coe016_kallis.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:25] Welcome back, cultures of energy, listeners, we're really, really glad that you've come to spend some good quality quality audio time with us. We are coming to you from Rice University as often is the case, and we want to thank the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences for being an important sponsor of our little adventure here in podcasting. And we have another fantastic show for you here today for your delectation. Does my co-host, Dominic Boyer, I want to say hello to the crowds?

Speaker2: [00:01:02] I want to say a few words Yes. Oh right,

Speaker1: [00:01:04] Go do words. Hello. Word it out.

Speaker2: [00:01:06] I yeah, yeah. So we do have a terrific show today, and we'll be speaking with Yorgos Karlis, who is an environmental scientist who works at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. And he is part of a field that I really frankly didn't know existed until I learned about his work, called Ecological Economics. Mm hmm. And this conversation is all about de-growth, right? Right. Which is he'll argue, and I'm going to say I agree with him a really key concept to be thinking about as a as questions of energy transition and environmental remediation in the 21st century. In other words, talking about or he's thinking very much about our obsession might be are being generally our society's obsession with growth as an index of national welfare and personal welfare and prosperity and happiness and everything else health. That concept of growth as being so central to how we think about our well-being is in fact unsustainable. You know that, and it has to be questioned and opposed to by this movement that calls for de-growth. Now, what that is exactly is complicated, right?

Speaker1: [00:02:26] And he explains that really nicely in the conversation that we have with him because it is a concept that circulating but maybe not circulating as widely as it as it should and it might. So part of our advocacy here is to to try and get the word out there a bit more about de-growth because and it's a specific kind of of growth that is fetishized and that has become so sacrosanct in terms of of welfare and well-being and that it's economic growth. It's very specific. It's not about, you know, the growth of more forests or, you know, roots of grass or, you know, even little piglets in a sty. It really is about economic growth. And so that's what you know, that's what this movement is honing

Speaker2: [00:03:08] Production, transaction consumption, all the things that are measured in GDP,

Speaker1: [00:03:12] Right? And he also has some really important, I think, things to say about the question of production versus reproduction and the qualities that we need to foster and try and cultivate around reproductive labour and distributing that labour differently. I think that's a really important moment in the conversation and in this thinking around de-growth is redistributing those kinds of human labors that we do.

Speaker2: [00:03:42] Right. So yeah, it was a it was a really interesting conversation and we should do a special shout out to our colleague and students here at Rice. Victor Jimenez Arriaga, who is the one who first brought Professor Callouses work to our attention, right?

Speaker1: [00:03:59] And he was great. Thank you, Victor, for for facilitating everything. And yeah, so. I think the other thing that Yorgos speaks about is the difference between kind of an ecological orientation versus an environmental one, so I think it's really important that he sees himself as an, you know, an ecological economist, not an environmental economist, because an environmental economist is someone who might be interested in sort of carbon trading and redd programs, offsetting management of management of the environment in the context of the economic status quo and the position that he takes is is pretty different as an ecological economist. This is a more radical position. It's a more radical form of engaging in economy.

Speaker2: [00:04:53] This is not just about cap and trade proposals and things like that. In fact, he's quite critical in his writings that those types of market mechanisms are really are going to function, in part because, well, he has his interesting discussion he talks about in the interview about also the intersections between politics and economics and how if you make proposals like de-growth proposals, you know one party does that. It leads to a recession, then that becomes the boost for, you know, a business as usual party to come in on the next election cycle. So there's a complex metabolism there, too. But really, I think what he's getting at is a very interesting point that if our if if our ideas of economy and growth are so sewn up with carbon fuels, a carbon democracy is to actually would put it in the first place, then it's very unlikely that just tweaking that logic a little bit or trying to use the market to undo, you know, use market signals to somehow undo that notion of economy. It's not really going to work. You're kind of taking the poison again in a different way.

Speaker3: [00:05:56] Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Speaker1: [00:05:57] Right. And just sort of upscaling some of that poison too, right? He mentions nuclear energy as an example of how that might be sort of confabulation.

Speaker2: [00:06:07] So this is both I mean, it's it's a conversation I think is philosophical as well as practical. It really is about a transformation in our way of thinking as much as it is about our way of doing so. One of the things I believe he is advocating is that we have to sort of begin thinking about economics beyond like the market, right? Beyond growth, obviously beyond a notion of the economy.

Speaker1: [00:06:29] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. The fiction of the

Speaker2: [00:06:30] Economy, right? Exactly. So shall we move to that? Great.

