SNEAK PEAK! Excerpt from Volume 2’s Editorial Introduction: Can the University Be Socio-ecologically Sustainable?

by A. Dunlap, L. H. Søyland, and A. Ruelas

This issue presents nine exceptional articles examining or developing aspects of post-development and degrowth in relation to education; eco-feminism; wind energy development; digital extractivism; political resistance in Norway; the (fast) Fashion industry; squatting; green criminology; and transportation. We will offer an overview of these articles below. Before this, however, we want to engage in a thought experiment and conceptualize what a university articulating post-development and degrowth values and imperatives might look like. We find this rather important, as we are either students or employees at a high-learning institution that does not currently embody the socio-ecological values and practices necessary to regenerate ecologies and social relationships.

As it stands, and as was discussed in the editorial introduction of Volume 1 (Dunlap et al. 2021), the planet is engulfed by and on a track towards intensifying global environmental catastrophe. This is linked to the failure to properly diagnose and remediate socio-ecological harm. Isak Stoddard and twenty-two other colleagues (2021), in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, demonstrate that the last thirty years of climate change mitigation policy have been a failure. The ‘successes’ that have emerged exist in the shadows of the global intensification of resource (material) extractivism, with increases in energy use and carbon dioxide emissions (Dunlap 2021a). The university system, we must admit, bears partial responsibility for this failure, which, as staff and students, we are obliged to change. Higher education institutions are instrumental in knowledge production, socio-cultural value affirmation, societal development and, consequently, play a significant role in the current trajectory of our planet (Gills & Morgan 2021a). Many now emphasize the need for higher education institutions to change in order to rethink education as a key site of social-ecological activism (Murray 2018). This includes resisting instrumentalist notions of education and the ways that capitalism is naturalized within these institutions, thereby foreclosing other futures (Gayá and Brydon-Miller 2017). Education should foster respect for Indigenous rights, epistemologies, and practices (Gayá and Brydon-Miller 2017; Murray 2018). Socio-ecological and climate catastrophe shows us not only that mainstream curriculum needs to be radically put into question, but also that what governments, markets, and technological development have been doing—relying on intensive mining, chemical processing, and manufacturing—has placed ecosystems and the world out of balance.

References

Dunlap A. 2021a. Does Renewable Energy Exist? Fossil Fuel+ Technologies and the Search for Renewable Energy. In: Batel S and Rudolph DP (eds) A critical approach to the social acceptance of renewable energy infrastructures – Going beyond green growth and sustainability. London: Palgrave 83-102.

Dunlap A, Søyland LH and Shokrgozar S. 2021. Debates in Post-Development and Degrowth: Volume 1. Oslo: Tvergastein.

Gayá, P and Brydon-Miller, M. 2017. Carpe the academy: Dismantling higher education and prefiguring critical utopias through action research. Futures 94: 34-44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2016.10.005.

Gills B and Morgan J. 2021a. Economics and climate emergency. Globalizations 18(7): 1071-1086.

Murray, J. 2018. Student-led action for sustainability in higher education: a literature review. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 19(6): 1095-1110. https://doi.org/10.1108/ IJSHE-09-2017-0164.

Stoddard I, Anderson K, Capstick S, et al. 2021. Three decades of climate mitigation: why haven't we bent the global emissions curve? Annual Review of Environment and Resources 46: 653-689.

SNEAK PEAK! From Volume 1’s Introduction: What is Post-Development & Degrowth?

