Abstract
Impelled by the intertwined expansion of capitalist institutions and fossil-fueled industry, human activity has made devastating impacts on ecosystems and earth systems. The colonial, class, racial, and gender systems that coevolved with these historical processes have long been critiqued for engineering exploitation and inequality. Yet the technologies with which these systems interact are widely portrayed as neutral and nonpartisan. This paper interrogates the purported independence of technology on two fronts. First, it uses a political ecology lens to illuminate some ways in which the generation and application of technology have been historically entangled with colonial, racial, and gender systems. Second, it considers how those entanglements have been variously obscured, acknowledged, depoliticized, and/or politicized in two realms of thought and practice: ecomodernism and degrowth. Conclusions call for bringing creative innovation of ecomodernism together with degrowth commitment to just social–ecological transformation.
Introduction
Amid accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss, and other earth systems disequilibria, contemporary societies face transformations as great as those provoked by the emergence of industrial capitalism in Europe (Polanyi, 1944), and as deep as those undergone by diverse lifeways reconfigured as the “third world” during the 20th century (Escobar, 1995). Such challenges provoke heated debates about the use of technology and politics to transform environments. Human brains, mouths, hands, and eyes have evolved in ways that enable communities to develop shared languages and practices through which we innovate and pass on that marriage of technique and knowledge called “technology.” We humans mobilize those same capacities to generate and pass on political-economic institutions and ideologies through which power and technology circulate, together with visions for desired futures.
Today, refusal to recognize the entanglement of practical worldmaking technologies with the values that give them meaning and purpose sustains the popular fantasy that current societies can resolve environmental crises by changing technology, without addressing underlying social systems and relationships. Technological innovations that make production more efficient and less polluting are certainly necessary. On their own, however, these are not nearly sufficient to decouple current economic activity from ongoing degradation of ecosystems, earth systems, and human lifeways (Hickel and Kallis, 2020; Parrique et al., 2019).
So, this paper calls on readers to mobilize our tremendous innovative capacities to upgrade not only technological artifacts but also the sociocultural systems in which they are embedded. It begins by introducing a political ecology framework and key concepts, then highlights some roles that historically specific colonial, race, and gender systems have played in shaping the technologies through which humans produce, reproduce, and sometimes transform worlds. Ensuing explorations of how these dynamics are variously addressed and obscured draw examples from degrowth and ecological modernization (hereafter referred to as ecomodernism), with recognition of factors that make both currents difficult to summarize. Whereas degrowth objectives and arguments are labeled and debated as such in hundreds of publications, conferences, and courses, ecomodernism operates largely unnamed and unexamined throughout mainstream thought and practice. Whereas the well-consolidated paradigm of ecomodernism is widely perceived as rational common sense, more heterodox explorations of degrowth have been widely feared and mischaracterized. With these caveats, the following discussion aims to be provocative, rather than definitive.
At the heart of ecomodernism is the conviction that expansion of modern western science and lifeways can—and should—improve the entire world; together with the belief that technological innovation can—and should—solve the ecological contradictions of colonial capitalist growth. Rarely recognized as political, this ecomodernist perspective is communicated via means ranging from school curricula to corporate media, and taken for granted as the rational basis of mainstream policies. Modernist use of an authoritative voice unmarked by race/class/gender/nationality, together with universalizing analyses and recommendations, often render invisible the roles and the relevance of differently positioned identities and sociocultural systems in the production and implementation of knowledge and technology.
At the heart of degrowth is a commitment to support pathways toward more equitable and sustainable futures by decreasing quantities of material and energy used by wealthy economies; by curbing cultural and personal obsessions with growth; and by reorienting values and institutions around caring regeneration of humans and other nature. Strategies to innovate and repurpose technologies are conceived as inseparable from moves to forge different kinds of ecosocial worlds. Rather than prescribe universal solutions, many degrowth advocates seek context-specific responses, starting by changing relations and institutions in their own realms, with the goal of increasing possibilities for others to pursue alternative paths to well-being.
Analytic frame
The shallow historical depth and narrow cultural scope of mainstream discussions about technology and environment limit analyses of causes as well as horizons for change. Sustainability efforts tend to focus on sustaining the status quo here and now. This article tries to broaden the scope with a political ecology frame that contextualizes technology among political economic, ecological, and sociocultural phenomena interacting on various spatial and temporal scales. The field of political ecology took shape in tandem with anticolonial, environmentalist, feminist, and critical race studies in a tumultuous period that shook western academia by critically interrogating the dichotomy between nature and culture, the universality of reason (notably that of homo economicus), and the neutrality of western scientific methods and findings (Paulson, 2017).
