On 5 July 2025 The AKADEMIA Forum held its annual symposium titled: Dialogue with Nature and with Ourselves: Ending the Growth Paradigm to Achieve a Sustainable Future

The AKADEMIA Forum is a faculty-student project in the Faculty of Letters that began in 2023 seeking to generate deeper understanding and dialogue as well as action towards addressing contemporary global issues. This year was our third Symposium which brought speakers and participants together to discuss climate change from the perspective of government objectives for ever increasing economic growth, or GDP. Moreover, we focused on how we act within this culture of overconsumption for economic growth that is now being spurred on by new AI technology. An overwhelming amount of data shows us the seriousness of the climate crises we face, and the impact is visible in devastating ways including extreme heat waves, wildfires, floods and millions of climate refugees already in existence. Yet, greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of the natural world continues to increase. We do not lack climate data to show us how serious the biospheric change is, so what explains the inertia in changing course and act differently to save our planet and create a sustainable world for future generations? The nine speakers explored from various angles this conundrum, which is underpinned by a logic of mainstream economics that drive a ‘common sense’ of perpetual economic growth based on ever-increasing consumption based on appropriation and extraction of our natural world, which then ends up as waste and pollution.

The symposium was attended by over 80 people in-person and online. It was organised around themes of a book by the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel (2020) titled Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World. He states, “Capitalism is organised around the imperative of constant expansion or growth, ever increasing levels of industrial extraction, production and consumption which we measure as Gross Domestic Product, GDP. Growth is the prime directive of capital. Not growth for any particular purpose but growth for its own sake. Its totalitarian logic is that every industry must grow all the time with no identifiable end point.” We are so used to hearing this ‘common sense’ of profitability, as if the objective of life itself is economic growth, “but this kind of growth quickly becomes deadly. . . If GDP was just plucked out of thin air that may be okay, but it is not, it is coupled to energy and resource use and has been for the entire history of capitalism. As GDP grows, the world churns through more energy and waste each year to the point that it is overshooting way beyond what climate scientists have defined as safe boundaries with devastating consequences for the living world.” Global GDP and material footprint go hand in hand, and the objective of growth can be said to literally be killing our planet, unfolding the terror of the Anthropocene. GDP is driven by ever more consumption, and high-income countries like Japan consume infinitely more than developing economies. In Japan where we live “growth has become completely unhinged from any concept of need and has long been in excess of what is required for human flourishing. Ecological breakdown is being driven almost entirely by growth in high economic countries, and particular by excess accumulation by the very rich” while growth hurt lower income populations disproportionately. “Ultimately this is a crisis of inequality as much as anything else,” writes Hickel. Thinking a bit deeper we see how the much-vaunted SDGs slogan, “leave-no-one-behind” directly relates to our consumption in high income countries. Making these more in-depth connections underpinned the many exciting talks at the AKADEMIA Forum symposium where professors and students presented their research.

We started with a talk from PhD student Sionainne Leslie O'Neill, Med, from Antioch University who discussed her research projects with students focusing on developing a deeper relationship with water through dance, and “Moving towards Environmental Justice and Healing.” This was followed by a talk by Marta Ilo, an MA student in Peace Studies and Anastasiia Kovalska, a BA student in Social Anthropology both at Soka University Japan (SUJ). They talked about the stark environmental impact of war, in a presentation titled “Ecocide and War: How Human Actions Drive Environmental Collapse” in the case of the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Next Samuel Katta (MA, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies), talked about “Mining and Agriculture” examining Soil Contamination and Pollution by Mining Companies in the case of Rural Sierra Leone, showing the devastating impact of mining on agriculture and livelihoods, mining minerals that link for example to our mobile phones. The morning session ended with a talk by Ulv Hanssen who is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at SUJ who discussed the main theme of whether “capitalism can be environmentally sustainable” exploring this from a degrowth perspective. He showed that basically this is impossible and thus illuminating the need for a fundamental restructuring of our economies if we want a sustainable future. The afternoon continued this theme of the need for degrowth, turning to how as consumers our daily acts intricately participates in the global climate crisis. This started with a talk by Professor Anne Mette Fisker-Nielsen from the Faculty of Letters (SUJ) who focused on the link between meat consumption as a leading cause of biospheric change. In her talk titled “The affective power of carnivorism and what you don’t wanna know despite the age of ecological crises” she argued for the need to become primarily plant-based if we want a sustainable future. This talk was followed by three presentations taking a similar stance by BA students in Social Anthropology in the Faculty of Letters. First, Olha Stashuk talked about the huge environmental impact of fast fashion and how this link to processes of identity, “Buying new? How about being more? How capitalism sells you to you.” This was followed by Yleov Serrano who talking about the ever-increasing problem of plastic waste, showing how in fact “Recycling is a Myth”. He argued that that recycling diverts our attention and limits our responsibility by making our plastic waste someone else’s responsibility to deal with while we continue to pollute the environment. The session ended with Tania Lantukh talking about the problem of mis- and disinformation that drive “The Climate of Deception: How Propaganda Fuels Climate Change Misinformation”, a fitting lead into our final talk about the impact of the Attention Economy.

The symposium ended with a deeply thought-provoking keynote by Professor Connie Lasher from Molloy University, currently a visiting professor at Soka University teaching courses in the Environmental Humanities that also included discussions of the Poetic Spirit and “Dialogue with Nature” by the founder of Soka University, Daisaku Ikeda. Her keynote titled “The Attention Economy versus the Poetic Spirit: Reclaiming Agency and Constitutive Relationality in Defence of Dialogue with Nature”. She argued that we cannot understand the failure to respond to climate change unless we understand the forces in contemporary society that are designed to prevent action. Professor Lasher examined the role of digital culture and the rapid, profit-driven scaling of AI as not only the most powerful manifestations of extrem(ist) interpretations of capitalism, but also the most sinister in their intentional exploitation of both nature and the human person. She argued that what is targeted, extracted, commodified, in the new “Attention Economy,” is nothing less than the way we are present and relate to ourselves, to each other, to the world of non-human nature, to that wholeness and sense of meaning that Daisaku Ikeda has called “the enduring spiritual realities of our lives.” Ikeda states, “modern civilization will be healthy only when the poetic spirit regains its rightful place.” Professor Lasher showed how the manipulation and commodification of our “attention” presents a direct challenge to this humanistic perspective. 

Decorating the room was also inspirational designs by Fernanda Shimabukuro (BA Social Anthropology Faculty of Letters), a photo collection of Dialogue with Nature by Dana Silva (BA Social Anthropology Faculty of Letters) inspired by Connie Lasher’s course in Environmental Humanities, and a poster presentation titled “Seeds of Hope” Regina and planting trees by Regina Tan (BA Faculty of International Liberal Arts).