Peter Victor is one of the world’s foremost post-growth theorists. His books include Escape from Overshoot: Economics for a Planet in Peril (2023), Herman Daly’s Economics for a Full World (2022), and Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, not Disaster (2008 and 2019). He is Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar at York University, Canada, and has worked for over fifty years on economic and environmental issues as an academic, consultant, and public servant. Peter’s work on ecological economics has been recognized with the Molson Prize in the Social Sciences by the Canada Council for the Arts in 2011, the Boulding Memorial Prize from the International Society for Ecological Economics in 2014, and his election to the Royal Society of Canada in 2015. I reached out to him to see if he would talk a little about his observations and thoughts, and he kindly agreed.
RH: First, thanks for taking the time for this conversation, and thanks also for your book, Escape from Overshoot. It’s an excellent book on a subject that literally everyone needs to know about—humanity’s dilemma of overconsumption and overpopulation, and what we can do about it. Why did you decide to adopt that title and framing?
PV: I’m glad that you like the book. It is based on several decades of working on the economy and the environment as an academic, consultant, and public servant. I chose overshoot as the framing for the book because of the overwhelming evidence that humans are exceeding the capacity of the planet to support us and many other species. This is well-described as overshoot. Right now, considerable attention is being given to climate change, and rightly so, but the problems arising from the vigorous pursuit of economic growth by virtually all nations and international institutions are broader than that. Using overshoot as the framework entails a wider range of considerations, a more comprehensive analysis, and a broader set of solutions.
RH: You were educated as an economist. What was your “aha” moment, when you realized that growth is unsustainable?
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