Dr Katharina Richter on the cultural direction of socio ecological transformations. Illustrations by Deborah Mullen.
Degrowth is a big tent, peopled by ecological economists, political ecologists, activists, (eco)feminists, anthropologists, artists, researchers, students, political scientists, sociologists, and many more. Participants in a social movement, degrowthers are often both researchers and activists. They provide compelling answers to the question of how to live well and equitably within social and environmental limits. To address socially and ecologically harmful productivism and overconsumption, the initial focus lay on self-limitation, expressed in concepts such as ‘voluntary simplicity’ or ‘frugal abundance’. (1) Sustainable degrowth aims to democratically reduce consumption and production levels. (2) These notions are being pushed by post/decolonial thinkers, feminists, anti-racist activists, and environmental justice movements from the Global South, who complement this individualised, quantified approach to degrowth with a pluriverse of economic practices that centre care, communal resource governance, and diverse knowledges as conditions for the reproduction of life. (3)
We can see that changes to our consumption, production, and working patterns alone won’t be enough to sustain a profound transformation towards a just and sustainable world. To understand the deeper shifts that are required, we need to look at cultural aspects of socio-ecological transformations. So what would it mean to put a cosmological limit to growth? Namely, limits that arise from our cosmology – that is, the way we see the world, knowledge, our own destiny, the role of nature, and so on. (4) To help degrowth thought and practice grapple with this question, this article brings degrowth into conversation with Buen Vivir, an indigenous principle and decolonial practice of ‘Good Living’ from Latin America. The first part looks into perceptions that see degrowth as an anthropocentric – and thereby Eurocentric – movement. The second part introduces Buen Vivir and explains why a dialogue between the two helps overcome degrowth’s human-centred analysis. This section also sets out the importance of ‘cosmological limits to growth’ for cultural elements of sustainability transformations. The last part sketches out what ‘cosmological limits to growth’ can mean in practice. The ideas put forward in this article are based on my PhD, for which I conducted research in Ecuador. In early 2020, I interviewed 15 social leaders, community members, and politicians, and observed public meetings and municipal, nongovernmental, and indigenous assemblies.
Degrowth’s Colonial Nature
The political project, social movement, and field of study that is degrowth is a broad church. In it, you’ll find a broad range of knowledges and worldviews, contingent on the different disciplines’ methodologies and location within the natural and social sciences, humanities, or arts. There has been early criticism, however, of a tendency within degrowth to articulate a political critique of economic growth that is based on a narrow, anthropocentric view of the environment, and pays too little attention to colonial-era, hierarchical identity systems that continue to constrain equitable resource access. (5) This may be surprising, given degrowth’s core argument is that the economy is, in fact, embedded within a planetary ecosystem. The majority of early degrowth literature adopted this argument and worldview from the discipline of ecological economics, which seeks to dispel the strict nature/culture divide prevalent in our current understanding of the world, an inheritance of neoclassical economics. This divide is argued to be the underlying cause of ecological breakdown and ‘market failures’ such as pollution and waste (Fig.1). (6) However, the critique of growth put forward by ecological economics is based on the concept of ‘ecosystems’, from which, in a simplified manner, societies “receive inputs from the earth, the atmosphere, and the waters, and [to which] they give outputs”. (7)
The language of inputs and outputs, resources and materials acknowledges the embeddedness of human life within the natural environment. Yet, it also objectifies living beings, together with other abiotic elements like rocks and minerals. It detaches them from their cultural values, and the political processes that shape landscapes, societies, and histories. The nature/culture divide, for example, formed the cosmological basis of colonial plantation economies, which served as blueprints for industrial manufacturing in England and elsewhere. In plantations and later in factories, slaves and sugarcane then machine parts and workers were easily interchangeable as The language of inputs and outputs, resources and materials acknowledges the embeddedness of human life within the natural environment. Yet, it also objectifies living beings, together with other abiotic elements like rocks and minerals. It detaches them from their cultural values, and the political processes that shape landscapes, societies, and histories. The nature/culture divide, for example, formed the cosmological basis of colonial plantation economies, which served as blueprints for industrial manufacturing in England and elsewhere. (9) In plantations and later in factories, slaves and sugarcane then machine parts and workers were easily interchangeable as commodities – that is, exchangeable at market rates. (10) Early capitalist developments were also accompanied by scientific advances in astronomy, mining, or metallurgy. (11) The place of humankind in the world was transformed, as were those remaining worldviews that saw nature as a living, female, nurturing being. Nature became an inanimate, controllable object. (12) This anthropocentric view sanctions resource exploitation and is arguably the cultural foundation of the economic growth paradigm.