Speaker1: [00:06:34] Yes. Let's hear from Yorgos.

Speaker2: [00:06:36] Go, Yorgos.

Speaker4: [00:06:57] Welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast we have on the Skype line from Europe, from Barcelona, to be specific. A distinguished environmental scientist who is working in ecological economics and political ecology, Yorgos Khalis Welcome to the Cultures of Energy podcast.

Speaker3: [00:07:15] Thank you for inviting me. I'm very happy to talk with you.

Speaker4: [00:07:18] Terrific. I think Simone is going to

Speaker2: [00:07:20] Lead the conversation off today.

Speaker1: [00:07:22] Yeah, you ought to go. I mean, we know that you've been doing a lot of work academically and I suspect otherwise around the question of de-growth. And so I thought it would be really useful just to get a kind of working definition of what de-growth entails because we know from from looking at some of the de-growth materials that in fact, you've argued that it's not just one thing, that it has sort of multiple elements to it and multiple inroads that we need to to begin working toward. But can you tell us what de-growth is and what it does and what we hope it can do in the future?

Speaker3: [00:08:01] Yeah, I think it's paper, right, and it's time I talk to give a different definition, so I should improve my own consistency, but the one that I'm kind of settling in this period of time when I try to summarize the essence of this concept or keyword keyword and what it tries to capture is two things. The first one I would say is the critique if you want to call it a ruthless critique of the idea or the ideology of growth. So the day has to be understood first and foremost as a negation, so it's a critique of growth. And the second the second way I understand this is as an open hypothesis that we can have an economy or a society if you want that prospers without drawing or even with its size, the size of economic activity becoming smaller. So in that sense, there are two two meanings in this term the growth.

Speaker1: [00:09:08] That's great. Yeah, I know that the literal translation of D growth as it's been used starting with activists in 2001, was that quiescence. This French word that means reduction and you describe that this word became a missile world were a missile word that sparks this kind of contentious debate on the diagnosis and prognosis of society. So it really has these far reaching possibilities. How can you tell us a little bit more about the social movement out of which de-growth grew?

Speaker3: [00:09:46] Yeah. So the missile in the missile was a critique. I mean, the concept appeared as the growth sense in France in the early 2000s, and it was kind of a response for critique to the then dominant idea of sustainable development. So it's kind of a missile war to kind of unsettle, let's say, the consensus that was dominant at that time, but you can have both a cake and eat it all like have both continuous and sustained economic growth and at the same time, ensure ecological sustainability and social equity, which was the talk of the day then. So in one sense, that was the idea of a missile war that you throw a word in the word in the debate that unsettles because the it's the negation, and it's a direct critique of something that is considered beyond criticism like economic growth. Who wouldn't want it right or left green or not green? Why not have economic growth? So this was this is the idea between me and myself. The roots of the movement are long, and of course, in a way, the growth is a reincarnation of what was the radical ecological movement in the 1970s. And I think it's, you might call it a branch and evolution or a new intellectual keyword to capture some of the concerns of this movement. And the analyst political philosopher political theorist who has analyzed the history of the Green Movement. Andrew Dobson has made a distinction between the ecologist movement, which has always had a radical, radical political demands and has always argued that there are and there should be limits to growth from environmentalists.

Speaker3: [00:11:42] What he calls the idea that the environmental problems are simply technical problems, that they can be resolved or managed better with techno institutional solutions. So in that sense, the growth continues in this tradition of the ecologist movement that was questioning the essence of the system, which is the premise of economic growth. Now the specifics of how the grasslands came into being, let's say more specifically than the ecologist movement in general. It was a it was in the context of movements in the city of Lyon, in France, movements against advertising and against big infrastructures, something like similar to the circling around the Adbusters in Canada, something similar a similar magazine in a group of intellectuals in France, in the city of Lille, or a series of mobilizations. And then this attracted and started the collaboration with intellectuals most known among whom Serge Lotta's, who is one of the main authors in the literature on the growth and economic anthropologist who was working in Africa. And he was part of the so-called Post Development School people criticizing the idea of international development and its effects in Africa. So a confluence of intellectuals and grassroots activists in France that then kind of grew concentric, largely out of France and rest Spain and Catalonia, where I'm here, Italy, a lot Greece and now increasingly other parts of Europe, Germany, Canada also. So there are no small groups all around the world of scholar activists, I would say, working on the growth.

