tl;dr Recapture the concept of growth by reformulating it as ecological growth, containing expansion and contraction, and a clear focus on ecosystem regeneration
A very long time ago, in the autumn of 2022, Liz Truss was briefly Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. One of her big policy announcements was her desire to ignite the forces of growth – by means of government debt and tax cuts, for example in the form of tax-free banker bonuses. She advised the so-called free world to follow her example, because this was supposedly the only way to deal with the rising wave of authoritarianism in the world. Outgrow your ideological opponent until they break? You’d felttransported back to the past of the 1980s: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, “Wall Street”, “Rocky IV” and so on.
Liz Truss is gone, but in Germany, Friedrich Merz and Christian Lindner would all too happily agree. After all, for Merz the peak of German prosperity is forever in the past, unless something decisive happens – probably a CDU-led federal government, the same we recently had for 16 years in a row. And as early as 2019 Lindner, head of the German FDP, has been proclaiming “Growing for the future” as a party motto: Germany needs more growth! Because of freedom! And because of our wealth! Would somebody think about the children?!
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said there are words that bewitch you. By this he meant “knowledge” – philosophically certainly a demanding and confusing concept. In the economic policy debate, “growth” seems to be what bewitches us. The term has become so commonplace in the public debate (even among those who want to replace it with “degrowth”) that anything possible and impossible can be projected onto it: growth of the economy! Personality Growth! Growth of freedom and quality of life! And, hand on your heart, who wouldn’t like to be three percent happier today than last year?
I think it’s high time to recapture the concept of growth from the Christian Lindners and Liz Truss’ of this world and turn it upside down: We must hack and reprogram growth in order to finally be able to do something meaningful with it again.
It won’t work without growth
But wait a minute, I hear from the growth-critical corner: Whether we dance to the left or to the right of the golden calf, it doesn’t change anything about its fundamental problems! Isn’t the idea of growth, of the limitless accumulation of stuff and capital, of the expansion of economic activities into our natural environment as well as our mental and spiritual inner world, the cause of most of the problems of our time? Yes, of course it is. And indeed, an understanding of growth that continues to rely on the accumulation and expansion of economic capital, the linchpin of capitalism, gets us nowhere – except into multiple ecological and social crises that are self-reinforcing. But: without growth, it just won’t work.
As long as there is a short, sharp intake of breath on one side of the growth discourse, a brief explanation might be in order: growth is an ecological category. In the planetary ecosystems, constructive and reconstructive processes are constantly taking place. Especially those who are concerned about the current state of these ecosystems – be it rain forests, oceans or moors – must have an interest in having reconstruction processes taking place here. And those are growth processes. Without intact ecosystems there’s no biodiversity, no climate protection, no opportunities for sustainable agriculture and a decent life for now eight billion people.
This environmentally benign growth can be provided in at least two ways. First, by withdrawing human economic activities to give ecosystems time and space to recover. In this case, green growth could indeed mean economic contraction or degrowth. However, it is clear to all of us that time is crucial in the 21st century. For example, how much time do we have to avoid climate catastrophe? Well, about the next ten years, until the early 2030s. By then, more than 80 percent of all CO2 emissions today must be gone in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.
Functioning ecosystems will play a crucial role in this. We are urgently dependent on theCO2 absorption capacity of rainforests, oceans, moors and other ecosystems. And here the turn to ecosystem restoration – after all, the United Nations declared 2020s as the decade of ecosystem restoration – cannot succeed through a withdrawal strategy alone. Rather: It takes active development work through human, i.e. economic activities, and these will generate economic growth and an increase in GDP.
From green to ecological growth
Such renewal growth in the double sense, ecologically as well as economically, is absolutely necessary. To do this, however, we have to fundamentally think differently about growth and evaluate it differently: growing for the future – but in the right way! What we need is an unbiased look at growth and reconstructing it for the green transition.
Incidentally, this is not synonymous with green growth: the idea of ”green growth” continues to play the old capitalist growth game with investments in green technologies to create green products for green markets, regardless whether ecosystems are affected or not. Since the other side of the growth discourse is now probably holding its breath, here’s a brief explanation too: where economic growth is still needed, particularly in the poorest countries and regions of the planet, growth should be as green as possible. This then also requires (free!) technology transfer from North to South and global debt relief to build up the corresponding technological infrastructures without immediately falling back into neocolonial dependencies.
In the Global North, however, we are talking about completely different conditions. In Europe, in North America, in the Gulf region, in East Asia, planetary boundaries are clearly exceeded by economic methods and lifestyles: here the strategy of green growth would require a massive step towards an absolute decoupling of economic activity and environmental consumption. But such a globally effective absolute decoupling has not yet taken place, despite all green investments and legal and political measures of the past decades. In fact, decoupling remains mostly relative (we’re just moving more slowly towards the abyss) and local (the North continues to outsource environmental consumption to other regions of the world). Given this very modest record of green growth, it would be downright irresponsible to put all our eggs in one basket. Mainly because we can’t get a new hand once we’ve played ours.
As necessary as green growth is in some regions of the planet, for a majority of humanity – more than 55 percent of the world’s population live in countries with high or very high standards of living, as measured by the UN Human Development Index – something else is needed. That is why I contrast the old growth and the green growth with a third type of growth: ecological growth.
The regenerative economy
Green growth understands the need to put the functioning of the planetary ecosystems first before all economic activities. This is the only way to create truly sustainable prosperity for everyone, because even in the 21st century you cannot eat, drink, or breathe money. At the same time, and here I am perhaps calming down the growth-critical corner, ecological growth also includes contraction: constructive and degradative processes constantly occur together in our natural environment – and we need a political-economic system that can allow this as well. Just as growth cannot be a dirty word, neither can contraction be a dirty word. Ecological growth includes both and represents the core of a regenerative economy.
In such a regenerative economy, not only ecosystems recover, but also social systems, and we as humans personally. Because honestly, how can we allow our own health to go the drain in addition to our planetary health? Not only in Germany, but also worldwide, we have seen a dramatic increase in mental illnesses in the past two decades, most recently driven by the corona pandemic, which in turn is directly related to the spread of industrial agricultural processes and the loss of biodiversity. Ecological growth as a means and path to a regenerative economy can then not only be a balm for ecosystems, but also for us. The idea of dynamic construction and degradation, which is central to ecological growth, also has a very personal relevance: it is about being able to let go and dare to make new beginnings.
To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, it is only when we leave behind the old ideas of growth and the old economic game of exploiting planet and people, that human development, cultural and moral advancement can really begin. With ecological growth, the peak of true prosperity is not behind us, but ahead of us. We just have to dare – and finally hack growth.