In this they downplay the need for more fundamental social as well as economic
transformations. They also downplay the significance of knowledge and values
emerging from ‘below’, including from local people living with and experiencing
social and ecological dynamics on a daily basis. As illustrated in examples of land
use and tropical forests, discourses and interventions ensuing from them ignore
such alternative knowledges at their peril. The result can be reduced robustness of
policies and interventions, missed opportunities and injustices. The chapter
concludes that a more inclusive and deliberative politics of knowledge is essential
if green transformations are to be robust, effective and contribute to the social justice
dimensions of ‘green’.
Green limits
Green, today, is powerfully associated with respect for environmental limits:
whether in relation to climate change, biodiversity, water, land, oceans or their
‘nexus’ interactions (see Stirling, this book). Growth and progress, it is argued,
must keep within limits or else founder amid dangerous resource scarcities, crisis
and turbulence.
Green limits have long been invoked in science, policy and popular debate to
argue that human business-as-usual cannot continue. Their genealogy stretches back
centuries, to the ideas of islands and their limited biogeography that inspired ‘green
imperialism’ in early European encounters with the tropical world (Grove, 1996),
to notions such as the ‘carrying capacity’ of local and regional environments coconstructed with colonial environmental and conservation science and policy,
whether concerning forests or rangelands (Leach and Mearns, 1996). By the 1960s
and 1970s scientists and social movements alike were pointing to the environmental
costs of dominant industrial development paths, on a shared, constrained, small
planet newly visible as such from the gaze of space. It was in this context that
Meadows et al. (1972) articulated the supposed resource-based ‘limits to growth’
as demand looked set to outstrip supply. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, policy
analyses often purported to identify emerging imbalances between people’s use of
and demands on environments, and environmental capacities, resulting in resource
scarcities and environmental degradation. Neo-Malthusian perspectives often dom -
inated, highlighting the threat of rapidly growing, resource-consuming populations.
This history of limits thinking has, notably, co-developed with vibrant critique
around its assumptions and evidence, including the overlooked capacity of human
innovation (e.g. Cole et al., 1973).
Today, environmental limits are being invoked with renewed vigour and at
planetary scales. This is underlain by a growing sophistication and authority of earth
system science, and its understandings of thresholds, tipping points and the possible
consequences of exceeding them (e.g. Lenton, 2013). The two most prominent
contemporary concepts are the idea of a two- degree limit for global climate change
and the more all-encompassing idea of ‘planetary boundaries’. These have gone
well beyond science to become settled as discourses linked with influential
What is green? 27
transformations. They also downplay the significance of knowledge and values
emerging from ‘below’, including from local people living with and experiencing
social and ecological dynamics on a daily basis. As illustrated in examples of land
use and tropical forests, discourses and interventions ensuing from them ignore
such alternative knowledges at their peril. The result can be reduced robustness of
policies and interventions, missed opportunities and injustices. The chapter
concludes that a more inclusive and deliberative politics of knowledge is essential
if green transformations are to be robust, effective and contribute to the social justice
dimensions of ‘green’.
Green limits
Green, today, is powerfully associated with respect for environmental limits:
whether in relation to climate change, biodiversity, water, land, oceans or their
‘nexus’ interactions (see Stirling, this book). Growth and progress, it is argued,
must keep within limits or else founder amid dangerous resource scarcities, crisis
and turbulence.
Green limits have long been invoked in science, policy and popular debate to
argue that human business-as-usual cannot continue. Their genealogy stretches back
centuries, to the ideas of islands and their limited biogeography that inspired ‘green
imperialism’ in early European encounters with the tropical world (Grove, 1996),
to notions such as the ‘carrying capacity’ of local and regional environments coconstructed with colonial environmental and conservation science and policy,
whether concerning forests or rangelands (Leach and Mearns, 1996). By the 1960s
and 1970s scientists and social movements alike were pointing to the environmental
costs of dominant industrial development paths, on a shared, constrained, small
planet newly visible as such from the gaze of space. It was in this context that
Meadows et al. (1972) articulated the supposed resource-based ‘limits to growth’
as demand looked set to outstrip supply. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, policy
analyses often purported to identify emerging imbalances between people’s use of
and demands on environments, and environmental capacities, resulting in resource
scarcities and environmental degradation. Neo-Malthusian perspectives often dom -
inated, highlighting the threat of rapidly growing, resource-consuming populations.
This history of limits thinking has, notably, co-developed with vibrant critique
around its assumptions and evidence, including the overlooked capacity of human
innovation (e.g. Cole et al., 1973).
Today, environmental limits are being invoked with renewed vigour and at
planetary scales. This is underlain by a growing sophistication and authority of earth
system science, and its understandings of thresholds, tipping points and the possible
consequences of exceeding them (e.g. Lenton, 2013). The two most prominent
contemporary concepts are the idea of a two- degree limit for global climate change
and the more all-encompassing idea of ‘planetary boundaries’. These have gone
well beyond science to become settled as discourses linked with influential
What is green? 27