By speaking of resources or materials, ecological economists, and some degrowthers, therefore accept and mirror the mapping of capitalist exchange values onto the intrinsic and disparate values of the living world. Degrowth scholarship influenced by ecological economics puts forward evidence for postgrowth transformations regarding work, money, or wellbeing in the form of economic models, which are based on the abstraction of ‘ecosystems’ into mathematical representation. (13) Though paramount for guiding policy, these models sustain a mechanistic view of nature. This is problematic – and Eurocentric – because in doing so these models risk universalising a provincial, European/North-Atlantic conceptualisation of nature – that is, nature-as-ecosystems, or even materials. This anthropocentrism in turn hampers possible alliances between degrowth and environmental justice movements from the Global South. In addition to degrowth’s anthropocentrism, some of these movements have rejected degrowth as an ally because of its labour-market based perception of time, perceived to clash with indigenous and cyclical notions of time. (14)
In response, a lot of work has been done by (activist-)scholars who aren’t ecological economists to show that this narrow cultural framing isn’t the only way of thinking, practicing, and approaching degrowth. In relation to degrowth, analyses of social property claims to trees in Brazil, the khat economy in Madagascar, Ubuntu in Southern Africa, Buen Vivir in Latin America, and environmental justice movements in Chiapas demonstrate that knowledge and ways of inhabiting the world are connected to territories as biophysical and political entities that are more than either ‘just’ nature, or ‘just’ culture. (15) Thereby, they show that it is possible to challenge anthropocentric, mechanistic conceptualisations of nature and attribute agency to the living world within the parameters of degrowth. These cultural analyses have undoubtedly broadened the tent of degrowth. Indeed, they show us how to overcome tendencies to reproduce anthropocentric nature/culture binaries within degrowth. Buen Vivir is one such approach to cultural analyses, and in a dialogue between degrowth and Buen Vivir has the potential to create an ecology of knowledges. (16) Such conversation brings together different ways of knowing so that together, they may overcome their respective limitations and confront the intersecting challenges of the Anthropocene.
Buen Vivir as a Grassroots, Decolonial Project
Degrowth is one of the most convincing and holistic responses to the Anthropocene. However, its Eurocentric focus, expressed in, amongst others, forms of human-centric knowledge production, limits its place of relevance. It thereby also challenges only parts of the civilisationary patterns that have caused the multiple crises of the Anthropocene. Latin American thinkers have argued that we aren’t just living in times of ecological crisis, but in multiple crises of modernity, defined by racism, sexism, classism, anthropocentrism, etc. (17) So why would an equitable dialogue between degrowth and Buen Vivir, an Andean-Amazonian conceptualisation of ‘Good Living’, create useful frameworks for a decolonial approach to degrowth? First, the violent politics of extractivism that confront a good or in fact any life in the Andes, disclose what is at stake for people living on the extractive frontiers from which raw materials are obtained. Andean and Amazonian communities have everything to gain from degrowth in the North. Second, other ways of engaging with the natural, or living, world and with ‘others’ in our society show up the limitations of our own, dichotomous thinking when it comes to nature vs. culture, the insider-outsider logic of the nation state, etc. This process also requires us to recognise that scientific, peer-reviewed knowledge alone won’t be able to tackle the Anthropocene’s multiple crises. Third, it situates degrowth in relation to other responses to these intersecting crises. Connecting with decolonial struggles will allow us to design transformation strategies with tools and concepts that are fundamentally different than the ones that have led to these crises in the first place.