Speaker4: [00:13:32] So you're one of the things I wanted to to ask you to to talk a little bit more about. That's really fascinating in your writing. You talk about growth fetishism and almost it's like growth almost has a religious quality, especially perhaps among economists and politicians who are thinking about, you know, welfare, you know, the health of the nation. A term like recession is always something that seemed to be a bad thing, and it's always put forward as being like a sickness, whereas growth is always seen to be a good thing and in a very unexamined way. But it seems to me your work and the broader work of the movement is drawing attention precisely to that. That fetishism. So could you could you say a little bit more about that?

Speaker3: [00:14:20] Yes, I mean, one of the intellectuals of the South influenced a lot of the de-growth scholars and movement and me personally and not because he's my compatriot, I'm Greek and he was Greek, Cornelius Jarvis. He was. He was a Greek philosopher, activist, not activist. I mean, I would say political politically involved in the Communist Left. He was a Marxist until at some point he he said he was no longer a Marxist in the 60s. He had the left Greece. He fled from political persecution there. He lived in France. And then interestingly, as a combination, he he was working for the OECD for the National Accounts Group. You know, counting the growth rates in the country while at the same time being a political activist, a philosopher and later a psychoanalyst. It's a very interesting figure that shows like the different variants that combine interdisciplinary and creative new spark, new ideas like ideas that have come into the growth. So he he was the first one to argue, and I'm referring to him because I think he made the argument most compellingly about four societies before capitalism were imaginary. I mean, what was giving essence to societies because societies need something, something that holds them together? He called this the social imaginary what you imagine that you are as a society and where you want to go.

Speaker3: [00:15:50] So he was saying that the societies before capitalism, you might argue before modernity. Religion was giving this. This imaginary was providing this imaginary was providing the source of truth and the sort of cohesive goals of where the society was going. And he argues that for capitalist society, especially after the Second World War and the periodization is important, the equivalent role of the central imaginary signification, as you call it, the central imaginary becomes the idea of growth, the idea of expansion. And if these what, what, what, what provides meanings and what provides connection to all sorts of different endeavors. So we have from from the way we talk about growth to the story, we talk about the economy to the way we talk about education, to the way we talk about different policies, to the way different firms and different people think of their finances. There is this imaginary that gives a common meaning, and in a sense, it's the equivalent of what religion was for religious society. So we would say the religion of secular capitalist societies.

Speaker4: [00:17:04] One of the things you've also written about is connected to this is a critique of what you call technological optimism. The idea that you know, we can solve the problem of maintaining growth and environmental sustainability through an unspecified set of emergent technologies that will, as you put it, just put it, allow you to have the cake and eat it too. So why? Why? Why do you why do you see or what do you see as the problem with that logic?

Speaker3: [00:17:38] Yeah, I don't think it's a matter of optimism or pessimism, or if you put it in this term, I would say the optimism is on the side of those of us who talk about the growth because we are optimistic that people can come together and bring systemic change when we see that without systemic change. The consequences are going to be grave, as is the case now with climate change. And not only that sense, I would say that I am optimistic and perhaps some people rightly accuse those of us who talk about the growth as being too optimistic. But I think the optimism is on our side now. Technology, I would say the maybe also technological fetishism in a way that no matter what the problem is, the solution is technology. While we know I mean by now, we know. I mean, there is a history of trying technological solutions to social problems, and we know that it's it's new technology simply displaces and outsources the problem at a higher scale, higher scale, both geographical and in terms of impact. And at best, what it manages to do is to displace a problem either temporarily or spatially, you know, so people are saying now that in order to avoid climate change, we should go should invest full on nuclear energy. I mean, you don't need to be a scientist to understand what are the implications of that. You're trying to solve one big problem climate change by creating another one that is going to be to you for centuries, you know, like managing nuclear waste, having always the capacity to manage nuclear power plants ad infinitum, you know, as long as the radioactivity might be active. So you are creating you are displacing the problem, but you are displacing it, creating always a worse problem. And a series of so-called technological solutions to environmental and social problems are following this pattern. And this is a pattern that. Those who are involved in technology assessment or history of technology are very well aware of.

