Napomena uredništva: Ovaj je razgovor transkribiran na temelju „Politološkog podkasta“ kojeg je 7. srpnja 2026. godine s Mladenom Domazetom vodio Marko Grdešić. Mladen Domazet je znanstveni suradnik na Institutu za filozofiju te istraživač na Institutu za političku ekologiju. Snimka razgovora je dostupna na našem YouTube kanalu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eXq6myi7Ic
Marko Grdešić:
Hello, Mladen, thank you for joining us on the “Political Science Podcast.” We have a lot of topics, so let's start right away. First, what are the basic facts that describe our current ecological crisis? I know that you are not a natural scientist, but if you had to summarize the basic trends in the natural systems of our planet, what are the basic problems we are facing?
Mladen Domazet:
Hello and thank you for the invitation.
I am partly a natural scientist. I started with physics in the early days of my career. In my opinion, the most important global challenges are what we complexly call climate change. People know it better as global warming, and now that it is summer, it is always visible through the rise in the average temperature and then, consequently from that and from other human activity, the loss of natural habitat and biodiversity. I would say that both things can be simplified to the strongest driver and that is pollution with carbon dioxide, a kind of geological burping. In a very short time we have put a lot of carbon into the atmosphere in order to achieve some human activity. Then there is the acidification of the seas, the rise in the average temperature, but then also that instability of the weather which affects us as well as natural systems, which have also evolved to cope with certain cycles. And now we have greater chaos of droughts, then floods, then droughts, and so on. And at the same time we as a species are expanding into those habitats in an uncooperative way. We are not in this Pleistocene mode, where we try to place ourselves in balance with nature, but we come and take and drive out those who are already there, and those species are necessary for the functioning of the entire biosphere.
I think that this is the blow of civilization or humanity, and that is all of humanity today, against the limits of the planet. It is perhaps important to note that everything we are talking about is less than 1 percent of human history. We always like to cite as history only periods which contain writing that we have deciphered, but in fact the human species has existed on the planet for quite a long time. It had bad things and attempts and errors, but it did not always and necessarily carry out this complete destruction.
Marko Grdešić:
Thank you. How do we stand in Croatia when it comes to those natural limits, that is, which boundaries have we crossed, and in which areas are we still doing relatively well?
Mladen Domazet:
Well, I just consulted some data that we collected for the degrowth doughnut concerning pressure on natural limits, especially pressure translated into a fair footprint. Croatia is of course very small. Whatever we do, the planet is large, nothing in Croatia has a big impact. But the question is per capita, how much life in Croatia contributes to that common pressure of humanity on planetary boundaries. We have carbon dioxide emissions which are twice as large as what is fairly sustainable in Croatia, if not more than twice now already. To an extent we are also crossing the agreed boundary of land-use change, we have crossed it only a little. Here we would say, well, for us it should be clear that we should not interfere further in natural systems, especially by changing forest areas into agricultural or urban. And then, of course, there is the burden that agriculture adds nitrogen and phosphorus to biological flows.
Marko Grdešić:
You mentioned degrowth. That is an important term for us today. So, a simple question, or maybe not such a simple question: what is degrowth?
Mladen Domazet:
For me that is always the hardest question. Well, I have to admit, I prepared myself for it today. On the one hand, degrowth is a movement. That is, for example, what Vincent Liegey and Anitra Nelson would say in their rather strong answer. There was a discussion in the Anglophone part of the degrowth community about whether degrowth is a movement or an idea. And they strongly advocated the idea that degrowth is a movement because it organizes events, organizes political pressure and some kind of gathering around specific goals. What is nice about degrowth is that it connects with ecofeminism, connects with certain specific questions of protecting something that is threatened at that moment, and also with the larger story of degrowth. You go defend a forest, because it is important that we all understand why protection, why limits, and so on. On the other hand, it is certainly also a practical philosophy. I think that is what the great Giorgos Kallis, but also our Rudi Supek would say, because it gives meaning and some explanation of both collective and individual definitions of the good and the just.
And that, I would say, is quite important. Not only because I now work mostly in the sphere of philosophy, but truly for that global turn we must have that story. Whether we will call it philosophy, narrative, myth, an explanation to ourselves, but meaning is the key thing why we participate in something and why we mobilize around something. And without mobilization comes apathy, nihilism, then we are close to some renunciation of life.