Buen Vivir is a grassroots, decolonial project of the Ecuadorian indigenous movements. Buen Vivir, or Good Living, is Spanish for the Kichwa terms of sumak kawsay or alli kawsay. Sumak kawsay is a concept that has its origins in the indigenous world. Though this is contested by some, we have textual evidence of its use as a pedagogical principle from the beginning of the 20th century. (18) It translates into ‘life in excellence’ or ‘life in plenitude’. Today, it has become an umbrella term for a broad range of practices, imageries, and ideals of marginalised and racialised communities for working towards establishing equilibria with oneself, one’s community, and nature. (19) The concept took on this broader meaning during the 1980s and 1990s, in which multiculturalism strengthened the indigenous movements. Sumak kawsay as a way of life configures close relations with land, within families and the spirits of ancestors, forests, water, and hills that are central to Kichwa identities, cultures, and thinking.
Politically, the concept was consolidated via interaction with development organisations and left-wing intellectuals during the 1990s and early 2000s, a process that culminated in the constitutionalisation of sumak kawsay as Buen Vivir, or the right to Good Living in the 2008 Ecuadorian constitution. (20) By granting rights to nature, the constitution challenges nature’s subordination to economic activity. However, this success was swiftly followed by a co-optation of the concept, which coincided with the loss of political power of the indigenous movements during the governments of Rafael Correa (2007–17). The political oppression of social, indigenous, and environmental movements took place under the guise of a discourse of Buen Vivir that justified extraction-led, growth-based development. (21) Nevertheless, today sumak kawsay continues to be a political platform for the indigenous movements of Ecuador towards territorial self-governance, equality, plurinationality, and wealth redistribution. (22)
But what does sumak kawsay mean in practice? The literature about this is sparse, so I went to Ecuador to find out. For the purpose of this article, I will zoom in on some of the world-making practices that I observed, in other words, patterns and behaviours that create ways of inhabiting and viewing the world in which human, natural, and spiritual wellbeing is connected. Amongst others, sumak kawsay can be found in the recovery of ancestral seeds, such as quinoa and amaranth, in agroecological farming practices, as well as in the rituals, traditions, and garments of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador. Some of those patterns and behaviours I observed took place while I sat talking over a fire with a community’s wisewoman. We rubbed our hands with an ointment made of plants and herbs that were grown using ancestral, agroecological farming practices. This simple act reminded us of our connection with nature. Another ritual I observed was the spilling of small amounts of alcoholic drinks, such as chicha, the typically fermented beverage made from maize or quinoa, on the ground before the drinker had any themselves. It is an offering to Pachamama, or Mother Earth, and recalls her presence. An act of reciprocity, it serves to sustain caring, affectionate, and mutualistic relationships between people and nature. Though the practitioners of these rituals were from agricultural communities, there is more than a utilitarian aspect to these rituals and agroecological farming practices. In Ecuador, agroecological production is not the norm, and can be met with considerable resistance from within or outside communities. Nevertheless, for practitioners like the Sumak Mikuna (“Excellent Food”) co-operative in El Tambo, located in the Southern Cañar province, the health of their children as well as topsoil fertility are dependent on the cultivation of a broad variety of high-quality organic produce. (23) Rather than neoclassical economic concerns such as profit margins, it is the underlying worldview, or cosmology, that animates these rituals, and which, vice versa, is put into practice by these rituals.
The experiences I came to know while in Ecuador made me think that the world-making practices of sumak kawsay, observed in various communities in Ecuador, articulate ‘cosmological limits to (development-as-)growth’. Though the communities where I’ve observed these practices don’t struggle against the same extent of unrestrained growth and over-consumption as communities in the Global North, there is an understanding of the need to limit ecologically and socially harmful practices, such as the application of chemical fertilisers, or the construction of luxury houses by migrant returnees from the US or Spain. The practices I described above have the potential to limit socioeconomic activities before harmful social or ecological effects occur. Their respect guarantees the well-being of nature, which, in turn, produces material and spiritual wellbeing in its people. (24) In these contexts, Pachamama doesn’t merely have a symbolic meaning. Instead, she is a living presence who can act as regulatory restraint to resource extraction and/or environmental degradation. ‘Cosmological limits to growth’ therefore refers to limits set by worldviews – and their accompanying practices – that embed humankind within the living world, rather than considering humans as the masters of a controllable, inert nature.