Speaker1: [00:19:44] Right, and in this case, it's, you know, the the sort of impetus to move to nuclear or to undertake geo engineering by sort of contaminating the skies with with more technological objects is really it's it's a doubling down on growth. It's it's an expectation that we're going to continue to grow the so-called economy and that we can sort of engineer our way out of it. Yeah, I think that's why it's such a frightening. These are really frightening prospects for people. And you know, you've you've made some important statements about, for example, people like Thomas Friedman who see something like green growth as the answer to our current climate situation. And you've been critical of that because the idea of green growth follows the same logics as carbon growth. And that is if we keep on expanding the economy, keep on expanding wealth. You know, this is the story that the one percent tells. We just keep on expanding and growing and then everyone will have a very delicious slice of the pie, and that's never been true. And so this is just another form of sort of recapitulating and retelling that that fable that's never come to fruition for people.

Speaker3: [00:21:05] Yeah, I mean, the only way to to everyone have a good share of the pie by redistribution. There was a period in the 1950s that there was more redistribution than there is now. And everyone has a more decent share of the pie. I mean, this finished in the 1890s, and I'm talking here about your America. I'm not talking about the rest of the world, but the story was clear there. But with the environment, it's it's not even that because I mean, it hasn't it hasn't been the case that growth has led to environmental improvements. In any case, I mean, there is the so-called idea of the environmental kuznets curve that countries, as they get richer, they damage the environment more. But then they reach the point that the richer they get, the less they dominate the environment. But this has been well discarded in the literature that it's it either concerns like irrelevant or easy to tackle polluting substances where you just substitute for some other pollutant or it's very localized effects, of course, localized you improve the conditions, but by creating new problems elsewhere. So you might say yes as the economies grew like localize the water contamination decline because we developed more advanced wastewater treatment technologies. But all this was done on the back of fossil fuels, which means that another problem at the higher scale was created and displaced to the future because now we are facing the consequences of that and to many other places.

Speaker3: [00:22:34] So there is no evidence whatsoever that growth. Has led to environmental improvements or green growth is a is a fantasy and utopia of the type of utopian, you know, because there is utopia that can be creative and lets us imagine alternative futures and go towards alternative futures. But there is also utopia in the sense that you create impossibility in possibility theorems and visions, and you just drag drag the whole lot with you towards this direction. And I don't think the point is the point is that what people are intellectuals like Friedman are trying to salvage at all costs is the idea of growth. So I mean, it's growth that comes first and then it says like, OK, we can have growth and be green. It's not that green comes first. And then you say, like growth is the way to go about it. That's the next exposed secondary justification. But I think it's always how to subvert this idea of growth, but I think it's unsolvable in its own terms.

Speaker1: [00:23:38] Mm-hmm. I wanted to turn to a book that has gotten a lot of attention here in the United States and I expect in Europe also, and that is Naomi Klein's most recent book, which is called This Changes Everything. So I wanted to take a minute to walk through. She has this six point plan in an article that she's written called Capitalism vs. the Climate. And I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to run through those six points and hear your reaction to the cluster of them or any one of them. The first one, she says, is we need to revive and reinvent the public sphere. That's number one, she says that, you know, light bulb changing, carbon offsetting, that's basically bullshit. We need to have collective action to and focus on big ticket investments that will reduce emissions. So these are infrastructures like subways and streetcars. So number number two in her her litany here is remembering how to plan. So kind of going back to the, you know, the five year plan that, you know, forbidden sort of Marxist Soviet articulation of the five year plan. She says we need lots and lots of planning and not just at the national and international levels, but every community in the world needs to plan for how long it is going to take to transition away from fossil fuels. Mm hmm.

Speaker1: [00:24:59] Number three, she says, reining in corporations. She calls for a rapid reregulation of the entire corporate sector. I think that kind of speaks for itself. Number four, she wants to re localize production, and that involves, of course, reducing transportation effects and costs that are incurred when we have cargo ships, jumbo jets, heavy trucks, cheap goods being produced in places like China, where you know, people in Euro America get to feel good about, you know, their consumption because all of that pollution is being sort of offshored in China. She calls for ending the cult of shopping that speaks for itself, too, that we can't continue to have this kind of the consumption that we have now and still expect to, you know, remediate our environmental issues. And finally, and this is my favorite one, she says. We have to tax the rich and filthy instead of instead of the filthy rich. It's taxing the rich and filthy. So and again, she says explicitly, the old answer would have been easy will grow our way out of it. And so she says that, you know, these growth based economy is really just again lead to elites. So I just wanted to get your impression of which of these you agree with or critique or, you know, whether you feel like this is a good program that Naomi Klein has suggested.