Unfamiliar readers might wonder: Why post-development and degrowth? The answer is simple. They are two interdisciplinary and mutually reinforcing academic schools of thought critically assessing, and even refusing, the stubborn narratives and practices of development and economic growth: the existential motivation and propulsive force of capitalist accumulation. This has resulted in welcoming the “Necrocene” – as opposed to the narcissism of the Anthropocene (Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016) – that recognizes the “age of die-off, of mass extinction of life on earth” that future fossil records will reveal (Clark 2020, 10). Currently, 40% of the planet’s soils are severely degraded; earthworm biomass has dropped 83%; 85% of global fish stocks are depleted; “marine animals are disappearing at twice the rate of land animals”; 1 million species are at risk of extinction within decades; extreme storms have doubled since the 1980s; there have been multiple pollinator and insect die-offs; there has been an increase in forest fires, and the list goes on (see Hickel 2020b, 6-16; Wallace-Wells 2019). There is no shortage of new and even more alarming statistics, as increasing heatwaves break records, forests burn, and “more than 1 billion marine animals” die off in western Canada and United States (Bekiempis 2021). Meanwhile, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands experience extreme flooding with “at least 58 dead.” (Oltermann 2021) The socio-ecological disasters are no longer restricted to Island States and the Global South: Earth has already entered the era of the Necrocene. This state of the world stresses the importance of expanding not only the conversation around post-development and degrowth but taking actions from these conversations to create concrete institutional transformations (away from “green growth”) and to spread a diversity of direct action everywhere against this death-driven political trajectory. 

While mutually reinforcing in attempts to stop the spread of capitalist relationships, accumulation patterns, and socio-ecologically destructive development projects, post-development and degrowth have different origins and emphasis. The school of post-development emerged from the early observations of the deleterious – and geopolitically motivated – effects of imposing capitalist development in Latin America. The original contention, as Ivan Illich (1970) expressed it, was that the model of development spread across the world by the US and Europe was intensifying pre-existing material inequalities, ecological damage, and psychosocial poverty, thereby continuing the process of European colonial conquest and destruction. In short, development as planned poverty, continuing existing colonial forms of organization and development. The new international development standards reinforced and spread new standards – similar to imposed colonial standards – mandating capitalist markets, labor regimes, resource extraction, Western schooling (Berman 1983; Daggett 2019) and national planning. The “benevolent production of underdevelopment,” explained Illich (1970, 162), “allows ‘rich nations’ to ‘impose a strait jacket of traffic jams, hospital confinements, and classrooms on the poor nations, and by international agreement call this ‘development.’” The post-development school was inspired by Illich – but more so the collective efforts of people at the Intercultural Documentation Center in Cuernavaca, Mexico, notably Paulo Freire, André Gorz, Susan Sontag, Erich Fromm, among others (Hartch 2015). Post-development challenges the colonial pattern of facilitating and imposing development predicated on hierarchical forms of organization (e.g. bureaucracy, administrative decentralization), which take place through the imposition of particular Western-centric knowledge regimes (e.g. the engineer, see Daggett 2019; Davies 2021), regulated sexualities, and racialized and gendered divisions of labor that enforce ecologically destructive relationships and high-energy consumption patterns (see Kothari et al. 2019). Guided by political and Insurgent Indigenous movements in South and Central America, post-development questions the dominant technological, capitalist, and consumerist form of development, and corresponding methods of subjugation and authoritarian politics. Post-development, moreover, contends that there are ecologically, socially, and culturally appropriate alternatives to development that work with and strengthen ecosystems and peoples – and that do not require political subjugation and ecological destruction.

