(00:01):
Well, I'm in over my head. No one told me I'm trying to keep my footprints small was harder than I thought it could be. I'm in over my head. What do I really need? Trying to save the planet oh will someone please save me? Trying to save the planet oh will someone please save me?

(00:25):
Welcome to In Over My Head. I'm Michael Bartz. My guest today is Susan Paulson. Susan is a professor at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. Professor Paulson's research explores ways in which gender class and ethno-racial systems interact with biophysical environments. She lived for 15 years in South America working in teaching in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. And for seven years directed Latin American Studies at Miami University. Susan helped launched Lund University's graduate program in culture, power, and sustainability. And in recent years has been collaborating with international interdisciplinary teams researching de-growth. Welcome to in over my head, Susan.

(01:00):
Thank you, Michael. I'm really happy to be here.

(01:02):
So while looking at de-growth and post-growth, it soon became obvious to me that the dynamics between the global north and south play a significant role in this conversation. As an American who's lived in Latin America and has collaborated with European research institutions, I think you offer a unique viewpoint on this topic and I'm looking forward to talking with you. You know, in reading about de-growth, it just seems like such kind of a complex topic and there's a lot to it and people see it different ways. So maybe just to start, how do you define de-growth?

(01:28):
Thanks for that. Great question. So it's not an easy one. Scholars and activist movements are advancing a wide range of ideas and actions oriented towards building a more equitable well-being for humans and other nature. So there's quite diverse paths and policies towards that. But I think what I see that we're sharing in the de-growth movement are three objectives. One is to reduce the global use of material and energy. Two is to curb cultural and personal obsessions with growth. And third is to reorient our values, institutions and worldviews around equitable well-being.

(02:04):
Those are three very big ideas. I guess we can maybe start at the top. So when we're looking at actually reducing our energy consumption and you know, how much we're polluting, things like that. Yeah. What does that look like?

(02:17):
Well, the interesting thing is I think there's almost 100% agreement of physical scientists around the world that the way to address biodiversity collapse, climate change, ocean acidification, et cetera, is to reduce the total amount of material and energy that humans transform every day because we're creating too much entropy. Right. Anthropocentric entropy, there's really no doubt about that. The problem is it's been very tricky to get political will to respond, right? I would say both in terms of governments and corporations. And so there's a big breach about that in terms of the material de-growth, which is basically just using less resources and making less pollution.

(03:00):
Yeah, no, I think it's a very tricky thing. Like you mentioned it is political as well. And, and yeah, just like, I guess what, that's what kind of got me onto this topic, you know, even looking at green growth for instance, like can we really actually grow and reduce our environmental impact at the same time? Like to me that just seems like there has to be some sort of reduction in, in our consumption or energy use, right? So that's what really got me interested in, in looking into de-growth.

(03:23):
Bingo, , , right? New efficient machines and vehicles and systems are super important. They're absolutely vital. But we've seen throughout the industrial revolution, greater efficiency in a system built on a growth imperative actually leads to more growth because it makes it more financially attractive to use those resources to produce more profit. That's the trick of green growth, is that it is important to have different energy sources, all, all, all kinds of building and transportation that's more efficient and we also need to reduce the total amount we consume, right? And so those are two sort of parallel things and as you suggested, that involves not only reducing our consumption, but I think more importantly changing the systems through which we sort of provision ourselves and look after our world.

(04:17):
Yeah, no, for sure. And yeah, actually I think about when I was talking with David Font Vivanco, he talked about rebound effects, right? So the more efficient we become then we just use more stuff. If it's easier, we're gonna, we're gonna do it more, right?

(04:28):
There's something called Jevon's Paradox way back in, you know, in 1850, an engineer figured out, oh, we got much more efficient steam engines double, triple the efficiency in just a couple decades. Does that mean we used less coal? Absolutely not. It mean it was more seductive and attractive to use more and more and more coal.

(04:47):
Maybe let's, let's kind of touch a bit more on the individual side, the, the kind of that second point that you had mentioned. So yeah, what, what is the role of the individual in de-growth?

