Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I am joined today by Professor Kohei Saito. He is the author of the new book, Slow Down, The Degrowth Manifesto, available from Astra House. Professor Saito, thank you so much for

joining us at current affairs today. Thank you. Well, let's begin with the crisis to which your book

is a response. Could you maybe lay out for us the basics of what the kind of fundamental

crisis that you are trying to address is?

Yes, the book discusses the fundamental crisis in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a geological

epoch where the human activities, especially the economic activities, radically

transformed our planet by massive consumption of fossil fuel, for example. So one of the representative

crisis of the anthroposin is climate crisis. This crisis will be worse and worse in the coming

decades, and this will create the increasing economic inequality and also resource scarcity accelerating inflation.

And that will also destabilize its geological order leading to conflicts and war.

So the crisis we're heading in the Anthropocene is a polycrisis, the combined crisis of

crisis of capital accumulation, ecological crisis, crisis of democracy. So this is something

that we didn't experience for many, many years. Maybe it's first time. So we need a radical

ideas to challenge this crisis. Yeah, I mean, you point out, you use this term, I mean, perhaps some of our listeners

have heard it before, perhaps some haven't, the Anthropocene, which is, I guess, used

to refer to, you know, we're used to these geological epochs, the, you know, the Holocene

and so forth, with the Anthropocene being this kind of era

where, as I understand it, humans are so transforming that the natural world, that the world itself

is now kind of defined by our relation to it. Perhaps you could tell us a little more about it.

Exactly. Geology is usually

considered as some kind of natural formation, natural phenomena. That has nothing to do with human

activity. But the situation has completely changed because our economic activities have so much

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