of-center politics. A typical rundown of degrowth policies looks like a wish list from the Democratic Socialists of America: health care for all, universal basic income, a smaller military, mutual aid, better public transportation, decolonization, and so on. Adherents reject the view that degrowth would require some authoritarian power to impose it, but have yet to articulate a political plan besides changing one mind at a time.

“At bottom it’s not actually an evidence-based agenda,” Ted Nordhaus, the founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and self-described “eco-modernist,” told me. “It’s sort of a worldview and a vibe.”

And yet, for many, the vibe hits. Degrowth captures a core truth of the fight against climate change: What we’re doing is not enough and might even be making things worse. Degrowth might fail too, but in the eyes of its supporters, at least it’s directionally correct. It’s the protest vote of climate activism.

While in D.C., Saito co-headlined a workshop with a few dozen students at Georgetown, where they discussed degrowth. The group was mostly in favor, according to two students who attended. Fiona Naughton, a rising sophomore who studies international labor policy, told me she and many of her peers find Saito’s ideas inspiring. “A lot of us have felt such immense climate anxiety and considered whether or not we should have children,” she said. “Degrowth gives us hope for a future that we haven’t felt in a long, long time.”

I also followed up with Tianle Zhang, the protester who’d taken a selfie with Saito at the Columbia rally, and asked him about how he’d discovered Saito’s work. Zhang said that as a kid in Indiana, he’d watched the news in horror as oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for months after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded. In college, he’d sensed a gap between the immensity of the problem of climate change and the attempts to address it. Saito was one of the few scholars he found who was trying to connect thinking about the environment with a broader theoretical critique of capitalism and society.

Zhang said he was also deeply influenced by Paul Schrader’s 2017 film, First Reformed. The film stars Ethan Hawke as a troubled priest who descends so far into climate despair that he considers committing an act of terrorism. “For me, it was showing the failures of conventional morality to handle the issue of climate,” Zhang said.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why the age of American progress ended]

Degrowth’s appeal might be similar: not political, not even economic, but moral. In the climactic final scene of First Reformed, Hawke’s character wraps himself in barbed wire as he prepares to possibly do something horrifying and futile. This seems like a fitting metaphor for not only Saito’s proposals—Saito acknowledges that degrowth would require pain—but also their psychological appeal. We have been bad, and we must atone.

Beyond its stark moral claims, the very fact of degrowth’s unreasonableness gives it weight. Degrowth advocates have called it a “missile word,” designed to provoke. There’s a reason we’re talking about degrowth and not the “steady-state economy,” which environmentalists have been pushing for decades. As the prominent degrowth thinker Jason Hickel has written, the term itself upends conventional wisdom: “It is only negative if we start from the assumption that more growth is good and desirable.” To this way of thinking, the inconceivability of degrowth only highlights how trapped we are in the growth-fetishist mindset.

At the end of our dinner, Saito told me he’s working on his next book, about the role of government when it comes to implementing degrowth. “The state has to intervene, but how can we make a democratic transition?” he asked rhetorically. I asked if he had an answer. He said, “Not yet.”

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Western North Carolina was hailed as a ‘climate haven.’ Hurricane Helene shows it’s not so simple.

Western North Carolina, and specifically the Asheville area, had been considered a possible refuge from the impacts of climate change, but it is now suffering some of the worst devastation from Hurricane Helene. The area was dubbed a potential “climate haven” due to its elevation and temperate climates as recently as 2022. The storm and its...