(04:59):
Wow, that's another deep question, Michael. I'm an anthropologist. My colleagues study how humans have lived together for hundreds of thousands of years. And most historians and anthropologists think that sort of the last few hundred years have been characterized by a very, very unusual, unprecedented arrangement focused on individual actors here to four. It's been whatever kin groups, communities, tribes, looking after each other with the point of regenerating their group, right? That has a lot of implications and I think it's been pushed on purpose as part of the drive to expand profit and production in the 20th century. And it makes it really hard for us to imagine and work with commons, you know, most history of humans. We've managed the world through commons, our coasts, our forests, grazing lands. I mean, that's how we manage resources. And one sort of very tangible example I think about a lot is in the United States, the major category of household residents is uni-person households.

(06:03):
You know, 27% of households have only one person. And what happens in those? First of all, it's a, a huge use of resources, which it's great for the economy, right? Every single person buys their own refrigerator, their own stove, their own tv, their own couch, their own, et cetera, right? You know, and so in terms of GDP, it's great and in terms of resources, it's terrible, but there's a much deeper issue going on is that if you live alone, you don't get the daily experience of becoming human each morning by sharing breakfast, by sharing the labour of preparing breakfast and the joy of convivial consumption of breakfast and the commons management of the space and the provisioning. I think something like that ends up to the fact that we are in incapable of managing, for example, the common atmosphere around the globe. And I think it's partly because we've become human in this unusual moment where we're very alone, you know, in school we're trained to be individuals and compete with our classmates and friends. So that's one of the big things that many people in dig growth work on is experimenting with commons trying to create and generate and, and often recuperate longstanding sort of common and community management regimes and traditions.

(07:21):
So what are some examples maybe you have of the commons that people could learn about?

(07:26):
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, there's all kinds of examples that people are working with. Some quite long-standing, for example, cooperative energy systems, right? Co-Ops in the history of the US we had many, we had cooperative grain elevators, cooperative NRECA, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, et cetera, which have shifted over now to private for-profit enterprise. But there still exists and there's a new surge of those kind of utilities. People have organized cooperative childcare, community childcare, which I think is on many levels really positive. It's, you know, it's something that policy, well not many policy wants are focusing a lot on. But you know, the idea of working as a community sometimes doing sort of a round robin of parents taking roles and and decisions. There's also workers co-ops. I mean there's some, some quite big, you know, tens of thousands of members long standing.

(08:23):
For example, when, you know, we talk about in Spain in the book that, you know, workers run cooperative or sort of network of enterprises that work together as a cooperative in the US there's some savings and loans, things like that. So they, they exist in quite familiar ways and activists and thinkers are also working to sort of regenerate or work together in new ways. Things like time banks, you know, where there's computerized sort of dating systems, you're all members and we all trade an hour of work for this, for that, right? I ask you to make a podcast for my class and you ask me to write an article for your paper and we trade instead of buying and paying each other, right? And I'll have to say the interesting, not surprising thing is it's not easy.

(09:07):
You're right, it is more work. But what I like about that is that it's more relationship-building and it's less transactional. You know, it's less about money and power and it's more about community and helping each other out. And as, as we've seen, you know, in the, in the recent years, we need to come together and, and help each other out. Especially, you know, maybe in the future if there's gonna be more climate-related emergencies, you know, I think coming together as a community is gonna be very important. So I feel like the commons and helping each other out is a, vital thing just, for our wellbeing. Right. And I guess that kind of makes me think about how we approach de-growth and with the commons, it seems like it's kind of a, a bottom-up approach, right? Is that the best way to make an effective change?

(09:49):
I think the best way to make a change is on all scales in all places simultaneously, . So there's no privileged place, right? We need to change policies because policies set the landscape that allows people the freedom to experiment and build their commons or denies them that and makes it impossible for them to do it, right? We need to change education values, intimate relationships, also banking systems, national financial systems. And that's also a hard thing. Although I think the beauty of it is that each of us can talk through like you and I are and try to understand the goals and then work in our own place with our own capacities and have some kind of faith share faith with each other that our efforts will interact in mysterious ways in the future to move things forward.

