Political Geography 87 (2021) 102367 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo Viewpoint Limits, ecomodernism and degrowth Giorgos Kallis ICREA and ICTA-UAB, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain Robbins concludes his exchange with Gómez-Baggethun by free love, so that women could enjoy sexual pleasure free from the yoke remarking that ‘there is a great deal to chew here, especially with regard of motherhood. Goldman wanted women to stop feeding expendable to the way the degrowth community attempts to thread the needle be­ soldiers to imperialist war machines, and surplus labor to capitalist tween ethical limits and Malthusian scarcity’ (emphasis in the original). factories. Limiting population for Goldman was a deliberate political In explaining their positions on degrowth, both authors refer to my book action– a strategy against capital and its need for limitless growth. on limits (Kallis, 2019). In Robbins’s spirit of clarifying differences be­ In my book I call upon fellow environmentalists to take ownership, tween ecomodernism and degrowth, I explain here my thesis on limits, like Goldman did, of our desire for limits and to abandon conservative while acknowledging that I do not speak for the degrowth community, and depoliticizing attributions of limits to an external, stingy Nature. We as will become apparent from my differences with Gómez-Baggethun. want to limit growth to stop the destruction of an abundant planet. We Economists in the 1970s framed the limits-to-growth question in do not want growth because growth is meaningless. We are not worried Malthusian terms, positing scarcity against progress and giving credence that growth has limits - we worry what will happen if we do not impose to Ronald Reagan’s quip that ‘there are no limits to growth because there limits soon enough. are no limits to human intelligence’. Scarcity had been the bread and Beyond political desires, it is important to acknowledge that plane­ butter of economists ever since Malthus invoked limits to call for tary forces place limitations upon human choice. I prefer, however, the growth, while rejecting redistribution (my new interpretation of his more precise term, ‘thresholds’ to describe external forces that precipi­ Essay – see Kallis, 2019). Many environmentalists got trapped in this tate or accelerate ecological changes. Gómez-Baggethun uses the terms economistic framing. Instead of fundamental debates over the types of thresholds and natural limits interchangeably. He insists that whereas worlds we want to inhabit, economists diverted discussions to techno­ scarcity is socially defined, ecological limits are physically defined, with logical and market fixes against scarcity, while Reagan and neoliberal thresholds and tipping points indicating ‘natural limits’. But ‘limits’ is a policymakers worked to remove limits to growth through deregulation metaphor (Norgaard, 1995) that presumes our desire for that which is and the lifting of environmental protections. limited. Gravity, for instance, is a limit if you want to jump out of the For a radical environmentalism, instead, limits are not something out window, but not if you want to stay on your couch. Scientists can discern there that imposes scarcities but a political project towards the good and with more or less certainty the external thresholds of ecological changes just life. ‘Degrowth’ does not warn of limits to growth. Rather, it ex­ and the consequences of current choices. Continuous growth or certain presses a desire to limit growth and open alternatives. I call this project technologies may lead to exceeding such thresholds, causing disasters. ‘collective self-limitation’ and trace its origins to several sources: the What turns external geophysical forces into ‘limits’ is the desire to grow Romantics, who ridiculed Malthus’s premise that humans cannot limit and supersede them. Seeing the world as an external force that imposes their fertility; the anarcho-feminist Emma Goldman, an advocate of limits on us is an integral part of capitalism’s ideology of scarcity and birth control; Gandhi; or the ‘fundi’ German Greens and the European growth. In our culture, a politics of invoking catastrophic external limits political ecologists of the 1970s. This environmentalism, I argue, is a only fuels capitalism’s promise of ‘more’. truly revolutionary movement: It questions not the capacity of capital­ The distinction between collective self-limitation, external thresh­ ism to deliver the dream it sells, but the desirability of the dream itself. olds, and scarcity offers some clarity in the debate. Ecomodernists do not To see the difference between Malthusian scarcity and radical deny external thresholds. They might disagree whether human adapta­ degrowth, consider Goldman. Goldman was a proto-environmentalist. tion to climate change breaks down at 2, 3 or 4 ◦ C. But like degrowthers The cover of her magazine Mother Earth celebrated the abundance of they seek to reduce carbon emissions. Where ecomodernists part from an early Spring day—a stark contrast to the bounded Earth environ­ degrowthers is in the former’s belief that limitless growth within plan­ mentalists depict today. She also advocated birth control in the name of etary thresholds is possible (and necessary) by say developing nuclear E-mail address: giorgoskallis@gmail.com. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102367 Received 18 February 2021; Accepted 19 February 2021 Available online 10 March 2021 0962-6298/© 2021 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). G. Kallis Political Geography 87 (2021) 102367 power, carbon capture or industrial genetically modified agriculture. this can only mean foregone economic activity compared to what cap­ Notice here how under capitalism the specter of limits (in this case italism could achieve. Again, this would be a conscious limit to growth. climate change) is mobilized to justify and perpetuate more of the same: Gómez-Baggethun revives unnecessary in his essay the caricature more growth, more capitalist ‘technology’. science wars of the 1990s. Robbins is in fact at his best when he de­ This is precisely why I emphasize collective self-limitation instead - constructs contested views of nature. I had expected then Robbins to tell because the specter of external limits has been invoked over and again, us, in his example of the Wisconsin dairy farm, about the different views, from colonialists and Malthus in the 18th century to economists and projects, and power relations at stake in the farm’s automation – and Reaganites in the 1980s, to ecomodernists today, as a justification for where he stands in relation. Instead, his Wisconsin ecology seems limitless expansion. It is not a coincidence that earth appeared to us as a apolitical, especially given his claim to neutral observer status: he is limited spaceship the moment we were flying out of it. To accept limits there just to record how people adapt to forces beyond their control. means to accept that there is already enough – here, on earth – but there Robbins says that what Gómez-Baggethun approves or disapproves is will be enough only if we share what there is. And socialism, someone irrelevant in the face of such forces. What happened to studying the said, is about sharing. world so as to change it? Robbins’s critique of the Wisconsin farm reads The confusion between ‘thresholds’, ‘limits’ and ‘scarcity’ runs as a list of lamentable ‘externalities’ to an otherwise pastoral idyll. To through the debate between Gómez-Baggethun and Robbins. Gómez- borrow Robbins’s (2011) own brilliant phrase: Where is all the pain Baggethun accuses of Robbins of banalizing limits, when, in my view, hidden behind the peaceful vista? Robbins’s questioning of ‘natural limits’ actually refers to the ideology Placing this techno-pastoral future within an unspecified ‘socialism’ of scarcity, and not the presence of external thresholds or the need for (without elaboration of the details, possibilities, and paths of the so­ institutionalized limits. Robbins, however, confuses the conversation by cialist project in mind) does not make it ‘political’. Technology - the referring in same breath to ‘natural limits’, scarcity, and ‘elitist … forms robots - appears as a fix, independent of relations of production. The of self-denial’. Political ecologists have indeed exposed how capitalism assumption is that a very different political order will assimilate and produces and invokes scarcity toward de-politicizing ends or to justify reproduce technologies produced under very different relations. There is control over ‘excess others’ (Mehta, 2013). But this does not mean that a risk here of what Rob Wallace (2019) calls ‘red washing capital’: planetary thresholds are irrelevant. Robbins’s call for humility in the justifying real-existing technologies and the relations that produce them, face of uncertain futures does not answer Gómez-Baggethun’s concern with the excuse that in some undefined future, a hypothetical socialism with the material, energy and environmental implications of robots, (as remote a possibility as ever) could put them to good use. A socialism nuclear power, GMOs, geo-engineering, and other supposed solutions to also that challenges capitalism’s means but not its dreams does not live ecological destruction. Likewise, Luque-Lora in his contribution ques­ up to its name. How is the dream of the Wisconsin farm different from tions the political feasibility of degrowth but does not answer the promise capitalism has been selling to workers for centuries? Gómez-Baggethun’s challenge about the ecological plausibility of the A more sympathetic reading of Robbins is that he just calls for po­ technological solutions Luque-Lora seems to support. litical ecologists to hold back on their critiques of new technologies, If by self-denial Robbins means self-limitation, then Gómez-Bagge­ rather than to assume they are undesirable because they are capital- thun is right also to say that there is nothing elitist or self-denying