‘Anthropause’ Author Advocates ‘Degrowth’ as a Path to Prevent Climate Collapse

Interview with Stan Cox, a research scholar in ecosphere studies at the Land Institute, conducted by Scott Harris

anthropause

[Web editor’s note: This interview was originally broadcast live on Jan. 26, 2026]

Stan Cox, who formerly served as lead scientist at the Land Institute for 20 years talks about his new book Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth, which indicts our obsession with endless expansion and poses a new model of degrowth to protect the Earth from climate collapse.

Stan is the author of eight books including, The Path to a Livable Future, Sick Planet and How the World Breaks.

SCOTT HARRIS: Right now, I’m very happy to welcome to our program, Stan Cox, a research scholar in ecosphere studies at the Kansas Land Institute, where he formerly served as lead scientist for 20 years. And we’ll be talking about his new book, Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth, which indicts obsession with endless expansion and proposes a new model of degrowth for protecting the Earth from climate collapse. Stan is the author of eight books, including The Path to a Livable Future; Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine; and How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe’s Path, from the Caribbean to Siberia.

Stan, thanks so much for making time to be on our program this evening.

STAN COX: It’s great to be with you, Scott.

SCOTT HARRIS: So first off, I wonder if you just tell us about the title of your book, Anthropause, taken from environmental changes that occurred after the COVID pandemic lockdown when business, commerce and travel were slowed down or shut down across much of the U.S. and the world. But there were changes that occurred during that lockdown. Tell us about the meaning of that word and the title of the book, Anthropause.

STAN COX: Yeah, there was a remarkable change that came over urban, suburban areas during the period of lockdowns in the spring and summer of 2020 when a lot of us saw photographs of wild animals running around through urban areas. Carbon emissions dropped by 20 percent. People in northern India were able to see the Himalayas for the first time in the distance because air pollution dropped. And studies showed that people came to have a closer connection to nature because the one place they could go was to go out into the parks that were still open or go out into forest and so forth. And so I thought this would be a good parable to open up a book about how we need to stop having such severe impacts on nature.

Not that we should go into lockdown, because the problem isn’t that our bodies, that we personally go out into nature, that’s fine — but so much of what we do in a hyper-industrial society like we have, that’s what really has the severe impacts on nature.
And so what I wrote about is if we restrict our quantity of fossil fuels and other resources that we bring into the economy, use them to overproduce a lot of stuff that isn’t needed and then produce a lot of waste. If we sever that pipeline, then we can reap a lot of benefits.

SCOTT HARRIS: Right. It’s interesting, we were just talking in the interview segment just before we welcomed you on the air about Venezuela’s oil. And we’ve been fighting these oil wars. You talk about the military in the book and the enormous amount of resources our country and countries that are in the world spend on the military. And so we look at our recent history, we’ve been fighting wars for oil for decades now, right?
STAN COX: Right. And that’s why I devoted one section of the book to the military because if we have an economy in which we have rules and we say, okay, there’s going to be only this much fossil fuel being used, then what’s the first thing that we can cut out because we need to use the fuels to meet human needs. The first thing that we can cut out is the military industrial complex because it doesn’t meet anybody’s human needs and it causes more devastation than probably any other thing that the U.S. economy produces.
SCOTT HARRIS: We’re speaking with Stan Cox, a research scholar in Ecosphere Studies at the Kansas Land Institute, and we’re talking about his brand new book titled Anthropause. And we wanted to ask you, Stan, what would a pause look like? What would degrowth implemented into policies in our country or countries around the world? What would it actually look like?

STAN COX: The way I have always advocated to do that is to have a hard national cap on the quantities of oil, gas and coal going through the society and then to reduce that cap year by year—that not only would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it would also constrict the range of activities that our society could engage in. And then the other part of degrowth is to deliberately choose among that limited range of … Or how to limit that range of things that our society can do to use resources toward meeting everyone’s basic needs on an egalitarian basis and to eliminate unnecessary and harmful uses of resources.