Early on, political ecologists recognized environmental (tech)knowledges, practices, and purposes of diverse actors. Then, in dialogue with decolonial and feminist thought, asked how sociocultural systems instrumentalize differentiated identities to engineer access to and exchange of resources (e.g., Nirmal and Rocheleau, 2019; Sundberg, 2008). In contrast to liberal initiatives designed to empower marginalized individuals by integrating them into the dominant system, political ecologists often call for changing the social systems through which unequal control of resources—including technologies—are maintained and justified (Ahlborg and Nightingale, 2018; Hornborg, 2023).
Methods and debates
My approach to this debate draws on 30 years of intermittent field research among Andean and Amazonian communities, complemented by the study of international dynamics that drive environmental changes impacting those communities. The present article applies understandings developed along this journey to engage heated debates playing out in Environmental Values and other forums, via methods including examination of the form and content of key texts.
Keary (2016: 7) describes a long-standing axis of theoretical and normative difference: “The reified notion of ‘technology’ occupies two quite distinct roles in environmental debate. On one hand, it is the source of degradation and thus the root [villain] of all green thought. On the other, it is the arguable solution to the problems it has created.” Keary's study of climate modeling strives to deepen the debate with considerations of politics and knowledge production. However, ethnocentric assumptions about the neutrality of technology make it difficult for many of us to recognize epistemological, ideological, or cosmological foundations at play.
Murdoch (2018) argues that struggling with these deeper concerns is necessary in North American contexts where Indigenous people have rejected models of reconciliation that impose Western conceptualizations of nature, obscuring ecological violence at the heart of settler-Indigenous conflicts. For Murdoch (2018: 513), deep reconciliation “requires engaging with Indigenous philosophies that place land and relations to land at the center of right relations, thus working toward decolonizing settler-colonial-infused forms of reconciliation.”
Such attention to values and process runs up against a stubborn dilemma raised in Schlosberg's (2019: 1) introduction to a special issue on democratic values and environment: “to advocate democracy is to advocate procedure, to advocate environmentalism is to advocate substantive outcomes: what guarantee can we have that the former procedures will yield the latter outcome?” Below we ask how degrowth efforts that prioritize democratic process and decolonial learning might limit or delay desired environmental outcomes. And we ask how ecomodernist approaches to technology and environment that exclude concerns about decolonial and democratic process might constrain transformative potential.
Debates between these positions in the journal Political Geography were sparked by an exchange in which Robbins (2019) praises high-tech innovations applied by US farmers, together with promises to spread such innovations around the world via forms of socialist modernism, and Gomez-Baggethun (2020) contends that such top-down modernist solutions sustain the status quo of western development that led to current crises, whereas context-sensitive approaches to technology advanced with degrowth make more robust contributions to needed change. In response to the attention provoked by this exchange, the journal's coeditor Benjaminsen (2021) organized a forum with contributions from a dozen scholars, several of whom focus on coloniality. Hickel (2021: 1) uses quantitative data to demonstrate that high-income countries use most global resources and are primary drivers of global ecological breakdown: “These high levels of consumption and emissions depend on a significant net appropriation from the global South through unequal exchange, including 10.1 billion tons of embodied raw materials and 379 billion hours of embodied labor per year.” Mehta and Harcourt (2021) argue that technosolutions such as next-generation nuclear energy to solve the energy crisis, geoengineering to combat global warming, and genetically modified food crops to address hunger are supposedly culturally neutral and gender-blind, but actually create new vulnerabilities for marginalized groups. The present article builds on these and my own contribution to that Political Geography forum (Paulson, 2021) to ask how colonial, race, and gender systems are tangled up with the technologies through which such deeply unequal material flows are sustained, and through which marginalizations and vulnerabilities are produced and reproduced.
Key concepts: Technology, environment, and sociocultural systems
This special section on The Political Ecology of Technology raises questions about how to conceptualize “technology.” Relevant to our conversation are definitions established in Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area,” and in Wikipedia (“Technology”, n.d.), “Technology is the application of knowledge for achieving practical goals in a reproducible way. The word technology can also mean the products resulting from such efforts, including both tangible tools such as utensils or machines, and intangible ones such as software.”
