The streets of Brussels were clogged with diesel smoke last month, a friend wrote to me, as farmers brought their tractors to the city. The early weeks of 2024 have seen protests in many parts of Europe over multiple issues affecting the livelihoods of the people who grow our food. As I followed the mainstream coverage of the protests, there was one note that stuck out, repeatedly, as in this Guardian comment piece:

Months from European parliament elections… farming – which represents just 1.4% of EU gross domestic product – has climbed, suddenly, to the top of the political agenda.

I’ve put that parenthesis in bold because I want to underline the strangeness of the assertion. It’s not that the number is wrong, it’s that it doesn’t mean what commentators seem to think it means. It offers a false sense of perspective. And it leapt out at me because I was already writing about exactly this: the way in which putting GDP numbers on agriculture misleads us, how pulling on this thread can help us unravel the half-buried assumptions on which modern industrial societies have been built, and what this might bring into view about the helplessness which many of us experience in the face of climate change.

The essay that follows wasn’t written in relation to the farmers’ protests. It started out as a talk for an event called ‘Wild Growth’ at the public library in Albertslund, Denmark, last summer.1 But this seems like a good moment to share it.

Meanwhile, for a direct response to the issues raised by the protests, I recommend

DH

During the research for At Work in the Ruins, I heard a story about what happened when Greta Thunberg met Emmanuel Macron. This would have been in early 2019, soon after Thunberg’s speech at Davos where she told world leaders, “I don’t want your hope, I want you to panic.” When they met at the Elysée Palace, the French president told her straight out, “France is unable to decrease its emissions because of its economic growth.”

What struck me the first time I heard this was the frankness of the admission. That continued economic growth cannot be reconciled with ecological viability: I’d heard this thought expressed by heterodox economists, climate scientists and anonymous junior officials, but it remained politically unspeakable, a proposition with which no elected leader or candidate hoping for power could associate themselves. So it was startling to learn that it had been spoken aloud by someone in Macron’s position, even behind closed doors.

Over time, as I’ve thought about this story, there’s something else that strikes me, and it’s the note of helplessness in the president’s words. There’s something here which I suspect many of us will recognise, if we have been visited by thoughts of climate change; if an awareness of the depth of the trouble it represents has weighed on us in quiet moments, in the small hours of the night, or as we watch our children play. We look out at the world and find it hard to imagine how things can go on like this, yet harder still to see how they could change. What that scene at the Elysée suggests is that this double bind is not a symptom of our relative powerlessness – our inability to get those who hold power to listen – but that the powerful themselves may be as gripped as anyone by the same paralysis of the imagination.

There’s a knot here that I want to try to unpick: a knot in which helplessness and growth are bound together. If we can loosen it a little, I think we may learn something about our situation, and perhaps begin to slip the trap of panic and paralysis which takes hold of many of those who are most alive to the depth of the trouble we are in.

When a politician talks about “growth”, or when the word is used in a newspaper article, we have a sense of what is meant. According to the textbook definition, it stands for the rate of increase in the “aggregate production” of an economy: all the goods and services produced within a given territory and traded for money in the course of a year are totalled up to give the Gross Domestic Product, this figure is then compared with the totals for previous periods, and the rate of increase – or decrease – from year to year is headline news. In this way, the state of a country, a group of countries such as the European Union, or the world as a whole – the “global economy” – comes to be represented by a single figure which is treated as an overall indicator of whether things are getting better or worse.

The reporting of economic growth is the everyday manifestation of a powerful cultural logic: a way of seeing and understanding the world that shapes our societies’ sense of what is real, important, possible and desirable. This logic rests on a set of interlocking assumptions which are rarely stated outright, but which, like the foundations of a building, remain hidden from view, though without them the whole structure could not stand.

The same logic shows itself in the concept of economic development, according to which the nations of the world can be lined up and measured like children’s heights against a wall. Once they have been ranked in this way – from “most” to “least developed” – it becomes easy to talk as though those of us in countries such as Denmark or Sweden, the United Kingdom or the United States live closer to the future, while those in Mexico, Palestine or Bangladesh are living in a version of our past. This is how Hans Rosling could declare, “I was born in Egypt!”, since Sweden in the 1940s would score the same as present-day Egypt on the development indicators. Yet in order to talk like this, we must assume that there is a straight line running through history, a single path which all human societies have been following forever, which leads to the way that some of us have been living, around here, lately. And having made this assumption, the relation between our societies is reduced to a one-way traffic in ideas and technologies – since how could those whom the indicators show to be the “most developed” have anything to learn from those who have lagged behind?

What we are dealing with here is the cultural logic of progress. It is a logic which has animated the moral imagination of modernity: some of the most impressive achievements of modern societies have been inspired by this logic, though the same can be said of their greatest horrors. When we begin to talk in terms of progress, we are drawn into viewing the past as simply a poorer version of the present, the future as the only direction in which we might look for a sense that change is possible, and history itself as though it were capable of being represented on a spreadsheet, its losses balanced against its gains, to produce some notional equivalent of the GDP which would allow us to say whether things are moving in the right direction and at what pace. Founded on these assumptions, the cultural logic of progress, growth and development makes possible a certain kind of knowledge and a certain sense of agency. Yet, like the courtiers in Andersen’s story of the naked emperor, those who view the world through this lens are unable to see things which are plain enough to the unassisted eyes of common sense.

Let us try a thought experiment which might make this clearer. In order to calculate the rate of economic growth, it is necessary to treat all of the activities in which money is handed over as essentially interchangeable. According to the World Bank, agriculture currently makes up around 4% of global GDP. Seen in these terms, the growing of food is a relatively small and shrinking part of the patchwork of human economic activity. Yet this is an illusion. Wipe out almost any other 4% of the patchwork of activity we call the global economy and the result would be hardship for those immediately affected. Actually, I suspect we could sit down together, drawing on our own experience, and identify 4% of that patchwork which could be wiped out tomorrow, to the overwhelming benefit of almost everyone: start with the big tobacco companies, the online gambling industry whose adverts are everywhere, or how about the advertising industry itself?

Now, imagine a scenario in which agriculture is wiped out – and you realise that it is not a small and shrinking part of that overall patchwork, but the underlying weave without which none of the rest is possible. Whatever the numbers seem to indicate, we remain as dependent as we ever were on the land and the activities of growing food.

Our relationship to land and food plays a particular role within the logic of progress. This was brought home to me by a conversation I got into one New Year’s Eve at a kitchen table in a nice neighbourhood of a European capital city.

He worked as a ministerial advisor, the man with whom I had this conversation – or for a think tank, or a newspaper, or one of the big NGOs. It doesn’t matter which it was, or where exactly he got his PhD. What matters is that we could barely understand each other. It started when he asked about my writing. Something he’d heard had made him curious, and so I found myself tracing out this line of thought about the logic of progress and the assumptions which structure the way that most of us have learned to see the world. These assumptions bring certain aspects of historical experience into focus, I said, but they blind us to others, and the picture of the world which results is increasingly at odds with the lived experience of many of those around us. The logic of progress no longer serves as it once did, as a foundation on which to build political projects or to make promises that ring true. Worse, it ends up blinding us to the forms in which hope could come and the moves that are worth making in times like these. We need to learn how to go on together, how to make lives worth living, in the absence of progress.

He could make no sense of this: how could I not see that history was heading in the right direction? In his world, progress was a fact that could be demonstrated with statistics; to treat it as a narrative, a frame of culturally determined assumptions, was simply perverse. Under other circumstances, I suppose he would have found an excuse to leave the conversation, but there was a long way to go till midnight and we were guests in the home of a mutual friend. So he kept going, trying to find some solid foundation of agreement. And what sticks in my mind, years later, is the baseline to which he fell back, the fact which he seemed sure that no one could dispute.

“You’d have to agree, at least, that it’s a good thing we don’t all have to work on the land anymore?”

Put like that, of course, it sounds compelling: who wants to argue that it’s a good thing that anyone has to do anything? But let’s turn the statement inside out and see what falls out. I’ll leave aside the histories of enclosure and forced displacement of rural people, the huge landless peasants movements which struggle against the same processes today, and just ask this: are we sure that it is a good thing that, in our highly developed societies, hardly any of us are involved with working with the land and growing food anymore? At what point does development begin to feel like helplessness?

Let’s bring this back to the helplessness which many of us experience when confronted with what we know and what we have good grounds to fear about climate change. I want to make some suggestions now about the nature of this helplessness, where it comes from and what we might do about it. These are also suggestions for how we might think about growth, because I have come to suspect that there is an important connection between this helplessness and our relationship to land and food.

First, then, I want to suggest that this helplessness is not something new that arises in response to climate change. It was there all along, only its significance has changed. Within the cultural logic of the societies into which many of us were born, our ignorance and lack of skill or experience in growing food were a mark of progress; our distance from the land was proof of “how far we have come”.

For those most sheltered from the costs and consequences of modernity, climate change is the place where this logic is shaken and begins to break down. As our earlier assumptions give way, we are no more ignorant or helpless than we were already, but what used to be a source of pride becomes instead a source of anxiety.

Behind a lot of what is said about climate change, it seems to me, there lies a basic existential anxiety about where our food is going to come from. To make things trickier, this anxiety lives deep in our gut-intelligence, in the parts of ourselves that we share with our ancient ancestors and our fellow animals, while talk about climate change generally takes place in a language of measurements and calculations, problems and solutions, that speaks to a disembodied head-intelligence.

I suggest that the best response to the helplessness which many of us experience when the realities of climate change come home to us is to recover another sense of growth: not as an ever-increasing bundle of commodities, traded through markets and treated as though they were interchangeable, but the cycle of seasonal growth on which all of our lives continue to depend. I mean this literally: contrary to the logic of progress and the pride it encouraged us to take in our distance from the land, it would be a good thing for far more of us to get back involved with soil and gain at least some skill and experience in growing food.

It’s clear that the climate is already changing. The patterns of heat and rain become stranger and less predictable. The ways of growing which have dominated industrial agriculture are particularly vulnerable to these changes, because they involve placing big bets on a small number of cash crops. These ways of growing also tend to be highly dependent on fossil fuel inputs, destructive of the life of the soil itself and of other species, feeding into the climate and biodiversity crises. Their dominance has to do with their profitability for the handful of global companies that control key parts of the industrial food chain. Yet even today, these ways of growing remain less dominant than we tend to assume: by one reckoning, only 30% of the world’s food is produced within the industrial chain, while 70% is produced within “the peasant food web”.2

When we can be less sure of the shape of the seasons from year to year, we will need more resilient ways of feeding ourselves. These will require a greater diversity of food species, more hands-on involvement, skill, knowledge and inventiveness. Getting back involved with land and food under difficult conditions will be a humbling experience. It will call for all of our human cleverness, but also more of our capacity for attention, patience and care than the patterns of industrial activity have generally allowed for. We can begin practising this today, in gardens and public spaces, reclaiming abandoned patches of land in our cities or bringing life to depopulated rural areas, building culture and community through these efforts. There are almost certainly people near you who are already doing this.

These are not the only things that are called for in response to the trouble that the world is in, they do not offer a solution that will make that trouble go away, but they offer clues as to what is going to be called for in the changed world that human activity has brought about, and a path beyond the helplessness which many of us experience, a helplessness which always is the shadow side of the logic of growth, progress and development.