In the series Prospects for Degrowth

I am a degrowth activist.

It’s not a career path I ever envisaged for myself. I arrived here after a couple of decades working, for want of better phrasing, on “capitalism’s side”. First for a range of high-growth Silicon Valley software companies and their ilk; latterly directly in venture capital focused on climate change technology startups, aka “Climate Tech” or “Impact Investing.”

Climate change was an important stop on my journey here.

Growing up in Malta, a small Mediterranean island, I was from a young age acutely aware of environmental degradation. Hot, Flat, and Crowded could have been inspired directly by my country although a more accurate title would have been Hot, Flat, Dusty, Corrupt, Post-Colonial, and Crowded. But rather than dwell on politics or activism I chose to embrace high salaries and high-powered perks while my wife pursued an academic career in environmental and decolonial anthropology.

Through the twists and turns of life, remote jobs, and the nature of academic funding opportunities, when Covid hit we found ourselves living in rural Scotland with two young children, a five-year-old and a newborn.

Lockdown was fantastic for me.

I was not required to work. I taught my five year old daughter swimming in the river in summer and she taught me cross-country skiing in the forests in Winter. We spent the in-between times at our allotment learning how to count seeds, draw plants, and build stuff. Our newborn in the meantime wreaked havoc with our sleep patterns and an equal amount of havoc with our hearts as we saw his joy when tasting freshly picked raspberries for the first time.

During this time I was also evaluating what to do next with my career.

Spending more time with rural communities and farmers in Aberdeenshire, climate change came to the fore of my consciousness once again. Even here, in the far North of a rich Western country, weather patterns were already playing tricks on us while unemployment, poverty, and addiction lived next door to handsomely paid oil and gas engineers and executives.

I emerged from lockdown resolved to do “something meaningful”and headed to Cambridge to join a leading climate tech incubator with the goal of founding a venture-backed startup to save the world. More twists and turns and I ended up employed by the very incubator I joined, there to help select the very best of the best prospective startup founders who, through hustle and venture capital, would decarbonise our economy and reshape it into a regenerative one.

What I found was that I was actually employed to be the conscience of the organisation and the experience led me to hit rock bottom.

In the roughly two years I spent embedded in the impact investment ecosystem I witnessed first-hand the entire gamut of reprehensible behaviours capitalists and financiers are so skilled at denying and deflecting: underpaid and exploitative employment; an implemented belief that white, male scientists and engineers are better than the rest; dismissal of the capabilities and experiences of Global South residents; direct workplace bullying, sexism, and racism; a sickening lack of integrity; and a surprising (to me, at the time) lack of care for ecology and environment.

As my job increasingly became centred around dealing with the practical and emotional fallouts from these behaviours I gratefully accepted the mercy of redundancy when it came. I was doubly grateful because I was also losing faith in the actual effectiveness of these climate tech startups at mitigating or reversing the effects of climate breakdown. To my untrained eye it seemed like too many of them operated a model of environmental trade-offs; doing the “least shit thing” instead of instigating any meaningful change. This gut feeling I had that climate tech wasn’t doing much good was difficult for me to articulate though because I lacked the right ideas and language with which to frame my qualms without sounding like an unhinged conspiracy theorist.

So with the benefit of a rest and hindsight I began reading again.

Not the technical or business stuff this time—my technical and business background had made it easy for me to absorb and understand enough of the so-called ‘hard’ climate science. I wanted to read the source textbooks of so many ideas impact investors claim to espouse but seemed unable to implement.

I started by reading the most often mentioned book in ‘impact’ circles: Doughnut Economics.

I was shocked.

Despite talk about planetary boundaries, circularity, regenerative economics, earth’s vital systems, and doughnut models I was struck by the notion that virtually nobody in “climate capitalism” had actually read this book. Or if they had, then they could not have really understood it. The path from Raworth led to Meadows, Carson, Schumacher, hooks, Marx and more recent thinkers like Hickel, Klein, Parrique, Jensen, and Cripps. System change, propaganda, limits to growth, modern monetary theory, colonial history, feminism. It turned out the language and ideas I needed were not only there, but had been there for a number of decades now. Therefore equally shocking is, as Katy Shields excellently lays out in the Tipping Point podcast, how all of this knowledge has been sidelined for the past half century.

As I increasingly developed an affinity to these ideologies I also developed in parallel a sense of impostor syndrome.

Despite Raworth’s exhortation that “we are all economists now,” I am clearly not an economist. I am also neither an academic nor a philosopher nor a policymaker. And despite an increase in my online popularity, having written a few provocative articles, I struggled to see where I can meaningfully contribute.

***

In April 2025 I arrived in Copenhagen (by bus) at the first meeting of a Nordic Summer University study circle on the topic of de-growth and exnovation that I was invited to attend. Out of thirty odd participants I think I was the only person there without a PhD (or not on track for one) or without direct involvement in public policy/activism.

This was not a new experience and neither is it a complaint.

In 2024 I attended several degrowth-related events including the Beyond Growth conferences in Rome and Vienna, a lot of online events and courses, as well as participating in some working groups run by the International Degrowth Network. In every case I felt a disconnect between my backgrounds and those of those around me or those delivering presentations. Not in a negative way. In fact, almost universally, most people I heard from and met have been open to teach, share, and discuss. Often very patiently. And the process has helped me build up my reserves of knowledge to be able to speak about the problems of capitalism in a more articulate and convincing way.

But I am still left with the question of where do I fit in exactly? What can I bring to the discussions that goes beyond just showing up? (Without discounting the value of “just showing up”, but that’s a different topic.)

