What is degrowth? The throwdown over growing down

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This week:

I started planning to write this story a year ago. 

Every time I tried to crack into the subject of degrowth, I would hit a wall of arguments and counter-arguments that are enough to make your head spin. 

But let's give it a go. 

Imagine a graph measuring the progress of nations. It's a given that none of us can control the X-axis of time moving to the right. But as that happens, most countries want the Y-axis of success to trend upward. 

But what can we even quantify as success? Gross domestic product — the value of goods and services over a period of time — is relatively easy to understand and, more importantly, a comparable way of measuring it. Chasing GDP growth is seen as favourable because it means your country is wealthy, moving that money around, competing with other nations and all this is generally associated with having better health care and education. 

To be clear, GDP is not and never was a measure for total societal well-being — especially when it comes to impacts on the environment. With global climate, pollution and biodiversity crises linked to humanity's over-consumption, an old argument against chasing GDP growth takes a new form: degrowth. 

It's one concept under the umbrella of what proponents call "post-growth" thinking. 

"What's common in all of them is just questioning the fundamental thesis of current economies: That we are only well off if we keep growing our consumption year by year," said Diàna Ürge-Vorsatz, professor at the Central European University in Vienna, who recently co-authored research looking at post-growth. 

The paper says degrowth, applying to high-income countries, means "a lower GDP as a probable outcome of efforts to substantially reduce resource use." That might look like a Canada where we drove less, bought fewer new clothes, grew more food locally (and, notably, worked fewer hours). 

"The point is that instead of measuring progress by increasing consumption, we could measure progress by increasing well-being," said Ürge-Vorsatz, who is also one of the vice-chairs for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She points to metrics such as the OECD Better Life Index, which looks at factors such as health, the environment and work-life balance. Canada scores high on the first two, lower on the third. But this kind of metric is only available for some countries; it takes a lot more data and is harder to measure than GDP.

The criticism against degrowth is plentiful and vocal. Here's a boiling down of just some of those positions:

And you bet there are rebuttals.

Jeroen van den Bergh, a policy scientist and environmental economics expert at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, finds current degrowth arguments "a bit naïve." 

He agrees that the future has to look different from the past and that means changing our relationship between growth and resource extraction. 

"There's too much pessimism that we cannot move away from that relationship that we've seen so far. And I'm not optimistic about it, but I think we can achieve a lot of change if we have very ambitious policies."

He advocates, instead, for "agrowth" — with the 'a' standing for 'agnostic', meaning countries don't assess policies on their growth potential, but on their societal well-being and on environmental impact.

"The only way to get away from the dominance of GDP is to have a replacement that looks very much like it," he said, arguing this approach would mean keeping GDP but also seeking policies that value other societal benefits. 

So while some degrowth advocates call for a reduction in what they see as less necessary consumption such as commercial air travel and fast fashion, agrowth instead pushes for being flexible, by seeing strength in policies that, for example, promote planetary health. 

All this might seem like arm-chair quarterbacking (on your last down with five seconds on the clock), but it's worth mentioning that this search for an alternative has both sides agreeing the world is already experiencing a stagnation in GDP growth. Unrelated to any degrowth policies, the world is seeing a decline in growth from around four per cent in the 1960s to around one per cent now in high-income countries.  

And climate change is forecast to hit GDP, whether we want it or not.

Based on analyses by actuaries — that is, estimates by people who estimate for a living, the worst-case scenario shows climate-fuelled catastrophes causing a 50 per cent loss in GDP by the end of the century. In other words, a massive economic depression occurring alongside deaths, destruction of long-term assets and more geopolitical fragmentation. 

Faced with that future, it's perhaps more understandable why people are seeking a different way to measure success. 

— Anand Ram

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In our newest episode: Corporate leaders say Canada's new greenwashing rules are causing companies to pull back on their climate ambitions. We hear from the executive chair of Maple Leaf Foods about what he says is a "greenhushing" effect of the legislation. Then, we hear from a lawyer and a climate advocate about the pros and cons of the federal government's new law.

Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca. (And feel free to send photos, too!) 

When Ocean Wise volunteers picked up litter on Canada's shorelines last year, they found the usual top items, including cigarette butts, plastic and styrofoam pieces. But they also found 32 per cent fewer straws and 25 per cent fewer plastic bags compared to the previous year. 

The results are promising, said Kaitlyn Harris, manager of Ocean Wise's shoreline cleanup.