More recently – taking hold in the early 2000s – and with similar intellectual roots to post-development, is degrowth. Inspired by Ivan Illich, Jaque Ellul, Nicholas Georgescu-Roege, and André Gorz (Demaria et al. 2019), degrowth contends that in order to avert socio-ecological catastrophe, a planned reduction of energy and resource throughput must be organized until the economy is back in “balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.” (Hickel 2020a, 2) The expansive tendencies of capitalism – to take more than it gives – that consume labor, hydrocarbon, mineral, timber, and kinetic energy resources is placed front and center in their analysis. A key strength of degrowth is that its focus on material throughput entails a critical stance to extractivisms, industrialisms and productivisms of different kinds – whether capitalist or not. Unlike others operating under the umbrella of post-development, degrowth is highly influenced by ecological economics and has a “stronger tie to the project of rethinking the economy” and “can be said to remain more anthropocentric” than post-development, explains Arturo Escobar (2015, 6). While these gaps are in process of being filled (Hickel 2020b), degrowth is revealing the flaws of “sustainable development,” ecological modernism, and “green growth.” This includes empirically demonstrating that technological and efficiency improvements will not allow capitalist economics to “decouple” Gross National Product (GDP) from ecological impacts so the global economy can grow forever. “[T]here [is] no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures on anywhere near the scale needed to deal with environmental breakdown,” concludes The European Environmental Bureau (Parrique et al. 2019, 3). The summary findings also maintain, “perhaps more importantly, such decoupling appears unlikely to happen in the future.” (Parrique et al. 2019, 3) Degrowth scholars have been at the forefront of debunking the myths of “green growth,” (Hickel 2020b; Kallis et al. 2020) but also offering viable policy solutions to avoid ecological and climate catastrophe.

This editorial introduction proceeds by locating SUM in post-development and degrowth struggles. This entails briefly examining the struggle between sustainable development – later to morph into “green growth” – and deep ecology, as this struggle underlined the formation of SUM. Thereafter, the introduction argues that the post-development school, of which degrowth is a part, both share commonalities and offer corrections to the deep ecology movement prevalent in Norway in the 1970s-1990s. Arne Næss, a prominent philosopher and a key figure at SUM, first articulated the ideals/principles and platform of deep ecology, which would inspire Norwegian and other Western environmental movements across the world. We demonstrate the great similarities between post-development, degrowth, and (some strains of) deep ecology, but also the shortcomings of the latter. Interestingly, similar shortcomings persist with degrowth, though this is changing as we write. Finally, we introduce the contributors to this volume before returning to SUM and ponder the role of insights from post-development and degrowth in further discussions.

References

Bekiempis, Victoria. 2021. "Record-breaking US Pacific north-west heatwave killed almost 200 people." Accessed 19-07-2021. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/08/pacific-northwest-heatwave-deaths.

Berman, Edward. 1983. The Ideology of Philanthropy: The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2016. The shock of the Anthropocene: The earth, history and us. New York: Verso Books.

Clark, John. 2020. "What is eco-anarchism?" The Ecological Citizen 3 (Suppl C): 9-14.

Daggett, Cara New. 2019. The birth of energy: fossil fuels, thermodynamics, and the politics of work. Durham: Duke University Press.

Davies, Archie. 2021. "The coloniality of infrastructure: Engineering, landscape and modernity in Recife." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space: 02637758211018706.

Demaria, Federico, Giorgos Kallis, and Karen Bakker. 2019. "Geographies of degrowth: Nowtopias, resurgences and the decolonization of imaginaries and places." Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 2 (3): 431-450.

Hickel, Jason. 2020a. "What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification." Globalizations: 1-7.

Hickel, Jason. 2020b. Less is more: How degrowth will save the world. London: Random House.

Illich, Ivan D. 1970. "Planned Poverty: The End Result of Technical Assistance." In Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution. London: Marion Boyars.

Kallis, Giorgos, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D'Alisa, and Federico Demaria. 2020. The case for degrowth. London: Polity.

Kothari, Ashish, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta. 2019. Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary. Delhi: University of Colombia Press.

Oltermann, Philip. 2021. "At least 58 dead in Germany as heavy rains bring catastrophic flooding ". Guardian. Accessed 15-07-2021. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/14/firefighter-drowns-and-army-deployed-amid-severe-flooding-in-germany.

Parrique, Timothée, Jonathan Barth, François Briens, Christian Kerschner, Alejo Kraus-Polk, A Kuokkanen, and JH Spangenberg. 2019. "Decoupling debunked." European Environment Bureau (EEB). Accessed 20-02-2020. https://mk0eeborgicuypctuf7e.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunked.pdf.

Wallace-Wells, David. 2019. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming. First edition. New York: Tim Duggan Books.