SCOTT HARRIS: Stan, you addressed the concern that this kind of major change in our economy would mean sacrifices. And I wondered if you talk about not only the concern by people that limiting the consumption of oil and energy products to produce endless streams of products and consumption, but tell us also about capitalism. We have a system right now where corporations, their credo is to maximize benefit to their stockholders and it’s grow, grow, grow all the time without much thought or discussion or planning for long-term survival and really the kind of resilience that our plant’s going to need as we face the climate crisis.
STAN COX: Yeah, that’s right. When people hear about degrowth, they think, “Well, how can that happen?” I’ve heard all my life that growth is necessary, that it’s the goal of a society because without growth, all terrible things will happen to us. But the truth is that growth of the gross domestic product or growth of material production and consumption—the benefits of that go to a very small sliver of society who are at the top of the economic pyramid and that growth only benefits them.

And so degrowth focuses on two things. One, reducing our impact on the earth and the other one is ensuring sufficiency for everybody so that everybody is able to have a good quality of life and to ensure that nobody is able to exploit the system and become billionaires and so forth. So it’s absolutely anti-capitalist view.

SCOTT HARRIS: Right. Well, we only have time for probably one more question. And I wanted to ask you, in thinking about the transition that would be necessary in our economy and culture to achieve degrowth policies at the state level, what kind of political changes do we need to make, not only in terms of the structure of our governance, but also in terms of how voters or those who participate in a democracy, a functioning democracy—how those changes could come about when we’re kind of steeped in the kind of … We’re really just steeped in prioritizing capitalist growth as part of our body politic. I mean, that’s the way it’s gone for hundreds of years here in this country.

STAN COX: Yeah. Yeah. We face enormous obstacles because the people who run the economy and society are going to use everything in their power and they have a lot of power to stop it. It’s going to take mass movements of all kinds to push this forward. And it’s not going to happen through simply campaigning for various candidates and so forth. It’s going to have to be something like what we’re seeing right now among the people of Minneapolis, for example, to rise up and say, no more of this. And we’ve seen it in mass movements around the world before—and it’s going to be very unpredictable, but it’s going to have to be a bottom-up movement.

SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think one of my concerns, we probably don’t have time to address this, but there’s been such resistance to addressing the climate crisis in our country. Not from the people necessarily, but from our institutions, both political and economic. It’s concerning that we might need some horrible catastrophe to occur and environmental collapse of some kind to wake people up who need to wake up to make these changes. And by then it might be too late. That’s a concern.
STAN COX: Yeah, that’s exactly right. The sooner we can reign in the abuse that we’re doing to the earth, the better it’s degrowth—or the end of growth is going to come. Whatever we do, it’s either going to come as … With business as usual, it’s going to come as a downward spiral into a kind of a Mad Max collapse of the world. But the sooner we achieve some kind of a rational plan for managing degrowth and reducing our impact on the earth, the more, or the better chance we will have for what’s referred to as a softer landing. And it’s going to be a very different world from what we have now, whichever way it goes, but we need to go with the soft landing and not the Mad Max world.

SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely. That’s all we have time for, Stan, but thank you so much for spending time with us. I think you have a website, right? For the book, Anthropause?
STAN COX: Yes. It’s at Seven Stories Press. Yes.

SCOTT HARRIS: Okay.
STAN COX:  So I think it’s sevenstories.org, but I should know.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, people could look that up. Thank you so much for spending time with us and congratulations on this new book, Stan and your long career trying to make us aware of what we need to improve and survive. So thank you. Appreciate your time tonight and we’ll look forward to staying in touch.
STAN COX: Okay. Thank you, Scott.
SCOTT HARRIS: Take care. Good night, Stan. Yeah.
STAN COX: Bye-bye.
SCOTT HARRIS: Bye. That’s Stan Cox, a research scholar in ecosphere studies at the Land Institute in Kansas. We’ve been talking about Stan’s new book titled Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth.

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