Rethinking Economics to Create Shared Prosperity

As the impacts of climate breakdown intensify, the cost of living crisis takes hold globally, and levels of inequality remain stubbornly high, it begs the question: is our economic system working to meet the needs of people and the planet? The climate science is unequivocal and clear - the 1.5 degree threshold is swiftly approaching, and we can no longer rely on conventional economic models that do not recognize the ecological limits of the planet. Cities around the world are leading the way in establishing innovative wellbeing models, to creating thriving, just and resilient urban environments. This episode unpacks why our current models aren’t working and how purposeful government led action at the city level can support shared prosperity.

Featured in this episode:
“Global wellbeing is at risk – and it’s in large part because we haven’t kept our promises on the environment” UN Secretary-General António Guterres: https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/06/1119532

Featured guests:
Katherine Trebeck is a political economist, writer, and advocate for economic system change. She co-founded the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and also WEAll Scotland, its Scottish hub. She is writer-in-residence at the University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh Futures Institute and a strategic advisor to Australia’s Centre for Policy Development. She sits on a range of boards and advisory groups such as The Democracy Collaborative, the C40 Centre for City Climate Policy and Economy, and the Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity.

Saiorse Exton is an activist for climate and equality, based in Ireland. She founded her local branch of the 'Fridays for Future' movement and organizes nationally and internationally. For her Rise project, Saoirse rewrote Irish mythology from a feminist perspective – foregrounding the strong characters that traditional narratives tended to suppress. She ended her second term as Equality officer of the Irish Second-Level Students' Union in 2022, where she developed a passion for legislative and student-led activism.  She is a member of the C40 Cities Global Youth and Mayors Forum, working with Mayors from around the world to implement change in sustainability policy.

Image credit: Equity © Erick M Ramos & C40

If you want to learn more about the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy, please visit our website: https://jccpe.utpjournals.press/

Cities 1.5 is produced by the University of Toronto Press and Cities 1.5 is supported by C40 Cities and the C40 Centre for City Climate Policy and Economy. You can sign up to the Centre newsletter here. https://thecentre.substack.com/

Cities 1.5 is hosted by David Miller, Managing Director of the C40 Centre and author of the book Solved. It's written and produced by Peggy Whitfield and Jess Schmidt: https://jessdoespodcasting.com/

Our executive producer is Chiara Morfeo.

Edited by Morgane Chambrin: https://www.morganechambrin.com/

Cities 1.5 music is by Lorna Gilfedder: https://origamipodcastservices.com/

Transcript

[Cities 1.5 main theme music]

0:07 David

I'm David Miller and you're listening to Cities 1.5, a podcast by University of Toronto Press, produced in association with The Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy and C40 Cities, a global network of nearly 100 of the worlds megacities, committed to accelerating climate action. C40's mission is to halve the emissions of its member cities within a decade, while improving equity, building resilience, and creating the conditions for everyone, everywhere to thrive. Join me as I connect with leading mayors, experts, policymakers, and youth leaders who are helping ensure a 1.5 degree world by leading city-based climate action. 

Each week, we delve into the necessary transformative solutions to today's most pressing climate challenges. The fight for an equitable and resilient world is closer than you think. [Cities 1.5 main theme music fades out] 

[urgent music]

As the impacts of climate breakdown intensify, the cost of living crisis takes hold globally, and levels of inequality remain stubbornly high, it begs the question, "Is our economic system working to meet the needs of people and the planet?" [urgent music fades out] For nearly 80 years, the world has generally used the metric of growth in national accounts—gross domestic or national product—which measures the monetary value of certain activities as a standard for economic success. The general theory is that as long as the economy is expanding, all is well. However, this is far from the full picture.

We know from the work of ecological economists who use the laws of physics in their economic work, that endless growth is not possible to sustain on a finite planet. The conventional economic theories and models we currently rely on do not recognize these limits. Allied to that is the fact that, for about 40 years, most Western countries have pursued policies we could call "neoliberal" – low taxes on the wealthy and business, weak or little regulation, and the privatization of public assets in the purported belief that markets will allocate resources efficiently. Collectively, we chose to be governed by the false idea that infinite growth has no detrimental impact on the planet, and its corollary that our basic public policy goal should be to foster growth. The allied idea is that markets can solve all of our problems, while pretending that these policy choices would not have serious environmental and social policy impacts. 