per se intensive. Gómez-Baggethun is right, though, that Robbins (and, I in calls for limits, with numerous instances of emancipatory and egali­ would add, Luque-Lora and especially Huber) oversimplify and stereo­ tarian struggles for limits, as seen with Gandhi’s anti-colonial politics. type the degrowth position on industrial technology. To reject specific Contra Huber, desires to ‘live simply so that others may simply live’ are technologies does not mean that degrowthers reject all technologies, not a Western invention of academic post-industrial workers. Lumping that they are oblivious to the monumental technological changes needed also all defenses of limits under the Malthusian label is analytically and in the face of climate change, or that they dismiss labor-saving progress. politically wrong. There is a difference between reactionary prophecies The problem with nuclear power, for example, is not that it is ‘big’ or of ‘coming anarchy’ or ‘lifeboat ethics’ by doomsayers like Kaplan or ‘modern’ but that a world where nuclear power supplies say half of all Hardin and struggles to limit petro-capital at Standing Rock and else­ current energy (or worse, 10 times that by the end of the century at 3 where. The former invoke external limits to keep others out of their percent annual growth) is a world with a proliferation of accidents, lifeboats; the latter struggle politically to put limits on capital and to sabotage, and disposal risks. The concern is with the specifics and their share lifeboats. socio-ecological implications. By missing the distinction between self-limitation and scarcity, The concern is also with a modernist ‘fix’ mentality that searches Robbins associates limits with dystopian futures. So it is interesting to salvation in technology. Degrowth calls to pause and to reconsider a note that fictional utopias are limited worlds – islands like Homer’s techno-system that demands freedom to discover what can be discov­ Ithaca or More’s Utopia. Liberation and freedom, I argue in my book, ered (do we really need, for example, the ‘gain of function’ experiments require limits, like a pianist needs a finite keyboard to make music. that wire and store new viruses to protect us from a new pandemic, with Adventure without limit, without an Ithaca to return to, is no adventure. a real risk that they might end up causing it?). The emphasis in this This classical ideal of limited worlds stands in direct contrast to the position is phronesis (prudence) - a democratic choice of limits. Western-frontier fiction of liberation from all limits (at the expense of My problem with ecomodernism is not its insistence on certain the colonized ‘other’ of course), mythologized by Hollywood movies in technologies (debatable as they may be), but its emphatic rejection of which the hero beats death, the ultimate limit. the need for limits. To stop climate change we need to limit some pro­ Even Robbins’s socialist robotic utopia—embraced, as well, by duction/consumption, manage economic slowdowns and apply new Huber and Luque Lora— needs limits. If the dream is to liberate humans technologies - from clean energy, to removing carbon to stabilizing from toil, then there must be limits to what happens to liberated time. If icebergs. More, we also need to live, consume and produce differently— freed time is invested to more production and consumption, like capi­ with new limits and new possibilities. Ecomodernism’s staunch refusal talism does (except when stopped by the labor movement), then we are of limits is wrong and outdated. And there is nothing socialist in it. caught in an eternal replay of Keynes’s fantastical prediction that his grandchildren would work only a few hours a week. For socialism to Declaration of competing interest liberate workers from work, as Huber and Luque Lora desire, limits have to be imposed so that any liberated work cannot be invested in further No conflict of interest. work to increase productivity. Workers will work less when there is a limit on work, not when robots do the work. Furthermore, if socialism treats people and environments with the value that they deserve, then 2 G. Kallis Political Geography 87 (2021) 102367 Acknowledgements References I thank Susan Paulson, Paul Robbins and Erik Gómez-Baggethun for Kallis, G. (2019). Limits: Why Malthus was wrong and why environmentalists should care. Stanford University Press. constructive comments and Caroline Nagel for tightening my argument. Mehta, L. (2013). The limits to scarcity: Contesting the politics of allocation. Routledge. I acknowledge the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Norgaard, R. B. (1995). Metaphors we might survive by. Ecological Economics, 15(2), Innovation and Universities, through the “Maria de Maeztu” programme 129–131. Robbins, P. (2011). Political ecology: A critical introduction (Vol. 16). John Wiley & Sons. for Units of Excellence (CEX2019-000940-M). Wallace, R. (2019). Redwashing capital, uneven earth. https://unevenearth.org/2019/ 07/redwashing-capital/. 3