In popular and scholarly discourses, however, “technology” is often used to refer exclusively to fossil-fueled machinery (e.g., factories, airplanes, computers), produced by institutionalized western sciences (distinguished from other realms labeled as “ethnosciences” or “folk knowledge”). The world-changing moment we are living requires conceptualizations of science and technology that encompass a broader range of human knowledges and artifacts: water wells, pottery, fishnets, arrowheads, seed selection, irrigation, as well as languages, each revolutionary in changing the course of human history (Pfaffenberger, 1992). So, I join other anthropologists in thinking about technology as the techniques, tools, and systems of knowledge applied by humans across cultures and throughout history.
Environment is conceived here as dynamic space that is constituted by, and supports, the interaction of living organisms (including humans) with physical elements and forces. That space is usefully operationalized on different scales from garden plot to planetary atmosphere, always with temporal dimensions (Paulson and Boose, 2019: 2). In western discourses that construe humanity as separate from nature, the term “environment” is often used to refer to human-free realms. In the age of Anthropocene, however, scientists are increasingly acknowledging the mutually constitutive dynamics among human and other environmental factors that have long been at the heart of non-western knowledge (Leach et al., 2018: 1–2).
Sociocultural systems including kinship and gender have operated throughout history to produce and reproduce humans with differentiated identities and knowledges, and to sustain complex ecosocial worlds by guiding interactions among humans and between humans and other nature. Anthropological and historical studies reveal that these systems take many shapes, leading to strikingly different outcomes. The emergence and expansion of industrial capitalism is associated with the establishment of a unique set of sociocultural systems sharing an architecture of hierarchical binaries in which the superiority and domination of humans over other nature is linked with man over woman, colonizer over colonized, white over nonwhite, heternormative over queer, and production over reproduction. For many people today, these binaries are engraved in the world in ways that have come to feel natural, making it difficult to question their historical role in facilitating dynamics of exploitation and unequal exchange that have been vital to the development and application of current technologies.
Scholars have long noted ways in which hierarchical classifications of “rational” humans as superior to “instinct-driven” beasts have intertwined with class ideologies that rank “civilized” elites over “savage” workers. However, in reviewing Marxist critiques of capitalism's ecological contradictions, Barca (2019) points out a frequent failure to grasp coloniality/racism and patriarchy/sexism as fundamentally co-constitutive of industrial capitalist world ecology. More comprehensive analyses—and responses—are inspired by decolonial feminisms (e.g., Moreano Venegas et al., 2021).
Historical entanglements
While geophysical data signal recent aberrations in the earth's processes so drastic that they mark a new geological era, historical records signal an equally novel turn in sociocultural systems. It is this unprecedented sociocultural turn that has driven, organized, and justified the acceleration of global societal metabolism leading to the new era variously labeled Anthropocene, White (m)Anthropocene, or Capitolocene.
With the rise of colonial capitalism, social, moral, and (re)productive systems in Europe and its colonies were undermined through expropriation of commons and other moves and reconfigured for new worlds driven toward growth and governed by markets, money, and western science (Hickel, 2020; Moore, 2015; Polanyi, 1944). New kinds of people and relations came to be manufactured via institutions that applied racialization to engineer the appropriation of land and labor (Wade, 2014), and that instrumentalized gender via the association of masculinity with market-oriented activities labeled “productive” and the relegation of “reproductive” work as feminine (Federici, 2004).
New social expectations worked to increase productivity and expand production: elite white masculinities became oriented toward the generation of profit and display of wealth; subordinate masculinities shifted toward the performance of long hours of paid labor; elite white femininities were charged with maintaining purity of descent for inheritance of private property; while subordinate femininities became charged with the unpaid work of reproducing laborers and regenerating labor capacities through food, clothing, physical, and emotional care (Collard and Dempsey, 2018).
By cheapening the production of commodities, such as cotton, these racialized and gendered systems made profitable, thus possible, the development of new technologies, such as the cotton gin, the spinning mule, and the power loom (Malm, 2016; Moore, 2015). In sum, the innovation and application of fossil-fueled technologies supporting the expansion of wealth and power among global elites has been made possible by values and institutions that facilitate the appropriation of energy and other resources from less powerful people and places (Frey et al., 2019).