[upbeat, energetic music] The leadership and academic work of a relatively small group of ecological economists has helped to pave the way. People like Peter Victor and Tim Jackson, Kate Raworth, Katherine Trebeck, and Mariana Mazzucato, all of whom in different ways are challenging the orthodox thinking that has resulted in a climate crisis and a crisis of inequality. These ideas are gaining momentum. Recently, the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, said this:

3:43 António Guterres

We must place true value on the environment and go beyond gross domestic product as a measure of human progress and wellbeing. That does not forget that when we destroy a forest, we are creating GDP. When we overfish, we are creating GDP. GDP is not a way to measure richness in the present situation in the world. [upbeat, energetic music continues]

4:13  David

Purposeful government-led action can create a different path when we include the planet's needs and those of all people in our economic and public policy decisions. It's important to note that these proposed frameworks will look different in the global north and the global south, and even within some cities. [upbeat, energetic music fades out] It's about creating a shared prosperity that ensures no one will be left behind, and about only using one's ecological fair share. There are examples now in cities as diverse as Amsterdam, Oslo, and Bogota have these ideas taking shape, helping to craft an economy where everyone can thrive.

[light, rhythmic music] This episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Katherine Trebeck, a political economist, writer, and a leading advocate for economic systems change. Katherine co-founded the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, a network committed to redesigning our economies to prioritize shared wellbeing for both people and the planet. [light, rhythmic music cross-fades to upbeat electronic music]

I also have the honour of speaking with a youth climate leader from Ireland, Saoirse Exton. Saoirse is an inspiring climate activist who has been [with warmth] fighting for change since she was 11 years old, and she shared with us her insights about why we need to rethink our current economic systems if we want to tackle the climate crisis. A quick note that you may hear us use terms such as "wellbeing economy", "circular economy", "shared prosperity", or "donut economics". [upbeat electronic music fades out] We are using these terms and theories broadly, to refer to regenerative economic models and policies which take the environment and people's wellbeing into account, as opposed to conventional economic theories, which consider the environment as an externality. So, let's get going.

[light, rhythmic music] By focusing on shared prosperity as our goal instead of growth, we open up larger conversations of how to build a better, more supportive economy. Incorporating the fundamentals of wellbeing economics requires us to rethink our economic system in order to meet people's basic needs for housing, food, and decent work, while ensuring we stay within the ecological boundaries of a finite planet. Katherine Trebeck is one such economist. She is the co-founder of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, or WEAll. She is Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Futures Institute, and a strategic adviser to Australia's Centre for Policy Development. She sits on a range of boards and advisory groups such as The Democracy Collaborative, the Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity, and our very own C40 Centre for City Climate Policy and Economy. I reached Katherine for a remote interview at her office in Glasgow, Scotland, on February 2nd, 2023.

Katherine, thanks so much for joining us today.

7:33  Katherine Trebeck

David, such a delight to be chatting with you. Really looking forward to our conversation.

7:37  David

You've worn a lot of hats about wellbeing. Before I ask you about what that means, how did you get interested, and why did you co found WEAll?

7:48 Katherine Trebeck

The short story is, essentially, I was working with Oxfam for almost 10 years in various different roles, and it was increasingly apparent to me through the different work I did there that, if we were to have a chance at addressing poverty and the environmental breakdown, the things that Oxfam was working on, we needed to look at various aspects of the economic system and, for me, particularly in the global north, working for an organization that was focused on global justice, it really felt that the economic systems in places like where I'm sitting today, the UK, where you are in Canada, those sorts of countries needed to think about their use of resources, and were they leaving enough room for our friends, colleagues, and family around the world to meet their basic material needs. And so, WEAll, I describe as having many mothers, in that it was a coming together of various different organizations and individuals who, in their own different way, had been working on thinking about what might a better, more humane, and more sustainable economic system look like? And they'd been building the evidence base and advocating and working together to show what it looks like, but they were still relatively disparate, and they really felt that if that economic system change movement, in all its diversity, was going to have a chance at creating the sort of impact and sort of change that was necessary, we needed to collaborate like we've never collaborated before.

So WEAll, Wellbeing Economy Alliance, is essentially about trying to make those linkages, amplify what's already happening, support the movement, because it's hard, working on economic system change, so to be a bit of a place for people to lean back into and recharge and reconnect with each other, but also to feel that they're part of something bigger than just themselves, and that there are others facing shared challenges. So, while it abbreviates to WEAll, we all is also the theory of change too, that by working together, we might just have a chance at turning things around.

9:45  David

Interesting to me that people coming from a social justice perspective have also come to the conclusion that it's our economic system that is driving these problems. It's very clear from a climate change perspective that the global obsession with growth has helped drive the overconsumption of resources, particularly fossil fuels that is causing climate change and making it very hard to change trajectory. Can you talk a bit about what a wellbeing economy actually means? It sounds great. We all want to be well, but what does it mean? 

