Alice Mah and Cara Daggett talk degrowth, doomerism and the ecological damage of endless growth

Alice Mah is Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow. Prior to this, she was the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded project “Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry.” Her work focuses on toxic pollution and environmental justice. She writes about social and ecological transformations and is always trying to develop anti-colonial ecological futures. Cara Daggett is an associate professor of political science in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research explores the politics of energy and the environment. One of the things she brings to this conversation is her shrewd sense of the overlap between human well-being, science, technology, and the more-than-human world. Cara is known for bringing feminist approaches to power to bear on understanding the ways that global heating emerged, and how it can be combated. Her book The Birth of Energy (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-birth-of-energy) has become essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the acceleration of everything and an ideal of productivity were normalized: the underlying logics that inform today’s uses of energy. In this conversation, Cara and I ask Alice about her recent book, Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation (https://www.dukeupress.edu/petrochemical-planet), which is an incomparable study of the petrochemicals industry at a time of planetary collapse. One of the toughest-to-crack aspects of this ultra-toxic industry is the fact that it is basically impossible to simply replace petrochemicals in the global economy. There is basically no way to produce them without fossil fuels and virtually no method of decarbonizing the shadowy production practices involved. And the petrochemicals industry is the #1 industrial consumer of fossil fuels globally. Whether it overcomes that feeling of being overwhelmed or not, Alice and Cara think that the way forward is what they call “multi-scalar” and “multi-temporal” action. If we’re going to save some portion of the Earth we’ve ravaged, it will mean being able to think and feel and act outside of the very short-term timeframes we’re accustomed to in a system that incentivizes and rewards corporate plunder. Can we imagine forms of “multi-temporal resistance” and start “building things” on different timescales? For the Earth to heal from extractivism, we’ll have to. This will require a much deeper sense of duration and what Alice describes as an “extension of empathy” across eons.