And in that sense, I think those two important explanations are respecting limits, acknowledging limits, both personal and collective, and building community. Understanding that a large part of meaning and justice is determined by the community which I am part of, and that we have to work on the community. I think that will be important to mention later as well with some embodiments of degrowth or some conclusions of degrowth for our actions here and today.
And in that sense, as a practical philosophy, it is important that degrowth is also a goal before it is some abstract ontology. In the sense that we often reject philosophy: that is the crowd that deals with cool words, closes itself in its room, feels important, etc. Finally, I think it is important to say that degrowth is also a strategy, as ecological economists would say. I have just returned from a conference of the European society for ecological economics and for them degrowth is both an individual call and a structural direction, which is then important in thinking about strategy.
On the one hand, degrowth also has consequences for what I do in everyday life, how I become active. Me, you, anyone else. And then also for giving a structural direction, what should society do, because we know that this individual activation of mine does not produce any heroic shifts. We do not change the world exclusively as individuals. Okay, now that becomes a discussion about what history looks like, whether it is a sequence of heroes or actually some invention of heroes, which is used to explain waves, larger changes that come through certain social movements, and also natural changes. Actually for ecological economists degrowth is a question of what we can actually do here and now when we remove various, I would say, unfounded assumptions.
Marko Grdešić:
How does degrowth currently stand in today’s political climate? You have been part of these discussions and this movement for a long time. Can you compare the situation today with the situation ten or twenty years ago?
Mladen Domazet:
I think that today, compared with ten or twenty years ago, degrowth has largely been normalized in public-scientific discourse. Perhaps somewhat more in the West than in the East. Also, two weeks ago there was the first larger conference devoted to degrowth, but specifically with the aim of Eastern Europe, rather than internationally where the West and the North then start to dominate.
And there you could see some things that we have already been doing here in Croatia and the region for a very long time and have somehow normalized in public discourse. Some things are still new in some parts of Eastern Europe. For some students quite a lot of this was a discovery, there was less published in local languages and so on. But it is still largely normalized. Still, much less time is spent explaining what degrowth is than I spent in my previous answer to your question. However, degrowth is still a huge bogeyman in politics.
As soon as one enters the sphere of action, not academia, not student movements, not anarchists who sit on the grass, then the attacks and resistance begin and everything is presented as a terrible shock, which we could see in the context of the Zagreb conference on degrowth in 2023. An article is just coming out that I prepared with my colleagues Puđak and Ančić, an analysis of that media discourse, I would say resistance, toward degrowth and toward the discussion of degrowth in Zagreb and in Croatia. In those ten years it somehow got out of the academic niche. Back then it was more a philosophy and academic niche, an idea that respons to many questions that we posed ourselves. And now it's more normal, maybe even a more popular term. I hear it in places that I sometimes find surprising.
Marko Grdešić:
Do we in Croatia have an intellectual and political tradition that would be connected with these ecological topics. That is, do we have foundations on which something can be built? And I am particularly interested if you have any observations connected with Yugoslav socialism. Did it, at least in some of its aspects, perhaps toward the end, become open to ecological concerns?
Mladen Domazet:
Yes, in my opinion it became extremely open at least on the academic side. And I would say that the academic side was not unimportant. Of course, when the war happened everything revolved around brave men and a lot of shouting, but immediately before that the intellectual sphere had an influence on the public one, as it does today. That is why we do all this. And in that sense I am interested in researching more. I have to say that I am at the beginning with that. I am applying for projects, they have not really encountered interest and understanding. Actually, already in the seventies, when the discussion about the limits to growth appears in the West, it immediately appears in Yugoslavia as well. Yugoslavia is a co-organizer of the Stockholm conference, in the small committee preparing the conference. It feels like a very proud international player because it manages to bring part of the global South to participate in the conference despite the resistance of the socialist bloc. At the same time, the response of the socialist bloc appears very quickly as well. That is interesting to research now. There are entire groups of colleagues researching Wolfgang Harich, an East German thinker who reflects on what the West is saying to the East by calling for degrowth and calling for limits, and what the East has to answer. And our researchers, for example Andrej Kirn, in the eighties publish overviews of the Eastern European and Soviet response to the calls to the limits to growth. It could be said that they are only following, but especially in Supek’s philosophy there is also that indigenous response, what our thinkers propose that the planet and local society should do.