Speaker3: [00:26:27] No, I agree with all of them, and I endorse all of them and the people who talk about the growth write very similar stuff like to me, his book has a very similar saying. I think he calls it a tree program, so he has reuse, redistribute, recycle, very localized. So very, very similar ideas are coming out. What I would add, I would say not disagree, but what I would add and why. Perhaps sometimes it's good to insist on the word growth that only doesn't is a little bit more reluctant to talk about. I mean, we've discussed this, and she has expressed some concerns with the world. But I would say what I am missing in this account is that the let's say we did this if if we we end within quotation marks, let's say we were progressive governments coming in power in poor countries like, I don't know, the US, Germany or England and started kind of transitioning towards this direction in this program. Okay, that's that's a failed experiment. What would happen then, is like that probably their economies would slow down. Okay. Or they would even contract. It's a likely outcome someone might say, like, OK, if you're not concerned, if you don't want to fetishize growth, why do you keep talking about growth now? I'm talking about growth because in the current economy that we have and it's all the economies that we know about, I mean, it's the type of economies that we have since we started talking about economies like the last 200 years. We know that this type of transformation is about mommy, and mothers and ourselves are proposing are not going to be expansionary transformation.

Speaker3: [00:28:06] So they are going to be transformations that they're going to reduce surpluses. They're going to reduce labour productivity the way capitalism understands and needs labour productivity, et cetera. So the question is, what do you do then? Because the easiest thing is like, you have a fantastic scenario where you have progressive governments coming with this agenda and within two years, they fall because of a recession. You know that they can't handle and then the opponents come in power and the claim that they're going to bring growth back and jobs, et cetera. So this program needs to be complemented by kind of a of an agenda of how do you manage the growth or how do you manage prosperity without growth? Justin Jackson called it. And I think there is where Naomi Klein's program needs. It needs advancement in its development and its thinking, and we need those economists to join the board and start thinking about these things. This is why I think it's important to keep talking about the growth, and I don't agree with not implying that we have to to invade the world because we don't care about the growth or the growth. We just care about doing the leap and substituting fossil fuels, et cetera. I think we cannot afford to ignore growth. We want to to fix after the fetishize ourselves from growth. But we cannot do it by simply saying that we won't pay attention to it because it will come in our face even if we don't pay attention to it.

Speaker4: [00:29:36] So, so I'm interested to for you to to to follow that line of of thinking a little bit further and talk to us about what you term in one of your essays is selective degrowth. And given that de-growth is multiple and complex and that it's philosophical as well as practical, be really curious to to to hear you talk about what you think. Some of the most effective points of intervention have been are today what they could be in the future? You know, breaking de-growth apart a little bit into some of the practices and ideas that you're working with. What do you think is particularly effective in terms of moving degrowth forward as a movement?

Speaker3: [00:30:19] Yeah. I mean, I mean, one part of it is the type of movement and politics and political change that people like Naomi Klein and her book want to bring forward. So the idea of blockade that's there in the book, like also blocking destructive projects and blocking commodification and privatization of. This is super important, you know, together with a creating a new progressive politics and trying to to to get into power positions in the state at different levels. So all these things, all these things are important. I think the growth has something extra to to offer there in addition to other progressive politics. I think what what the growth might have to offer a little bit more is a little bit more thinking on on on what I said before. How do we start managing or handling or creating transformative structures to for prosperity without growth? And I don't have any firm answers, and I don't have to say this will work because nothing has been tried. So this is a little bit paper exercises that we are doing. A lot of these paper exercises that we are doing is the idea of how would we transform my work and welfare relations, the welfare system and work. These are two fundamental questions. I don't think we've gone very far into this thinking, but I mean, one idea that has been with the ecologist movement for a long time and it's still with the degrowth movement and trade around is the idea of work sharing, like reducing working hours, changing the idea of a full time job five days a week, 40 hours.

Speaker3: [00:32:16] So by sharing work, we might create more work for more people, less work per person, but more people at work, even without the economy expanding. So that's one key idea. Another key idea that is floating around but has its problems. But also worth considering is the idea of a basic income guaranteed out of the total wealth of a country. And if it's a diminishing wealth but guaranteed for everyone to make sure that a minimum level that makes sure that no one falls outside of the safety net plus gives some autonomy to people to decide how much of their time to allocate in the wage labor economy and how much to devote to autonomous activities outside of it. And there are a couple of. There are many ideas like that, but of course, then the core question becomes like the politics that can bring it forward. And then again, there I say that I don't think any political economist like me is in any privileged position to speculate or theorize on this politics and on this there is a lot of thinking by radical political theories of how things might come in difficult times, such as ours.

Speaker4: [00:33:32] You know, you talk again in your essay on one of your many essays on de-growth that that, you know, rapid social transformation is possible. We saw it in the 20th century, as you know, European and especially North American, Australia and New Zealand societies rapidly changed in the global fight against fascism. You know, quite a lot was accomplished in a very short amount of time. Ironically, where we are today, it feels as though the main response to precarity, vulnerability, uncertainty has been a sort of a return of a certain kind of neo fascist politics. We're we're speaking to you the morning after Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee in the United States. Obviously, these movements are very strong, maybe even gaining strength in many parts of Europe, too. So, you know, I'm curious, as I'm sure we all are for your thoughts about how do we shift the conversation in such a way that people could embrace, you know, prosperity without growth? Or, you know, rethinking the problem of prosperity in such a way that addressing something on the scale of climate change isn't simply a politics of fear, because once it becomes that, it's very easy for that to play into the hands of populist demagogues.

Speaker3: [00:34:50] Yes, I mean, it's a good it's a question, as you say, like whether we're in the 1930s or the 1940s. And I mean, it was in a sense wishful thinking to say that we were in the 1940s. I remember there was an essay that I got inspired from for this idea was Mike Davis, who had written an essay. I don't remember when was 2008 2009 about the war on climate or something like that? Climate change could be the equivalent, and we should make it the equivalent mobilize a kind of collective response around the problem of climate change. But I think this was partly wishful thinking on his part and on our part to say that this would happen because there was not a unity of purpose that perhaps there isn't a war and then this unity of purpose is also very problematic. You know, that can be politicizing. It can provide authoritarian responses to political problems. So that was a tricky argument to make. But I mean, I stay by the argument that social change happens quickly and happens always when someone least expects it. And of course, when it happens, those who experience it do not understand that they are experiencing it is always exposed. When we write history that we understood that social change happened in a particular period and that it happened quickly. So then the question is what sort of social change is taking place now? And you are right that there are huge concerns about the direction things might take right now. And I mean for. Those of us who have driven a little bit of political economy or ecology, and especially the work of Aulani on the great transformation.

Speaker3: [00:36:29] I read it when I was doing my postdoc in Berkeley in 2005, that was before the crisis, but critical scholars were already saying that this is the direction things are going with the increasing commodification and financialization of everything. And this is, of course, where things went. So now we are in Poland said it was writing in the 1930s, and she said, like the movement of liberalism for commodifying everything in the name of expanding the economic trade to counter movements and the one both are counter movements that they are trying to take society out of this dynamic. But the one is very regressive and the other one can be progressive. And we see this political system in many places, unfortunately, not also in the US, which have Trump. You have Trump. You also have Bernie Sanders, not in Greece. I witnessed a very similar political polarization in Spain, too. Unfortunately, some other countries, I don't know Hungary, for example, you don't have this polarization and we just have a neo fascist party dominating without any kind of response from the left. So so you have these two tendencies that they are well documented again by historians and we know that they happen in these type of situations. And the question is where where things are going to go. But I think this is not a matter of predicting it, and I don't think I can shed any more light on that or on the discourses and organizing principles that might lead to one way rather than the other.

Speaker1: [00:38:09] One of the one of the things that we've been seeing around the world, at least in scholarly conversations of late and the last decade or so, is this turn toward what people are calling post humanism and post humanism has been critiqued for a bunch of different reasons that I won't go into, but I wanted to think about this question of the human. One argument is that post humanism has, you know, sort of emerged on the scene because of our very dire climate conditions and because of ecological disaster that is on the horizon and occurring in some places. And so we've therefore turned to understanding, you know, non-human beings and creatures and plants and animals and the material environment. We want to attend to it more closely. But I want to come back to an element of the human and a question of labor that you've written about. And what you've said is that care the sort of, you know, caring for, you know, the environment and humanity is a really key element or a hallmark of the de-growth principles. So that care is something that's focused on reproduction rather than expansion classically. Of course, we know that, you know, reproduction and care has often been gendered work. It's undervalued work. It's something that happens within the family. We have the classic schism between, you know, productive labor versus reproductive labor. But one of your arguments is that de-growth needs to look toward the equal distribution of care work and and the recentering of society around it. And you say that a caring economy is labor intensive. Precisely because human labor is what gives care its value. And I think that that's really important. So it is about a redistribution of labor tasks and the kind of labor tasks that we do. But I think even just in a philosophical sense, this sort of impulse to care is really critical, and it brings in a kind of emotional or affective dimension that so often gets left out of discussions of the economy, but also environment in many ways. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the importance of care and human labor.