The argument I make here complements recent ‘limits’ debates within degrowth, ecological economics, and political ecology. They critically interrogate the mainstream environmental view of ‘limits’ as external – that is, physical and absolute borders, as epitomised in the famous, albeit depoliticised, image of ‘planetary boundaries’. It has been argued that, in and of itself, these limits, while having great potential to guide policy, do not contain unfettered growth. Given the lack of political progress in addressing the climate crisis, some highlight the possibility of prioritising morally constructed, internal limits that would restrain excess in autonomous societies. (25) Others have argued for societal self-limitation, where thresholds are defined collectively to contain both inequality and ecological destruction. (26) Intersectional feminist and decolonial thinkers also stress the political nature or artificiality of scarcity that motivates some ‘limits’ scholarship and which justifies uneven resource access along gender, race, and class. (27) They also draw attention to how different actors experience and understand limits and scarcity, and warn against a totalising conception of limits as ecological thresholds that erase other ways of relating to the living world – such as the practice of sumak kawsay. The notion of ‘cosmological limits to growth’ avoids the simplistic bifurcation of limits as either ‘real’ or ‘constructed’, and contains within it a possible pluriverse of worlds and knowledges without erasing one or the other. As such, ‘cosmological limits to growth’ are relational limits that arise out of our connection with each other and to the living world. They are normative constraints to the environmental destruction associated with economic growth. At the same time, they can create political instruments, such as Rights of Nature, that have the potential to change our view of nature as dead, inert matter, towards the environment as a living world. The conclusion will briefly elaborate on what impetus this notion can give to the cultural direction of socioecological transformations.
Cosmological Limits to Growth in Action: On Cultural (and Political) Directions of Socio-ecological Transformations
Politically, ‘cosmological limits to growth’ can be put into practice through Rights of Nature (RoN). Environmental personhood is becoming an increasingly popular policy instrument to safeguard against environmental exploitation. In the social sciences, it can challenge the nature/culture divide prevalent in many theoretical approaches. Rights-bearers now include rivers, mountains, and national parks in India, Ecuador, Colombia, New Zealand, the US, and elsewhere. Some have criticised RoN for perpetuating categorical binaries that pit a nature that is ‘out there’ against society, and for problematic colonial categories of personhood. (28) RoN nevertheless open up possibilities for protecting, and even imputing onto it, ways of living that respect nature as a living being. They could transform our understanding of nature from an inert resource towards a rights-bearer with agency. As such, RoN are an interesting, pluriverse avenue that should be explored in degrowth policy proposals.
In terms of cultural direction, there is a wider point to make for degrowth thinkers and practitioners. Going back to my observations in Ecuador, one agroecological producer planted certain types of trees to attract certain types of birds. In general, she dotted her vegetable patches with trees throughout, so that, in her words, the birds would have to eat as well. There might be another reason too: while the birds eat the fruits, they might fertilise a vegetable or two along the way. This is, in effect, the argument that agroecologists make: integrating natural solutions improves yield in comparison to monocrop production. In that sense, the grower’s relationship with nature doesn’t limit growth per se, but rather, the kind of culturally and ecologically harmful growth that a monocrop culture would bring. This observation, however, illustrates how ‘cosmological limits to growth’ embed society into nature. They recognise that while all ‘limits’ are necessarily socially constructed and physically present, it is this embeddedness that constrains harmful growth. ‘Cosmological limits to growth’ are intrinsic to worldviews based on connectedness with nature, and also found in pre-capitalist European cosmology. (29) They are antithetical to the nature/culture divide within some degrowth scholarship, which has been criticised as anthropo- and Euro-centric.
To really change the systems destroying the world, we need to fundamentally revisit our relationship with nature, and dismantle the nature/culture divide that justifies the treatment of the Earth as a resource. We need cosmological limits to growth because they steer the discussion beyond socioeconomic transformations to the more active, cultural direction of degrowth processes. To change the way we see nature, and, eventually, act towards it, is a fundamental condition for constraining harmful growth. If we consider ourselves part of nature and practice reciprocal behaviours, then we can eventually reinscribe cosmological limits to growth. However, changing the way we think and feel (“sentipensar”) requires a cultural transformation of a magnitude that has not yet been acknowledged by degrowth scholarship.
