Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Welcome to this New Year’s edition of the CUSP newsletter, gathering together recent highlights from what is fast approaching 10 years of CUSP research and advocacy.
It’s a good moment for reflection, for all sorts of reasons. The new year is always an opportune time to contemplate what we’ve achieved and what we still hope to achieve. And as the days (in the Northern hemisphere) grow imperceptibly longer, it’s also a fitting moment to reflect on what Hannah Arendt termed natality: the coming into existence of new life and new ideas.
Arendt made a couple of observations about that process. One is the sheer constancy of natality in the world and its presence as a powerful, countervailing force to mortality.
The other point she made is how little control we have over that force—despite our assumptions that we are somehow responsible for it. Your children are not your children, said the poet Kahlil Gibran. They come through you but they are not of you. That’s also true of our intellectual offspring, argued Arendt.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
The concept of degrowth was first introduced into the French language (as décroissance) by André Gorz in the 1960s. It was more or less dormant until its reincarnation (by Serge Latouche and others) in the early 2000s. It found a brief and glorious moment in the sun during the EU Beyond Growth conference a couple of years ago. But since then it’s led a curious life.
On the one hand, it’s been subject to a fiercely irrational, not to say anti-scientific, backlash (as I mentioned in our last newsletter). On the other, as CUSP fellow Dario Krpan and his co-authors have recently pointed out, ordinary people still respond positively to the concept once they’ve understood clearly what it means. It’s still contested. But no one has complete control over its meaning or its fate. That’s natality in action.
Ironically, of course, the same thing is true for economic growth itself, which once had a very precise meaning as a measurable increase in the Gross Domestic Product. But as CUSP researcher Richard Douglas has highlighted in his recent book, growth has since accrued an almost religious significance in modern society. Politicians, economists, journalists: all pledge allegiance to its fickle promise of progress in an otherwise treacherous universe. Natality again, I suppose.
Richard’s blog on climate denial tackles another unfortunate aspect of the same phenomenon. When the scientific consensus on climate breakdown is weaponised for political reasons, change demands engagement from beyond the scientific and policy community.
The unpredictable aspect of natality is nowhere more profound than when 'new' ideas meet a new generation. CUSP researchers Anastasia Loukianov and Kate Burningham have been working with Brand Legacy consultancy to figure out what Gen Z makes of sustainability. Richard Bampfylde’s work bringing CUSP research to a new younger audience in Jordan and the Middle East has culminated in his report on transformative eduction for the Ban-Ki Moon Centre for Global Citizens.
I’ve had my own fair share of experience with natality, of course. Launching The Care Economy over the last few months has led to some fascinating encounters with a wide range of audiences—from my event with Kate Raworth at the Conduit to my recent, commissioned article for the BMJ's (the British Medical Journal) special issue on climate breakdown.
And finally, it’s worth mentioning a drama series that I wrote for the BBC more than a quarter of a century ago exploring the tension between environment and development. It’s just been re-released unexpectedly as an audiobook by Penguin. Your ideas are not your ideas. They have a life of their own. That was Arendt’s point, I suppose.
In this newsletter, you’ll find a host of other examples. New papers, new funding, new engagements. No doubt this coming year will be full of many more.
As ever, we welcome your comments and suggestions and wish you all a wonderful year ahead.
Best wishes,
Tim
Prof Tim Jackson
Co-Director, CUSP
