SLOWDOWN: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives

Abstract

Unorthodox ideas can make or break a scholar’s career, but with time, the most reasonable ones might meet a receptive audience. One such concept is slowdown, coined by Danny Dorling, the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. In Slowdown, Dorling presents quantitative findings that question the explanatory merit of Great Acceleration, a period following World War II signaling the quickening pace of population increase, human impacts on the environment, and climatic change. According to this English geographer, the Great Acceleration has ended, and humans have been pumping the brakes on many of their global activities. Slowdown goes against the grain of what geographers, including myself, have published on the Great Acceleration, oft depicted through graphs with upturned curves and dire interpretations of humanity’s future. Based on my reading, the term slowdown signifies a temporal process, not a thematic time period like the Industrial Revolution. Dorling does not appear to propose a replacement to the Great Acceleration, or, for that matter, the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Cthulucene, Novacene, Plantationocene, and other periods made fashionable by scholarly discourse. Slowdown is a temporary pattern of change occurring after an acceleration in humanenvironment interactions. (Dorling similarly defines capitalism not as a formal ideology or philosophy, but as a transition between two states of relative economic stability.) Recognizing that change is nonlinear, Dorling concentrates analysis on “change in the change that is occurring” (27). Raw numbers may show increases, but the pace of those increases complicates the story. Certain aspects of the Great Acceleration are ending, but not all. Dorling dedicates a chapter to various decelerating dimensions of society, specifically debt, data, demographics, fertility rates, and economics. To illustrate slowdown in each of these areas, Dorling incorporates a diverse array of variables, including change in the U.S. student debt (2006–2018), articles on Wikipedia (2001– 2019), total population (1–2100), total fertility rate of the United States (1973– 2016), and the NASDAQ Composite Index (1971–2019). Climate change and temperature increase, on the other hand, continue to accelerate with no sign of slowing down anytime soon. To be sure, Dorling qualifies that he is not gaslighting the doomsday environmentalists by acknowledging, “If we are to survive as a populous species, the human-made component of climate change