Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Enough! insists there is enough for all. Creating such a future is not about producing more or living with less. Instead, it starts with rethinking our politics, economics and approach to livelihoods. Mary Lawhon and Tyler McCreary develop a “modest approach” to justice and sustainability, drawing on ecology and postcolonial theory, as well as their research on infrastructure in African cities and the Canadian north. The authors chart a pathway beyond modernist and arcadian environmentalisms, emphasizing uncertainty while holding onto hope for creating better worlds. The chapters tack between conceptual contours, concrete examples, proposed inventions, and personal narrative. Theorizing from the struggles of the global south and Indigenous peoples, Enough! proposes delinking livelihoods from work through a redistributive basic income, which enables enough without overreliance on modern states. It also enables us to prevent conflicts over jobs, reduce some types of production, and deploy resources towards building postcapitalist worlds.
Can we imagine a future economy that is attractive, fair, sustainable and ... possible? Lawhon and McCreary have. In Enough! they hurtle us beyond the eco-twin romances of degrowth and techno-optimism to a world where basic income is guaranteed, Earth systems are protected, peoples' needs to thrive are met and the human economy remains vibrant, active, inventive, and full of possibility. Modesty, they show us convincingly, requires neither wearing a sack cloth nor boarding a spaceship. Recommended reading for an optimistic and progressive future.
— Paul Robbins, Dean, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and Professor, Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Mary Lawhon is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh and International Faculty in the Global South Studies Centre at the University of Cologne. Her research interests are in urban political ecology and theorizing from cities in the global south.
Tyler McCreary is Assistant Professor of Geography at Florida State University and Adjunct Professor of First Nations Studies at University of Northern British Columbia. His scholarship examines how colonialism and racial capitalism inflect the processes governing land, livelihood, and community life.
Introduction
1. Polarising political ecologies of the future
2. Neither more nor less: cultivating a modest political ecology
Interlude: radical potential of a universal, unconditional basic income
3. A modest economy: diverse and distributionist
4. A modest state
5. Modest livelihoods
6. Onwards