Speaker3: [00:40:32] I fully agree that the attraction is the emotional and these dimensions are completely outside of the economic, I mean, geography or in environmental studies. I think there are people who are doing a better job on trying to incorporate and integrate and value these dimensions. But in economics, economics is such a close discipline and so fashioning and modelling itself in the pseudo ideal of natural science, positive science based on mathematical formalization that any talk of that would be heresy in the mainstream department, right? Yes. Well, we believe and we wrote that in our book, and we put a lot of emphasis on that precisely because I think it was. Fortunately, under emphasized in previous discussions about limits to growth and the growth, and there was a very serious and valid critique by feminist economists on on on the previous conferences of the growth that there was, there was an obvious gap in this dimension that we were focusing also too much on production and consumption. But we are forgetting a huge, if not the the most substantial part of our working time is going, which is reproduction and caring for one another. And it's it's an important it's an important question, both because it is gendered and it is equally distributed and unfairly distributed. And we should address it head on. And it is important because in the context of crisis and also neoliberal reforms, we do not have only an environmental crisis, but we have a lot in the book we call Crisis of CARES. So we have a crisis of the welfare system, which means a displacement of activities that they were caring activities and welfare activities provided collectively by the state. We are decentralized and displaced back to the family. And this all this in the context of already stagnating or falling falling incomes, accentuating gender inequalities and the pressure to households and especially women to provide this caring work.

Speaker3: [00:43:00] So we have like we have a crisis of care. And as I said, we have also the criticism and the potential threat that many of the things that I would say are celebrated and promoted in the name of the growth or alternative economies, which is a kind of more artisanal household type of production back to the land, the lower forms of energy production, etc. All these projects carry a much bigger burden in terms of reproductive work and a lot of much more work to be carried out in the non-paid, non-paid sector and outside of the market economy. And again, there is a crucial question of who does this work? Who does this increasing that we would like to see it increasing reproductive and caring and outside of the market work because if it is to displace this work to those who are already and equally the ones providing care work in our societies, then it's a huge problem. And the growth, rather than being progressive, is even more regressive than a welfare state based on growth. So these are core questions. I think that should be at the center, at the center of the debate. And it was a well, well made criticism by feminist economists of the first degrowth conferences and I think not fully integrated or satisfactorily addressed. But I think there are small steps to integrating these two lines of thought. And in the last growth conference in Leipzig, I mean, there were many panels on care and on feminist economics and emerging, I would say, of the two discourses.

Speaker1: [00:44:46] That's great. I think this is really important. So thank you for building that out some more. It's a really a key element, it seems to me

Speaker4: [00:44:53] And also for your for your movement, against the mathematics of economics. I mean, back in the days of people like, you know, John Maynard Keynes, you could read his essays because they weren't filled with math. And then sometime over the latter half of the 20th century, they became so technical it was like trying to read a statistics book to read an economics article. But I think your work is taking it back in another direction. Even simple to anthropologists like us can understand what you're writing, which is right. Let me let me read one thing just to prove that point one short short piece that you wrote in the conclusion to one of our articles where you say that in these times of crisis, we need a new storyline and a vision, a new political project, not individual environmental policies increasingly rejected because of their cost and the economy. Sustainable growth does away with economies and growth and offers such a promising vision which is cohesive enough for the purpose. The vision is one of a society with a stable and leaner metabolism, where well-being stems from a quality relation and simplicity and not material wealth. This is something you wrote about five or six years ago. Would you still hold on to that? Does that still work for you?

Speaker3: [00:46:05] I think I have improved.

Speaker4: [00:46:06] Ok, so what's your updated edition

Speaker3: [00:46:09] Of that about? No, I still hold, though I haven't said something terrible because I've been criticized and I've taken back like a definition I have given. I don't remember if it wasn't the same article or another one. Growth is downscaling of economic production and consumption. And then I have to backtrack because this was too much of a domestic definition of what the growth was. So this big, you wrote, I think I would still stand by, but it was written in a context that I was responding to a colleague who was making the argument, who was making the argument that the growth is not cohesive enough as a concept. And then for it, it's redundant. So I was saying that it is a concept that signifies and signifies something to which we can put words in. It might not be something that can be operationalized with a single indicator as GDP, but that's precisely the problem with simplifying concepts like growth. But then they are violent in their simplification and in their accounting. So I was responding in this context. I mean what I wouldn't feel so comfortable with and change now that I'm not trying to to frame the growth, as you know, like the rallying slogan for social change.