In The Magic of Technology. The Machine as a Transformation of Slavery, Hornborg (2023) argues that technological innovation is not a politically neutral revelation of natural principles, but rather a power-laden means of harnessing natural and human forces; an argument he demonstrates with quantitative evidence of unequal ecological and economic exchanges along with value chains that increase profits for some while degrading socioecosystems of others. Hornborg traces the evolution of these dynamics since the emergence of coal-powered industrial production in Great Britain through the global application of digital technologies today.
A recent article titled “Fossil fuel racism in the United States: How phasing out coal, oil, and gas can protect communities” details how public health hazards from air and water pollution, and risks associated with climate change, fall disproportionately on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities (Donaghy et al., 2023). The authors demonstrate that systemic racism subsidizes the fossil fuel industry by enabling it to externalize the costs of pollution and environmental degradation onto communities of color.
In the face of unconscionable ecological and social damage, the will to continue pushing economic expansion is boosted by technological innovations, including fossil-fueled transport and informational technology, that facilitate the displacement of workloads and environmental impacts onto distant and subordinated people and places. As they adapt across changing contexts, colonial, racialized, and gendered relations of (re)production remain fundamental to today's technological landscapes.
How is technology neutralized or politicized?
Moral commitments to improve human conditions worldwide motivate technological proposals made by ecomodernists and degrowth advocates alike. Both currents of thought and action took shape mainly in the context of wealthy societies and north-Atlantic scholarship, and currently circulate in every part of the world. Yet, their politics of knowledge differ significantly, from acknowledgment of a thinker's own positionality to attitudes toward techniques and knowledges based in other positions and places.
I ask how these politics are manifest in two key texts. First is An Ecomodernism Manifesto (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015), published by a US-based environmental research center called The Breakthrough Institute. Manifesto garnered reviews in mainstream media including The Guardian, The New Yorker, and Wired; and provoked sharp scholarly debate (Collard et al., 2016; Goldstein, 2018; Isenhour, 2016; Kallis and Bliss, 2019). I revisit the publication here because its message and form continue to resonate strongly with mainstream public and political visions. Second is Degrowth & Strategy: how to bring about social–ecological transformation (Barlow et al., 2022), developed by a collective of activist scholars who initially mobilized to organize the conference Degrowth Vienna 2020. Aspects of Degrowth & Strategy have been discussed among diverse communities ranging from graduate programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona to International conferences at The Hague and Zagreb, and radio shows Ö1 in Austria and This is Hell in Chicago. Links to related webinars, reviews, podcasts, blogs, and videos are gathered on the book's website (Degrowth and Strategy, n.d.).
The texts model starkly contrasting positions. The 18 coauthors of Manifesto speak with a single authoritative voice to announce one decisive blueprint for modernization; in contrast, the 50 contributors of Degrowth & Strategy offer diverse perspectives and practices in a toolbox designed to empower variously positioned readers to develop their own pathways toward degrowth, and to build alliances among them. The Manifesto's master plan to reorganize and intensify global farming, forestry, and settlement epitomizes modernist moves to apply northern-led technologies on global scales, including the transfer of techniques and artifacts to the global south; in contrast, editors and contributors to Degrowth & Strategy seek ways to better learn from and ally with diverse communities and socioenvironmental justice movements, rather than project Euro-American values and technologies onto them.
Neutralization and politicization of technology can be seen in divergent responses to scientific evidence showing that global environmental damage continues to worsen, and that decoupling of economic growth from overall environmental impacts has not yet happened, nor seem likely to happen on anywhere near the scale needed to halt breakdown of earth systems (Hickel and Kallis, 2020; Parrique et al., 2019). Whereas ecomodernists respond by impelling more economic growth and by ramping up western science to increase the power that humans exercise to transform other nature, degrowth advocates respond by insisting that technological innovations be combined with institutional and values changes that curb the drive for economic expansion and that support diverse knowledges and cosmologies. Many observers perceive the ecomodernist response as neutral and the degrowth response as political.