"This means that the federal plastic ban is working," she said. "This is having an actual impact on the environment, which ultimately means less [plastic] is ending up in our oceans, affecting habitats and ecosystems." 

The federal government labeled plastic manufactured items as toxic in 2021, paving the way for a national single-use plastic ban on some items in 2022, including plastic straws, bags and utensils. While the regulations are still in place today, it's been a confusing back and forth. 

Industry groups quickly challenged the "toxic" label that underpins the regulations, and the Supreme Court sided with them, deeming it unconstitutional. But it still upheld the regulations until a decision came from an appeal, which is still pending. 

Some provinces already had their own provincial bans on items such as plastic bags, and fewer of those items were found on their shores. The highest number of plastic bags, straws and utensils per capita were found in Ontario, which has no plastic bans.

— Charlotte Lepage

Living in a mountainous region may mean roads are too steep to walk or bike, making a car necessary, right? Maybe not. This woman explains why and how she, her partner and their dog have lived car-free in a village in the foothills of the Italian Alps for the past five years, with a few different bikes.

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What started with a seaweed guidebook and some stickers for his kids soon became a microalgae scientist's introduction to the power of seaweed as a climate solution.

The goal of 'farming under every panel'

This summer, a solar field in Alberta will not only be generating about 40 megawatts of electricity each sunny day but also producing eggs, honey, meat and wool.

There are 110,000 solar panels on the 130 hectares of land, in addition to about 400 sheep, 40 pigs and 100 chickens. The bees are arriving soon.

The solar project, which is owned by Edmonton-based Capital Power and located near the town of Strathmore, is beginning to resemble a hobby farm. But for those involved, it's an important opportunity to test new technology and farming techniques.

As demand for electricity grows every year, this site provides a glimpse into the future of the solar industry in Canada.

The chickens arrived this week and began laying eggs inside their new home, a mobile coop that slowly moves between the long rows of panels.

The structure is a self-propelled pasture barn designed by UKKÖ Robotics, a Manitoba-based startup. The concept is to house animals in a building, while providing fresh grass to graze and spreading the manure evenly on the land. Multiple times a day, the coop slowly moves a small distance, usually half a metre at a time.

The company has installed 50 of the roaming structures around the world, but this is the first time it will operate on a solar site.

"If it does work, I think there's some great applications throughout North America because this is underutilized agricultural land," said Daniel Badiou, co-founder and CEO of UKKÖ Robotics.

Solar industry vs. Farming

As the solar industry has expanded, especially in Alberta, rural landowners have raised concerns about the impact on farmland.

Those critiques are in part why the Alberta and Ontario governments have introduced new rules that restrict solar panel development on prime agricultural land and require solar operators to include some type of agriculture, depending on the quality of the land.

But sheep farmer Janna Greir said she thinks solar farming and regular farming can actually go hand in hand. She's the co-founder of Solar Sheep, and this is the fourth summer that she'll manage the vegetation at this solar field.

"Our vision is essentially farming under every panel," said Greir, who began by using sheep and has expanded to test out on other animals.

"We want to kind of prove the concept that we can raise more protein and more local food per acre," she said.

"There's a ton of solar development going on throughout the province, and so we're just trying to keep that land in agriculture. But we're also trying to keep it and leave it in a better place than when we started."

'Rethinking how beekeeping is done'

The bees will also be part of testing new technology, as they will be housed in a predator-proof, climate-controlled building that's similar in size to a garden shed. The mobile indoor apiary is designed and built by Bee Cube, a Calgary startup.

Each building has sensors to monitor temperature, humidity, weight and the sound of the bees.

"All that data goes to a database so that beekeepers will know what's going on inside their hives at any given time," said Herman Van Reekum, founder and CEO of Bee Cube.

At the solar field, the bees will not only produce honey; they'll help pollinate the various types of flowering plants.

The main objective of the Strathmore solar field, located about 40 kilometres east of Calgary, is to generate electricity, but the agricultural activities are nonetheless important, said Wade Heuscher, solar manager for Capital Power, the power generator that owns the project.

The company is beginning a 10-year soil-testing program to better understand how the livestock, rotational grazing and vegetation management are impacting the soil conditions.

"This is the way of the future, " Heuscher said. "I think this is a partnership that all solar providers should be looking at doing."

— Kyle Bakx

Thanks for reading. If you have questions, criticisms or story tips, please send them to whatonearth@cbc.ca.

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Editors: Emily Chung and Hannah Hoag | Logo design: Sködt McNalty

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