Thanks a ton for this review. I followed Jason Hickel for some time and read his book quite a while ago. I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to connect with him.

Please don’t mind me using my notes as comments on your review. Feel free to correct me or guide me if you find anything wrong or dubious (that is why I have numerated my notes).

1. “The problem is growth for growth’s sake.”
 This is correct, but it’s nearly a truism. There’s something deeper behind growth (spoiler: the Jevon Paradox? Naturalism?). Also and after all, any living being grows. Life itself emerged out of nothing and expanded into the seas, the earths, the skies (even the space a bit). So, opposing “growth for growth” with a mix of degrowth and animism risks sounding rhetorical rather than theoretically grounded.
2. “Francis Bacon and René Descartes. Especially the latter’s dualism, which cast humans as apart from nature rather than a part of nature.”
Wait!Didn’t Bacon and Descartes disagree sharply on this very point? I might be wrong, but in any case, the deeper issue here is that this critique reads Descartes and Bacon through the lens of today’s ecological crisis, which can be misleading.

   2.1) What Descartes and Bacon mainly achieved was not so much casting humans out of nature, but casting out gods and the surnaturalism from our logic from this time onwards. They purged supernatural explanations, which was a major step forward.

   2.2) Personally, I argue that casting humans out of nature is correct and that we should go further now in order to compress our ecological crisis to its minimum, by casting all living beings out of nature (life is anti-nature as it contends with the universe) instead of incorrectly trying to put human back into nature.
3. “Now, think of animism what you will, but it usefully is characterised by a respect for the natural world and by cultural taboos on rampant extraction.”
 The term “animism” is so broad and variable that it ends up meaning very little. Shouldn’t it be explained as deeply as naturalism here? Besides, returning to our pre-Darwinian, pre-Copernican ancestors is simply not a decent option.
4. “The Jevons Paradox.”
Caution: the Jevons Paradox operates very much like a fundamental law. It applies not only to energy or materials but to agriculture, biological mutation, etc., in any dynamic systems whatever its way to develop (mechanistic like the universe or evolving like life). JP is not going away. Therefore, isn’t degrowth leading to a stable state incompatible with this reality?
5. “Given that capitalism is the water in which we all swim, this will take a certain amount of deprogramming your mind.”
 Correct. Remark: Staying within, but amending (and not de-amending), our Western naturalist paradigm might be easier and way faster than combining degrowth with animism. Understanding that life fights the universe could be a quick and effective project. It’s something we can all observe directly. It’s also a logical next step of Cartesianism and its rejection of the supernaturalism. This could also correct the inconsistency in Hickel’s and greens’ claim that we must understand ourselves as part of life and part of nature. Life and nature, as concepts, are antinomic as nature would include non-life too.

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Thanks, stay tuned for more as I am not done with this topic yet either.

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Thanks, that book is high on my list. I listened to an interview with him, and it resonated.

For what it’s worth, Hickel similarly advocates consuming less.

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And indeed, all the talk about degrowth is hopium. We are in this to the bitter end, collapse is unavaidable.

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Thanks, I hear what you’re saying regarding hopium. I might well bring up the question of Hickel’s optimism in Tuesday’s book club.

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