Post-Growth Living. Kate Soper

the more alarmist responses to climate change, alternative hedonism dwells on the pleasures to be gained by adopting a less high-speed, consumption-oriented way of living. Instead of presaging gloom and doom for the future, it points to the ugly, puritanical and self-denying aspects of the high-carbon lifestyle in the present. Climate change may threaten existing habits, but it can also encourage us to envisage and adopt more environmentally benign and personally gratifying ways of living.

      Alternative hedonism is premised, in fact, on the idea that even if the consumerist lifestyle were indefinitely sustainable it would not enhance human happiness and well-being beyond a certain point already reached by many. Its advocates believe that new forms of desire – rather than fears of ecological disaster – are more likely to encourage sustainable modes of consuming. By supplying a broader cultural dimension to the existing arguments and outlook of the political wing of anti-systemic forces, it can help to build a more diverse and substantial opposition to prevailing economic orthodoxy. It can also provide an overarching ‘imaginary’ for the various initiatives seeking to bypass mainstream market provision via alternative networks of sharing, recycling, exchange of goods and services and expertise (the Slow City, Slow Food movements, Buen Vivir, the New American Dream and now, most recently, and possibly most ambitiously, at least for the US, the Next System project).

      In sum, a counter-consumerist ethic and politics should appeal not only to altruistic compassion and environmental concern (as in the case of Fair Trade and ethical shopping), but also to the self-regarding gratifications of living and consuming differently. It can seek democratic anchorage and legitimation for its claims about the attractions of a post-consumerist lifestyle in already existing ambivalence about and resistance to consumer culture. At a time when some economic theorists predict a terminal decline in capitalism’s powers of accumulation,⁴⁰ and when the environmental obstacles to growth appear insuperable, it becomes urgent to renew an earlier tradition of positive thinking on the liberation from work, and to associate that with an alternative hedonist defence of the pleasures of a less harried and acquisitive way of living. The reduction in work needs, in other words, to be seen as an essential condition for relieving stress both on nature and on ourselves. If the circulation of people, goods and information were to slow down, then the rate of resource attrition and carbon emissions can be cut, and time freed up for the arts of living and personal relating currently being sacrificed in the ‘work and spend’ economy. Parents and children would then more readily reap the benefits of co-parenting, and personal fulfilment would become less dependent on the quick fixes of consumerism.

      Today, then, critics of the existing political-economic system need to connect with and give voice to the political desires implicit in disenchantment with consumerism.