The Problem with Limits

On self-limitation vs. external limits

Evening winter sun shines across native bunchgrasses and rolling hills at Peehee Mu’huh, Thacker Pass, in Northern Nevada in 2022. Everything pictured here has now been bulldozed for an open-pit mine. Photo by the author.

Hi everyone,

Recently, on the advice of a friend, I read a book called Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care. It was written by Giorgos Kallis, a prominent degrowth scholar and someone who I briefly took a course from as part of my recent studies in the degrowth movement.

I was primed to dislike the book. We read a few segments of it as an assigned reading, and at the time I wasn’t a fan. I’ve had some significant political disagreements with major figures in the degrowth movement who are close collaborators of Kallis. And, to be frank, Kallis wasn’t my favorite teacher — although in retrospect, that may be due more to my own biases and the fact that I was waking up at 4:30am for class. I was grumpy.

But on second reading, although there are significant parts I disagree with, the book proved insightful.

Rather than what I feared it would be — an apologia for “green growth” or rejection of ecological consequences — it presents a nuanced argument against the political utility of external limits (which environmentalists have often relied heavily upon as a foundation for our outreach and communication), and for the necessity of self-limitation as the fundamental principle we should build our movements on.

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Limits as a finish line to reach as fast as possible

Kallis first argues that there is a distinction that is often missed between different flavors of limitation. The first is based in what he calls “[a] yearning for limits” which “is at the heart of radical Western environmentalism.” He continues:

“Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, for example, the book that launched modern environmentalism, was not about a scarce nature running out of space to absorb chemicals. Carson wanted us to place a limit on despoiling a nature full of life. Her call to limit the use of pesticides was not a sacrifice from her perspective (and not only because there are organic alternatives); rather, limiting a damaging kind of production was the path to a better future full of bird songs.”

The second kind of discourse treats limits as an external boundary to be grudgingly accepted, and often pushed against. “The difference between Silent Spring and [the 1972 report] Limits to Growth is subtle but important,” he writes.

“Limits to Growth also pointed to a looming disaster and called for a change of course. But Limits did not claim only that growth, like pesticide use, has terrible consequences; rather, it predicted that growth will come to an end, and that this would be a terrible consequence.”¹

There is a parallel here between different flavors of forest conservation: Muir’s desire to protect trees for their own sake, and Pinchot’s to do so in order to ensure sustained timber yield. As Pinchot’s mindset underlaid the transition from old-growth logging to the currently dominant tree farm model which has extended the lifespan of the timber industry, Limits to Growth has contributed to, among other things, a significant increase in corporate efficiency efforts which often harms the planet.

Limits are attractive to people who love the land. As Kallis wrote, we yearn for them. We want industry to be restrained, and so we are smitten with the idea of external limits. Yet we have to acknowledge that a limitation approach has also been adopted wholeheartedly by government and industry. Think of “wise use.”

Limits appeal to the rational mind. A limit set, for example, on the acceptable amount of a given pollutant that can released into the environment — say, mercury emissions from coal power plants — creates a stable business environment and protects polluters from liability. Although the regulatory regime is currently being dismantled inside the United States for all the wrong reasons, many have argued for decades that it’s chief effect has been to neutralize public opposition to corporate poisoning.

There are problems with limits.

Limits depend on your goal

Kallis writes:

A limit presupposes a goal. Gravity, then, is a limit if you want to jump from the rooftop of a building and arrive on the ground intact. It is not if you want to commit suicide. And gravity is actually helpful if you want to throw down a ball. Seawater is life for fish but death for humans... The limit resides in the subject and the intention, not in nature, which is indifferent to our intentions. And it is our intentions that should be limited.

There are limits in the natural world. The concept of tipping points in the climate system is one example. There are countless others. But rarely can ecological limits be quantified as precisely as the load-bearing strength of a carabiner or a bridge. Ecology doesn’t work that way. It’s a realm of gray areas, slippery slopes, and people making educated guesses about networks of relationships with unthinkable complexity. Consequences are rampant in ecosystems; definable limits rarely are.

