Practicing Anti-Growthism in Larimer County, Colorado

Last week, President Biden invoked “God” in his quest to keep economic growth racing forward in the U.S. If you think “growth” is a religion, Biden did nothing to dispel that thought. As an environmentalist watching growth rage across and destroy the landscape here in Colorado, I often feel at a loss for how to fight it. That said, I’m also focusing on small but meaningful steps I can support and take to fight growth.

The anti-growth movement — sometimes called “degrowth” — is growing, despite the irony in that statement, and that’s great news. In a nutshell, “anti-growthism” and “degrowth” can be described as a set of theories and practices that oppose and/or try to slow and stop endless economic and population growth. As wikipedia summarizes, “Degrowth emphasizes the need to reduce global consumption and production (social metabolism) and advocates a socially just and ecologically sustainable society with social and environmental well-being replacing GDP as the indicator of prosperity.”

Practicing anti-growthism can be comprised of many activities undertaken by people in environmental or economic justice movements. Some examples might include:

1. Live more simply and spend less money,

2. Support, enforce, and enhance regulations that stop or change endless economic expansion policies,

3. Support stabilizing global, national, state, and local human populations,

4. Support economic policies that even-out affluence rather than further expanding the chasm between the rich and the poor,

5. Take land out of the productive economic system by protecting it as an environmental asset,

6. Rewild landscapes,

7. and so on…

My goal with this list and post is to propose positive outlets beyond the endless ranting (by me and others) about how growth is destroying the U.S. economy, the landscape, non-human species, and human lives including here in Larimer County, Colorado.

Number 5, above, is of specific interest to me because it can achieve several goals at once — if we take land out of the productive economic system by protecting it as an environmental asset, we are strongly practicing anti-growthism.

Here in Larimer County, Colorado, where I live much of the time, there’s a very active local system of people and practices that take land out of the productive economic system. The City of Fort Collins has a “Natural Areas” program that buys land to take it out of economic productivity thus protecting the environment. That program has been supported several times by local ballot initiatives that raise taxes to buy and/or conserve the land. Ditto with Larimer County — again, the County has an “Open Lands” program that buys/conserves land and takes it out of higher levels of productivity, which has also been supported by multiple County-level tax initiatives.

Exemplary local citizens occasionally rise up and take land out of production themselves. Two years ago, a group of neighbors successfully passed a Fort Collins city-wide ballot initiative to protect the former “Hughes Stadium” land owned by Colorado State University which was going to sell it to a developer and subdivide into hundreds of new houses.

Larimer County also has a local “land trust” that works with rural landowners to either put “conservation easements” on land or buy that land outright for protection. Other state and federal programs also exist including Great Outdoors Colorado that uses statewide lottery proceeds to buy and protect land across the state including in Larimer County. The National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and Colorado State Land Board also own and manage significant amounts of land in Larimer County, and occasionally they buy or swap even more land to give it more environmental protection.

The biggest irony, of course, is that the more land that is protected from growth, the more people want to move here to escape the madding and growing crowds in other places. So what’s the solution to that? More practice.