The Guardian’s Journal section on Saturday 8th March 2025 contains an article by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, entitled ‘When the call is growth and more growth ask: what for?’ It might have been written by a secularist, and its relevance for anyone connected with environmental action groups, or indeed anyone who cares about the future of planet Earth, should be obvious.
Williams thinks that the ‘more growth’ mantra lacks a moral purpose. For example: ‘The uncomfortable truth is that in our present global context, growth frequently means the opposite of…shared responsibility’. Essentially, growth (Labour’s imperative for putting broken Britain back on some sort of track) skates over issues such as socio-economic inequalities, public accountability, insecurities of one kind or another, and a growing (!) sense of alienation of the public from decision-making processes, and from each other. It seems that a lack of real engagement with matters both punctual and epochal results in pulling up the psychological drawbridge in defence against the new age of cynicism (see note 1 below), indifference, plain fear of what might happen next, and a hapless where-do-we-go-from-here syndrome.
Williams has always been a reasonable voice in his version of the wilderness (to include the plight of the Church of England) and his concern for those who will inherit an increasingly uncertain future will be widely shared. But it’s not clear if Williams joins, say, the Young Greens, in criticising growth as a basic principle of progress, or whether he thinks that growth is a good idea provided it is correctly managed. Though his target is obviously Labour’s apparent lack of regard for the values he holds dear, there is a wider, though environmentally unspecified, remit when he concludes that we need to build ‘a new consensus around security, respect and hope’.
In fact, Williams’s article might at first glance be considered typical of elephant-in-the-room thoughts on the Government’s plans for economic regeneration in the anthropocene. For a more extensive context readers should follow through when he tells us that he has been working with the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) whose website mission statement - ‘The overall research question is: What can prosperity possibly mean in a world of environmental, social and economic limits?’ - sounds admirably apropos. https://cusp.ac.uk Williams’s implied point is not hard to understand: we can’t have a better future unless we grasp the environmental nettle. Doing so raises fundamental questions about the way the capitalist or any other socio-economic system operates, and how assumptions about progress turn theory (e.g. the idea that society’s wealth creation mechanisms are generated by competition, the results of which will supposedly ‘trickle down’ to benefit all) into practice. The ‘extractionist’ underpinnings of industrialization remain a cornerstone of our dash towards climate Armageddon and the crises in biodiversity, in conjunction with our habit of being exemplary consumers. Wearing our climate action hats we need to ask how growth based on consumerist principles might be tamed. Whatever the answer the first step is to interrogate and defamiliarize given assumptions about how society ‘works’. We still await the green revolution.
The scenario is horribly complex, as even a cursory look at CUSP’s blogs and conference summaries will indicate. But as Tim Jackson’s paper reports, we now have to think in terms of growth stagnation, and de-growth, simply to survive the future. This is not good news for business-as-usual mindsets. The Conservative Government’s promises initiated by David Cameron have not prevented BP from reneging on its own stated environmental commitments for the sake of its shareholders, and the present Labour Government has no convincing answer to questions about how growth can be reconciled with sustainable green values. For sure, some progress has been made, but the fact remains that we are releasing ever more CO2 into the atmosphere, and that developments in the growth of ‘post-industrial’ electronic initiatives (where AI does the work of manual labour) requires even more energy to power the warehouses of IT severs around the world. This contributes to all the ‘stuff’ we consume. Environmentally, nothing electronic is free. If you save paper by reading your news online, you are still drawing on the planet’s resources. Does anyone know how best to move forward when human progress is itself part of the problem? What does ‘civilization’ mean as the world heats up, and food chains start to break down? How shall we deal with all the plastic in the oceans? And so on.
There is an unavoidable question here: if what we do on a daily basis is destroying our habitat why carry on like this? What are the brakes on thinking and acting differently? Can we live fulfilled lives without propping them up with consumerist addictions? How come we derive satisfaction from acts of consumption as well as, or sometimes even rather than, what’s consumed? How has consumption become an automatic reflex – the religion of the market place, now infested with online inducements and influencers? I’m reminded of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, one of the founding poems of modern alienation. These days the ‘overwhelming question’ of futurological anxiety can be resolved by a spot of retail therapy: Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’/Let us go and make our visit. (see note 2 below) Anyone for a Fosse Park experience?
Of course, in an age when just about everything is under review and up for grabs even epistemology has been called into doubt, and it sometimes seems as though we lack the truths that would permit us to make ‘progress’ without the scarequotes. As Williams points out, we must not isolate the idea of growth from the imperative of public good. What we lack is the ‘clarity and purposiveness about what growth is supposed to serve’. This comment obliges us to interrogate the idea of growth for its failures, its capacities, and its promises, beyond the lure of false profits.
The message: try to resist the taken-for-granted consumerist production line when its choices are part of the myth of the good life, provided you have the money. If sufficient numbers of people change their behaviour we could make serious inroads into a situation in which the idea of limitless growth treats us like cattle and expects us to behave like sheep.
(1) BP’s decision to reign in its green credentials and to re-invest in oil and gas exploration was predictable in the age of greenwashing. See, for example, Julie Doyle: ‘Where Has All the oil Gone ? BP Branding and the Discursive Elimination of Climate Change’, in Heffernan and Wragg (eds.), Culture, Environment and Ecopolitics, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.
(2) I’m very well aware that arguments about the values of ‘mass’ culture form a background to my context for this quotation. To what extent does mass culture deflect our attention from environmental imperatives? Would you be better reading, say, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything (you may save a bit buying from Amazon), rather than watching Strictly? Even potential climate disasters have been made into blockbuster Hollywood movies. What does it mean to be ‘entertained’ by this kind of culture?
Comments