Speaker3: [00:47:24] Or I wouldn't say that it's the key word of the storyline. I would say that it is one key word of a broader storyline of a progressive storyline. I think it's a key word that always brings back on the question the ecological question in its radical form. So that cannot be some subsumed in just any form of progressive social change. That should be the social democratic change would be even overcoming capitalism. I think all left or progressive discourses often have the problem that they do not account for the fact that they are courting the same imaginative growth and expansion of the projects that they are confronting and that in this sense, they do not fundamentally address the ecological dimension. So in that sense, I think the growth is very relevant for any storyline that it's going to emerge in this crisis and create a positive image of the future. But if my sentence is read in the sense that the growth on its own is this rallying slogan, a story like this I wouldn't say anymore. If I ever said it, I'm not sure if I said it, you

Speaker4: [00:48:34] Know, but I think you made a really important point that part of the reason why we need to speak against growth or negate this growth is because of to get back to what we were talking about before that. There really is a kind of fetishism of growth right now. It's a real discourse. It's a discourse that shapes people's imaginations and their realities. People, you know, make decisions based on whether they think something will grow in investment will grow or not. And and it's so bedrock to our, you know, social life that if we don't actively work against it, there's a there's a large chance that it'll just continue to perpetuate itself in one form or another. But as the political theorist Tim Mitchell has argued, and I know you've looked at his work to the whole concept of growth itself, his argument is is tied to, you know, the coming of a petroleum economy. It's he he talks about it as a kind of petro knowledge. You could only have this idea of limitless growth with the idea of the the massive magnitudes of energy that fossil fuels had. Yeah. So I like this idea that you what you said earlier that, you know, change may come in a way that we're not even recognizing it. It may not be something that's like a flash of lightning. It may be very humble and modest and slow, sort of as we as we as we gradually transition away from fossil fuels towards different types of energy sources, we may find that, you know, giving up growth isn't as hard as we thought. Or do you disagree?

Speaker3: [00:50:01] No, I agree with that. I mean, I I mean, the danger is the political that we were talking about before. But yes, I fully agree with what you're saying. And Tim Mitchell's work is, yes, fantastic in that. And there are a couple of other works under preparation that they are looking at that at the history of the idea of growth. And I think Mitchell is one has done. I mean, it's not his main focus, but I think chapters in his work or tangentially he has touched on. I mean, it's fantastic. I mean, for me was revelatory, a revelation to to to realize reading his text that growth is so recent of an idea. I mean, you would think that it's much older than it is. But Mitchell basically says the idea of the economy, not even of growth, is an idea of the 1930s that really took shape in the 1950s. And of course, the idea that this thing, which is called the economy has to grow. It's at the same period and the two come together. And I think this is this is a fantastic insight, you know, but it's also in a way, it's an insight that shows how how hard you might read it in two ways. You might say how hard it is to change that or how easy it is, because if it's so recent and it's not so entrenched, sometimes we think it is. It means that if we if we a change of. Configuration and might be what you were just talking about, like changing the way we produce energy from fossil fuels to renewables that socially and politically, we will have a different evolution where the term gradually of growth or the imaginary growth we will give its place to something hopefully better.

Speaker1: [00:51:43] Right. I mean, that's something that we've been talking about quite a bit here in the center is that as we're seeing transitions and making transitions to different forms of energy away from carbon forms, that instead of using the same sorts of political forms to manage these new energies, that what we ought to do is look to these new energies to actually generate a new form of politics in a new form of sociality. So that's, you know, perhaps too utopian. But, you know, we like to be on the positive side of the future at some point,

Speaker4: [00:52:17] We think that's a good utopia. Since you were saying that there's good utopias and bad utopias, I think that's a good utopia.

Speaker3: [00:52:23] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker1: [00:52:25] Well, Yorgos, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy life to to talk with us and to share these fantastic ideas about de-growth and give us a really good sense and an in-depth understanding of what the stakes are. I think it's a really important set of questions and movements that that you're involved with, and hopefully this will expand the reach of of those movements as well.

Speaker3: [00:52:50] It was a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Speaker1: [00:52:54] Wonderful. Maybe one day we'll meet in person.

Speaker3: [00:52:56] We hope so. Yes. In your future. Thank you.