It is interesting that there is also a political response. A younger Slovenian geographer, and later politician, makes a public resignation from the Party quite rebelliously, accusing it that in the process of making a long-term plan for social development it surrendered to growth, but thereby also to ecological imperialism over the southern parts of Yugoslavia. Simply, a more serious, louder political discussion than we often hear today precisely on the topic of degrowth. And the entire department of sociology in Zagreb in 1989 writes about the limits to growth and the reflection of that on Croatian and, at the time, Yugoslav society. Simply, it was normalized that one should have a position on it regardless of what one specifically dealt with, and so Štulhofer also writes about degrowth.
Marko Grdešić:
Thank you, that is really interesting. I think there is space for quite a lot of research there. So I hope that in a few years, when you have finished that work, we can sit down again and talk about it.
Mladen Domazet:
I would be glad, it would make sense to get to know that part of our history as well.
Marko Grdešić:
The next question is something that troubles me quite a lot, so I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Namely, in order for the degrowth movement and idea to become established, it is necessary to dismantle this consensus that exists in wider society, that economic growth is rational, necessary and useful. As you said, from that perspective degrowth is a bogeyman. The experts who then speak in the name of the public make a great effort to create an impression of respectability, that they are the ones who are responsible and normal and grown-up, while the ecological perspective is presented as something that is unusual, strange, a little crazy, a little incompetent. However, it is this mainstream position which is unsustainable and in the end cuts the branch on which we sit. So how can we fight against that, how can we gain that aura of respectability in the public when it comes to these ecological topics?
Mladen Domazet:
I have some ideas about that, but I have to say that I am not a strategist and that my colleagues will point out how I have missed the mark several times in the past. Maybe it is worth looking at that episode from 2023. It seems to me that it is important to open a fair conversation, that we have a media space where we really sit at the table and try to give space to both sides without mockery, ridicule or hierarchical positioning. Sometimes I am invited on television to comment on reports from 2023, 2022, 2021, perhaps even some newest reports, about how we are following curves that the first limits to growth model predicted, where we are heading toward a collapse in the thirties. I give some kind of explanation, but then an older professor appears, more decently dressed, who actually, without an opportunity for me to answer, says that I am lying or that this is nonsense or that I am naive. And we very quickly move into ad hominem as well. We should have that kind of fair conversation, but also be clear about the premises, because what you yourself mentioned, the premises on which the promise of growth rests, are often hollow or deceptive, at least today.
Likewise, one often then says, but where would we be today? Today we would be somewhere else where you and I would not be talking in this way with this technology if there had not been a certain dedication to growth. But that does not mean that we can continue with that same system precisely because of these limits that we have recognized. It seems to me that perhaps strategically one of the things which could eventually be useful is local action, more than exhausting ourselves in a global debate where President Trump will not hear either me or you, whatever we say, because primarily there are no miraculous technologies there, and usually miraculous technologies are invoked at the global level. Fusion will come at any moment, energy will flow without pollution and without limit, and so on. And there are no angel financiers. Often thinking about solutions at the local level means that we have to think about what we can do with what we have here and now, and that is precisely, in my opinion, the degrowth approach. It is not like someone coming here now and offering us some miracle. Or, if we had a million dollars then we would solve this canal in our local neighborhood in this way.
Marko Grdešić:
You mentioned economic growth, so let us touch on that a little as well. It seems to me that economic growth is actually a kind of fig leaf for the continuous growth of inequality, at least in today’s context. Politicians who present growth as the only reality do it so that they would not have to talk about redistribution. So I think there is a lot of potential there to gain public support if degrowth is connected with redistribution. Because otherwise degrowth is presented as some kind of impoverishment, and then mainstream politicians can say: surely you do not want to be poor? What do you think?