Western North Carolina, and specifically the Asheville area, had been considered a possible refuge from the impacts of climate change, but it is now suffering some of the worst devastation from Hurricane Helene. The area was dubbed a potential “climate haven” due to its elevation and temperate climates as recently as 2022.  The storm and its aftermath illustrate the damage that can be wrought by just one of the unusually extreme weather events that are becoming more common as a result of climate change, however — and make clear that elevation will sometimes not be enough to protect the region against such events. “Some of these places, especially at higher elevation, it’s not too hot, you’re far from the coast … places like Asheville have a lot of appeal” as climate refuges, said Margaret Walls, an environmental economist and a senior fellow at the nonprofit Resources for the Future. However, she said, in the mountains “the terrain makes it such that flooding is a problem,” and particularly in poverty-stricken areas, “there are a limited number of places people can live so they tend to live in flood prone places.” “From a rainfall perspective, the Appalachian Mountains are woefully unprepared — at the community level, the household level, our infrastructure is not prepared,” said Nicolas Zegre, an associate professor of forest hydrology at the West Virginia University Davis College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Severe flooding and mudslides brought on by Helene have left dozens of people in the region dead and displaced or stranded many others amid the wreckage of buildings and roads. Hundreds of thousands of households in North Carolina remain without power days after the storm hit, according to PowerOutage.us. Search and rescue operations are still ongoing. Much of the rain fell on mountain communities with only one or two roads leading in or out, meaning that once they were washed out, it became all but impossible to deliver supplies and relief through overland routes. Zegre noted the region has been hit with the aftereffects of heavy Gulf or Atlantic hurricanes before, notably in the early 1990s. Since then, however, the effects of climate change have likely made hurricanes more intense and denser with moisture, which made the aftermath of Helene “unprecedented” in the region, he said.  Much of what has made the storm's impact so extreme, he added, comes down to a combination of the mountainous terrain and simple gravity. “When you drop that amount of rain in mountain topography, it’s hard to avoid being impacted by the flood.” In the mountains, “the water doesn't linger like on a flat flood plain … it kind of is concentrated, and it moves at high velocity,” said Philip Berke, director of the Center for Resilient Communities and Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Additionally, Berke said, the region had already seen heavy rain in the days before the Helene remnants moved north, and due to the elevation, “cold air goes up, the dew points get reached, and the hurricane was just pumping in all that warm, moist air on top of a highly saturated situation.” An area doesn't have to be regularly impacted by extreme weather events to be devastated by one, experts said. Even if a storm like Helene is a far rarer occurrence for western North Carolina than wildfires are for the western U.S. or tropical storms are for Florida, a single catastrophic event can be enough. “When you look at property damages or damages per capita and you look at the top counties in the U.S., in many counties one single event will shoot them up to the top of the list,” Walls said. “There’s a county in New Jersey that’s very high on the list purely because 99 percent of those damages came from Hurricane Sandy.” “The lesson here is trends matter and there are certain locations that get hit repeatedly, but no place is really immune — every place needs to prepare,” she added. And when an area has limited resources — and a limited tax base — to begin with, a disaster at this level makes the rebuilding process even more difficult and complex. “It’s easier for the city of Atlanta than it is for one of these small counties in North Carolina,” she said. Berke noted that the devastation of the storm comes at a time when much of the region was experiencing the beginning of a resurgence that made it an attractive target for development. “They want to build. They want to expand. They want their tax bases,” he said.  Places like the town of Chimney Rock, which floodwaters all but swept away, were seeing new economic growth in areas like tourism, rafting and vacation rentals that weren’t part of their economies a decade ago. “At the same time, the climate and the heat has been building up and accelerating, so you have these converging forces,” he said. Ultimately, events like Helene and its aftermath demonstrate the need for both mitigation of climate change and a more expansive vision of adapting to its impacts, Zegre said. “We can’t stop the rain, we can’t stop the rivers, so we really need to think about how to adapt,” he said, particularly if the influx of tourism and permanent residents continues. “We need to expect that these storms are going to be a worst-case scenario.”

How the ‘Frida Kahlo of environmental geopolitics’ is lighting a fire under big oil

Colombian environment minister Susana Muhamad once worked for Shell. Now, as the country gears up to host the biodiversity Cop16, she is calling for a just transition away from fossil fuelsShe is one of the biggest opponents of fossil fuel on the world stage – but Susana Muhamad’s political career was sparked in the halls of an oil company. It began when she resigned as a sustainability consultant with Shell in 2009 and returned home to Colombia. She was 32 and disillusioned, a far cry from the heights she would later reach as the country’s environment minister, and one of the most high-profile progressive leaders in global environmental politics.Muhamad joined Shell an idealistic 26-year-old. “I really thought that you could make a huge impact within an energy company on the climate issue, especially because all their publicity was saying that they were going to become an energy company, meaning they will not be only a fossil fuel company,” she says, when we meet in the Colombian embassy in London. Continue reading...

She is one of the biggest opponents of fossil fuel on the world stage – but Susana Muhamad’s political career was sparked in the halls of an oil company. It began when she resigned as a sustainability consultant with Shell in 2009 and returned home to Colombia. She was 32 and disillusioned, a far cry from the heights she would later reach as the country’s environment minister, and one of the most high-profile progressive leaders in global environmental politics.Muhamad joined Shell an idealistic 26-year-old. “I really thought that you could make a huge impact within an energy company on the climate issue, especially because all their publicity was saying that they were going to become an energy company, meaning they will not be only a fossil fuel company,” she says, when we meet in the Colombian embassy in London.“I resigned the date that they decided to put their innovation money on fracking.”Muhamad, centre, speaks at a press conference in 2022 on the introduction of a fracking prohibition bill to the country’s parliament. Photograph: undefined/Courtesy of Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo SostenibleNow 47, Muhamad, whose surname comes from her Palestinian grandfather, is preparing to oversee biodiversity Cop16, a summit on the future of life on Earth that will bring together leaders from nearly 200 countries in Cali, Colombia, next month. For many, she is a rising star of the environmental movement, joining voices such as the Barbadian prime minister, Mia Mottley, in putting forward an alternative vision of how the world could be, and demanding the developed world finance a just transition.“Susana is the Frida Kahlo of environmental geopolitics,” says activist Oscar Soria. “Like Kahlo, whose art challenged cultural norms and spoke of resilience, Muhamad paints a vision of ecological justice that goes beyond traditional environmentalism … an environmental agenda that is … reshaping the narrative around climate justice and biodiversity restitution.”Muhamad during a visit to the Colombian embassy in London. Photograph: undefined/Courtesy of Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo SostenibleColombia’s embassy is sandwiched between Harrods and its Ecuadorian counterpart, and the room we meet in has a front row seat to the UK capital’s wealthiest extremes. Outside, a Rolls-Royce SUV and a blacked-out BMW wait with their drivers next to the high-end department store. Convertible supercars pass shoppers swinging luxury purchases from their hands. Muhamad, representing Colombia’s first ever leftist government, is entertaining NGOs, journalists and senior British politicians – and pushing a vision of “just transition” that would resolve economic imbalances alongside the environmental.The minister has had to be careful to avoid rhetoric on global inequality that might allow her political opponents to tie her administration to more radical leftwing politicians from her region, but she is not naive to the potential pitfalls on the path to net zero. “We have to be clear that this energy transition cannot be at the cost of Indigenous peoples, local communities and biodiversity,” she told the plenary hall at the conclusion of Cop28 in Dubai last December after a deal to transition away from fossil fuels was passed. “In this balance between opportunity and risk lies responsibility. I want to call on everyone to keep being mobilised because intergenerational justice with this text is still at stake,” she said.Colombia became the first significant fossil fuel producer to join an alliance of nations calling for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty at the December meeting. President Gustavo Petro’s administration is pushing to ban fracking as it tries to phase out coal, oil and gas, pledging to make biodiversity the basis of its wealth in the post-fossil fuels era. Last month, she launched a $40bn investment plan aimed at making this vision a reality. Muhamad was one of the ministers leading efforts to include “phase out” in the final Cop28 text in Dubai – an attempt that was ultimately unsuccessful. Colombia and Brazil, under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have been leading efforts to end deforestation in the Amazon.Muhamad with Cop28 president and UAE special envoy for climate change Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber Photograph: Juan F Betancourt Franco/Courtesy of Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo SostenibleThe night before the embassy meeting, Muhamad addressed an event for the nature summit at the Natural History Museum. Standing under a blue whale skeleton and with a statue of Charles Darwin at her back, Muhamad underscored the urgency of the task, inviting the world to the “people’s Cop”. “As we decarbonise, we have to protect and recover nature because otherwise the climate will not stabilise,” she told the crowd.Muhamad has been quick to point out that decarbonisation efforts alone will be futile without the conservation of the natural world and the huge carbon sink it provides, which absorbs half of all human emissions each year. “There is a double movement humanity must make. The first one is to decarbonise and have a just energy transition,” she said in August while announcing her vision for the conference. “The other side of the coin is to restore nature and allow nature to take again its power over planet Earth so that we can really stabilise the climate.”The scientific backdrop to October’s conference is bleak. Figures from WWF show that wildlife populations have plunged due to a mixture of habitat loss, pollution, overconsumption, the spread of invasive species and global heating. Last year was the hottest ever recorded. The droughts and extreme heat have brought catastrophic consequences for Earth’s forests, grasslands and oceans: ecosystems that underpin human health, food security and civilisation. Despite the warnings, the UN’s biodiversity convention has long been overshadowed by its climate counterpart, and governments have never met a single target they have set for themselves on biodiversity.Cali will be the host city for the biodiversity Cop16 to be held from 21 October to 1 November 2024. Photograph: Courtesy of Convention on Biological DiversityThe summit also has important domestic significance. Since Petro, a former Marxist guerrilla, announced at the climate change Cop28 in Dubai last year that Colombia would host the biodiversity conference, he and Muhamad have put Cop16 at the heart of the domestic agenda, hoping to use it as a chance to bring lasting peace with hold-out rebel groups in forest areas. In July, Central General Staff (EMC), a guerrilla faction that rejected the country’s 2016 peace agreement, threatened the summit after a series of bombings and shootings that were blamed on the group, but it has since backed down on the threat. Even so, 12,000 soldiers and police offers will be in Cali to guard the conference.“It was a very strange situation, and we are also hoping to use Cop as a way to promote peace within the country,” Muhamad says.At home, her ministerial brief ranges from eliminating deforestation across the country, which has fallen to its lowest level in 23 years, to managing Pablo Escobar’s hippos, which have thrived east of Medellín since the drug lord’s death in 1993. Muhamad bursts into laughter when I ask about the hippos and what it is like managing them, before settling into a ministerial answer. She says the African mammals are being phased out with a mixture of euthanasia, sterilisation and hippo transportation: “For us, it’s very straightforward, they are an invasive species that have been declared [as such] officially, not even by this government, by the last government. I agree with that assessment. We have already adopted in April this year the plan to manage the hippo problem,” she says.Muhamad during a 2023 press conference to announce that some of the 166 hippopotamuses belonging to former cocaine baron Pablo Escobar will be euthanized. Photograph: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty ImagesMuhamad has lived in an eco-village in South Africa with miners, worked in human rights in Denmark and lived with campesinos in Colombia when she was a student before her first “formal” job with Shell. Now, she is preparing to be a Cop president for the first time, a role that requires her to focus on consensus and make good on her decision to leave Shell. When contact by the Guardian, the company said it is to become a net-zero emissions energy business by 2050 and they are investing $5.6 billion in low-carbon solutions last year, which was 23% of our capital spending.Ultimately, she says of the vision she bought into at Shell: “I think it was greenwashing … There were people trying to push change but the regime of fossil fuels was too strong,” she says. “All of that influenced me to think that there was a more systematic change that needed to be made. And for me, the conclusion of that was politics.”

Is climate anxiety a pressing problem, or a luxury?

Concerns about our future are valid — but they aren't always shared by those who are fighting to survive in the present.

This story is part of the Grist arts and culture series Moral Hazards, a weeklong exploration of the complex — sometimes contradictory — factors that drive our ethical decision-making in the age of global warming. In May 2014, Kate Schapira carted a little table with a hand-painted sign out to a park near her home in Providence, Rhode Island, and started listening to strangers’ problems. The sign read “Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth,” referencing an emotion that was relatively unknown, or at least seldom named, at the time. As an English professor, she had no psychological training, no climate science background. She could not offer expertise, simply an ear and a venue for people to unload worries.  And people came, tentatively but earnestly, as she brought the table out roughly 30 times over the rest of the summer. Those who approached unloaded a variety of concerns — some directly related to climate change, all compounded by it. A man divulged his guilt over not being able to pay for air conditioning to keep his disabled son comfortable at home. A young woman complained that her roommate used so many plastic bottles “she had her own gyre in the ocean,” referring to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A former student described his fear of a future in which “everything’s melted and burnt.”  Schapira never intended the booth to be a permanent fixture in her life; she did it the first time, she explains now, as a way to lift herself out of a fog — to hear and be heard. Because everything she read about climate change had made her feel depressed and desperate. And worse, when she attempted to talk to friends and colleagues and loved ones about it, they mostly suggested she was overreacting. It was also a way to right a wrong, she says now, one for which she felt substantial guilt. Around 2013, a friend with whom Schapira exchanged letters had started to express more and more distress over the cascading evidence of climate change, and her helplessness in the face of it. Schapira felt herself growing increasingly depressed and anxious by her friend’s concerns, and wrote back to assert what we might call, in contemporary therapy parlance, a boundary: “I can’t hear about this anymore.” “I did someone wrong by saying, ‘I don’t have a place for this for you — there’s no place for this feeling,’” she said. “And then I was like, ‘No, there has to be a place for this feeling.’” (Schapira apologized to her friend for “rejecting an opportunity to listen,” and they continued to talk.) Schapira ended up spending the next 10 years — minus a couple during the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic — hauling her booth around New England and the mid-Atlantic. Over time, Schapira observed a pattern to the worries she took in — namely, that the ways in which our world is changing puts a strain on us and our relationships. It dictates how we feel, and then those feelings dictate how we behave. “Whatever the name for that is, I see it in everybody who talks to me,” she said. By 2019, Schapira noticed that those who approached her counseling booth no longer discussed climate change as a future phenomenon, a problem for grandchildren. It was real, it was present, and they were worried about it now. Many of them were afraid of what they would lose, she said. Something had shifted, and climate anxiety had become a mainstream experience. Kate Schapira sits at her climate anxiety counseling booth in 2017. Courtesty of Kate Schapira / Lara Henderson In the information age, awareness spreads very, very fast. In the past 15 or so years, climate change has gone from a niche issue within environmental circles to a widespread public concern. The rise in awareness could be due to any number of factors: decades of grassroots organizing that has pushed major politicians to address carbon emissions; savvier communications from environmental groups and scientists; or the exponential platform growth that youth climate activists like Greta Thunberg found with social media. But perhaps the simplest and most obvious reason is that extreme weather patterns due to climate change have become impossible to ignore. Or rather, they’ve become impossible to ignore for the rich. Hurricane Sandy brought death to the Hamptons. Much of Miami’s priciest oceanfront property will be partially submerged by the middle of the century. The Woolsey Fire burned down Miley Cyrus’ Malibu mansion. Drake’s Toronto home flooded spectacularly in a supercell storm this summer. (The ocher floodwaters, he observed, looked like an espresso martini.) It’s easy to disparage the uber-wealthy for the insulation they enjoy from many of life’s challenges. But the more uncomfortable reality is that until quite recently, the same could be said for the average American relative to other people around the world, especially in the Global South. That, too, is no longer the case. Our planet is transforming in a way that will make life much harder for most people. It already has brought suffering to millions and millions of people. And in the United States, most of us are learning about the scale and significance of this crisis at a point when there is not a whole lot of time to shift course. That realization carries both a mental toll and an emotional reckoning. The mainstreaming of therapy culture, the explosion of the self-care industrial complex, and the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic have all laid the groundwork for a very self-focused, individualistic framework for understanding our place on an altered planet. Is it ethical to focus on ourselves and our feelings, when the real harms of climate change are very much upon people with no time to worry about it? In 2019, Rebecca Weston, co-president of the Climate Psychology Alliance, was invited to a summit to address what climate change would bring to Montana, where she lived at the time. The conference brought together experts with different skill sets, and as a mental health professional, it was the first time she had thought about the emotional toll that climate change would have on communities, mostly around displacement from one’s home. There had been massive flooding in the state that year, followed by wildfires that turned the sky red and poured ash onto neighborhoods.  A few years later, right around the start of the pandemic, Weston began seeing references to “climate anxiety” everywhere. You couldn’t open a newsfeed without seeing a reference to an epidemic of mental health crises about climate change. Read Next It’s not just you: Everyone is Googling ‘climate anxiety’ Kate Yoder “It was in the very typical way that the media frames a particular kind of phenomenon as very white, very upper-middle class, very consumerist-oriented and individualist-oriented,” said Weston, highlighting one New York Times article in particular that she found “deeply offensive.” “And so when we think about climate anxiety, that’s the stereotype that emerges, and it’s a real problem. Because not only do I think that’s real and valid for the person [who experiences it], and she needs empathy, but it also really misidentifies a whole host of experiences that people feel.” That host of experiences encompasses both existential fear and acute trauma. Can we say that a mother in suburban Illinois stuck in a cycle of consuming news about climate catastrophe is having the same emotional response to climate change as a Yup’ik resident of the Alaskan village of Newtok, which is slowly relocating as chunks of its land are sucked into the Bering Sea? Probably not — the difference is an anticipatory fear of what could be lost versus mourning what already has been lost. That distinction, of course, is defined by privilege. The backlash to climate anxiety didn’t take long to emerge. In early 2019, the writer Mary Annaïse Heglar published a famous essay that chided white climate activists who deemed climate change “the first existential threat,” failing to recognize that communities of color have always had to reckon with threats to their safety and survival in a racist society. Jade Sasser, a professor of gender studies and sexuality at the University of California, Riverside, has spent the past five years interviewing predominantly young climate activists of color about their perceptions of the future, specifically with regard to having children. She found that most did not identify with the concept of climate anxiety. It was more: “Climate change makes me feel overwhelmed when I consider it in the context of everything else I’m already grappling with.” “A lot of the dominant narrative around climate anxiety assumes that people who experience it don’t have other serious pressing anxieties,” she said. “That’s what, I think, leads to it being perceived as a privileged narrative that some people really want to reject.” The sun rises behind a ridge of trees in 2019 near Missoula, Montana. The state has faced destructive flooding and wildfires in recent years. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images In April 2020, Sarah Jaquette Ray — a professor at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt — published A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, an amalgamation of research and actionable advice largely directed toward young people overwhelmed by their fear of a warming future. But over the course of writing and then promoting her book, Ray encountered pushback, largely from young people of color.  One Chicana student referenced offhand, in a class presentation, “the white fragility of worrying about the future,” an observation that hit Ray like a “bolt of lightning.” At a talk Ray gave in South Africa to University of Cape Town students about her book, her discussion of the mental health impacts of confronting climate change was met with dismissal, even indignation: This is just not an issue for my community. We are dealing with drought, starvation, disease, much bigger things than what you are talking about. “And I remember feeling embarrassed — that I was talking about something like climate anxiety when they were dealing with [issues of] survival,” she said. In 2021, Ray wrote an essay of her own exploring the “overwhelmingly white phenomenon of climate anxiety” for the magazine Scientific American. AA number of climate psychologists and activists have expressed that the rise of climate anxiety is a normal, even logical reaction to a global existential threat. It’s entirely reasonable to feel worried or sad or enraged about the degradation of ecosystems that have supported human life for eons, especially when humans’ economic progress and development is directly responsible for that degradation.  Which leads to the question: How should we deal with feeling anxious and depressed about climate change? Worrying about the effects of too much carbon in the atmosphere is not an illness to be cured by medical treatment or antidepressants, but it does influence how we behave, which is a key element of climate action.  The field of psychology tells us that human brains try to protect themselves from emotions that hurt us, leading to disengagement and retreat. Psychoanalysis goes a step further, arguing that much of our behavior is dictated by unconscious emotions buried deep within — and to change that behavior, we need to unearth those feelings and deal with them. In 1972, the psychoanalyst Howard Searles wrote that our unconscious psychological defense against anxieties around ecosystem deterioration contributed to a sort of paralysis of action, which was culturally perceived as apathy.  “If we don’t go deeply into those feelings, we become really scared of them, and we then make it much, much harder to stay engaged with the problem,” said Weston, with the Climate Psychology Alliance. She also said that unexamined emotions can lead to burnout: “If [you move] too fast from those feelings to action, it’s not actually processed feelings — it’s push them away, push them away — and invariably that model burns out.” The premise of the Climate Café, an international initiative to engage people to share their emotions about climate change, originated in the United Kingdom in 2015 and started gaining traction virtually during the pandemic. It’s a gathering where people can simply talk “without feeling pressure to find solutions or take action.”  Weston, as a clinician, has run several of the events, and she describes them taking a “pretty predictable arc”: tentative quiet, followed by a brave participant’s admission of guilt for the future their children would inherit. Then someone else chimes in to express helplessness, or overwhelm, or fear. And then another person gets so uncomfortable with naming those feelings that they interrupt to suggest a petition to sign, and someone else recommends an organization to get involved with. “And immediately,” Weston said, “those feelings are lost,” meaning they’ve been pushed back down and left unprocessed. A new book edited by the psychotherapist Steffi Bednarek, called Climate, Psychology, and Change, includes a chapter that addresses the question of whether Climate Cafés are “a function of privilege.” The answer the authors arrive at is, essentially, that ignoring or pushing aside feelings of distress about climate change risks “the creation of a fortress mindset and prevents those in the Global North from taking action that is needed.” In other words, people shut down to protect themselves. A group of young climate protesters, part of the Fridays for Future movement, gathers in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., in May 2019. Eric Baradat / AFP via Getty Images Sasser, in her research with young climate activists of color, encountered a lot of rejection of the idea that we need to process our feelings about the climate crisis. “The rationale was, we don’t have time to sit around feeling sad and worried about climate change because we have to do the work,” she said. “For so many members of marginalized communities, paralysis is not an option. If you’re paralyzed to the point of not taking action to fight for the conditions that you require for survival, then you won’t survive, right?” That’s compounded, she added, by the fact that marginalized communities face many barriers to mental health care. Then there is the question of whether feelings drive action at all. When climate anxiety became a mainstream concept around 2019, the neuroscientist Kris de Meyer remembered “having debates with people from the therapeutic side, who said that everyone had to go through that emotional quagmire to come out in a place where they could act.” But he argues that it’s the other way around: that emotions are much more predictably the consequence of an action than the driver of one.  His research shows that the complexity of individual response to emotions means that you cannot reliably expect someone to take up arms against fossil fuel companies when they feel fear or rage or despair about climate change. What you can expect is that once that person exercises some sort of action, they’ll lose that feeling of powerlessness. Another critique of the mental health profession, articulated in Bednarek’s book, is that it has been too shaped by the “capitalist values of individualism, materialism, anthropocentrism, and progress,” with little focus on our collective well-being. Read Next The UN report is scaring people. But what if fear isn’t enough? Kate Yoder To that end, after a decade of running the climate anxiety booth, Schapira observed that what people expressed to her wasn’t necessarily climate anxiety, but a sense of unease and powerlessness that undergirded all their troubles. That they were so small in the face of massive political, societal, and ecological dysfunction, and had no sense of what they could do to make any of it better. “Mental health and mental illness themselves are community questions,” she said. “How does a community take care of someone who is in profound distress, but how do communities and societies also create distress? And then, what is their responsibility in addressing and alleviating that distress, even if that distress appears to be internal?” People told her they began to feel better, she said, when they got involved with something — a group, a campaign, a movement — and found their place as part of something bigger. In 2018, during Nikayla Jefferson’s last year of undergrad at the University of California, San Diego, she became deeply involved with the youth climate group Sunrise Movement as an organizer. She participated in a hunger strike at the White House. She helped lead the 266-mile protest march from Paradise, California, to Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office in San Francisco to demand stronger federal climate legislation. She published op-eds in national outlets demanding action on a Green New Deal and mobilizing voters for candidates who she felt really understood the gravity of the climate crisis. Jefferson felt extremely anxious about climate change, but she also felt that that was the “fuel of her climate work” — a special pill she could take to push herself to the extremes of productivity. She had internalized popular messaging of that era of climate activism, specifically that there were 12 years left to stop catastrophic climate change, according to an IPCC projection of a need to curb emissions drastically by the year 2030. “And if we didn’t do this thing, then the world was going to end, and we would fall over some time horizon cliff, and [the Earth] would be completely inhabitable in my lifetime.” By the end of 2020, she was in the hospital with a debilitating panic attack, and something had to change. She started a meditation practice, got involved in the Buddhist community, and ended her involvement with the Sunrise Movement. I asked Jefferson about how fellow activists in her generation had related to the idea of climate anxiety, as it was clearly pervasive among its members. There was resistance to using the term, she said, for fear that it would alienate marginalized communities that were important to the movement’s success. “But I don’t think I agree,” she said. “I think we are all human beings, and we are all experiencing this pretty catastrophic crisis together. And yes, we are all going to be anxious about the future. And if we’re not feeling anxiety about the future, either we have made great strides in our journey of climate acceptance, or we’re in denial.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Is climate anxiety a pressing problem, or a luxury? on Oct 3, 2024.

