I am one of the people who made it to the end of watching the series ‘Lost’. I really quite enjoyed it in places, but in the end it got bogged down in its own silliness, with plot lines that went nowhere and the promise that the whole thing would eventually make sense (which it never did), and when the whole thing finished with the most contrived, ridiculous and utterly unbelievable ending, I came to rather resent the 3 days and 18 hours of my life that I had invested in it. Getting to the end of Leigh Phillips’ book ‘Austerity Ecology and the Collapse Porn Addicts’ was a similar experience.
This is a book that would have you believe that "the back-to-the-land ideology and aesthetic of locally-woven organic carrot-pants, pathogen-encrusted compost toilets and civilisational collapse is hegemonic". Phillips wears his antagonism on his sleeve throughout, referring to Transition folk, degrowthers and the wide spectrum of the Green/alternative economics world as "anti-packaging jihadis", "degrowth militants", "green Mr Magoos", and "an army of tattooed-and-bearded, twelve-dollar-farmers’-market-marmalade-smearing, kale-bothering, latter-day Lady Bracknells". Plaudits for creative writing aside, hopefully you are getting a sense of where Phillips is coming from. This is a tirade which starts out attempting to sound rational and informed, but which as the book goes on, loses the plot entirely.
‘Austerity Ecology’ is published by Zero Books, who imagine themselves as holding some kind of line against ‘cretinous anti-intellectualism’, and publishers of Greg Sharzer’s atrocious hit job on localisation ‘No Local’, a book so bad I didn’t make it beyond the third chapter due to his basically making the same point over and over again, basically "localisation is a rubbish idea because Marx said so". ‘Austerity Ecology’ tries really hard to avoid doing the same, but in the end just can’t quite help itself.
Phillips’ central thesis is that he sees the rise of those on the left who question economic growth and consumer culture, and he is appalled. "Far from being central to progressive thought", he writes, "this cauldron of seething, effervescing misanthropy is in fact utterly alien to the rich tradition of humanism on the left and must be thoroughly excised from our ranks".
He argues that we need growth, and more of it, and to argue otherwise is anti-progress, anti-modernist, even anti-human. "There will need to be more growth, more progress, more industry, and, above all, we will need to become more civilised, if we are to solve the global biocrisis … this new paradigm of rejecting growth and embracing limits is also by definition a rejection of progress", he fulminates.
All of which leads us to an interesting discussion about what exactly progress is. "The logical conclusion of degrowth is ineluctable", he writes, "we must remain technologically, scientifically, medically frozen. All new innovation linked to the material world must be relinquished". What rubbish. Phillips sees progress as being about inventions, about things, machines, devices, economic growth.
New Economic Foundation recently published their suggested five headline indicators for national success in the UK. They argue that the 5 measures should be Good Jobs, Wellbeing, Environment, Fairness and Health. They seem like pretty good indicators of "progress" to me. Surely progress should be that the places where we live feel like they have more control over their own future, more options, better connected, increased biodiversity. That people are becoming healthier, wiser, more fulfilled. When the Caring Town Totnes initiative asked local people "what makes you unwell?", the answers were not about disease, but about loneliness, isolation, stress, financial worries. When government fails to address those challenges, then it falls to us as communities to do so. To take such a narrow definition of ‘progress’ really does nobody any favours.
I recently visited Ungersheim in north eastern France, where the Mayor has taken to Transition with huge enthusiasm, and, among other things, has:
- Introduced more participative democracy
- Become a Fair Trade town
- Launched a local currency, ‘Le Radis’ (the radish)
- Mapped the biodiversity of the area in an ‘Atlas of Biodiversity’
- Returned a former waste heap created by mining to nature
- Installed a 120m2 solar thermal installation at the swimming pool
- Installed a wood biomass boiler which also heats the pool and several adjoining buildings
- Built a 5.3MW solar installation and industrial estate
- Changed all the public lighting in the village to low energy bulbs, leading to a 40% reduction in energy use, as well as turning some street lights off after midnight
- Assessed all public buildings for their energy consumption
- Made land available (land owned by the Comune) to a PassivHaus co-housing project, Eco-Hameau Le Champré
- Bought a working horse to help with local food production, and also to act as a ‘bus’ to take local school kids to school
- Changed the catering arrangements so that the local primary school now serves 100% organic meals, every day, including snacks
- Transformed 8 hectares of land owned by the Comune into an organic market, Les Jardins de Cocagne, which produce 64 varieties of vegetables, provide 250 baskets of food for local families each week, and which run stalls at 5 markets every week (and provides the food for the schools)
- Started a food preservation business, canning locally produced food so as to extend its availability
It certainly felt like progress to me and to everyone I spoke to there. People were really excited about the changes they could see happening around them. It did not feel less civilised, less human.