Mladen Domazet:
Well, you are 80 percent right, but then it is important to remember that limits exist. So, on the one hand there is that tactic of unfair opposition to degrowth, without conversation but with shaming. It will lead to impoverishment, caves, there will be no food, there will be no shoes. However, the escape from that is not to say that natural limits do not exist. That is, we should not repeat the mistake of socialist productivism which also promises an unlimited material throughput. And it was precisely against this that those young geographers in Slovenia protested because in the most developed Yugoslav federal unit they see the effects of pollution on something they consider almost sacred. A certain natural landscape that industry needed for rapid development. And it had nowhere to throw those eternal PCB chemicals except into pits in the karst landscapes where there is untouched nature, because what can you do, the targets have to be met and then there will be a salary for everyone. I think degrowth from the beginning actually contains a conversation about redistribution, but it has not emphasized it clearly enough. Our research, for example, from 2019 among the ecological movement in Croatia also showed that members of the movement are aware of this limit, but they are less aware of the conviviality and redistribution which must accompany the structural attempt to acknowledge limits and reduce flows. So, we cannot have everything the same and the stop. Let's organize ourselves differently to try to have enough with what we have.
And now, why is that important to me and why do I dwell so much on this more difficult answer? It seems to me that 15 years of this professional work with degrowth in Croatia is precisely work on that. Croatia is often located very close to that kind of sweet spot globally, where it has sufficient and significant development. We have hospitals, we have theaters, we have faculties, we also have good entertainment, we have the most beautiful coast, but actually people are constantly dissatisfied and strive toward some fake Abu Dhabi. We see this year, it is clear to everyone that the coast cannot be so crowded, so burdened without collapsing. And when we worked on the degrowth doughnut, we started with Croatia and defined where we should pay attention precisely because there were both positive and negative examples in Croatia. Precisely because that set of indicators tells us: look, it is not so difficult. The steps toward a good optimal life are small, at least for countries such as Croatia. And it is then important in the movement itself not to call for Croatia to give up everything, here and now and be the first to do so, while Norway burns as much fuel as it burns.
Marko Grdešić:
I think that is an important part of the PR image, in the sense that people should be told that life would actually be better, not worse, for the majority, if some principles of degrowth were followed.
Mladen Domazet:
Absolutely, many people have said that. But as I said, I am a bad strategist and communicator. But okay, I will stick to the academic work. For now it is going okay for me.
Marko Grdešić:
You mentioned the doughnut twice. Please explain that to us.
Mladen Domazet:
Well, the doughnut is generally an instrument with which Kate Raworth wanted to show visually how we can depict the situation of limits, how close we are to limits and how much we cross them. Also, the goals, how close we are to goals or how much we fail to achieve them. And that is classic doughnut economics. I teach it in various programs around the world. Its big problem is that after we make the calculation of those doughnuts, we remain locked in a concept that tells us that human aspiration is unlimited and that it always hits against nature. Nature is that strict check which then sets limits for us. How happy we would be if only we could spread our wings.
Because actually all the goals are set in the domain of the social and push toward some maxima, while all the limits are set in the domain of the natural. And then we created the degrowth doughnut in order to say that this is not the correct philosophy, to return to that philosophy from earlier. It is not correct that all limits are exclusively natural, there are also social limits. There are social attitudes which are limiting for true change. For example, excessive anthropocentrism or the absence of trust in society. With the absence of trust or with the presence of distrust in society, we cannot act collectively in the best direction even if we have the best ideas and the best leaders, because I simply do not believe that you will make the same effort as me. So I will not do it, and then you will not do it, and then all of us together are frozen and paralyzed. So there are also social limits, and today, in the first quarter of the 21st century, there are also serious demands for repairing ecosystems, where we know that we can do it and where we have really visibly destroyed them. So our goals are not exclusively social infrastructural development, but our goals in the 21st century must also be goals of ecorestoration, repairing ecosystems and returning to a certain ecological balance.
Marko Grdešić:
So you actually think that Kate Raworth’s doughnut model is productive, but that it also has some problems.