10:21  Katherine Trebeck

[laughs] Yeah, it's positive, isn't it? It's a positive vision. Oh, and just to reflect on your point there, I mean, I'm often saying that climate environmental breakdown question and the social justice question are two sides of the same coin, and that coin metaphor, I think, is very apt because it's the way we set up our economies that links the two. We know that social inequalities, huge levels of consumption by some people are the ones that are driving environmental destruction and vice versa. It's those with very few resources, who are doing less but bearing the brunt of environmental breakdown, and so those resource inequalities, in terms of use of resources, are deeply feeding the environmental breakdown question, and so we have to turn our attention to the economic system.

And so, the idea of a wellbeing economy, I mean, the simplest way I can describe it is essentially an economy that is deliberately, purposefully, concertedly designed to deliver social justice on a healthy planet. It's about stepping back and saying, "What sort of economy do we need to deliver what people on the planet truly need and truly want?" And, it's essentially also about saying the economy is not so much a goal in its own right, but needs to be designed to be in service of those, I guess, higher order goals of social justice and environmental health. And so, that's quite different from, I guess, the sort of 1990's view of sustainable development. You'll probably remember those three pillars that, when we visualize sustainable development, you saw economy on a par with society and the environment, [light pizzicato string and percussive music] and the wellbeing economy agenda is essentially doing what ecological economists have been telling us for decades, what feminist economists have been telling us for decades and, to be honest, what First Nations communities have been living for millennia, that the economy is a subset of society and the two sit within our natural world. And to take that seriously means a very, very different approach to the economy. It means asking, "What sort of economic activity is going to align with a flourishing society and a healthy planet?" and actually, also, to have a really honest conversation about what sort of activities we need to power down if we're going to have a chance at supporting humanity in today's world. So it's quite a different approach to the economy. Lots of different pieces to that but, at its most basic, it is really about rethinking the role of the economy. [light pizzicato string and percussive music fades out]

12:39 David

Well, it's a really interesting way to put it, and so different than the normal economic conversation which, from a government perspective, is, "Let's grow the economy and then we can discuss how to split it up". It sounds much more to me that the wellbeing idea is about how we structure the economy so that it gets the results we need, a just society and a sustainable approach to environmental issues.

13:02 Katherine Trebeck

The sad thing is, is so much of that money that comes through economic growth is then used to patch up and repair and clean up and heal and fix the damage that that growing economy was doing, so it's a perverse way of setting things up. So, the wellbeing economy is about saying, "Well, couldn't we get things right, first time around?"

13:21 David

Give a couple of concrete examples, if you can, about how we do that. How do we get it right the first time round? You also hinted at there's things we should not do. So the concept's pretty clear, but what does it actually mean on the ground?

13:34 Katherine Trebeck

Sure. So, let me stay a little bit in the abstract for a moment just to frame that, and then let's get into some of the examples, but, one, I like to think like someone who's part of the wellbeing economy movement, and there are people all over the world and, you know, a huge number of people who are a part of this and, whether they use the term "wellbeing economy" or "regenerative economy" or "solidarity economy" or "cooperative economy" or "participatory economy" or "donut economics" and so on—the term doesn't matter—essentially, all these folks are people who really recognize that the economy needs to be in service of what people and the planet need.

So, if you're part of that movement, one of the simplest things I can say is to think of maybe a three-year-old that you might know, a granddaughter or grandson or a niece or nephew or a son or daughter, and just think about how they're often asking, "But why? But why?" and, with a kid, it can often be a bit annoying, but I think we need to be like that. We need to look at the high number of people, say, sleeping rough in the town here where I am, in Glasgow, at the moment, look at the huge number of floods that have just swept across South Australia, why there are places in the UK that are opening up warm banks alongside food banks because people can't afford to keep pneumonia away—quite literally, people are dying of pneumonia—why more and more young people are lonely and scared for their future, why people are in work, but still in poverty and having to get top-up wages if they're lucky. And so, when we see those sorts of examples that show us that business as usual is no longer delivering the way we need it to—if it ever did is another conversation—and we channel our inner three-year-old and we look upstream, we find ourselves facing the economy, and then we can think about, "What sort of changes do we need?" And those changes are going to happen very, very local, to how we design cities and local neighbourhoods through to national macro economies, right up to the global, geopolitical, economic infrastructure, and there's a whole suite of changes that are needed. So, it's a little bit like a jigsaw puzzle of a whole suite of different changes – how we tax, how we subsidize, what sort of business models, how we purpose our economy, how we do our energy system, and so on and so on. How I think of clustering those pieces of the jigsaw puzzle is with what I call the four Ps, so if you're doing a jigsaw puzzle, you start with the corners, so you start to move your pieces around so you're working on the corners, and so the four Ps of this wellbeing economy jigsaw puzzle are purpose, prevention, pre-distribution and people-powered. 

