In response to climate change and environmental breakdown, degrowth has become one of the key concepts in political ecology and related disciplines. Degrowth provides a critique of the ideology of growth measured as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a core objective for capitalist economies. It argues that degrowth is possible, desirable and necessary to halt further ecological destruction and to build socially just and ecologically sustainable societies.
I’m not entirely convinced that anything we do at this point can save us – or rather, save modern industrial society.
The human race will likely be fine in almost any scenario except some sort of Venus-like hellscape (which probably isn’t as unlikely as we’d like to think…), but we’ve set in motion such enormous changes that the damage is already done even if we went carbon negative right at this very second, so personally I think it’s unlikely that current mass-scale industrial society will survive a 100 years or that we’ll be able to avert billions of deaths.
Even if you’re right, I think its important to not get into a defeatist attitude. There are levels of global catastrophe and having a philosophy of “its already too late” could lead to an even worse outcome.