Mladen Domazet:
That is right. And then we proposed those innovations. Somehow in that wave, when we proposed those innovations, the idea came that people themselves could sit down and, within the philosophy of the doughnut, say what their goals are, what the limits are. And that a scientist would not come from a laboratory and tell them this must be what you monitor. What should you monitor? It seems to me that many citizens’ assemblies, for example in France, are proposing precisely something like that. They ask experts: if we wanted to achieve this and this, what would the indicators be that we would measure, and how do we stand today with those indicators? Why do we do it through the doughnut and not through some ordinary table? Because the doughnut really nicely shows on that circle where things are critical, but also which things you still constantly have to keep in mind. We cannot repair emissions if social distrust is still high. Then we repair emissions autocratically and that is not a society in which we want to live, even with lower emissions.
Marko Grdešić:
Difficult question, but we have to ask it: is green economic growth possible? If it were possible, then we could more or less continue as before. We would only replace fossil fuels with renewable sources. That is approximately the approach of the so-called green transition in the European Union and elsewhere. What would you say to that and what would degrowth say to that?
Mladen Domazet:
Degrowth would say that it is possible only on paper and only in certain parts of the world, say Western Europe, at the price of making it impossible for the rest of the world. And of course, it would be possible if we had 200 years to achieve it. We do not have 200 years to reduce emissions. We do not have 200, we do not have 300, we do not even have 100. To keep the biosphere in conditions resembling the Holocene, we would have to achieve it in the next few decades. Actually, we should achieve net zero by 2050. And so, when examples of the success and beauty of green growth are shown, they always assume that somehow there is only that oasis, only that one Denmark where it is happening, and that the rest of the world does not exist.
And in that sense the idea of green growth is, I would say, a real enemy for us here, for us who are not in the center. We will pay the price for green growth being achieved somewhere as an example. Eastern Europe was, as they called it, the natural belly of Europe. When food ran out, they took from Eastern Europe. When biomass ran out, they took from Eastern Europe. Somehow, still suppressing its indigenous development. I think that for us green growth is effectively an enemy, not a friend. Also because of the players which support it. And in the way capital, and now we have to come to those simple dichotomies, is actually trying, by putting on a green coat, to retain the hierarchical, extractive relations that led to the conditions that we have now. We did not get here by accident. They knew what they were doing and they did not care.
Marko Grdešić:
We already see that extraction on the periphery of Europe, in Serbia, we see it in Bosnia and Herzegovina, so it will not be a great surprise if tomorrow it comes here too.
Mladen Domazet:
No, with Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina it is already in our backyard. Again, people with whom we are directly connected, food or other biomass with which we are directly connected currently exist in those spaces. If they are ruined for the needs of batteries that we will not primarily drive, we will lose their current ecological benefit as well.
Marko Grdešić:
How do you view the tensions between degrowth and the socialist tradition? We touched on this a little when we talked about Yugoslav socialism. That is, how do you view those tensions between green and red, to put it like that, because a lot of degrowth theory was articulated outside, and sometimes against, Marxism. Can green and red work together?
Mladen Domazet:
I think they work together today. On the one hand, there were cases where the two were in conflict. And now we are getting into details that you and I should discuss on the basis of the specifics of the texts we published. But what we spoke about earlier concerning the Croatian intellectual tradition certainly shows that they should not be in opposition.
Supek’s proposal is a coalition of the “hippies and turners.” And there will be an opportunity someday to explain exactly what that means, but that is precisely that call against western Marxism which in some way mocks the insufficiently aspirationally aware worker, who only wants more consumer goods, like our parents in the eighties: trash slapstick comedies, summers on the coast, buying plastic goods. As if that were some short-sightedness. Supek calls for understanding where the desire for control over those material goods comes from, but then also actually finding a language in which the turner and the hippy understand that they share the living world and what the living world means to them. And okay, all of that becomes philosophy.
And today? First of all, that Marxism which degrowth criticized was the wrong ecotranscendent Marxism, which is not even Marx’s Marxism. Today there is a fashion of pointing to the ecological Marx, who never published his ideas. Okay, but a person works their whole life, you develop philosophy while you are alive and while you work. And he ultimately does that in his texts. This is not a conversation with his mother-in-law over tea, but actually a program that he did not manage to publish.