Ecomodern technologies of worldmaking
Ecomodernist worldmaking prioritizes the generation and application of technology designed to reduce environmental impacts while maintaining high standards of living for humans. Barca (2019: 227) explains that ecological modernization, “which now dominates environmental discourses in mainstream ENGOs and in global environmental politics (including climate negotiations), was originated as a North-European stream of social theory in the early 1990s. It offered an optimistic, win-win vision of environmental reformism as an effect of techno-fixes coupled with market incentives.” Today, ecomodernism is not an elite or partisan perspective but zealously embraced by actors in widely divergent sociocultural and power positions. In debates between industrialists and environmentalists around an Italian steel plant, for example, Greco and Bagnardi (2018: 489) observe that “both fronts adopt similar technoscientific arguments while failing to problematize the multiple dimensions of environmental injustice and to connect the crisis to broader social relations of production.” Meanwhile, Barca (2019) explores how the terrain for thinking about ecological politics in class terms is currently framed by the entrenchment of labor within the politics of ecomodernization.
The signature value in these discourses is sustainability, often embraced as a commitment to sustain the worlds we know. As Keary (2016: 7) observes, “Technological optimism, often tied into the idea of progress, plays a powerful role in sustaining the prevalent mode of capitalist production in the face of its environmental consequences.” That optimism shines in the Manifesto's bold blueprint for fortifying currently dominant modes of life via expert science and large-scale expansion of modern western technology. And propels enthusiasm for tech futurist Peter Leyden's (2022) accolade of “The Great Progression” against calls for more radical transformations expressed by the “Great Transition Initiative” (n.d.).
The future technoworld mapped out in Manifesto features increased urbanization of populations supplied by intensified agriculture, aquaculture, and desalination. Arguing that plentiful access to modern energy is essential for human development, the authors hail next-generation solar, advanced nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion: “Transitioning to a world powered by zero-carbon energy sources will require energy technologies that are power dense and capable of scaling to many tens of terawatts to power a growing human economy” (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015: 22).
Manifesto's proposal to instigate redemptive growth via massive applications of modern technology promises to radically reconfigure our world. So why do proponents perceive ecomodernism as apolitical? And why do opponents critique it as conservative? Appearance of neutrality is maintained by keeping focus on new technologies, while not attacking dominant technologies—or sociopolitical situations that sustain them. The outcome of this strategy in the realm of energy production is evident in bp Statistical Review of World Energy 2022 (2023), which documents the largest ever increase in renewables capacity at a combined 266 gigawatts, coexisting with continued increases in global energy–related greenhouse gas emissions in a growing energy system still dominated (82%) by fossil fuels.
Opening paragraphs of the Manifesto identify means and ends that seem shared with degrowth: “A good Anthropocene demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world. In this, we affirm one long-standing environmental ideal, that humanity must shrink its impacts on the environment” (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015: 6). Also in sync with degrowth, Manifesto authors acknowledge deep histories of human innovations, including those enabling gathering, hunting, and agriculture. Unique to modernism, however, is a normative frame of upward progress, in which older technoworlds that endured and evolved over millennia should be replaced by new and future ones, hailed as superior. The Manifesto does recognize harmful impacts of this shift: “The modernization processes that have increasingly liberated humanity from nature are, of course, double-edged, since they have also degraded the natural environment” (ibid.: 16). But maintains its teleological vision of progress via promises that, sometime in the 21st century, new technology will finally lead to better outcomes: “Even as human environmental impacts continue to grow in the aggregate, a range of long-term trends are today driving significant decoupling of human well-being from environmental impacts” (ibid.: 11).
The forward-looking enthusiasm of ecomodernism is welcomed by many as a remedy to perceived backwardness of environmentalists striving to return to pristine nature, and to perceived naiveté of degrowth yearnings for pasts imagined as more convivial.
Degrowth technologies of worldmaking
The eight editors of Degrowth & Strategy introduce visions and values of the movement. We understand degrowth as a democratically deliberated absolute reduction of material and energy throughput, which ensures well-being for all within planetary boundaries. Contrary to perpetuating economies driven by growth and profit, degrowth offers an alternative vision for societies, centred on life-making, ecological sustainability and social justice. Since degrowth is based on the principles of autonomy, solidarity and direct democracy, bottom-up organising is seen as key to making an equitable and just transformation happen (Asara et al., 2013). Crucially, degrowth also acknowledges the historical inequities of colonialism and neocolonialism, and therefore demands that the Global North reverse the social and ecological burdens it imposes on the Global South. (Schulken et al., 2022: 11)
Degrowth advocates examine technology on scales ranging from case studies of computer-organized time-banking (McGuirk, 2017) or communal bike maintenance (Burkhart et al., 2020) to quantitative analyses of material and energy flows across global value chains enabled by digital and industrial technologies (Alonso-Fernández and Regueiro-Ferreira, 2022; Warlenius, 2017). A special issue of the Journal of Cleaner Production brings together 23 articles applying degrowth analyses to technological innovations from smartphones to smart cities (Kerschner et al., 2018), and Part II of Degrowth & Strategy assesses practical applications of technology in initiatives surrounding food, housing, digital technologies, energy, transportation, health care, money, and finance. All of these studies consider technology in context, just as they contextualize efforts to reduce material and energy use. Downsizing is never homogenous: it is the wealthier economies and populations that need to cut back material and energy use, in those sectors that are most destructive and least vital for well-being, thus allowing others more autonomy to use their own resources to pursue their own paths to well-being, through technologies of their choice and under their control.