So, let's dive into some examples there. Purpose is about really being fair-weather friends of economic growth, rather than it's ever-faithful followers, so saying, "Let's think about the composition of growth. What do we need to grow more? Where is growth necessary?" and, "What countries, what localities don't need any more economic growth?" and very much explicitly thinking, "What sort of growth?" So, you might see things like governments who are bringing in multi-dimensional wellbeing frameworks into their government system, to have a broader purpose to understanding the economy and looking at the economic impact.

16:39 David

Can you just explain to the listeners a bit what that sort of framework means and why it's different than what we do traditionally, which is measure GDP which basically is what's spent in the economy, essentially?

16:53 Katherine Trebeck

Sure. I guess the last few decades and the post-war settlement really has given us this system of essentially growing the economy, and how we measure that growth has come to be gross domestic product, and that has, not unilaterally, but has dominated policy-making and decision-making in governments around the world for decades, and it's become the default way we think about different countries when we think, "Are they developed or not developed?" or, you know, "Where are they vis-à-vis each other on those league tables?" It's through GDP. 

It also governs the entry ticket to many global geopolitical clubs. It's, you know, "How big is your GDP?" It's your entry ticket to something like the G7, the G20, and yet gross domestic product was never designed to be a proxy for the success and welfare of a nation. It also was designed 90-odd years ago, in a world where we weren't so cognizant of the reality of planetary boundaries. It also ignores distribution of resources, so we've seen recent research and research over the last few decades, seeing just how much the benefits of growth, so often, go to those at the very top and how this idea of trickle down has failed. And it also doesn't care whether you are spending to clean up and repair after something having gone wrong, like a car accident or on a divorce or on, you know, spending because people broke their leg. Actually, it doesn't reward you when people stay happy and healthy in their communities.

One of the classic examples is, if we keep a tree healthy and thriving in someone's backyard, and they pick their apples from it and they cook their own apple pie and share that with their neighbours, that sounds like a pretty lovely community to me. That won't touch GDP at all. And so, it gives the policymakers a pretty narrow, if not set of perverse, incentives, and so the idea of wellbeing frameworks that Canada has and, in fact, over half the OECD countries have, and local states have them as well, is essentially saying, "Let's put a much broader suite of measures and metrics on the table and undertake policymaking accordingly."

19:00 David

[driving music] So, we'd look at what actually matters to people's lives instead of these abstract ideas.

19:06 Katherine Trebeck

Yeah, and stop seeing GDP as a proxy for that and assuming, "Well, if we just increase GDP, there's an automatic read across for good lives for people," because we've known that read across isn't happening anymore. We've seen GDP growth at the same time as in-work poverty going up. We see GDP growth at the same time as huge destruction to the planet. We see GDP growth at the same time as economic inequality, loneliness, and so on. So, it's almost lazy policy-making just to rely on GDP as the dominant measure of progress. So, this agenda, this metrics-beyond-GDP agenda, there's huge numbers of governments who are working on this. It's essentially upgrading our governance systems, so they're fit for the 21st century.

19:48 David

That was really clear. And, if we start looking at things, and let's go to Cities because, you know, we're an organization of cities, we start looking at things through a big city mayor's perspective. You know, people have needs for housing, they have needs for transport, we want to minimize our impact on the planet so that our city will still be here in 100 years if it's a seaside city with a threat of sea-level rise. Are there some examples of kind of concrete things that mayors and city governments they lead, can do that could be building blocks, the four Ps that can help fill in the jigsaw? And are there examples of cities that are actually doing it? [driving music fades out]

20:32 Katherine Trebeck

Yeah, and it's a fantastic question because I think there's a suite of things that mayors that you work with will be already undertaking. So it's things like rolling out free or affordable and clean and accessible public transport systems, rethinking how energy is generated, so maybe micro, community-owned, renewable energy, maybe neighbourhood-based community energy, for example, but also thinking, "How do people engage with decision-making in the city?" as well, so participatory budgeting that places like New York, here in Glasgow, a whole ton of other cities are experimenting with is another good example of the sort of thing we'd want to see more of in a wellbeing economy, but also thinking about, "What's the economic ecosystem in that city?" and what I mean by that is what sort of businesses are sitting on the high street, providing for people and residents of the city? What sort of economic activity is going on? Is it just the sort of big-box model of retail and again, fingers crossed, it'll trickle down, or is it saying, "Well..." – and this is something I learned in Economics 101, many, many decades ago is that– "you can generate this local economic multiplier if you have local ownership, local employment, thinking about maybe smaller businesses, how do you support from that?" and so then, levers that mayors will be able to access, things like procurement and planning regulations are maybe not the most exciting of discussions, but I think they can be really, really important in enabling us to set up and deliberately encourage and help flourish the sort of economic activities that are much more aligned with what local residents need, and also what the environmental needs, so really thinking about, "What sort of businesses do we want to be operating in a particular locality? Who's employed by them? Who owns them?" And so, you get there in that, and this is this agenda of community wealth-building. You get that local economic flows, staying locally, rather than being extracted off to remote, big businesses somewhere else who care very little about the locality.

