Blake Alcott, ecological economist & pro-Palestinian activist

Ecological Economics knows that the things in the natural world we can use as resources are limited. Therefore there is a limit to both the number of people on earth and to their per-person consumption of these resources. This quantity - population x affluence - is already at least double what the natural world can provide sustainably. So the human economy must shrink. Economic 'degrowth' is imperative, whether it happens politically and humanely or chaotically and disastrously. The most honest, and only effective, way of lowering our amounts of depletion and pollution is to enact legal caps on the extraction or destruction of good things like metals, fossil fuels, topsoil, fresh water, a productive climate, natural beauty and other species.

After about 20 years of thinking and writing about sustainability strategies, I've come to the conclusion that strategies of resource efficiency, lifestyle sufficiency, renewables and lower population must all fail because of the rebound effect: resources temporarily saved in one area, by one strategy, are snapped up by another area, or by other consumers, overnight. Yet no human polity in the next several decades will become ready to enact the necessarily effective strategy of resource caps. Thus, sadly, it is a waste of time to work for the big issues of global environmental improvement.

But some 'environmental' policies, on a smaller scale, do raise quality of life. For instance: while slowing population growth or, ideally, lowering absolute human population size might not lower negative environmental impact (population x affluence), for many of us - and certainly for all non-human animals and wild plants! - the world would be more pleasant if it were less crowded by us and our infrastructures. If we'd somehow legally reduce car trips and flights we'd have less noise and danger. If we'd convert to organic farming we'd have more biodiversity and a more beautiful world.

Alas, the Paris 2015 and subsequent COP meetings water down the valid Kyoto approach of hard caps and showed us that greenhouse emissions are not about to be lowered. So, save your energy, so to speak. Despite this opinion, I do work a bit for Degrowth and for the brilliant Swiss Glacier Initiative.

Since 2013 I've spent more and more time working for One Democratic State (ODS) in Palestine, for instance as Director or Co-Director of the NGO ODS in Palestine (England) Ltd. And since 2022 as a supporter of the ODS Initiative. I was long an active member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (Cambridge branch), and published several articles on Palestine (at Publications).

Download my book, as a PDF free of charge, called The Rape of Palestine: A Mandate Chronology. It is a reference book made up of 490 separate instances of the dialogue, such as it was, between the Palestinians and their British colonisers in the years 1917-1948.