(10:43):
Yeah, I guess when I think about like policy and, and changing the larger system for me like that, that seems like the most difficult thing cuz it's great if, you know, you, you within your local community want to make a change. I found that very empowering myself, being involved in my local community with environmentalism. I think you can make changes on the small scale more easily, but I think that's where I feel a bit in over my head when it comes to the way that the systems are run. And I think, you know, a big theme that comes out within that is that inequality and exploitation, right? Because there are very powerful people in powerful positions who are making those decisions and there are people who are much less fortunate, maybe don't have a voice. So do you wanna maybe speak to a bit of that?

(11:23):
All right, well you brought up two big issues there. First I'll just mention the question of scale. Yeah. I mean, it's intimidating to think, well I'm gonna change the national policy or I'm gonna change IPCC's policy, et cetera, right? There's been some really interesting movements by municipalities including big cities in, in Canada, in your country, Canada, US all over Europe that are making some very bold policy moves. And later on we can talk about policies and the EU also, you know, quite, they have a couple of green new deals, one very radical and one very conservative, right? And so that's interesting, but before we get to those, your deeper question, inequality, exploitation, those are not unwanted side effects of our global economy. Those are actually the, the necessary mechanisms through which current economy works. Since 1980, GDP growth has coincided quite closely with growth in inequality of income and wealth between nations and within nations, right?

(12:24):
And it's absolutely key to generating more growth in this economy we have now is first of all, having the kind of power inequalities that allows capital to exploit people and their resources in very cheap ways and to really extend bizarre frontiers towards profit. And secondly is the capacity to displace the waste and harms of that either by, you know, I'm degrading mountains in Bolivia and so you don't see that the new solar panels are a problem, right? And also, you know, things like climate change, right? It hurts hurting other people, people in the tropics and poor countries more than us dumping garbage elsewhere. And so those power inequalities are so crucial both to pushing, expanding production and to sort of hiding and justifying the harms of that expanding production. And that's where we need to work are the inequalities and the brilliant ma grade is that if we just keep pushing growth, then everybody will have more that, I mean, that's one thing we need to fight about. And the other is sort of divisiveness, right? The vast majority of people who are being exploited and whose environments are being exploited are set up in situations where we fight against each other and attack each other and blame each other rather than the system that's sucking our ecological and economic energies up towards the 1%. So yeah, inequality and exploitation, that's the heart of the matter.

(13:54):
Absolutely. Yeah. Something you said as you were explaining that, that we can have growth maybe within those countries, like obviously the North America we need to degrow, right? But like in, in the global south, perhaps they would want to have the same standard of living. Some people might say, so are, are some people saying that we need to have them grow as well?

(14:13):
It's very, very important since day one, drow thinkers have been thinking decolonial. They're thinking we need to stop grabbing the resources from other people and destroying their environments. You, you know, Europeans started thinking that right from the very start it's been about people in high-income and high ecological impact countries wanting to reduce their role in the world. It's not about telling anyone in Sudan or Ecuador that they need to reduce. Absolutely not. And so many people in the south love the idea that the northern countries would slow down their extractivism and exploitation, right? I mean that's like a gift to them. And so that people from poor countries can have more autonomy to use their own resources, their own labour to move towards their own ants. You also mentioned, oh well they want the same standard of living as us. That's not necessarily right.

(15:08):
I prefer to say let them move towards their own ends. And in Latin America, people have been thinking a lot about Buen Vivir which is a path towards the future. That's not about US standard living, everyone getting more cars and more houses and more bigger computer, whatever. It's a different goal. I think most of my colleagues think the reduction in matter energy use needs to come mainly from wealthy economies and within those economies, not from every sector. Maybe we wanna invest more material and energy in healthcare and education and, and provisioning. Maybe we wanna invest less in who knows yachts and fast fashion and fast food or, you know, certain other dimensions of life, right? So it's not that everyone is gonna have to go back to a caveman and you know, and it's definitely not the north imposing on the south, it's on the contrary from the beginning. It's been the north trying to impose less on the south look after our own house before we're telling them how to manage their futures.

(16:09):
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I think in what you're talking about, you know, just that kind of multiple perspectives and and respecting other people's values and beliefs is so important, right? Because if we're saying that everyone has to live like the standard North Americans do, then obviously that's not sustainable, but it's maybe also like Right. Not what they actually want to be doing. And I think, yeah, I I it's kind of maybe a, a stereotype of a typical North American of driving cars and eating fast food and things like that. But I think that's a good point. I remember talking with Richard Wilkinson in the Just Transition season and he talked about inequality and how that actually affects environmentalism and saying that like, you know, in the United States, they're a very unequal country within their country,

(16:47):
So you are more concerned with how you appear to others. So you are more likely to spend money on designer clothes or rather than extravagant car things that make you look more successful in other people's eyes. And it, it's really quite a powerful influence on consumerism.

(17:05):
So I think that's a good point of instead of just thinking about cars and fast food and, and those items looking at how do we invest in healthcare, how do we invest in senior care and, and re retirement plans and things that actually promote wellbeing, right? Rather than just material status.

(17:22):
I love that you talked to Richard Wilkinson, what he says about inequality. Yes. It seems that it's really vital to make all of us, including the ones at the top feel insecure about buying more to establish our status and show off more, which is again, good for the GDP and bad for material and energy. But there's another thing that happens. You mention, oh well our standard of living, I mean I live in the US we have one of the highest GDPs in the world. In absolute per capita terms, we are like way down in terms of maternal mortality, infant mortality, literacy, homicide, suicide, I mean mental health, obesity, all kinds of factors that I might choose to measure a happy society or what you call standard of living. The GDP hasn't bought us that, right? And so that's something that it's really hard for people in the US to question that. There's, it's so deeply ingrained this kind of mantra that raising the GDP is the only path to all good ends. Richard Wilkinson shows us the empirical correlation just doesn't work. And yet we keep believing that so deeply.

(18:27):
Oh, absolutely. And, and so I know in like the de-growth book that you wrote and in other reading I've done, you know, there are alternative ways to measure that. So what are some of those other ways we could measure besides GDP, how the country is doing?

(18:40):
There's Genuine Prosperity Index. People in Bhutan,you know, for almost 40 years now have been evolving their National Happiness Index and really measuring and working for policies to advance on those fronts and well, I mean the very well known sort of human development index, it still includes income, but it does have health and education is part of the package that Amartya Sen, you know, got a Nobel Prize for advancing that. So again, I mean it's, again, it's sort of the case of, of all sort of physical scientists agreeing that we need to reduce entropy, but politicians can't move that forward. I think it's the same in terms of measuring well-being that social scientists, economists have long found wonderful ways of measuring health wellbeing. Yeah. Richard Wilkinson for example, but politicians keep pushing for GDP and I mean, it doesn't take a genius to figure out where that's coming from. If you look at the flows of profit in the past decades, you can see where the push is coming from to make that the measure of wellbeing or make, make that appear as the measure of wellbeing. Convince us that that's what we need to work towards.

(19:50):
Yeah. So if we want to make those changes where we're maybe not measuring GDP, we're measuring wellbeing. Yeah. What is the role of policy there?

(19:58):
I mean there's all kinds of moves, but I do have some, I mean we are, people are thinking about and practicing and as I said, people including Canada, especially on the niche level putting important ones in, right? So I'm just gonna mention a few, some are about just taking the foot off the accelerator. And this is interesting cuz there's a lot of resistance. Oh no, you're gonna force growth on. It's like, okay, let's just stop forcing growth for a moment, right? And so it's a less aggressive, so ending planned obsolescence, cutting advertising or limiting advertising, shifting from ownership to uni usership where we have sort of common sharing of tools and equipment and things stop subsidizing ecologically destructive industries, reduce food waste through food systems and, and requirements of, you know, resource efficiency for nutritional outcome fees on food waste, et cetera. And we, we, and we, I mean already there exist fees on carbon emissions, waste pollution, forest destruction, very modest, so modest that they don't make a dent in the profits possible out of those investments, right?

(20:59):
I think they're very simple things cuz they're basically like, just stop pushing growth, stop using, for example, public tax money and public energy and public universities to push growth and, and just be a little more maybe agnostic about it, right? a big thing is employment. Obviously, many of those would contribute to less jobs needed. I mean, if we didn't have planned obsolescence, we wouldn't need to make new items and clothes every year, right? People could keep them for 20 years. We would've less factory workers. So shorter work week, we already make more than enough good services for everybody to live happily, right? Shelter food. So we could all just work less. That's like the goal, I mean the fantasy hundreds of years ago at the birth of the industrial revolution, wow, we're gonna innovate and we're gonna have lower the burden of work on humans, right?

(21:46):
And, and that's gonna involve distributing the necessary labour, right? What's essential labour, it's not like, okay, half people are gonna be unemployed and half are gonna work 50, 60 hours a week like we already do. We can share it more fairly and also share the admiration, the dignity and the financial reward more fairly obviously using innovation and productivity to liberate humans from work to feed people better, you know, to do things that we actually want rather than to get a GDP that we believe will eventually lead to those things. There's two kind of big issues that we think and debate a lot about. One is public job guarantee, one is universal basic income. So that's another set. And then there's a n one more to actually two more sets of things. One is about reducing inequality and there's all kinds of little and big policies that we can do, right?

(22:32):
To stop the growth going exclusively to to the 1%, which is what's happened in the last four decades, right? It doesn't need to happen in the mid-20th century. Many countries actually had growth with greater equality year by year, but that's not true since 1980. So income ratio limits within companies, lower municipal or national wage caps raised minimum wages, again on municipal state, national level, steep progressive tax on income and corporate profits, capital gains tax, et cetera. All of these things, they have multiple benefits in that they can generate cash to finance a transition that we're looking for. They also end up curbing the drive for growth, you know, because if you've got this potential of 1% to just be mega billionaires, they're gonna push it, right? And that has a huge ecological and social consequences. And so if we set up mechanisms to make that more difficult, then it will curb that drive, right? And the mechanisms of exploitation. So even if some people are driven to be billionaires, if there's not such huge inequality, it's gonna be harder for them to access cheap labour and cheap materials. And the very last category I'm not gonna go into, I'll just tell you what some of the things go in there. Neutralizing debt, reorganizing money systems, strengthening democratic participation, enhancing commons, decommodifying public goods and essential services. So those are policies, again, many are already enacted on municipal levels and some on national levels. So they can and do exist.

(24:09):
Great. That is an extensive list, Susan. Thanks so much for that. That was, that's a lot. I do think having those concrete examples about reforms, right? That, you know, it's not just this pie-in-the-sky idea that these things are happening at some scale in some places that I think that helps a lot with moving in the right direction when it's, it's something that we have those examples for, right? So I think I really appreciate that very, very long list of policies. One that stands out for me is, is around work and debt. You know, I live very frugally intentionally, you know, I'm living very simply and for myself, I I really see that as empowering in my time, my use of time living the way that I have in intentionally, you know, I'm able to really take that gas pedal off and slow down and, and especially living in North America, you know, that's not the the norm.

(24:58):
I think Michael, that example of your personal life is so valuable because it's changing the world by living the way you do each day, you change you how you become your interactions with those around you, including your podcast listeners, you know, your neighbours, your children. That's the most tangible way we can change the world. And it, it's works. So I'm really glad to hear that example more power to you,

(25:24):
You, when you're talking about working less and having less debt and you know, like I talk about my lifestyle, I think a, a big thing that comes out, a big theme in de-growth is that idea of a good life, right? Living simply so that others may simply live. Tell me a bit more about that.

(25:39):
Well, I've lived for many years in, in South America, more than a dozen years living amongst rural communities in the Andes and the Amazon and then other years living in cities. And there's sort of two things that happen. One is that there's long traditions of life evolving over generations and centuries that coexist and interact with sort of colonial or modern visions, right? But they still are alive and they still regenerate traditions of community resource management and community sharing and convivial eating and, and things like that that are really important that are now sort of giving life to a new, to new movements in many of the countries, as I mentioned, some of them kind of come together under the terms bu or good living [inaudible] that are basically about my wellbeing is the community's wellbeing, including the community, the environment, community, right? The human and other nature community.

(26:43):
So that's really encouraging. That's in encouraging to me to think, to see some of those deeply embedded values and practices of environmental and communal management sort of be valued and interconnect with each other. And scholars are interested and it's, you know, gotten into some national constitutions with the rights of nature, the rights of water, Buen Vivir rather than growth being written into the constitutions. Granted, it's not easy for governments to implement those visions, but it's, to me it's beautiful that they've been manifest politically at least that way. So that's sort of one strand that I've been learning from by listening and being together with people that are seeking, yeah, I was gonna say different futures, but they're also futures that are richly informed by what people value from their heritage.

