GIORGOS KALLIS: The way we’ve come to think about limits, it’s paradoxical and it’s part of the problem of continuously pursuing growth without limits. So I wanted to understand how we have come to think about limits as something that comes to us from outside and as something that we should always try to overcome and transcend. Even the environmentalists—who we tend to think as the ones who are more conscious and more aware of limits, and arguing that society should consider its limits—they are part of a game that is part of the problem. Because, since the onset of industrial civilization and capitalism, this duality of thinking of the world as limited and at the same time using that to try to justify overcoming any possible limits, it’s two sides of the same coin.

I’m Giorgos Kallis and I’m a professor of ecological economics and political ecology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the author of the book Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care.

In intellectual history, Malthus has come to pass as, may I say the word, the party pooper. And, you know, like the doomsayer at the beginning, when progress was starting and industry was starting to produce goods. He was the one who said, “Oh, be careful. That’s not going to last long, because people are going to start procreating like crazy. We’re going to have more and more people, and then famine is coming, so while you celebrate now for having a little bit of growth, this is going to collapse soon.” That’s how he has been interpreted and come to pass in history—I’m oversimplifying now. So then if you are now today saying, be aware that, you know, oil might end or fossil fuels are damaging the climate, we have climate change, you are branded as a doomsayer, because supposedly you’re making the same argument as Malthus made about food back in the nineteenth century. And then the argument goes, Malthus was proved wrong, because we managed to produce more and more food, then have more and more people on the planet.

That’s the standard argument about Malthus. So I read what Malthus wrote, and his argument was actually that our wants and our drives are potentially unlimited. This is what you hear also today. You can’t limit people. You can only be a tyrant if you tell people they can’t consume whatever they wanted to consume. Now Malthus was saying something very similar. At the time he was talking about population. So he was saying you can’t, and you shouldn’t, control people having as many kids as they can have. Malthus was a priest, and he was clearly saying that God has brought us to earth in order to populate and multiply. God has made sure that if we try to control how many children have, we are going to suffer. If we don’t control them, we’re going to suffer in another way through farming, because God wants to keep us trying to do that. So, if he had made it easy, we could relax and stop trying to grow without limit. But that makes it difficult to suffer, so what we have to do is work harder and harder, produce more and more food, come up with better technologies in order to manage to increase our numbers and a little bit more. So I’m arguing that this is fundamental thought for capitalism and a fundamental thought also for the science of economics, which is the science that, I would say, tries to explain capitalism and tries to justify also capitalism as the best possible system.

We can write a different history of environmentalism and say that that has been around for a while. It has also been in other parts of the world. But American environmentalism appears during the 1960s. First we have Carson’s book Silent Spring. And then we have two fundamental works, I would say. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which is actually the work that brings Malthus back to current debates, and this is through which most people find Malthus. Basically Ehrlich argued that sooner of later you would have a famine, or collapse of the system. And then after that, in 1972—which is the year I was born [laugher], out of coincidence, I think—there is The Limits to Growth report, which is the one that brings this idea of limits to sort of popular, I would say, awareness. The report is arguing that the way the economy was growing, and given limits to materials and energy, by around 2030 or something like that, the global economy would crash, because we don’t have enough to keep going.

So that’s the period where this idea of limits is being put on the table as central to an environmentalist. But there are two different notions of limits taking place there, and the two are conflated. The one is limits, or something external, as resources being limited, nature being limited. Then eventually this limit posing a challenge either to adapt to these limits or try to overcome them—which I think is very much the terms of the debate set from Malthus and then reproduced by economists over the years—that I think is losing the essence of radical environmentalism, which is the second take on limits and is the one I defend. And it’s like a limits as a social project, as a project for a better life—wanting to live within limits, of understanding that limits are necessary in order for us to live a meaningful life and create a functioning society. And I think the two things are mixed by environmentalists who are trying to argue for limits as something good by using the argument that the planet is limited so it forces us to do that. So in my book, I’m trying to disentangle these two things.

We are damaging, without limits, the climate. So we are destroying the climate, we are completely destabilizing it now. So the question is not so much what’s the limit that is coming to us from the outside. But it is how we will stop doing that. How we will put a limit upon ourselves. So in one sense the 2° or 1.5° or 2.5° is the scientific information about what the impact will be if we go beyond these temperatures. But I’m saying they are not really limits in the sense that we can go to four degrees Celsius and create a society where people live crappily. Some will still be rich, some will still go around walking over corpses, and the majority of people will live terribly, but there will still be a civilization there. So it’s not really a limit. We can cross that limit and we will keep working, but we want to make it the limit. So we want to limit ourselves within 1.5 degrees because we don’t want to create a world where it would be like how we imagine it would be under 4 degrees Celsius.

This idea of limitless growth is bound and connected to the invention of money. It is an idea I get from a classicist, Richard Seaford, who has written about the appearance of money in the society that it first appeared in in a generalized form, which was Classical Greece. And Seaford is arguing how what we understand as the Greek civilization was to a large extent constructed as a reaction to what people realized was the potentially disastrous path of money running after more and more money. So Athenian democracy was established as a response to the civil war that started because of skyrocketing inequalities and because of the invention of money and lending at interest rates. Seaford argues also that tragedy, like the main art form of Greeks at the time, was full of messages about the conflict between the limited and the unlimited; and it was a constant reminder of the dangers of following the unlimited, or the unlimited nature of money. But even philosophy, he argues, it tries to deal with the question of infinity. So we see there that there is a clear connection between the logic of money, which is unlimited, and the logic of society preserving itself, which is like, How do you limit this unlimited power?

Some environmentalists, including myself, we often do make arguments that are Malthusian. It’s like the arguments of the type, we are running out of oil, we are running out of resources. This growth will not continue forever. Climate change is going to bring the economy to a halt. And I’m arguing, don’t frame your arguments like that. You don’t need to. You can still be scientific and not frame your arguments like that. You can frame them like Carson in Silent Spring frames them, which is like this earth is beautiful and it’s abundant, and we are destroying it. We should stop this destruction. We should stop emitting carbon. We should stop extracting resources and destroying, like, people’s livelihoods and mountains and environments. You don’t need to fall into this discourse of “We are running out of things,” because this discourse, first of all, is very much part of the civilization that is destroying things without limits. So if you tell people we are running out, the normal reaction will be like, okay, let’s move to the moon and to Mars now—like, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos type of thinking. That’s the reaction because it’s part and parcel—like, we’re running out of things, oh, we should get more, you know. On the contrary, I’m saying, like, change the frame. And it’s like, we have enough, we always had enough, and we are destroying it. So can we stop this destruction?