ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with a critical discussion of mainstream ideas about sustainable development, built on the idea that economic growth can and should continue. The conventional model of development has been questioned from a number of different positions and the ‘cultural myth’ of growth challenged by environmentalist concerns about limits. This chapter reviews these critiques. It discusses a series of radical ‘green’ critiques of developmentalism, including radical ecologism, bioregionalism, deep ecology and ecofeminism. In different ways, all of these have set out alternative frames for understanding the unsustainability of conventional approaches to environment and development. Standing against such radical environmentalisms are Promethean ideas about a technology-led route to a sustainable future that does not demand an end to economic growth. These ideas are presented and critiqued. The chapter then turns to the question of limits to growth, which has persisted since its first heyday in the 1970s. It pays particular attention to ideas about degrowth, or the search for a future living within limits but without scarcity: the challenge of achieving prosperity without growth.