(27:38):
One really good example I think of someone who's living simply is the former Uruguayan president, Jose Mujica. Tell me about tell me about him.

(27:47):
He's great. I mean, well he's got a long history at, in political activism, pro-democracy activism and like you chose to live a quiet private life. And when he was elected president of Uruguay, he continued to live in a modest small house and he donated all of his salary and he, you know, wore jeans and sandals every day and, and lived his life. Uruguay is interesting in many ways for generations that had the highest literacy levels in Latin America. And people are well educated, you know, it's not like he's a peasant, he's a well-educated cosmopolitan guy and he chose to live this modest life and not compete to be showing off in that way, which I think is a beautiful example. And I would say that our Pope Francis, in many ways has, I mean obviously that's the Franciscan way, but I think he embodied and continues to embody many of those impulses to live gently. And you know, one of the things I loved about him was after he went to the Vatican, like a year or two in, someone discovered that he'd been sneaking out at night, dressed in like a shabby, you know, priest's coat and hanging out with poor people and homeless people because that's what was meaningful to him. And I just, I love that.

(29:06):
What I like about those two examples is that those are people who are in potentially positions of power, right? Yes. And, and it's, I think it's very seductive that if you are in that position of power, you have to act a certain way. You have to have a certain high standard in order to feel more important maybe. I think that's, those are great examples of people who are still doing good work and, and maybe more humble and I feel like we need more of that.

(29:27):
Amen.

(29:27):
Yeah. So, Susan, we've, you know, we've covered a, a lot of ground. This is a very complex topic and we've mentioned kind of some policy issues and we've talked about standard of living and it had some great examples about people who are doing great things. But on the individual level, this show is about empowering citizens to take action on the climate crisis. So when it comes to de-growth, post-growth individually, what can people do to have an impact?

(29:51):
Ahaha? Very good. Okay. , we all can have an impact in different ways, right? I mean, I'm a teacher and for me the classroom is very political. Other people, you make podcasts, we all have different ways. Some of the steps many of us are taking. One is to question assumptions. You know, unlearn instead of starting with doing and acting, starting with undoing, unlearning some of the sort of myths about, you know, more salary, more GDP means better and et cetera, right? I would say learn in different ways. Listen to your podcasts, learn from, you know, people in South America that I spend time with, learn in different ways that coexist with information we get from corporate media. I mean, we have many options to do it, but it's so seductive to get sucked into the messages of the dominant media practice, commons and care in our daily life in all kinds of ways.

(30:51):
I mean, whether you are doing it by sharing knowledge and ideas and questions with a, with a common group of people that are generating doubts and ideas together in a shared space. And I would say for me, one of the biggest moves that I'm working on is alliances across difference. I think one of the, the biggest challenges to change is this kind of divide and conquer, you know, identity politics that have sort of separated us in all kinds of ways. And that's pretty hard to learn across difference and to ally and, and so that's one thing I'm working on. And again, I would say have faith, you know, get together with people who are different from you and talk about these issues and try to share and support faith that we can all do our own thing and that the outcomes will interact in, in surprising ways, maybe ways I didn't imagine, but ways that do move towards the goals that I'm dreaming of.

(31:50):
Well, thank you so much for that, Susan. Overall this has been a very enriching conversation. I'm really glad that we had a chance to talk.

(31:56):
Yeah, for me too. Thank you so much for reaching out Michael, and I hope we continue. I, I'll think of you and your, your path on life and I'm really happy to see, I see it in your face, in your eyes that you found motivation and satisfaction on that path. So thank you for that example.

(32:15):
Well, that was my chat with Susan. It's clear from talking to her that things need to change within the policy and communities, but that work is starting, and I'm hopeful that we're going to make a change. Well, that's all for me. I'm Michael Bartz. Here's the feeling a little less in over our heads when it comes to saving the planet. We'll see you again soon. In Over My Head was produced and hosted by Michael Bartz in partnership with Environment Lethbridge. Original Music by Gabriel Thaine. If you would like to get in touch, email info@inovermyheadpodcast.com

(32:42):
I'm trying to save the planet, oh will someone please save me?