I think that the real enemy here is Lenin’s classic dialectical materialism, which is in many respects an incorrect and deficient science. And Croatian thinkers also say that in the early 20th century, certainly Einstein does so as well. However, the direction is not necessarily wrong in questioning materialist foundations. What we think we find in late Marx is the search for that equalization, the exploitation of nature and what nature is in that non-romantic, non-spiritualist discourse in which he works, in that kind of classical materialism.
And I would say that today, actually, that division among the younger population, and also the voting population, does not exist. That everything young is red-green. Or if you are afraid that some greens are straying into liberal circles, okay. But then what is green-red in the German party Die Linke is such that it turns more toward green than the green turns toward red, but therefore it also grabs more of that young population than the greens are able to retain.
Marko Grdešić:
Just briefly, Supek's “hippies” are students of social sciences and humanities, as the foundation for the left?
Mladen Domazet:
Yes, that position is from 1978, from the second or third edition of the book This Only Earth, which begins with scientific explanations of the limits to growth which then quickly slide into technical concepts, graphs, understanding. For example, many people do not understand the exponential curve, that adding always the same share in repeated phases actually leads to a very uneven and crazy exponential growth, that this is not the same as adding the same quantity every year.
Marko Grdešić:
Let us move a little to public opinion in Croatia, given that you have dealt with this quite a lot. How do Croatian citizens view climate change, how much is that problem perceived and how willing are people to make some sacrifices in their lives and not just support the green agenda in principle?
Mladen Domazet:
I would say that the situation changed with COVID and here we need to seriously discuss what that social phenomenon did to other trends in our society. That distrust in leadership, distrust in expertise and some feelings of material deprivation. Some people were either confined or reduced to working in very bad conditions with no possibility of discussion. It was simply an emergency situation and it was carried out as it was carried out.
First, here we have a concern about climate change for several decades. Then one can say, okay, but how naive are our people, they seem to be so concerned, but would not do anything. We began questioning that unwillingness to act 15 years ago, because it seemed to us that this action was always somehow Western. Will you sign a petition, will you join a party, will you buy a green product? And that is not a form of activity to which people in these areas are inclined. Before COVID there was that inclination, but there was also great indecision, a large group of undecided people.
After COVID our situation became polarized. In the last article in the journal Social Ecology that my colleague Brajdić Vuković and I published in the spring, we actually show how that neutral middle was destroyed and there is a 50-50 division, slightly in favor of degrowth, where people are ready to act very progressively, ready to seek various social instruments. A good part of the absence of progressive action here was due to the absence of infrastructure, so we would often measure whether people recycle in areas where there is no infrastructure for recycling.
I also see this among younger MA students now, they first check what is offered and what is possible, and then see how willing people are to use what is possible. The same with transport, you can ask people how much they are willing to give up driving a car, but there is no public transport. I cannot give it up, I have two jobs and I have to get to two different ends of the city or something like that.
What we saw after COVID was that polarization. On the one hand there is that high level of activation, readiness to act here and now, but also that very affective resistance and actually renunciation of that readiness. So there is also a population which says: well, I just won't do it, I won't do it because it comes from those people in white coats, I won't do it because it comes from the authorities, I won't do it because something is being demanded of me. Why me first? Similar to China’s position: let the West practice degrowth first, then we will start too.
Far from our public opinion being uninformed, uninterested or unready, but unfortunately with this polarization things are actually very sharpened, so there are conflicts around it. Because now the affective dimension is present. Because it is also very important to those who are ready for it. People are extremely concerned about the future of their children, people show affective attachment to the fact that action must happen here and now.
Marko Grdešić:
Then, a more speculative question: do you think there is potential for a political party to win more serious victories in the political sphere with a more ambitious green agenda?
Mladen Domazet:
I do not know. I think yes, but that it must have these instruments of ambition to show that it can implement them, and I think that, at least from this last research we published, international solidarity is a large part of breaking that resistance.
On the one hand there is a lack of knowledge and lack of understanding, and that is a very slow process. Forced education is not education. Everyone watches BBC documentaries and everyone is ready to agree with David Attenborough that the world is a mess. But then they claim that they do not know; the other side claims that it does not know about climate change. Well, you know, it's what you like about Attenborough. However, there is still that problem of understanding trends, complex systems and so on; that is a slower path through education. We have not carried out curricular reform, we have not introduced even that educational content from the youngest age, and what we have is superficial: diesel is bad, nuclear energy is good or something like that. And actually we do not have education for teachers so that they can deal more seriously with this topic, which is socio-ecological, so that children or young people can be talked to about the Fridays for future movement, so that this can be seriously discussed. Well then, what kind of world are we leaving to you and what are we doing now so that we can move toward that world?
