When I was jotting down ideas for a new impact agency, I had a clear vision in mind: a strong economy and a thriving natural world don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Daniel Susskind’s book Growth served as the inspiration for founding The Activist Agency.

We’ve been led to believe there are only two possible economic paths: either we continue at our current pace toward total ecological collapse, or we choose the route of economic decline—“degrowth.”

Neither of these options is particularly appealing to most people, and since a third path is rarely discussed, let alone put on the political agenda, I was delighted to encounter it in Susskind’s book.

He begins by listing all the good that economic growth has brought us. In 1820, about eight out of ten people in the world lived in extreme poverty. Today, that number has dropped to just one in ten. Growth has enabled people to live healthier lives. We work less, have more leisure time, and can choose how to spend our time.

However, we are paying a tremendous price for the pursuit of growth. We are on the path to ecological disaster.

At the heart of the degrowth movement is the belief that perpetual economic growth is undesirable. And it’s true—our current model is destroying the planet. Therefore, it has been concluded that unlimited growth is impossible on a finite planet.

The planet’s material resources are indeed finite, but according to Susskind, that doesn’t matter. What’s important for growth are intangible ideas—concepts for how we can use the planet’s limited resources in new ways that create more value.

I wrote the paragraph below in my notebook immediately after reading this, and it became the launchpad for founding The Activist Agency. And in November 2024, we officially announced the new Nordic impact agency together with Tuuli Kousa and Niklas Kaskeala.

“The most serious limits to growth may be an imaginative one: a failure to adequately search through this enormous space of economic possibility and an inability to imagine how life in the future could be very different from today’s.”

If we accept a healthy planet as the foundation for all economic activity, then only our imagination limits our success and growth. But we have to open our eyes and step out of our trenches—only then can we see the future with new eyes. Only then can we build new business models that don’t depend on virgin raw materials or unlimited cheap energy (because all energy has an environmental impact). We have the opportunity to come up with ideas based on circular economy, services and experiences instead of products, or intangible value creation through beauty and design.

I warmly recommend reading Daniel Susskind’s book Growth – A Reckoning.