Toxic Legacies / Filtering the Truth

Whilst watching the documentary Closing the Loop, I stumbled
across the quote by the environmental journalist Maxine Perlla,
who stated: “I tend to think that the circular economy represents
our best chance of being able to consume comfortably
and maintain our current lifestyles. The alternative would be
to go back to the dark ages, and no one wants to do that.” I
thoroughly disagree with this quote and find it directly addresses
what I see to be the issue at its core. Living “comfortably”
and maintaining our current lifestyles is precisely what got us
into this situation and an increase in source reduction might
actually be the only way out. As Annie Leonard, the executive
director of Greenpeace USA states: “For years, we’ve been
conned into thinking the problem of plastic packaging can be
solved through better individual action. (…) But the truth is that
we cannot recycle our way out of this mess.” In order to truly
address the problem of waste in our consumer-based system
and significantly decrease environmental impacts, it is of course
important to focus on increasing the lifespan of products and
their reuse and shift towards a circular economy that prioritises
the use of renewable resources. But it is just as important to
reduce consumption, and reset our values to incorporate larger
scale reduction on both a systemic and individual scale. A
shift which does require collective behavioural changes in consumption
patterns, more responsibility and regulations, however
does not require us to go back to the “dark ages” – it requires
methods such as degrowth.
Degrowth is an economic theory underpinning a growing political
movement, that directly challenges our present growth-centred
economic system and aims to develop new roots for an
economy that “works for all”. First coined („décroissance”)
by the French philosopher Andre Gorz in 1972, it questions
whether Earth’s natural capital is compatible with the survival
of a capitalist system and addresses the need to reduce global
consumption and production for a socially just and ecologically
sustainable society. 58 The main argument degrowth raises,
is that an infinite expansion of the economy is fundamentally
contradictory to finite planetary boundaries, and we need to
reset our standards in which social and environmental well-being
replace the current standard of GDP as the indicator of
prosperity. 58 Degrowth suggests a planned reduction of energy
and resource use to bring the economy back into balance
with the living world and questions our current definition of
and “need” for growth as an ideology of capitalism. The movement
calls for high income countries to scale down their energy
and use of resources by reducing their inequality through
measures such as job guarantees, shorter working weeks and
basic universal income, and low income countries to continue
to grow their economies in sustainable ways. 59
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