Notes
(1) Bengi Akbulut, ‘Degrowth’, Rethinking Marxism 33, no. 1 (2 January 2021): 98–110, https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2020.1847014; Serge Latouche, ‘Essays on Frugal Abundance. Degrowth: Misinterpretations and Controversies – Part 1 of 4’ (Melbourne, Australia: Simplicity Institute, 2014), http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/FrugalAbundance1SimplicityInstitute.pdf.
(2) Research & Degrowth, ‘Degrowth Declaration of the Paris 2008 Conference’, Journal of Cleaner Production 18, no. 6 (April 2010): 523–24, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2010.01.012.
(3) Susan Paulson, ‘Decolonizing Technology and Political Ecology Futures’, Political Geography 88 (1 January 2021): 102369, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102369; Stefania Barca, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, and Alexander Paulsson, ‘The End of Political Economy as We Knew It? From Growth Realism to Nomadic Utopianism’, in Towards a Political Economy of Degrowth, ed. Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Alexander Paulsson, and Stefania Barca (London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019), 3–4; Padini Nirmal and Dianne Rocheleau, ‘Decolonizing Degrowth in the Post-Development Convergence: Questions, Experiences, and Proposals from Two Indigenous Territories’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 2, no. 3 (1 September 2019): 465–92, https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848618819478.
(4) Bentley B. Allan, Scientific Cosmology and International Orders, Cambridge Studies in International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 11.
(5) Susan Paulson, ‘Political Ecology’, in Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, ed. Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria, and Giorgos Kallis (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 46.
(6) Katharina Richter, ‘Struggling for Another Life: The Ontology of Degrowth’, Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化. Journal of Global Cultural Studies, no. 14 (31 December 2019), https://doi.org/10.4000/transtexts.1242.
(7) Kenneth E. Boulding, ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’, in Environmental Quality Issues in a Growing Economy, ed. H. Jarrett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 2.
(8) Adapted and modified from Daly and Farley, 2011, 51 in Richter, ‘Struggling for Another Life’.
(9) José Guadalupe Ortega, ‘Machines, Modernity, and Sugar: The Greater Caribbean in a Global Context, 1812–50*’, Journal of Global History 9, no. 1 (March 2014): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022813000478.
(10) Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2015), 38–40.
(11) Allan, Scientific Cosmology and International Orders, 90–92, (ibid.).
(12) Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Digital (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), 37, 41, 74, 80, 156, 186, 63.2
(13) Ortzi Akizu-Gardoki, Conrad Kunze, Anthony Coxeter, Gorka Bueno, Thomas Wiedmann, Jose Manuel Lopez-Guedeh, ‘Discovery of a Possible Well-Being Turning Point within Energy Footprint Accounts Which May Support the Degrowth Theory’, Energy for Sustainable Development 59 (1 December 2020): 22–32, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esd.2020.09.001; V. Andreoni and S. Galmarini, ‘How to Increase Well-Being in a Context of Degrowth’, Futures 55 (January 2014): 78–89, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2013.10.021; Peter A. Victor, ‘Growth, Degrowth and Climate Change: A Scenario Analysis’, Ecological Economics, The Economics of Degrowth, 84 (December 2012): 206–12, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2011.04.013; Giacomo D’Alisa and Claudio Cattaneo, ‘Household Work and Energy Consumption: A Degrowth Perspective. Catalonia’s Case Study’, Journal of Cleaner Production, Degrowth: From Theory to Practice, 38 (1 January 2013): 71–79, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2011.11.058; Tiina Heikkinen, ‘An Equilibrium Framework for the Analysis of a Degrowth Society With Asymmetric Agents, Sharing and Basic Income’, Ecological Economics 148 (1 June 2018): 43–53, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.02.007.
(14) Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos, Ivonne Yánez, Patrick Bond, Lucie Greyl, Serah Munguti, Godwin Uyi Ojo, Winfridus Overbeek, ‘Not So Natural an Alliance? Degrowth and Environmental Justice Movements in the Global South’, Ecological Economics 157 (1 March 2019): 175–84, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.11.007.