22:30   David

One of the criticisms of the wellbeing approach and also of ecological economists, which is allied, although perhaps not exactly the same thing, although I do find the idea of talking about prosperity very powerful because that's something people can understand, one of the criticisms is, "Well, there's all these countries in the world that really need development. They need growth." So, what's your response to that?

22:56 Katherine Trebeck

I'd agree. I think this is an agenda that, to me, is first and foremost about countries that have enough in the macro sense, and to say they have enough in the macro sense is very much to really recognize that even, say, a country like the UK, one of the six richest countries in the world in GDP terms, there's huge levels of inequality here. So, the UK is not very good at sharing that wealth and resource. There are people sleeping rough, people dying prematurely because the UK is so bad at sharing that wealth, but collectively it has enough and, if it was better at sharing that wealth, it would be in a much better place. 

But the UK isn't the same as a country that hasn't got... The sort of countries I used to work with when I was at Oxfam – South Africa, for example, or some of the other countries in the global south – that are still struggling to meet the basic needs of their citizens. And so, this is an agenda that has global justice at its heart because it's essentially saying that if, as a world, as a humanity, we care about global justice, in that countries like the UK, like Australia, like Canada have to make ecological room because, at the moment, they're taking more than their fair share of ecological room, and implicit in that reality is that other countries that do not yet have enough to meet basic needs are going to stay in that situation. So, we're implicitly saying, "Well, those global inequalities are here to stay," unless we make ecological room for them.

Having said that, it's an agenda that I think that puts the onus on the global north to change most quickly. There is certainly no correlation [chuckling lightly] in GDP terms with wisdom and ideas and good practices, so I think what we can do is learn from countries and colleagues around the world who are undertaking different approaches to the economy, who are setting up their societies differently, who are exploring different ways of approaching these questions, and really learn from each other.

I would say there's also a bit of a cautionary tale here. You see, so often, international institutions say to some of these countries in the majority world, "Take that agenda, follow in the footsteps of those rich countries in the global north, replicate all they do," and yet I think there's a conversation to be had about, "Well, look at all the damage that that did. Look how it hasn't delivered for communities. Maybe that's not such a good pathway for everyone to be following."

25:18 David

Yep, sometimes it's completely the other way around – the global north should be learning from the global south. Certainly, we see that in cities where there are tremendous innovations all over the world. Katherine, this has been a fascinating conversation. I could speak to you for hours. I really appreciate you spending the time with us today, and your ongoing work to start building that jigsaw and filling in the pieces so that we can move to a society where the economy works for people, not the other way round.

25:49 Katherine Trebeck

It's been such a pleasure, David, and you did ask me for an example of a city, and so, just as we're finishing off, I can drop one in. I've recently moved home to the town I grew up in, Canberra in Australia, and they have got many, many pieces of the jigsaw in place – great public transport, spaces where you can just hang out and chat to each other without having to spend money on a coffee, really great community groups sharing things – you know, there's a group on Facebook called Buy Nothing where you can share things and give things away rather than having to buy – lots of great farmers markets, big push on renewable energy. So, people could do worse than having a glance at my little hometown of Canberra.

26:25 David

[light, rhythmic music] You know, Katherine, [with mirth] that is not the city that I would expect you to pick. [Katherine laughs] I thought you were going to talk about Amsterdam or Glasgow or maybe Portland in the US.

26:35 Katherine Trebeck

Oh, Glasgow's working on it. [laughs]

26:35 David

Canberra, Australia, a model of moving towards wellbeing and good practical steps and putting people's priorities first. That's a fantastic example, and thanks again for being on Cities. 1.5.

26:47 Katherine Trebeck

Great to chat with you. [light, rhythmic music fades out]

26:57 David

[upbeat electronic music] We are clearly seeing the environmental and social consequences of our current economic models, most visibly through rising inequality and climate breakdown. Today's youth climate leaders recognize that the way we've organized our economic systems is part of the problem, and are rightfully demanding systemic change, a call that mayors and global leaders must respond to if we want to leave a habitable world for the next generation.

