Can we discuss degrowth without the ideology?

December 17, 2025

It may well be that imperialism, colonialism, racism and ecocide are the four horsemen of capitalism’s apocalypse, but all this ideology is clouding the issue. What we need is degrowth, both of the economy (certainly in industrialised countries) and of population. If you degrow the economy but the population continues to grow, then people get poorer.

We need degrowth because the world is in overshoot. We have consumed too many resources and produced too many wastes. This is reflected in climate change and plummeting biodiversity. We have to restore balance, though that might not be possible until the population gets down under two billion people.

It’s worth looking at Japan whose population shrank by 908,000 last year to around 120 million. Its economy shrank this year as well. While commentators decry both, nevertheless, the fewer the number of people, the more resources there are for each person, assuming the economy doesn’t decline more quickly than population.

Sea-level rise threatens to take food-producing land away from us. Soon we may not be able to feed everyone. So, reducing the human footprint, and the number of feet, is critical, not just for the sake of climate mitigation, but for adaptation as well.