Back to Copenhagen. For the first time I expressed these concerns of mine explicitly in group discussions and I received an interesting response. Or perhaps this response was always there but I am now in a better position to receive it. Put simply, what I heard was a variation (or paraphrasing) of: “OK, so you know a bit about how the other side works. Is there something you can tell us that we can use to build power, effectiveness and tangible plans to help us move away from capitalism being the dominant economic paradigm?”

Maybe I wanted to hear this. But when I proposed a discussion topic for an open space session loosely titled “Developing a practical field guide to disrupting capitalism” it was one of the most subscribed sessions that morning.

We had a wide-ranging and invigorating discussion but the biggest purpose it served to me personally was that it helped kick into gear a few skills of mine that have lain dormant for a couple of years. Or perhaps, rather than dormant, resting and replenishing themselves. Skills that I have previously used to create successful business strategies, campaigns, and product ideas and designs.

I am not laying claim to a Eureka moment; a starting point at best. But I’d like to share four key points that have emerged from my observations of the current state of degrowth activism and academia. The purpose is to have constructive discussion, learn further from your feedback, and most importantly, make progress.

Details can be devils

Degrowth, post-growth, stable-state, steady-state, regenerative, sustainable, circular, buen vivir, transitional, doughnut, post-economic. Inside academic circles these can be important distinctions and can lead to important research focuses and discoveries. But from the outside it looks suspiciously similar to the linguistic obfuscation we accuse economists and green-growthers of: addressable carbon, net-zero, real zero, greenhouse gas equivalents, decoupled growth, impact entrepreneurship, climate entrepreneurship, supply-chain transparency.

To be effective and build power we need to simplify, not exacerbate, the cognitive overload experienced by “regular” people making day-to-day decisions.

Nuance is important but let’s also be mindful of where the line in the sand is and pay more attention to which side people are on and less to which square foot they precisely occupy.

Practical idealism requires real alternatives

It’s easy for me to rail against the evil of venture capital-driven business and startup incubators. And I can be fairly convincing as to why the built-in profit motive will almost always result in an extractive business that will most likely undo any potential for “good” the underlying ideas might have. But then the natural question from the entrepreneur is usually: “OK, so what do I do?” “Where do I find the funding for my startup?” “Who is going to mentor me and be my advisor?” “How do I compete against the incumbents?”

I use entrepreneurs and startups a lot in my examples because I know that world but the story applies elsewhere too. You can shame or convince (depending on tactic) an oil company employee, a farm labourer, a banker, a marketer (or insert other harmful industry) only up to a point. And that point is the prospect of having no job the next day.

Put more bluntly, it’s very easy to be idealistic when you have few responsibilities or when you have a tenured job. Idealism can lead the way but it needs to be followed by practical alternatives for everybody else.

A measure of progress is needed

John Doerr, one of the most successful and wealthy American venture capitalists active today, decided a few years ago that he wanted to solve climate change. To do this he wrote a book called Speed and Scale in which he outlines ten areas that urgently need fixing so that we can “save the world”. Things like “Fix food” and “Electrify everything”. The underlying premise (similar to, say, Bill Gates’s approach) is that we can invest our way out of catastrophe and to enable this, the website speedandscale.com collects and shares data tracking “global progress to net zero.”

It’s not my goal to critique that project. The majority of the actions being tracked come out of the green growth approach to sustainability and there are better people than me who can critique that.

What I am interested in is the idea of tracking progress.

If we are to make meaningful and urgent progress on instigating global system change then it strikes me as useful to have an idea of how far we’ve come and how far we need to go. Reducing progress to a simplistic set of top-down goals and metrics is probably not realistic, or even desirable, but I’m sure there’s a valuable middle ground between a centralised over-reliance on metrics and, well, none at all.

Action plans

Ryan James of (re)Biz shared an observation with me last year that the opposite of consumerism is creativity. Not in the artistic sense but in the broader sense of making as opposed to consuming. The difference for example between darning a sock and buying one, between preparing a meal or ordering one. Or the difference between consuming venture capital to build a “climate tech unicorn” versus creating a regenerative organisation.

The problem of course is that the recipe, or instruction manual, for the first two (sewing and cooking) are easy to envisage. The instruction manual for building a new economy is harder to imagine. That is, the concrete set of steps we need to take to connect the academic and idealistic vision to what I do tomorrow morning.

The obstacles are many. But in the capitalist system we have books that guide people, step by step, laying out every template and minute detail, for how to build billion dollar companies and the venture funds that invest in them.

We need alternative instruction manuals “lying around” for people to pick up and follow when they get the itch to do something.

***

I am sharing these observations as a starting point not as an end point. As a call to anyone with a desire to collaborate on these specific topics to reach out and co-create a plan for creatively disrupting capitalism.

I chose the term “disrupt” to be part of this article’s title, and of the open space discussion in Copenhagen, very deliberately. It is a term capitalists love. Capitalist economics thrives on disruption. You disrupt an industry with new technology, starve the incumbents, and replace the system with your own. Refine, repeat, and grow. Examples abound: Starbucks and Amazon undercut local retailers until they’re starved out of the market; Uber crowds out local providers and then jacks prices; Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Netflix and other streaming services hold creators to ransom; Facebook, Google, and Twitter undermine news and literature to replace them with attention-draining 30-second clips and headlines. The list goes on.

So why not disrupt capitalism? Creatively. By which I mean replace the consumption model with a maker model. Or rather, models, because one size doesn’t really fit all and the monoculture of capitalism needs replacing with a diverse array of making things.

Capitalism’s version of disruption is violent and heavy-handed, starving people and organisations of meaning and income.

We don’t need to be violent in return. But we can be firm and assertively state that yes, we are going to disrupt your system. Not to starve you, but because we, and you, need to go on a diet.

Teaser photo credit: By Wuerzele – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37518751. By Wuerzele – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37518751