There are those who are ready to support a political actor who would speak about real action on climate change, but then those who resist, on the one hand, they resist because Croats or citizens of Croatia are last on everyone’s list, too squeezed already, everything is looked at only through the suffering of the Global South or, for example, immigrants. Serious international action is needed, which is currently the problem. Europe has become too frightened of tyrants and wars on its borders to actually say: look, we set the boundaries, we set the ideal of a good world. And we still do set it, the inflow is still greater than the outflow. People want to come to live here, every immigrant we ask: why do you not go to Russia, right? If there were serious European solidarity, in my opinion, that would already be a great motivator for that Croatian political actor to say, okay, we are not asking for changes and sacrifices exclusively from the citizens of Croatia. Because this way, the French and Danes will continue to consume more CO2 per capita than we do.
Marko Grdešić:
We are coming toward the end, so let me ask you a question connected to the phenomenon of climate angst. It seems to me that people do not know how to cope with bad news. Do you perhaps have some advice for them, especially young people who process this bad news? How do we do this while remaining sane? Most of us know that the situation is bad, but somehow we suppress that realization and continue business as usual. Personally, it seems to me that it does not make much sense to just encourage hope and optimism without some foundation, because if you tell people that there is hope, they can return back to passivity or to their usual routines, to some form of self-deception. What do you think?
Mladen Domazet:
It seems to me that one can make the point that degrowth is crucial here as a concept and idea. On the one hand, it is a question of creating realistic, sober sustainability. We are not helpless, there is a lot we can do and we know how to do it. Divine enlightenment is not required for this phenomenon.
We know which steps, we know which strategies. On the other hand, involvement in the community is important, because neither a miraculous machine nor that brave miraculous individual, the kind that Silicon Valley offers, will do it for us. Rather, we do it as a community. For me, that is a very important question of meaning. I think that is also that vision of a better life. Life is good even when conditions are terrible, when you are with a good group of people and working on something meaningful. So in that sense it seems to me that degrowth is precisely the answer. Philosophy as an important discipline, returning to talking about the question of meaning and then, in all of that, not being too optimistic, as you say, that is then also a question of ecopessimism.
Giving up on the idea that with three important and, as one would say, impactful steps we will fix everything and return to the old. Rather, the question is what do we want to achieve, accepting that the situation is what it is? And that we repair things little by little, because we do it for the good of ourselves and our surroundings, ourselves and those close to us and then farther and farther and farther, in some kind of nested community. Rather than looking for a simple solution, universal for everyone and produced without my consent. It simply happened, daddy solved everything. In that sense it seems to me that it is truly the building of a better world of meaningfulness. Yes, the chances that you can expect to have three cars and flights around the world every month are small. We cannot expect a future from the Jetsons. But a future in which you do something meaningful, eat well, do not struggle for a long time with prolonged, very agonizing illnesses, that seems to me like a good future. At the same time, for our generation, and certainly the generation after me, there is a chance that you are truly the generation that will literally save the world. The world in which there are people and in which we can talk and write about it.
We are now exactly at that narrow strait through which we will either pass or no one will write about this anymore, regardless of the fact that the eventual broadcast of this program will float through space like those television signals from long ago.
Marko Grdešić:
So, instead of some toxic optimism, an informed pessimism that is politically and collectively more productive.
Mladen Domazet:
That is right, certainly. I think that toxic optimism is precisely part of the reason why we found ourselves in this problem. So let us become sober, mature and say okay, qualified pessimism. But also seeking satisfaction right here and now, not postponing it for some time when we solve everything, 50 years from now. Life can be good even in small ways and right now. Again, from this part of the world, considering the terribly traumatic experience of war, some people will say that they also had their best moments in that dark period.
Marko Grdešić:
Mladen, thank you very much for this conversation.
Mladen Domazet:
Thank you very much for the invitation.