(15) Jonathan DeVore, ‘Trees and Springs as Social Property: A Perspective on Degrowth and Redistributive Democracy from a Brazilian Squatter Community’, Journal of Political Ecology 24 (2017): 644–66, https://doi.org/10.2458/v24i1.20904; Lisa L. Gezon, ‘Beyond (Anti) Utilitarianism: Khat and Alternatives to Growth in Northern Madagascar’, Journal of Political Ecology 24 (2017): 582–94, https://doi.org/10.2458/v24i1.20895; Mogobe B. Ramose, ‘Ubuntu’, in Degrowth: Vocabulary for a New Era, ed. Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria, and Giorgos Kallis (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 212–14; Richter, ‘Struggling for Another Life’, (ibid.); Jonathan Otto, ‘Finding Common Ground: Exploring Synergies between Degrowth and Environmental Justice in Chiapas, Mexico’, Journal of Political Ecology 24 (2017): 491–503, https://doi.org/10.2458/v24i1.20887.
(16) Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 30, no. 1 (2007): 45–89.
(17) Edgardo Lander, Crisis Civilizatoria: Experiencias de Los Gobiernos Progresistas y Debates En La Izquierda Latinoamericana (Guadalajara, Jalisco: Centro María Sibylla Merian de Estudios Iberoamericanos Avanzados en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (CALAS) : Editorial Universidad de Guadalajara, 2019), 15.
(18) José Benjamín Inuca Lechón, ‘Genealogía de Alli Kawsay / Sumak Kawsay (Vida Buena / Vida Hermosa) de Las Organizaciones Kichwas Del Ecuador Desde Mediados Del Siglo XX’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 12, no. 2 (4 May 2017): 155–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2017.1325101.
(19) José Efraín Astudillo, Prácticas del Buen Vivir: Experiencias en comunidades shuar, kichwa y manteña (Cuenca; Quito: Universidad de Cuenca; Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2020), 247, https://dspace.ucuenca.edu.ec/bitstream/123456789/34710/1/documento.pdf.
(20) Carmen Martínez Novo, ‘Ventriloquism, Racism and the Politics of Decoloniality in Ecuador’, Cultural Studies 32, no. 3 (4 May 2018): 389–413, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2017.1420091
(21) Novo, ‘Ventriloquism, Racism and the Politics of Decoloniality in Ecuador’, (ibid.).
(22) Floresmilo Simbaña, ‘El Sumak Kawsay como proyecto político’, R, Revista para un Debate Político Socialista, no. 3 (2011), https://lalineadefuego.info/2011/04/12/el-sumak-kawsay-como-proyecto-politico/.
(23) Interview with President of Sumak Mikuna, El Tambo, 24 February 2020.
(24) Interview with Blanca Cecilia Velasque Tigse, Quito, 4 February 2020.
(25) Giorgos Kallis, Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care (Stanford, California: Stanford Briefs, 2019), 55.
(26) Ulrich Brand, Barbara Muraca, Éric Pineault, Marlyne Sahakian, Anke Schaffartzik, Andreas Novy, Christoph Streissler,Helmut Haberl, Viviana Asara, Kristina Dietz, Miriam Lang, Ashish Kothari, Tone Smith, Clive Spash, Alina Brad, Melanie Pichler, Christina Plank, Giorgos Velegrakis, Thomas Jahn, Angela Carter, Qingzhi Huan, Giorgos Kallis, Joan Martínez Alier, Gabriel Riva, Vishwas Satgar, Emiliano Teran Mantovani, Michelle Williams, Markus Wissen, Christoph Görg, ‘From Planetary to Societal Boundaries: An Argument for Collectively Defined Self-Limitation’, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 17, no. 1 (1 January 2021): 264–91, https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2021.1940754.
(27) Lyla Mehta and Wendy Harcourt, ‘Beyond Limits and Scarcity: Feminist and Decolonial Contributions to Degrowth’, Political Geography, 15 May 2021, 102411, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102411.
(28) Ariel Rawson and Becky Mansfield, ‘Producing Juridical Knowledge: “Rights of Nature” or the Naturalization of Rights?’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 1–2 (1 March 2018): 99–119, https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848618763807.
(29) Merchant, The Death of Nature, (ibid).
