Let's say you have an OJ business. You buy oranges, sell juice, and create waste. And your super smart assistant figures out a way to make less waste and more juice. So now that you can get more juice with fewer oranges, you charge less in order to attract new customers. Maybe you expand your stand into an OJ empire serving the entire nation with your preferred pulpy product. Pretty quickly you end up with even more waste. Orange farmers are expanding production and the people saving all the money on cheap OJ can use that cash on plain tickets, cheeseburgers, and more orange juice. That's why everybody needs a lot of little. Oh, that's me. This is the story of growth. But instead of orange peels in a stand, we have carbon emissions in the economy. As better technology and more efficient process is allow us to get more energy from a given amount of dirty fuel, energy then gets cheaper. And in turn, families increase their energy use. Since the products made in factories can be produced with less fuel, all sorts of goods get cheaper. And when people can buy more, they do. Very serious people get fought this apparent contradiction. Pointing out that GDP is just a measure of value, not a measure of resources or stuff. They say that through efficiency, we can continue endless compound growth with less environmental damage. But so far, that hasn't come close to happening. In the last two decades, the only year we've reduced carbon emissions is 2009, which also happens to be the only year the world's economy didn't grow. The growth helps slide poverty, right? Not exactly. In the US, GDP has tripled in the last 40 years. But the bottom fifth of American households haven't gotten a raise, and the median hasn't cashed in on that growth either. So who's making more money as the national income increases? Top 5% of earners? The 1%? And the top 100th of the 1%. As for global poverty, you can argue that growth causes it to some extent. GDP counts money spent on new products in the economy, so one sure way for less developed countries to achieve growth is to literally sell things that used to be free. When communal orange groves that provide for everyone are privatized by a corporation and the juices sold back to the community by the plastic half gallon jug, that's considered growth. You could argue that the community doesn't have to buy orange juice, but if this were to happen with communal water sources, I think you see the problem. Or when healthy communities get sick and have to buy expensive patented medicines, that counts as growth too. Basically, GDP measures costs, not benefits. But we can't just turn around and decrease the GDP since growth-based economies tend to either grow or collapse. Half a year without growth is officially called a recession. Degrowth offers an entirely different economic possibility. Degrowth is about reducing our society's metabolism. Slowing down the rate at which we use up all the oranges, guzzle down the juice, and shit out rinds all over the land. Instead of cutting costs to profit and grow our OJ stands, we make sure all our workers are paid well. Or even better, own the company and farm cooperatively. So we got to charge a little more. But we spread the wealth around a little better so no one's excluded. We compost the peels for the community orange grove and take Fridays off to spend time with our friends and family. In other words, we don't have to devise eco alternatives that accommodate growth. Instead, we can focus on improving quality of life. Now there's no set script for degrowth. It might be putting caps on resource use and auctioning off limited permits to mine fossil fuels and distributing the proceeds evenly to everyone. Or it can be a job guarantee program to make sure everyone has meaningful work even as the economy produces less stuff overall. People can be paid for restoring ecosystems, growing organic veggies, or taking care of their aging grandparents. Degrowth is urban gardens, open source software and community credit unions. It's cooperatives for child care and health care emphasizing voluntary work to meet local needs. Degrowth above all is a cultural shift. The growth at all costs mindset divides surplus production into wasteful individualistic consumption and reinvestment for growth to make it even bigger surplus next time. Meanwhile, 2 billion of us aren't even meeting our basic needs. In degrowth, Topia, we share the surplus to live better, make rad art, and drink the finest hands-pleased orange juice at our wild parties.