by Thomas Lepeltier, Journal des libertés, 21 June 2025
Should rich countries reduce their production and consumption to avoid catastrophe? The author has his doubts: slowing down across the board would deprive future generations of progress to come and make our societies more vulnerable, without solving environmental problems.
In brief
- The call for slowing down rests on an image: a car at risk of hitting a wall. The author asks what this wall would be, whether it is certain, and whether society does not have good reasons to move forward.
- For most of history, societies lived ‘in slow motion’, that is, in poverty; two centuries of acceleration have transformed living conditions.
- He accepts that certain polluting or scarcely useful activities need to be slowed down, as societies have always done, but not activity as a whole.
The article’s three arguments
Depriving our descendants of future progress
Those who want to slow down are not giving up past gains: they assume that future advances are unnecessary. Yet these could make machines less polluting, jobs less arduous and medicine more effective.
Slowing down also has a cost
Less activity means less income for citizens and the state, and therefore more poverty, less healthcare and less innovation, with a risk of a spiral of decline.
Slowing down solves neither resources nor climate
Slowing down the extraction of a resource also hampers the search for substitutes. And it is developed societies that pollute less, will emit less and will best withstand global warming.
‘Questioning the idea that we should slow down therefore does not mean that all activities should be maintained as they are.’Thomas Lepeltier, Journal des libertés, 21 June 2025
Why this debate interests us
Slowing down society is a theme that APALA’s think tank has already explored, notably through a series of mini-lectures. This text responds, with supporting arguments, to an idea that has become very prominent in the debate on ecology. It usefully distinguishes between two things that are often confused: slowing down certain activities, which every society does, and slowing down the economy as a whole.
Questions for debate
- How can we choose which activities to slow down without hampering those that improve life?
- Would slowing down in rich countries really reduce global emissions?
- What do we owe future generations: preserved resources, or knowledge and techniques?
To go further on apala.fr
Summary written by Claude (Opus 5.5 model), an artificial intelligence, for APALA, based on the article published in the Journal des libertés on 21 June 2025. The views expressed are those of the author. Spotted a mistake? Write to us.
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