Description
Western culture is infatuated with the dream of going beyond, even as it is increasingly haunted by the specter of apocalypse: drought, famine, nuclear winter. How did we come to think of the planet and its limits as we do? This book reclaims, redefines, and makes an impassioned plea for limits--a notion central to environmentalism--clearing them from their association with Malthusianism and the ideology and politics that go along with it. Giorgos Kallis rereads reverend-economist Thomas Robert Malthus and his legacy, separating limits and scarcity, two notions that have long been conflated in both environmental and economic thought. Limits are not something out there, a property of nature to be deciphered by scientists, but a choice that confronts us, one that, paradoxically, is part and parcel of the pursuit of freedom. Taking us from ancient Greece to Malthus, from hunter-gatherers to the Romantics, from anarchist feminists to 1970s radical environmentalists, Limits shows us how an institutionalized culture of sharing can make possible the collective self-limitation we so urgently need.
Author: Giorgos Kallis
Publisher: Stanford Briefs
Published: 08/06/2019
Pages: 168
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 7.90h x 4.90w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9781503611559
ISBN10: 1503611558
BISAC Categories:
- Nature | Environmental Conservation & Protection | General
- Philosophy | Political
- Business & Economics | Development | Sustainable Development
About the Author
Giorgos Kallis is ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona.