Timothée Parrique is a French economist specialized in degrowth. He currently teaches at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His latest book, Slow down or Die, was first published in French in 2022 under the title Ralentir ou périr. The English translation was published only last year.
I read the original French version of the book but never took the time to review it here despite the fact that I really liked it and still think to this day that it is a must-read to anyone interested in creating a better world for everyone.
Anyway, without further ado, here is a video of a talk the author gave at TEDx Lausanne very recently. This is well worth the 14 minutes :
I find this speech brilliant. It starts by reminding the audience of the Meadows report. (also called Limits to Growth, all the way back to 1972). Then it pursues by stating that keeping on business-as-usual will only lead to resource scarcity, systems collapse or both as we can’t have infinite growth on a finite system (called Earth).
The author then mentions the crude reality, with 7 of 9 planetary boundaries have been breached. If this is something I had mentioned previously, I didn’t know that the 15% wealthiest of the global population consumes as much as the rest. This shows how privileged and even wasteful the richest 1.2 billion people are.
The presentation continues, stating that for a while, the consensus was that taxing pollution, investing in clean tech and innovation would be enough to result in green growth and that all our problems would then be solved. And, unless you have slept in a cave for the past 15 years, you know this didn’t happen and that we still need to get global greenhouse gases emissions to actually drop, and fast.
This is already a daunting task as it is. AND, there are all the other boundaries to take care of. “Solving” climate change alone won’t deal with everything else. Hence the image of the giant Rubicks cube that needs solving with six issues : climate, soil, oceans, pollution, biodiversity, water and climate. As we have seen, technology is only a fraction of the solution, and only a small part of it.
Hence the three elements explained afterwards by Timothée Parrique :
Scale (also called minimalism, degrowth,…) is about going for sufficiency. Keeping our precious resources for what truly matters ;
Under, composition are elements such as eating less meat, travelling using less energy intensive means… For energy, it’s going from fossil fuels to renewables. This is all about adequacy ;
Efficiency : we don’t need to innovate any more on technology but on how we use it. We should be promoting well-being as an alternative goal to GDP – something am well aware of since I wrote about it years ago while doing my MBA in Sustainable Business and Energy.
With so many intricate problems, sustainability and energy transition professionals know that this will require complex thinking. In the end, Parrique believes that Less + Different + Better can help us move from isolated gestures to systemic change, with each steps unlocks the next one.
To end this article, I believe this is an absolute must watch for sustainability professionals and concerned citizens wherever they are. The old world is dying indeed. What the world of tomorrow will be is up to each and everyone of us. This is up to us all.