States around the world are currently continuing to burn fossil fuels en masse, driving global warming far into the realm of crisis. Different experts have proposed various limits to atmospheric carbon. Kallis states that 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is probably incompatible with civilization. The large international NGO 350.org calls for lowering atmospheric carbon levels to 350 ppm, while at a briefing for the small-island nations at the 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen, Dr. Thomas J. Goreau stated that “CO2 buildup must be reversed, not allowed to increase or even be stabilized at 350 ppm, which would amount to a death sentence for coral reefs, small island developing states, and billions of people living along low-lying coastlines.”

And it appears that, for capitalists, the only limit related to global warming they will accept is the limit it will eventually impose as catastrophe rages unchecked across wide swathes of the planet and physically prevents them from continuing their business. Prior to that, from the perspective of industry, no limit has been reached.

Limits depend on perspective.

From external limits to self-limitation

Most people in the dominant culture see limits as something to be surpassed. Food scarcity calls for genetic engineering, fish farms, vat-grown meat, and plant breeding. Global warming and peak oil means we pivot towards nuclear fusion. Urban sprawl and traffic jams necessitate building new highways and packing downtowns with dense, vertical housing. Carbon emissions mean we build electric cars and SUVs. And for the most deluded, lack of lebensraum on Earth means we must expand to Mars and become multiplanetary.

Let’s contrast this with a completely different approach to limits. In a 2013 interview, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer and activist, said:

“One of the stories I tell in my book is of working with an elder who’s passed on now, Robin Greene from Shoal Lake in Winnipeg, in an environmental education program with First Nations youth. And we were talking about sustainable development, and I was explaining that term from the Western perspective to the students.

And I asked him if there was a similar concept in Anishinaabeg philosophy that would be the same as sustainable development. And he thought for a very long time. And he said no. And I was sort of shocked at the ‘no’ because I was expecting there to be something similar. And he said the concept is backwards. You don’t develop as much as Mother Earth can handle. For us it’s the opposite. You think about how much you can give up to promote more life. Every decision that you make is based on: Do you really need to be doing that?”

The alternative, as Mr. Greene relates, is a humility so staggeringly different in character that it represents an entirely different worldview. For him, the promotion of more life is the key goal of human activity, and social decisions are based on that — not on what sort of human benefit can be extracted by taking as much as possible up to ecological “limits.”

Similarly, Kallis argues that human flourishing and freedom lies not in the fulfillment of material wants, but rather in joyful self-limitation:

“Like religious societies, capitalist civilization has generated a set of wants for its members... The system is stable as long as it satisfies these wants and people do not question their meaning.

But questioning what we want is what autonomy and democracy are all about. Radical environmentalism keeps this democratic spirit alive, [philosopher Cornelius] Castoriadis insists, because it is the only contemporary movement that questions wants and defends limits. Other movements [such as Marxism] question the distribution but not the content of capitalism’s dreams.

Ecologists ask instead what a life worth living consists of… revealing the absurdity, according to Castoriadis, of the “humiliating” idea that the only goal in life is to produce and consume more. This is a defense of self-imposed limits (autonomy), not limits that we imagine are forced on us by nature or the way society supposedly is (heteronomy). The case for self-limitation rests on the negative consequences, or the risks of not limiting ourselves; and on the freedom of setting limits to our own powers and intentions, limits without which freedom loses its meaning…

Beyond consequences and freedom lies a third reason for self-limitation... This is justice, or care for the Other, since limitless expansion inevitably colonizes and assimilates the lifeworld of others, human and nonhuman alike. As the Spanish philosopher Jorge Riechmann writes, ‘Only self-limitation makes possible alterity, leaves space for the other.’”

This analysis helps me to crystallize problems that I’ve always had with approaches like the planetary boundaries framework and the ecological footprint concept. Despite their communications value, these approaches concede something incredibly important by implying that any destruction up to the specified threshold is by definition acceptable. My perspective is closer to this:

“we shouldn’t limit ourselves just because there are limits, but because we want to do so. In fact, if there weren’t limits to growth, this would be all the more reason to limit it, because limitless growth is catastrophic.”

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1. Kallis goes on to note that “(Donella Meadows [co-author of Limits to Growth] and others did, however, push the Limits argument in their own work in a direction very similar to that of Silent Spring, calling for an end of growth and a change of politics and values.”