Brazilian State to Host COP30 Climate Summit Defends Gold Mining Rules

By Ricardo BritoBRASILIA (Reuters) - The Brazilian state of Pará, which will host the COP30 global climate talks next year in the Amazon, is...

BRASILIA (Reuters) - The Brazilian state of Pará, which will host the COP30 global climate talks next year in the Amazon, is defending local regulations that encourage illegal gold mining, according to documents in the case before the Supreme Court seen by Reuters.Brazil's Green Party has challenged the regulations allowing municipal authorities to license gold prospects of up to 500 hectares. The Green Party argues the rules encourage wildcat mining in the state where most illegal gold is produced.The federal government through the environmental protection agency Ibama, its solicitor general and the country's top public prosecutor are backing the lawsuit calling for the abolition of Pará's mining rules.A Federal Police forensic report added to the case said wildcat miners use chemicals that are poisoning rivers that are vital for Indigenous communities. For instance, mercury is used to separate gold from ore and cyanide is used in gold leeching.The state government said the regulations have been in force for a decade and predate the administration of Governor Helder Barbalho, which told Reuters in May it was studying a revision of the rules.The Pará government currently opposes the lawsuit in the Supreme Court. A request for comment from Reuters went unanswered.Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva asked to host COP30 in Pará's state capital Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon River, to showcase his efforts to stop deforestation of the rainforest, which acts as one of the world's largest carbon sinks to slow global warming. He has also pledged to end illegal gold mining, much of which takes place on protected Indigenous lands.The police report said water samples gathered by inspectors showed mercury contamination on the Tapajos River was "above tolerable limits" in areas inhabited by Munduruku Indigenous people and riverine communities.(Reporting by Ricardo Brito, writing by Anthony Boadle; Editing by David Gregorio)Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters.

