Stories about the past, present, and future; stories about people, things, events, and places; and stories about our lives — stories transmit narrative. Narratives shape how we interpret our lives and what happens in them. The stories we identify with and reject form our communities’ political core. The social, cultural, political, and personal choices we make stem from stories we accept.
Stories drive people to subjugate others, seek freedom, fight and abolish wars, make changes, preserve lifestyles, justify atrocities, advocate for peace, pursue dreams, , fall in love, and pick friends and enemies. Stories shape our lives, personalities, and even collective experiences. Stories command power.
People accord power to stories through conviction. The more we identify with a story, the stronger its power grows — and the more influential its protagonists, ideals, and messages become.
The modern world’s story setting is unique. An existential threat looms above us all: overshoot, rising tides, boiling temperatures, vanishing creatures, burning forests, melting glaciers, dying crops, and rapidly increasing disasters. This is our setting: it’s undoubtedly where our stories are taking place today. When abnormal ecological crises keep rapidly breaking previous records and shattering previous predictions, their symptoms become our undeniable reality.
Climate change, climate crisis, global warming, global boiling…
…No matter what your intentions are and despite how adamantly you believe this is a political crisis, this framing inevitably depoliticises it. The language communicates symptoms over cause, describing the crisis as economic and technological externalities. Global boiling and climate crises are undeniably real symptoms, but this initial framing displaces the story’s political nature. Our story is often narrated like so:
“With the Industrial Era’s advent, humanity began expanding rapidly and consuming greater energy for greater technology. The population expansion and excessive resource consumption has led to rapid changes to the climate and environment. Ultimately, we must find an alternative that can keep up with our socio-economic demands.”
Do you see the trick here? Let’s deconstruct this framing, as innocent as it sounds.
Deconstructing the Narrative
Think about the narrative discussed in the prior section: it places responsibility on our shoulders. Not the corporations, industries, institutions, and political powers, no; only we have to do something, apparently.
Forget the exploitative manufacturers, fossil fuel giants, industrial polluters, the automobile-infrastructural complex, and the actions of the billionaire elite. This is all our fault. The ‘consumer’ is responsible for what they consume — as dehumanising as that word is, although we seem to describe ourselves with it nowadays.
That’s the first strategy: engineer the profitable myth of individual responsibility. “Everyone else should change, not us!”
The “climate change” story is one that the world has largely come to accept. Denialists aren’t the key antagonists of this story anymore; we have already won that fight. The climate crisis itself is now a theatre of war in language and narrative — we are engaged in a battle for how we narrate climate change.
The second narrative strategy, though, is the most horrifying one: to frame the situation as an inevitability of the human condition. Recall this framing from the last section:
“…we must find an alternative that can keep up with our socio-economic demands.”
This is where the wicked ingenuity of this narrative lies. In other words, our socio-economic demands necessitate excessive energy supply. How can we ever replace fossil fuels without a complete societal breakdown?
This is the moral expressed with this story: “we can’t stop fossil fuels because our economy will collapse, so we must wait for miraculous technological solutions first — and do nothing about manufactured demand for excessive resource/energy consumption because it is too expensive (for us, the ruling class)”.
This sounds like a ridiculous strawman until you factor in how convenient this narrative is for the corporate world as it pushes for green growth: decoupling GDP growth from emissions, that is. Never mind that GDP is a horrible index to measure social progress with.
Economic Growth: The Invisible Character
I mean, sure, it sounds noble — let the economy grow and reduce emissions…but the fact this sounds innocent is precisely why deconstructing how we use language is so important.
Let me be clear from the start: green growth — “decoupling” GDP from emissions — is an empirical impossibility: you just can’t do it effectively enough quickly enough, even in the best possible circumstances. That is also notwithstanding the sheer humanitarian and environmental costs of the ecomodernist green-growth future, like lithium colonialism in the global south [1][2][3].
Should we, for example, keep vainly cleaning up after plastic polluters, or should we diminish plastic manufacturing and scale down supply chain logistics systems that rely on plastics? Not that cleaning up is bad; the point is that we need to stop the source of pollution.
This is but one facet among the many where our efforts to mitigate the destructive externalities of the capitalist obsession with growth are hindered by the fact that the root causes of said externalities — owing to the pursuit of endless “economic growth” — are left unaddressed. Even though mitigating these externalities is an important task, what we’re doing is the figurative equivalent of putting out fires while an active arsonist is still on the loose. Putting out fires is good, but…maybe catch and stop the arsonists too?
The façade of growthism only benefits industrial and corporate powers — not anyone else, let alone the world. It tells us that we cannot stop fossil fuels immediately until we replace our current economic consumption demands and infrastructure with technological solutions that we will never arrive to in time and cannot afford.
The antithesis to that is simple: degrowth.
In other words: reduce excess energy and resource demands in the global north; reduce inequality by redistributing the global north’s disproportionate wealth (hoarded by its billionaires) proportionately to the global north’s working class as well as to the nations in the global south; prioritise human and ecological growth over industrial profits and ‘economic’ growth; and generally, reduce excess consumption.
This would materialise in ways like building walkable cities with good public transit, ending planned obsolescence, scaling down energy demands for pointless consumer industries to ease the transition into clean energy, implementing universal basic income, and scaling down the size of our economies to prioritise social wellbeing and harmony with the environment.
Therein lies the double-objective of democratic eco-socialism: to simultaneously address intersecting ecological and social issues. The social, political, and ecological are inextricably linked. Like Chico Mendes said, “environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.”
Degrowth is a hard framework to sell because the first criticism anyone conjures up is that “it sounds negative”, but advocates have already addressed this: the framing is deliberately negative because the underlying message is to challenge how we currently define growth and encourage a paradigm shift therefrom. The whole point is to generate dialogue.
Reframing Our Narratives: How This Story Ends
While there certainly is a wealth of discussion we can have about degrowth, the message of my writing is to reassess how we talk about this crisis, its source, and its solutions.
Realistic solutions do exist to this crisis — there is hope, but that all depends on how we see ourselves and others in this story.
The Earth is our only sanctuary, so it matters how we describe its destruction and what we attribute that to. If we tell this story carelessly, we will spend our already limited time pursuing vain endeavours — and one such endeavour is our obsession with ‘economic’ growth at all costs, filtering the fight for our planet through those miserably hollow lens.
With this writing, I wanted to point out the invisible villain in our story.
As writers, activists, creatives, and artists, it is our duty to paint this picture as accurately as possible — to tell this story in earnest without severing the undeniable links between the political and ecological. As the new adage goes: “the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”
People are already contriving new descriptions aplenty, so here’s my little contribution to that stream:
By allowing the ruling class in the global north to disproportionately consume our resources in pursuit of infinite growth — and by neglecting feasible political solutions we can implement because of their obsession with ‘growth’ — our species is effectively committing murder-suicide, taking many others with us.
It is time we moved beyond describing this — in the news, in conversation, in political dialogue, in academia — with terms like “climate crisis” or “environmental destruction.” These are the symptoms and causes. Let’s use terms to describe this phenomenon by the outcome and its perpetrators too:
Self-extinction.
Mahal Ibrahim Abdulla is a writer, artist, musician, and an interdisciplinary researcher. He is the managing editor at Moosumi. He is an honours graduate in Politics and Social Policy from the University of Leeds. His current research interest is post-growth economics, and is studying physics to progress into a multi-disciplinary post-graduate pathway in his academic career.