Phillips would have you believe that Transition/Degrowth/anti-consumerism thinking has taken over the world, that he is alone in holding out against this tide of babbling unreason. Like UKIP railing against the dominance of "political correctness", he would have you believe that localisation and post-growth ideas and the idea of limits are ideas "that … dominate in contemporary culture". Really? "Anti-consumerism has become a fundamental doctrine of the modern left, indeed of mainstream thought across the board" he rails. Really? Apparently, "the idea of a balance of nature is … deeply embedded in our culture". I think we must be living on different planets.
Have we seen any political parties in this country, even fringe ones, running on policies around economic contraction and localisation? Even the Green Party was talking up growth during the last election. How often do these ideas even appear in the mainstream media? On television? On the radio? In discussions in most pubs up and down the country, or on the football terraces?
What are the actual trends we see happening in the world? The relentless erosion of local economies and independent businesses. The ongoing destruction of small farming. Vast crossborder organisations like Amazon destroying bookshops and other retailers while avoiding the tax arrangements other businesses are bound to.
And how about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), being negotiated in private between governments and corporations, which would make intentional localisation virtually illegal? In spite of this book not having an index (never a good sign – I thought Zero were a bastion of intellectualism?) I searched through it for mention of TTIP, but it didn’t appear once, leaving the impression that Phillips believes the localisation movement is a greater threat to social justice and fairness than TTIP.
If I were to address all the ludicrous arguments in this book this review would be almost as long as the book it is reviewing, so I have picked just a few of the key turkeys. The first arises from his use of the term ‘Austerity Ecology’? He argues that:
"One cannot in one breath rage against the imposition of economic austerity – the series of radical cuts to social programmes and depression of wages imposed by most Western governments in the wake of the global economic crisis – while arguing against economic growth. Austerity and ‘degrowth’ are mathematically and socially identical. They are the same thing. What green degrowth partisans are actually calling for is eco-austerity".
This is just one place in the book where Phillips parts company with reality (although not a patch on what comes later in the book as you will see). It is a ludicrous point. The kind of austerity suggested by Transition, post-growthers and the like is profoundly different from that being imposed by George Osborne and his ilk. Osborne’s version imposes negative distribution of money, resources and services, whereas the other version advocates for a positive redistribution.
Under Osborne’s austerity, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer; in a degrowth/post-growth approach the opposite happens. Under a degrowth/post-growth scenario, no-one starves to death, no-one freezes to death in their homes. In the UK we are now back to levels of inequality not seen since the Edwardian times, and Osborne’s austerity measures only add to that, the opposite of the degrowth approach. Degrowth has social justice, fairness, the idea of a ‘Maximum Wage’ designed into it, the opposite of Osborne’s approach. Clearly they are completely different, not "socially identical". To argue otherwise is completely disingenuous. And, given the publisher’s commitment to intellectual rigour, no evidence is presented at all for his argument that these two versions of austerity are "socially identical". No mention, for example, of Peter Victor and Tim Jackson’s work attempting to model what ‘ecological austerity’ might actually look like in practice. No mention of Tradeable Energy Quotas, David Fleming’s brilliant model for reducing carbon emissions while also building social equity.
Secondly, he argues that local currencies actually increase carbon emissions, "for the simple reason that the sort of larger loads in your car when you travel to the non-local-currency-accepting big box retailer can mean fewer trips there". I’ll leave you to reflect on the stupidity of that particular argument.
"Improving the wealth of a community requires economic development, something at which the Transitioners look askance" he adds. Keep up Leigh. Have you seen the Economic Blueprints some Transition groups are developing? The REconomy Project? The millions of pound of inward investment being generated by community energy projects? The shift in Transition to creating new local economies, new local businesses, to communities owning their own assets, becoming their own development? Local Entrepreneur Forums? We refuse to comply to the straw man you are creating for us.
Thirdly, he argues that localising food production, growing food closer to where people live:
"…means turning more forest, wetlands and grasslands into agricultural space, releasing vast quantities of carbon in the immediate term and, in the future, eliminating the carbon sinks that forests would have represented".