Hurricanes Kill People for Years after the Initial Disaster

The average tropical cyclone in the U.S. ultimately causes about 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths, new research finds

October 2, 20244 min readHurricanes Kill People for Years after the Initial DisasterThe average tropical cyclone in the U.S. ultimately causes about 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths, new research findsBy Andrea ThompsonThe Rocky Broad River flows into Lake Lure and overflows the town with debris from Chimney Rock, N.C., after heavy rains from Hurricane Helene on September 28, 2024. Approximately six feet of debris piled on the bridge from Lake Lure to Chimney Rock, blocking access. Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty ImagesMore than 160 people have lost their lives to the ferocious winds and catastrophic flooding wrought by Hurricane Helene. But the true death toll will take years—likely more than a decade—to unfold.A new study published on Wednesday in Nature found that the average tropical cyclone in the U.S. ultimately causes about 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths (those beyond what would typically be expected), compared with the average of 24 direct deaths reported in official statistics. The study’s authors estimated that, between 1950 and 2015, tropical storms and hurricanes caused between 3.6 million and 5.2 million excess deaths—more than those caused by traffic deaths or infectious diseases. And such storm-related deaths involve people from some groups more than others, marking an “important and understudied contributor to health in the United States, particularly for young or Black populations,” the authors wrote.“These are individuals who are dying years before they would have otherwise,” says study co-author Rachel Young, an environmental economist at the University of California, Berkeley.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.This study is part of a burgeoning trend: assessing the full health consequences of the growing number of disasters fueled by climate change. Epidemiologists and other experts have increasingly been emphasizing that heat wave deaths are significantly underestimated, and recent research has found that wildfire smoke kills thousands of people in California—many more than the actual flames. “We thought that there was something similar with hurricanes,” Young says.So she and Stanford University economist Solomon Hsiang looked at hurricanes that hit the U.S. from 1930 to 2015, as well as mortality data and used statistical methods to compare a state’s deaths before a storm with those that occurred over the course of 20 years after from 1950 to 2015. “We thought we’d see maybe six months or a year of a delayed effect,” Young says, but data showed excess deaths occurring for 15 years after a storm. “We were so stunned,” she says, that the researchers spent years testing and retesting to make sure the effect was real.Zane Wolf; Source: “Mortality Caused by Tropical Cyclones in the United States,” by Rachel Young and Solomon Hsiang, in Nature. Published online October 2, 2024Thinking beyond the data, the duration of the effect makes sense because “these are huge events,” Young says. “Look at what’s going on with Helene.” Families may have to spend months in damaged or mold-riddled homes before repairs are made. People may have to use their savings for repairs, leaving less money for their health care for years. People may be forced to move and live farther away from crucial social support networks. And these events exert a considerable mental health burden. “It’s devastating to the individuals, and it's devastating to the local and state governments, too,” Young says, noting that other research shows these governments experience budget declines for many years after a hurricane. For those affected, she adds, “you’re in a version of the world where you have less money, you have less resources, you have more pollution exposure”—a bad combination when it comes to staying healthy.When breaking out the data by age groups, the study found that people aged 65 and older had the largest number of storm-related excess deaths. But when the higher general probability of death in this age range was factored in, this group’s storm death risk was smaller than that of others. The biggest risk was found to be for infants under the age of one, with almost all of these deaths occurring within less than two years after a storm. Young says that this effect could be influenced by people’s inability to afford prenatal care in a storm’s wake, as well as stress or other factors.The risk of death was also higher among Black people than it was among white people, even though the white population that was exposed to storms was much larger than the exposed Black population.Zane Wolf; Source:“Mortality Caused by Tropical Cyclones in the United States,” by Rachel Young and Solomon Hsiang, in Nature. Published online October 2, 2024 (data and reference figure)The analysis further showed that “the mortality response isn’t going down over time,” Young says, meaning storms today have the same long-tail mortality impact as they did decades ago. Young and Hsiang don’t know exactly why this is the case and say it will take more research to dig into the reasons.That mortality finding particularly struck Eugenio Paglino, a postdoctoral researcher at the Helsinki Institute of Demography and Population Health, who was not involved with the new study. He says that on first reading the paper’s abstract, he thought the numbers of excess deaths the authors found “seemed pretty large,” but he felt they did a thorough job of checking the robustness of the results. He would like to see additional research examine what might actually be causing these excess deaths and further bolster the findings.Young and Hsiang also want to see this kind of follow-up research—and hope to do some themselves. It’s a necessary step toward the ultimate goal of informing policymakers of what is needed to safeguard communities in the face of the growing climate disaster. As Helene shows, “local and state governments and first responders are doing heroic work to help people after disasters,” Young says. “We don’t want their efforts to be in vain.”

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