Tribune. Each society has its taboos; they sometimes cling to trivial or strange words, such as “degrowth”, constantly rejected and disqualified for twenty years. Anxiety, not very mobilizing, negative, reactionary, fad of the rich or concept (already) outdated, all the worn-out arguments to discredit him cannot resist the implacable observation, made for decades now, according to which the extraction and the material accumulation reach their limits while the dominant imaginaries of growth push us towards the abyss.
The mainstream media are now interested in degrowth after decades of silence or denial. They are obviously pushed to do so by force of circumstances, while the latest IPCC report concludes that “Climate change is spreading, accelerating and intensifying”. The worst predictions, repeated for decades by those who said to themselves “Decreasing”, continue to be confirmed, while the urgency of a massive reduction in CO emissions is needed2, that is to say of most of the material flows which constitute the foundation of our existence.
Degrowth is neither a precise program of action nor even a theory, but an aspiration born from the acute awareness of the contradictions and dead ends which characterize our lifestyles, our infrastructures and our imaginations. This term fits both in the long duration of debates on the industrialization of the world, and in the shorter temporalities of the evolution of political ecology since the 1970s.
Negative externalities
For a long time, the very idea of economic growth was meaningless, with growth referring first to biology to describe the increase in the size of living things. The term was taken up by economic theory. Until the XIXe century, societies lived in a relatively stable world, managing scarcity and constrained resources. From the beginning of the industrial boom, many doubts were expressed with regard to the project of continuous expansion of production, and many alerts were formulated against the modern project of artificialization of the world.
The question of degrowth emerges especially in the XXe century, when growth becomes the dominant ideology and the main horizon. The modern project of material accumulation intensified in the middle of the 20th century.e century; new economic criteria are needed in order to measure it and make it a benchmark for public action (this is the famous GDP). This is what pushes certain observers and intellectuals to try to open the “black box” of growth, to penetrate into its functioning, to assess its effects and its dead ends.
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