Let's hear from Saoirse Exton, an Ireland-based activist for climate and equality. She founded her local branch of the Fridays for Future movement and is a member of C40's Global Youth and Mayors Forum, working with mayors from around the world to advocate for more ambitious climate action. Saoirse and I spoke at the C40 World Mayors' Summit in Buenos Aires on October 21st, 2022. [upbeat electronic music fades out]

Youth are the single-biggest force changing the global narrative about climate change and, Saoirse, it's such a honour to interview you, and thanks for being here with us today.

28:13 Saoirse Exton

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

28:15 David

So, can you talk a bit about your own personal journey? Why, at 17, are you a climate activist? Why do you care so much about this issue that you've flown all the way here to Buenos Aires to speak to a roomful of the world's mayors?

28:29 Saoirse Exton

I got involved in this when I was 13. I started climate striking, and I think a couple of years before I began, or even actually the year before, there was a referendum in Ireland about bodily autonomy, and I remember, on the day of the count for that referendum, I was really struck by the power of people coming together. I had never seen this before. I was 11 and I had just never experienced anything of the sort before, and I think Mum tells me this story that I don't recall, but it's funny. Apparently, as we were coming away from the crowd, I turned to her and I said, "That was my feminist awakening."

29:02 David

You were 11?

29:03

[laughing] Yeah. I was eleven. And so, I think from that point onwards, I was sort of looking for something to get involved in, but also, I thought that, like, you'd have to be an adult to get involved because, like, everyone in that referendum campaign was over the age of 18. You know, they were all able to vote and they were all adults and a lot older than me, but then I saw a video of actually the Australian climate strikes, which happened in late 2018, very close after Greta Thunberg started striking, and I was really struck by, like, the power of young people. I didn't realize that we could do something like this. I didn't realize protest was accessible to young people. So, I got in contact with the national group in Ireland, and I was like, "How do I do this?" and they were like, "Just go for it," and so I did. One day, I was like, "I'm going to climate strike," and so I did, and I think, from there, my understanding of how the world works, in general, and how important it is that we create a different system, and how important it is that we don't just sit idly by as our planet ends, really. It's become part of my life. It's not a hobby or something. It's part of myself and my personality.

30:16 David

You're Irish.

30:16 Saoirse Exton

Yes. [chuckles]

30:17 David

There's a long history of Irish raconteurs, playwrights, authors. There's a special gift to the world from the Irish, I think, of storytelling, and you spoke about this in the plenary today before the mayors, and I thought that was very powerful, so can you talk a bit about your thoughts about language and how we speak about climate change and why it matters?

30:41 Saoirse Exton

So in Ireland, we have one of the oldest surviving languages in Europe, and that is the Irish language. It's called Gaeilge in the language itself and, you know, it's a really fascinating language because it has ties that go all the way back to Indo-European languages, and so it has, like, linguistic ties with Hindi in India, and certain ties with Arabic, as well.

31:06 David

 I did not know that. I suspect most of our listeners don't.

31:10 Saoirse Exton

[laughs] It's fascinating, because, you know, I think we have this idea, especially Europe, or in the Western world, we've created this idea that we're very separate from the rest of the world, that we're almost superior but, in reality, you know, we're so interconnected, culturally speaking, and linguistically speaking, with the rest of the world because that's just human civilizations. And so, one of the great things about Irish is that because it's so old, it's developed with the way that Irish people have treated the land over thousands of years. So, like, the language has developed with agriculture in Ireland. It's developed with the way that we essentially worship cows. Farming has been a vital part of the Irish economy and Irish society for thousands of years, and the language reflects this. And so, it also reflects, in turn, the symbiotic relationship with the planet that my ancestors would have had, and that all of our ancestors would have had, and that has now being degraded, through, you know, capitalism and all of these things which we're now facing.

So I think language, especially indigenous languages, is something vital that we need to return to. You know, people always are like, "Do you mean we should return to, like, the feudal age or something?" I don't mean that. I mean that we need new ways of thinking and new ways of doing and part of that is combining, you know, traditional practices, which worked for thousands of years, with modern ways of doing things.

32:33 David

[pensive music] It's an interesting point that indigenous languages and traditional languages have connections with nature that we may have lost in the way we use our words today, and I think English is one of the languages that struggles with that. Can you talk a bit about that and how it impacts people, the language we use, in our relationship to nature, the environment, the economy?

32:55 Saoirse Exton 

So, I was in South Africa recently, and it was an incredible experience. I had never been anywhere in Africa, and I remember we went to this reserve, and there was a woman there and she was indigenous, and so we actually made connections about the similarities between how our people were treated by colonizers and the languages, and it was really fascinating because what she said was that the English language, for example, is quite an objectifying language. It looks at, like, the individual subject, rather than the relationship that that subject has to the world around it.

