Teun 🌏 ❤️ 🏳️🌈 🇺🇦 🇵🇸🌿 I like this blog post by @maxwilbert. It highlights the problem with speaking of environmental issues in terms of 'limiting ourselves'. Because that carries the implication that until these limits are reached, we can do whatever we want.
Instead of external limits, he argues (in agreement with author Giorgos Kallis), we should look for internal limits: ways of limiting our own behaviour to be more in line with the world around us – not just because of the consequences, but also because of the freedom and justice such limit-setting entails.
I like this.
However, I disagree with the wording here. I think we can go one step further and not speak in terms of 'limits' at all. I am not limited by the fact that I cannot take a private jet everywhere I go; I am positively happy about it. I am not limited by my non-consumption of animal products, it makes me feel great. What Wilbert and Kallis call 'self-limitation', I call flourishing.
As long as we keep thinking in terms of limitation/expansion, we stay stuck in the capitalist-imperialist mindset. This mindset sees expansion as the only way forward, with everything else being 'stagnation' or 'regression' and therefore Bad. Whereas what we should be looking for is ways to grow our quality of life without growing our destructive footprint.
In my humble opinion, of course.
🔗 https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/the-problem-with-limits
#degrowth #MaxWilbert #LimitsToGrowth #environment #EnvironmentalPhilosophy #GiorgosKallis #sufficiency #abundance
Dr Deb Lindsay
News Beep
Lawrence Nault- Stone & Signal
Christoph Rupprecht
Catie
Lucy Weir
Dr. Simon Bunchuay-Peth
Paula