Degrowth thinkers have reconfigured studies of technology and environment by bringing together ideas from thermodynamics, economics, anticolonialism, and social–environmental justice. Thermodynamic analyses theorized by Romanian mathematician Georgescu-Roegen (1971) and popularized by US ecological economist Daly (1977, 1996) show how the societal metabolism of human economies transforms material and energy into goods and services in processes that convert (low entropy) stocks of resources into (high entropy) waste.
Ivan Illich, Catholic theologian from Austria, brings inclusion and social justice to technological considerations, as expressed in Tools for Conviviality (1973) and Energy and Equity (1974). Illich promotes technologies that support people to exercise autonomy and experience satisfaction in pursuit of nourishment, home-building, healthcare, and learning. In the context of Mexican communities and Puerto Rican barrios of NYC where he worked, this involved redesigning infrastructures and landscapes to allow technologies such as bicycles and food gardens to flourish. Values expressed by Illich continue to fuel engagement with accessible technologies in the global south and north (Burkhart et al., 2020; Gerber et al., 2020).
In Écologie et Liberté (1977), Austrian-French philosopher André Gorz shows how the potential of technological innovation to reduce arduous labor and increase human leisure has been hijacked by industrial capitalist institutions that orient technology to very different ends: the increase in profits. Instead of liberating humans from toil, this application of technology increases demands on labor and seduces workers into seeking restitution for their sacrifices via more and more compensatory consumption. Gorz does not call for a return to medieval technologies but for prioritizing old and new technologies that can be managed without wage slavery and social alienation, in ways that enhance the autonomy of individuals and communities in production as well as consumption.
Drawing from these sources, Latouche (2009) charts eight principles for emancipatory and democratizing world-making: reconceptualize (ideas of wealth, poverty, value, scarcity, and abundance), restructure (productive apparatus and social relations), redistribute (wealth, access to resources), relocalize (savings, financing, production, and consumption), reduce (especially production and consumption of goods and services with little use value but high environmental impact), reuse, and recycle.
Writing about degrowth approaches to viable and convivial technologies, Muraca and Neuber (2017: 1814) emphasize that degrowth advocates do not reject technology or progress—Georgescu-Roegen sees technological development as the main characteristic of human cultural evolution. The question is: what types and applications of technology interact with what social systems to advance the values and purposes of a community or society?
Ecomodern positioning and politics of knowledge
Positivist narratives conveying universal reason and objective truth make ecomodernist messages compelling for wide audiences. The idea that scientific knowledge is generated by processes free of cultural, gender, or racial biases or interests—what Haraway (1988) calls “the god trick”—operates to minimize interference. Maintaining an apolitical profile, Manifesto authors do not debate ideas and movements that critique social and political influences on science and technology, but instead treat them as irrelevant, excluding from the text any mention of words including: class, colonialism, race, racialization, sexism, feminism, patriarchy, worker, ecosocial, reproduction, equity, or justice. In response, Collard et al. (2016: 227) diagnose Manifesto's futuristic dream with amnesia: “First, amnesia about the deeply uneven and violent nature of modernization. And second, about the struggles that have underpinned every effort to alleviate inequality and violence.”
What does the banishment of these concerns have to do with the positionality of ecomodern advocates? One might start by noting that, among the Manifesto's 18 coauthors, 15 appear to be men, and about the same proportion appear to be white. Of course, people positioned in given (gender/ethnoracial/class/national) identities can—and do—approach the world in many ways. Manifesto authorship is considered here as one example among many of the disproportionate preponderance of northern white men among champions of ecomodernism, and also of climate change denial (Buck et al., 2014; Krange et al., 2019; Nelson, 2020; McCright and Dunlap, 2011, 2015). In current science wars, climate deniers and ecomodernists sometimes appear as antagonists. Yet, in addition to their similar demographic profiles, they similarly exercise strategies designed to avoid changing—or even questioning—dominant social systems and institutions.
