Paper short abstract:

Environmental activists deeply criticized growth when environmental problems became a welfare issue. Growth’s embedded temporality is acceleration. Has this temporal logic been neglected in today's activism where temporalities seem to be urgency, an apocalyptic future and living in climate change?

Paper long abstract:

The ecological turn around 1970 played out differently in the Nordic countries and thus differently informed welfare state politics. In Denmark activists in the environmental movement NOAH have been accentuated as unavoidable societal actors (Larsson Heidenblad 2021).

From the beginning NOAH formulated a growth critique arguing that Danes’ wealth, consumption, and pollution were a “result of systematic plundering of poor countries” (Nogle oplysninger…, 1970). Elsewhere, they criticized solving industrial environmental problems by rinsing polluted water and air, as this would increase production, growth and as such pollution. Here they explicitly pointed out “uncontrolled economic growth” and “capitalist societies” as the root of the problem with environmental destruction (Ondets rod, 1972).

I approach growth dually: Firstly, I unpack NOAH’s critique of growth to highlight the depth of it. As insinuated, it consists of different forms, for instance critiques of capitalism, industrialism, and South-North relations (Schmelzer 2023). Secondly, I focus on growth’s embedded temporality – acceleration – and other temporalities in NOAH’s criticism as a sensitivity to time and multiple temporalities might improve our understanding of activism (Gillan & Edwards 2020; Paulin-Booth & Kerry 2021).

This paper will illuminate that saturating the environment within a market logic in welfare state politics in the early 1970s was met with a deep growth critique by visible environmental actors in Danish society. Possibly stronger than in environmental activism today where dominant temporalities rather seem to be urgency, an apocalyptic future and living in times of climate change. Might this have neglected growth’s temporal logic?