From a different but complementary perspective, the anthropologist Jason Hickel, in Less Is More [2], discusses how the ecological crisis cannot be understood outside the logic of limitless economic growth. Growth is not simply about “having more”, but about accelerating extraction, production and benefits. It requires that goods circulate faster, that trends change more rapidly, basically, for the markets to be in constant expansion.

The problem is not only what we consume, but how quickly and how systematically we are consuming it. The outdoor industry, even in its most environmentally conscious forms, often remains embedded in this dynamic. “Sustainable” collections are released each season. New materials promise lighter weight, greater resistance, improved performance. The language is ecological, but the rhythm is the same as old: produce, promote, replace.

Hickel’s work asks an uncomfortable question: can green consumerism truly challenge a system that depends on a constant growth of consumption? 

I was inspired by Pablo Batalla’s new book about mountains and their relation with different ideologies [3]. During his chapter about ecologism, he said the following: “It is not the one who cleans the most who is the cleanest – or the most ecological – but the one who dirties the least.”

It is so simple, it’s almost funny how much it seems to be ignored by nowadays society. The most sustainable act is not constant repair of damage, but the reduction of damage in the first place.

Applied to our relationship with nature, it is not about how many clean-up initiatives we participate in while continuing patterns of overconsumption. It is about whether we can reduce compulsion to consume, whether we can overthrow the consumerism machine.

Degrowth, as presented by Hickel and others, is often misunderstood as austerity or regression. What it actually proposes is to redefine prosperity as something that prioritizes human well-being and ecological stability over GDP expansion. It is not a call to retreat from modern life, but to recalibrate it. To slow the economic metabolism so that ecosystems can regenerate. To produce less, but better.

If Han’s burnout describes an exhausted person, Hickel’s degrowth describes an exhausted planet. Both have the same root problem: acceleration.

And perhaps the mountain is the latest place to be colonized by it. But it can go back to being a site of reflection rather than performance. What would happen if we went back to going there without transforming it into proof of our goodness? Wearing what we already own, even if it is no longer the latest technical innovation? Walking there without monetizing it? We need a refusal to turn every landscape into content and every identity into brand.

Han reminds us that true rest requires the capacity for contemplation, and Hickel, that ecological survival requires structural transformation, not merely improved shopping habits. When I was reading them together, their works turned into a powerful dialogue with a common theme: acceleration is reaching its limits, if not overpassed them.

In a culture that makes money even out of sunsets, maybe the most radical ecological gesture is not to buy better, greener equipment, but the willingness to step outside the performance trap altogether. The mountain only asks to be respected. If we learn to slow down and appreciate it, we might begin to unlearn the logic that exhausted both ourselves and the Earth.

Cover image: Less is more message with lettered bead. Source: Freepik.