Fleming's (2017: 23) article “Excuse Us, While We Fix the Sky: WEIRD Supermen and Climate Engineering” documents the dominant role of men identified as WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, in democratic societies) in spectacular technological responses. Keary (2016: 8) alerts readers to a related recasting of global environmental debates: “The intellectual justifications for growth-focused environmentalism have become much more sophisticated; a new prometheanism has emerged. Environmental modeling, powered by models of technological change, is now the most significant locus of technological optimism.” Some ways in which new promethean identities connect with those of WEIRD supermen and climate deniers are evident in policy documents that Keary analyzes, notably, IPCC reports increasingly dominated by modeled emissions scenarios. IPCC scientists represent an impressive 90 nationalities, yet the map titled “Where do IPCC AR6 authors come from?” shows a significant concentration of the 721 contributors in the global north, with 74 from the US, 45 from the UK, and 45 from Germany. In terms of gender balance, 79% of contributors to AR5 and 67% of contributors to AR6 identify as men (IPCC, 2018).
In the face of calls to respond to climate change by altering values, lifestyles, and relationships, it should be no surprise to find resistance among people who perceive themselves as privileged by the status quo. And, in current systems, some northern white men do enjoy disproportionate benefits and suffer fewer risks and sacrifices than others. For many men, however, fossil-fueled high-tech growth has been less of a joyride and more of a Faustian bargain in which money, prestige, and power associated with the titles of “breadwinner” and “nature-dominator” come with heavy costs. Across the Americas today, boys and men lag significantly behind women in education and life expectancy and suffer hugely disproportionate burdens of occupational deaths, murder, suicide, drug overdose, incarceration, and military violence (Curtin et al., 2022; National Institutes of Health, 2023; Paulson, 2015; Reeves and Smith, 2022; US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022). Certainly, those positioned in subordinate, non-normative, and global south masculinities bear compound burdens; yet, even among wealthy white northern populations, men are disproportionately hurt through behaviors such as consuming red meat and driving fast cars, not to mention harm experienced from repression of vital emotions and relationships, particularly those surrounding caring and self-care. Denial of widespread patterns of gendered harm to men has worked to resist change in gender systems that also bring harm to women and others in the service of economic expansion.
Kallis and Bliss (2019) argue that ecomodern discourses hold considerable sway because their (unstated) politics align with powerful interests who benefit from belief that the best way to save the environment is by accelerating modernization via economic growth. Engagement of some northern white men with this narrative seems to be encouraged by their self-identification with those powerful interests named by Kallis and Bliss, together with disregard for damages and risks suffered by themselves. Another factor may be environmental values and attitudes that coincide with those which ecomodernists portray as universally human, namely, the rational maximization of utility and the drive to exploit nature attributed to Homo economicus (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015: 19).
In sum, the positioning of modernist knowledge and technology as objective, authoritative, and universally valid has proven compelling for important populations and effective at achieving certain goals. Part of that effectiveness is gained by depoliticizing the arena, and by rendering invisible the positionality of authors and protagonists. By framing technological solutions as independent from social systems and identities, this approach motivates actors in certain positions to focus on scientific innovation and demotivates them from seeking ecosocial transformations for the sake of their own well-being, as well as that of human and nonhuman others.
Degrowth positioning and politics of knowledge
Measured against ecomodern standards, degrowth has been criticized for failing to advance an authoritative plan, or to consolidate a unified strategy for change (Robbins, 2019). While multiple knowledges and heterodox movements broaden horizons for degrowth, progress toward its goals has indeed been limited in contexts where institutional power favors authoritative knowledge, and where political successes are bolstered by unified positions (Paulson, 2022).
Innovations, and also frustrations, arise from dialogues across difference. Degrowth-related efforts to build multifaceted understandings of human–environment relations informed by thermodynamics, economics, engineering, anthropology, geography, spirituality, arts, and philosophy are sometimes perceived as lacking rigor and efficiency. At the same time, dialogues among scholars and activists, north and south, raise questions about conventional standards of rigor, including standard measures of technological effectiveness and efficiency.
Critics have long denounced harm done by modern technologies and economies to groups who are colonized and labeled “underdeveloped.” European pioneers of degrowth thinking responded by raising critical awareness of their own historical positions at the heart of colonizing growth, and by struggling to liberate their own colonial imaginaries, shaped in societies whose supposedly superior languages, lifestyles, and technologies were disseminated globally (Latouche, 2009: 11). Yet, efforts to think critically about harm done to worldviews of people like myself, positioned as developed colonizers, have been particularly thorny. It is hard to undo socialization in which exaltations of technological triumphs in cartoons, schoolbooks, political speeches, and Hollywood films obscure our complicity with outcomes that are ethnocentric, ethnocidal, and ecocidal.
Today, sensitivity to coloniality is evident among degrowth authors who insist that we wealthy societies put our own houses in order before intervening to “fix” the rest of the world (on whose backs we grew), and who criticize trickle-down and charity discourses that make it seem as if technological and economic growth of wealthy economies helps the global South (Hickel, 2015; Kallis et al., 2020). Instead, they argue that high-income societies would do better to focus on decreasing their own consumption and accumulation; repaying ecological debts; and reversing unequal flows of capital, resources, and waste. And on allying with a mosaic of progressive bottom-up movements across the world seen as key agents of needed social–ecological transformation (Schulken et al., 2022: 10).
Whereas efforts to decolonize degrowth have been informed by perspectives and practices expressed in indigenous struggles, among others (Nirmal and Rocheleau, 2019), serious work needs to be done on the roles that white privilege and racialization play in technosocial dynamics that drive growth, as well as among those that support just and equitable degrowth. An article by Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance collective explores contributions of feminisms to degrowth trajectories . Feminist analyses of the historical dynamics of gender systems are fundamental to the work of challenging growth-driven political economies, and of designing more equitable and balanced ecosocial systems. Feminist theories and methods that acknowledge and support diverse voices, knowledges, and practices are vital resources for building on heterodox degrowth thought and movements. In dialogue with postcolonial, decolonial, indigenous, and anti-racist efforts, intersectional feminisms have been unlearning and disrupting conventional politics of knowing and action in ways that help forge more inclusive understandings and applications necessary for degrowth futures. (FaDA Collective, 2023)
Degrowth & Strategy addresses this dilemma head-on, making a case that, to bring about shared goals of ecosocial transformation, degrowth networks need to bring together, honor, reflect critically on, and deliberate about a wide mix of approaches. In light of that vision, the co-creation of the volume Degrowth & Strategy has been a prefigurative exercise in itself, experimenting with inclusive, dialogic, nonhierarchical technologies for knowledge generation, and book production.
In sum, attempts by degrowth advocates to learn across academic disciplines, to contextualize and decolonize their own knowledge and technology, and to dialogue with differently positioned knowledges and technologies, have broadened horizons for responses to ecosocial crises. At the same time, insistence on considering technological processes in unique contexts, conditions, and power relations has limited the ability or willingness to scale up successful technological initiatives. Participants continue to experiment with strategies to organize and implement technological projects cohesive enough to bring about and sustain progress toward degrowth goals.
Conclusion
Debates engaged here cannot be reduced to opposition between techno-optimists celebrating the latest inventions and techno-pessimists blaming machines for destroying nature and human souls. This essay explores some of the deeper values, positions, and sociocultural systems that shape and sustain the generation and mobilization of technologies.
Ecomodernist and degrowth advocates alike seek to forge technological futures that enable more people and places to thrive, with less environmental degradation. Yet they differ substantially in the ways they address the sociocultural systems that shape technology production and that direct its purposes. By promoting technological innovation designed to diminish the need for sociocultural and political-economic change, ecomodern proposals work to sustain privileged interests in status quo arrangements. Degrowth advocates argue that, to successfully address current ecosocial crises, technological innovation must work in tandem with radical social and political-economic transformations.
Both approaches share understandings that human technologies continually interact with other environmental dynamics to shape emerging worlds, a vision beautifully expressed in Manifesto: “Humans are made from the Earth, and the Earth is remade by human hands” (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015: 6). This contribution invites readers to seek synergies inspired by ecomodernist awe of technological worldmaking and by degrowth efforts to address ongoing entanglements of technology with colonial, racial, and gender systems and dynamics.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.