What utter nonsense. Look at the local food projects being started by Transition groups and others around the world. Take Crystal Palace Transition Town’s ‘Patchwork Farm’, growing food across Crystal Palace in parks, gardens, school grounds, unloved corners. Or Liege en Transition’s Ceinture d’Aliment-terre project, reconnecting the city to the land around it as a learning network of farms serving local needs. Or Growing Communities in Hackney and their Food Zones model for feeding London. Or the research by the Urban Design Lab that showed that New York contains 1,200 acres of potential rooftop growing space.
No forest clearance, no wetland draining. No huge releases of carbon. Rather a bringing back to life of urban land currently covered in rubbish, or using food growing as a way to breathe life into public spaces, to reimagine peri-urban land currently home to stockbrokers’ daughters’ ponies, to bring food security, employment, beauty and wellbeing to disenfranchised urban communities. No swamp draining required. Sounds like progress to me.
Transition gets its very own kicking, in a wildly inaccurate ranty sort of "and your mum smells" kind of way. He refers to "the locally-woven organic carrot-pants (it’s those carrot pants again) and peak -oil millenarianism of the Transition Town movement". On the day I read his accusation that:
"the whole Transition worldview promotes an austere politics-of-limits mindset that retards human flourishing"
… we took delivery of the new Transition Network publication ’21 Stories of Transition’. A vibrant, colourful collection of stories from 39 Transition groups in 15 countries, awesome in the diversity of what they’re doing, and the real impacts they’re having. Stories that have, between them:
- inspired 18,527 hours of volunteer input
- put £1,032,051 worth of complementary currency into circulation
- created 43 new social enterprises
- Raised over £13,155,104.88 for investment in renewable energy
- led to 131,049 more miles being cycled
- saved 1,352,277 miles of car travel
- produced 17,800 MWh of renewable electricity a year, saving 7,450 tonnes of CO2 annually
- led to 74,196 more miles being walked
- begun work on building projects with a value of £5,150,371
And that’s just the measurable impacts. And that’s just 21 Stories. There are many, many thousands. "Retards human flourishing"?? Quite the opposite.
"In the end", he concludes, ramping up the patronising, "we have to say the best Transitioners can offer is an exercise in effective community building". Firstly, that’s nonsense. But secondly, his whole argument places no value whatsoever in "effective community building". He imagines that social cohesion will come, as we shall see, from a benign utopian socialist future, not from people learning how to wage peace in their communities, how to build connections and community, something which is seen widely as being central to improving public health, mental health, community cohesion. In these worrying times of terrorism and marginalisation, having the skills of "effective community building" may turn out to be far more important than most other skills a community could train itself to have. But for Phillips it deserves little more than a smug pat on the head.
As well as Transition he loves creating other straw men, lumping together the green movement in its huge diversity and many manifestations as one lumpen mass (I might recommend Andrew Dobson’s ‘Green Political Thought’ to help him tease this apart) and then painting it with some of the laziest stereotyping that even in the 1970s would have been outdated and somewhat bigoted. For example, he quotes, without comment, Yasmin Nair who says "the very idea that one should be concerned about privacy or dignity while shitting is one that hippy-radicals and academics mock". What? Eh? Does that actually resonate with anyone you ever met in your time doing Transition, never mind as a catch-all for the whole movement? Hold onto your hat though, it gets madder yet.
Phillips relationship to compost toilets is just one place in this book where he completely contradicts himself. He is rather fixated on shit and our relationship to it, using compost toilets as proof of how mad Transitioners and others really are. Yet later in the book, in a section where he takes on the idea of ‘peak phosphorous’, he argues that "we need research into how we can better capture and recycle the vast quantity of phosphorous that is just left to escape … from human and animal waste…", praising the Swedish cities experimenting with urine harvesting. We "will likely require brand new and society-wide composting infrastructure" he states, adding "this is no small endeavour", which leads me to wonder why, then, he feels so compelled to put the boot into and to condescend those already pioneering this great idea he just had?
Similarly, the book spends much of its time having a go at Naomi Klein, in particular at some of the arguments she makes in ‘This Changes Everything’. He is particularly dismissive of her suggestion that the standard of living we need to be aiming for is that of the 1970s, pouring scorn on the very idea, yet later in the book he effuses that the 1970s "was without doubt the high watermark of civilisation". Sometimes it’s like different parts of the book are written by different people who didn’t actually speak to each other.
