Engaging imaginaries, rejecting utopias: The case for technological progress and political realism to sustain material wellbeing

In his paper 'Is less more ... or is more less? Scaling the political ecologies of the future", Paul Robbins (2020) urges political ecologists to critically engage with both technological modernism and degrowth as imaginaries for how humans may live sustainably. The first of these imaginaries asserts that technological improvement will allow societies to use natural resources ever more efficiently, thereby producing more while using less. Degrowth, in turn, posits that it is only by renouncing dreams of endless economic growth, and by actually shrinking the global economy, that sustainability can be achieved. Although these imaginaries appear to be at odds with one another, Robbins argues that they share ample common ground and, indeed, that both may be necessary to deliver and sustain material wellbeing to the world's human population. In a response to Robbins, Erik Gomez-Baggethun (2020) contends that, contrary to the technological modernist belief that more production will come at less environmental cost, increased production invariably results in more ecological damage.