There's this author in Ireland called Manchán Magan. He wrote this amazing book called 32 Words for Field and, essentially, the whole idea of it was that, by having a look at the Irish language, it's really interconnected with the world that we exist in. There's a slaughter field, where obviously – it's obvious what would happen there. [pensive music fades out]

33:44 David

I don't think we want to go to that field today. [Saoirse laughs]

33:46 Saoirse Exton

There would be, like, fields that would be specifically for, like, breeding and it was specific to the purpose of the field. So it wasn't just, "Over there, there's a field." It was like , "Over there there is this specific field for dairy cows," for example. And so, it discusses the relationship and the role that that place has in the system. It intertwines places and the planet by extension with, like, societies. And I think, in a language like English, both because English is such a combination of all these different languages and cultures that have come and gone all across the world – like, you know, I speak a specific dialect of English because they came to Ireland and, you know, we have lost in some ways that connection, and I'm not sure how we've lost it, and I'm not sure how to re-establish that, but I think, you know, it is part of mindset shift to change the words that we use and remember that we are part of a kind of ecosystem.

34:47 David

One of the consequences of language, I think – and it's way beyond my expertise, but is when you use language that separates you from nature, that starts to infiltrate your decision making, and if we're going to address climate change I think we need to think a little bit differently about our connections, including our economic ones, because if we separate what we do as people from the planet and, say, "That's our economy," that doesn't make sense because we're on the planet. I know you have some thoughts about this as well, and it interests me that it can come from language. It can move from language to economics.

35:25 Saoirse Exton

I think, you know, the key thing is that, in our current economic system, for some reason, it's almost as if we're all completely rational beings, and all we want to do is spend all our money to maximize our satisfaction, and because the only way we can maximize our satisfaction is through buying things, and I think, you know, that ties to language because we've moved away from placing humans at the centre of everything that we do, which is absurd, because we're humans. So why are we ignoring our own humanity?

Too often, we separate economics from politics, and from, you know, social and cultural issues as well, because we have this idea that, like, economics is this immutable set of laws, when, in reality, it is political. It's inherently political. I mean, economics is a social science. We seem to forget that. It's not as absolute as, you know, the laws of physics. 

36:17 David

[gentle music] I'm interested in exploring this further because there's a group of economists called ecological economists that try to include our impact on the planet and on equality in their thinking about economics. They're behavioural economists who look at things differently, and recognize that people get pleasure from things they don't spend money on, as well. [chuckles lightly] It's not all, you know, consumption, yet what we hear in the international discourse is about one word, and the word is "growth". That's the goal of all the systems is growth. So, is that good?

36:54 Saoirse Exton

I really think growth is just not sustainable. Something that grows without being checked is a cancer. There's a fine balance we have to strike, biologically speaking, and I think it's the same with our economy because, you know, it's just not possible that we can keep and keep on taking resources, and just expect for nothing to change. We don't live on an infinite planet. We live on a finite planet with finite resources, so we have to work accordingly with that. [gentle music fades out] Jason Hickel uses the metaphor of the tree. If there's a drought, the tree grows less. If there is a season of lots of rain, for example, the tree grows more. It takes resources that is available. It doesn't take more and then deplete other trees around it of those resources. It survives with all that it needs and then, when there's plentiful times, then it can grow more than what it necessarily needs to survive. I think we really, really need to take lessons like this from nature because we are animals. We are fundamentally animals. We've forgotten that but we are.

37:55 David

I want to explore this issue about growth a little bit more. You know, we're here at the C40 World Mayors' Summit. We have a group of mayors of the world's leading cities, who are all trying to address climate change, and part of that is our economic systems. So, if perhaps growth is not the right thing to think about because we have a finite planet, do you have thoughts about what mayors should think about and talk about if we're going to create solutions that allow us to live sustainably on a finite planet?

38:34 Saoirse Exton

What we need to do is we need to have a look at the available resources and work accordingly with that. And we also need to stop things like planned obsolescence, for example, because these things, they're literally made to be disposable. A phone is made to be disposable. You know, after two years, it just stops working. So, you know, we need to make sure that what we are making does not take more than we actually have, we're not borrowing from the planet. I also think, you know, we need to move away from growth because, like I was saying, it's impossible. It's literally impossible to maintain growth infinitely. At some point, you're going to reach a climax of growth and it's going to collapse, and honestly, that collapse that will happen is far worse than any slight decrease in profit that may happen as a result of climate action.

I think we need to have empathy. We need to remember that, sure, these systems are important and they do dictate a lot of the elements of real life, but fundamentally, we are human and we need to have empathy for one another. It's a simple thing, but we need to remember that we're all living on this planet. We need to be more conscious. We need to be more aware. We can't just make decisions without thinking of the impact.

39:50 David

[gentle music] I understand that you're planning to go on to university.

39:53 Saoirse Exton

Yes. [laughs]

39:54 David

And what are you going to study?

39:57 Saoirse Exton

I'd like to do something in the kind of politics, sociology, economics field.

40:00 David

You're going to produce those solutions, I am sure. [Saoirse chuckles] And I thought your example of the phone is fascinating.

40:05 Saoirse Exton

Yeah.

40:06 David

When I was your age, the phones were all owned by the phone company and the phone company was owned by the people.

40:12 Saoirse Exton

Mm.

40:13 David

And, do you know how long the phones lasted?

40:14 Saoirse Exton

Well, I have an old phone from the '80s and it still works.

40:17 David

Exactly. It lasted forever.

40:19 Saoirse Exton

Yeah.

40:20 David

[gentle music continues] Because the phone company was public, and it made sense for them to have phones that last forever as opposed to the built in obsolescence of these ones. And, it was interesting you touched on that issue, because it is an example of how we could do things differently and how we did.

40:35 Saoirse Exton

And it's an easy example. Like, it's so easy to just stop planned obsolescence. You know, you can just say, "That's illegal". [laughs] I think that's actually another point. You know, like in the past, we made things to be resilient, and now we make things to be disposable. And again, it's like, you know, if you make things to be disposable, it's all about the consumption. We need to move away from this thought of consuming all the time. I find it interesting because people often say the current economic system is brilliant, because the consumer controls everything. But in reality, the consumer is controlled by what is actively available to them. I can't buy a phone that is – an affordable phone anyway, that is really resilient. It's not available to me, so I have no choice but to buy a phone which is made to stop working. So there actually isn't a lot of choice, I think is the main thing. And economics is all about choice, so if you don't provide that choice, consumers, they don't have any power.

You know, if you have an economy reliant on fossil fuels, and you are somebody who, you know, earns minimum wage and can't afford an electric vehicle, and the public transportation system is not that good, if there are things like taxation on oil, for example, you have no option but to pay that, and I think that's something we need to think about, as well, in climate action. [light, rhythmic music] You know, how do we quickly move away from fossil fuels without further widening the gap of inequality? Like, in Ireland, for example, we have a carbon tax, but the people who are suffering the most are the people who have the least amount of money, who are lower on the socio-economic scale. We can't do that, so it's complicated. We need to move away from fossil fuels carefully, but also quickly.

42:15 David

I think that's a fantastic spot to end the discussion on, because you're going to be an economist... [Saoirse laughs] ..we hope, and you will find those answers. And I just want to thank you for your ongoing work. People often say that young people are the leaders of the future, and I don't agree with that. You're the leaders today, and you're making real change today, and it's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

12:24  42:37 Saoirse Exton

Thank you so much for having me. [light, rhythmic music fades out]

42:40 David

[pensive music] The climate science is unequivocal and clear. The 1.5 degrees threshold is swiftly approaching. If we were to have any chance of averting climate breakdown, we can no longer rely on economic models which are based on extractive and exploitative use of our finite resources. This conversation is no longer happening at the fringes. Just in the last year, New Zealand published its first National Wellbeing Report, the World Health Organization launched an initiative calling for wellbeing to be at the heart of economic recovery, and at the city level, cities like Vancouver and Bogota are exploring alternatives to GDP.

Cities around the world are leading the way in establishing new models of wellbeing. They offer a different way forward, one that prioritizes social and environmental frameworks over an insatiable hunger for growth, and cares equally about the wellbeing of the people and the health of the planet. Purposeful city government leadership has a role to play in delivering a climate-safe world where no one uses more than their fair share, and populations can thrive within safe planetary boundaries. [pensive music fades out]

[upbeat, energetic music] Subscribe to Cities 1.5 and tune in next week to hear from several inspiring global youth leaders who are demanding more ambitious climate action in their own communities and beyond. You won't want to miss it. [upbeat, energetic music fades out]

[Cities 1.5 main theme music] Thanks for listening to Cities 1.5. I'm David Miller, the Managing Director of the C40 Centre for City Climate Policy and Economy. I was the Mayor of Toronto, Canada, and know, first-hand, the impact cities can have in solving the climate crisis.

Cities 1.5 is produced by Jessica Schmidt. Our executive producers are Isabel Sitcov and Jessica Abraham. Our music is by Lorna Gilfedder. Cities 1.5 is a production of the University of Toronto Press and the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy.
 
 

To find out more, visit the show’s website link in the episode notes. See you next time. [Cities 1.5 main theme music ends]