As the book goes on, amid all the localisation-bashing and hyperbole, we start to get a sense of actually where he is coming from. "This small-is-beautiful localism is a remarkably pessimistic position, and certainly at odds with the long-cherished, optimistic goal of socialists of global economic democracy". Ah. He continues:
"True planning, the kind that will actually take us most of the way to a low-carbon economy, would involve taking the power companies back into true public ownership – that is, transforming them back into the providers of public services rather than operating as de facto multinational corporations".
He wants, it turns out, to see a centralised, socialist world, in which the state can unleash the power of technology and progress to advance humanity and deal with the climate crisis (although it’s a vision that differs wildly from other ecological Marxists like John Bellamy Forster). It is at this point where, frankly, Phillips loses the plot entirely, building to his hysterical ‘Lost’-like fantasy crescendo finale. Having accused the localisation movement of being ungrounded, he argues for a ‘principle of audacity’, "that our species must continue to achieve ever more impressive feats". The next passage had me snorting out loud with laughter on the train where I was reading it (with apologies to the man standing next to me). He argues that we must:
"… continue to grow economically so that we can, for example, build and maintain effective near-Earth asteroid deflection systems to protect the Earth; spread throughout the galaxy so as to assure the continued existence of the species in the life-vitiating event of a local supernova; and ultimately advance to a level of technology and understanding of reality that perhaps we can figure out a way to permit intelligence to escape the heat death of the universe".
Blimey. On a serious note though, the real challenge is not our need to escape the "heat death of the universe" in several billion years time, but rather the "heat deaths" already occurring in ever greater numbers as the world moves above a one degree rise in temperature. In spite of claiming to be motivated by climate change, presumably so as to distance himself from the Matt Ridleys and other "lukewarmer" (the latest rebranding for climate sceptics) "eco-modernists" with whom he shares many views, what does he actually offer that will turn the climate crisis round? Nuclear power and the dream of a socialist government. That is pretty much it.
But as the recent election showed in the UK, there is no hunger among the population at large for the kind of socialist utopia he proposes. Although he doesn’t suggest this being imposed through a violent revolution, one must assume that given the apparent non-starter of the democratic route, that’s the only option left open to him. What we see in Transition is thousands of communities motivated by the urgency of climate change, but not prepared to put their hope in a political model that will never happen, and so are starting to do the work that needs to be done themselves.
The hope is that this then starts to shift and influence thinking further up the political system, something we can start to see evidence of. Rather than "retarding human flourishing", movements like Transition are giving many people their first experience of actually influencing the world around them, in a practical, empowering way, rather than some abstract political fantasy. And those steps are starting to lead to jobs, to development, to business and, yes, to ‘progress’.
"We must learn again how to weep hot tears of pride at the best of what our species can do" he concludes. Bloody right. As I visit Transition groups around the world and see the amazing flourishing of ingenuity, entrepreneurship, connection, care and brilliance, often those are the very tears that come to my eyes. Why is it that these so called ‘Promethians’ and ‘eco pragmatists’ who so hail the white heat of innovation and technology are unable to apply that same thinking to the challenge of urgent decarbonisation? Like Alex Epstein’s appalling book ‘The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels’ (which I reviewed here), many of Phillips’ arguments embody a fear of change, and a fear of difference, while slating those he targets as doing just that.
Like ‘Lost’, when I reached the end of ‘Austerity Ecology’, I felt aggrieved at the amount of time I had wasted on it. I could have spent that time doing something useful, getting on and actually doing something about climate change. Like ‘Lost’, the approaches put forward in this book will keep you waiting interminably for an ending that may or may not come, and if it does will almost certainly not play out as you imagined it would. Time is short, life is precious, let’s just start building a fairer, more just world here and now, rather than putting all our hope in distant dreams of socialist perfection and intergalactic space travel. And I never did find out how on earth you can weave a pair of pants out of carrots. Perhaps the sheer discomfort of wearing such an item might explain the curmudgeonly embittered spirit in which much of this book is written?
What I had hoped to read here was some kind of an analysis, a rigorous critique of bottom up approaches like Transition, an exploration of whether there is evidence that our theory of (bottom up) change actually works. I’d love to have read that, something that Luigi Russi’s excellent Everything Gardens and other stories was an attempt at. But this book contributes absolutely nothing of any use whatsoever to any of those discussions.
You might also enjoy Chris Smaje’s excellent take on Phillips’ work here.
