Contours of Climate Justice - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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Degrowth, or deconstruction of the economy: Towards a sustainable world Enrique Leff The degrowth wager The 1960s were a period of turbulence in the modern world. At the same time as emancipatory and countercultural movements (labour, youth, students, gender) irrupted, an alarmist discourse emerged that warned of the ‘detonation’ of a so-called ‘population bomb’, and suggested that rapid demographic growth was the main cause of the ecological crisis. For the fi rst time since a nascent capitalism in the Renaissance set in motion the machinery of production and market mechanisms, since the West had opened history to a modernity guided by the ideals of freedom and enlightened reason, one of the pillars of Western civilisation cracked: the myth of progress impelled by the power of science and technology, converted into the most servile – and serviceable – tools of capital accumulation, and of unlimited economic growth. The environmental crisis thus questioned some of our most ingrained beliefs: not only human supremacy over all other creatures on the planet and the right to dominate and exploit nature for the profi t of ‘man’, but the very meaning of human existence, grounded in economic growth and technological progress. This progress was forged Enrique Leff is a Mexican environmentalist and has as PhD in developmental economics. For many years, Enrique was coordinator of the UNDP Environmental Training Programme for Latin America and the Caribbean. He currently works in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Contours of Climate Justice. Ideas for shaping new climate and energy politics 101
in economic rationality, shaped by the tools of classical science, and set up a structure, a model, that established the conditions for a notion that progress was no longer based on the co-evolution of cultures with their environments, but on an economic development based on a mode of production that carried in its genetic code an imperative of growth – of limitless growth! The pioneers of the bio- and ecological economy raised the problem of the relationship between economic process and the degradation of nature, the necessity of internalising ecological costs and deploying distributive countermeasures to the market’s unbalanced machinations. In 1972, a study by MIT and the Club of Rome for the fi rst time highlighted the Limits to Growth. This is where proposals for ‘zero growth’ and a ‘steady-state economy’ fi rst appeared. At the same time, Georgescu-Roegen (1971) established the fundamental link between economic growth and natural limits in his book, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. The process of production generated by the economic rationality that nests in the machinery of the Industrial Revolution is defi ned by an impulse to grow or die (unlike living beings, who are born, develop and die, and human populations, which usually stabilise their growth). Economic growth, industrial metabolism and exosomatic consumption imply a permanently growing consumption of nature (matter and energy), which not only runs up against the limits of the planet’s resources, but also becomes degraded in the process of production and consumption, following the second law of thermodynamics. More than four decades after the eye-opening book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson 102 Critical Currents no. 6 (1962) on the eff ects of the insecticide DDT, ecological destruction has increased dramatically, accentuating global warming caused by greenhouse gases and by the inescapable laws of thermodynamics, which have set in motion the planet’s entropic death. The remedies generated by critical thought and technological ingenuity have been shown to be hard to integrate into the economic system. Sustainable development has been shown to be short-lived, because it is not ecologically sustainable (Park et al. 2008). In its globalising drive, the economic system has continued to obscure the fundamental problem. Thus, rather than internalising the ecological conditions for genuinely sustainable development, the geopolitics of ‘sustainable development’ ended up commodifying nature and over-economising the world: ‘mechanisms’ for ‘clean development’ were put in place, alongside economic instruments for environmental management that have gone a long way towards establishing (private) property rights over and the monetary value of environmental goods and services (Brand/Görg 2008). Free nature and natural commons (water, oil) have been progressively privatised, while an entire market has been created around buying and selling pollution rights (carbon trading) and giving a price to nature (carbon off setting). Today, confronted with the failure of all eff orts to mitigate global warming, awareness of the limits to growth returns and, with it, a clamour for degrowth. The degrowth wager is not a merely critical and reactive moral position; resistance to an oppressive, destructive, unequal and unfair power structure; a manifestation of alternative beliefs, tastes and lifestyles. Degrowth
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critical currents Dag Hammarskjöld
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The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation pa
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Photo: Dag Hammarskjöld Preface
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quote above by Albert Schweitzer ha
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Radical climate change politics in
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competitiveness and maintaining and
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the UNFCCC are today a greater thre
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Emancipatory demands and confl icts
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A feminist critique of the climate
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ment in Johannesburg (WSSD), where
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for strategic intervention is, ther
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compulsion to reproduce itself. As
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Kyoto’s ‘fl exible mechanisms
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new criteria of competitiveness, wh
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A reduction of absolute emissions i
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ests. This would seem to be confi r
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Literature Altvater, E. (2008), ‘
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Climate change and capitalism’s e
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The problem is that this does not c
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tional and local environmental gove
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The deadly triad: Climate change, f
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is, through the creation and tradin
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REDD realities Simone Lovera Some s
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REDD without emission reductions Th
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Contours of Climate Justice - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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