figure a

The load seems to grow incessantly during the mechanical harvest of grass. The silage produced from it is used as animal feed in cattle farming or to generate energy in biogas plants. (© Christine Rösch)

10.1 Unlimited Growth in a Limited World?

Consumption shapes the attitude towards life in affluent societies, albeit, historically, not for long (König 2008). For most people in rich countries, being able to buy products and use services is a natural expression of quality of life. Having money available for individual purposes such as clothing, food, entertainment, culture, mobility or holidays, as well as having as few restrictions as possible on consumption, has become an essential prerequisite for satisfaction. Consumption is not simply about satisfying elementary needs. Rather, consumption expresses an attitude towards life in which social status and economic success are also documented, both before oneself and before others. Since the strong economic growth in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s (Wirtschaftswunder), this attitude towards life has included the idea that consumption is increasing from year to year. Accordingly, economic growth is politically and economically desired and promoted. Even the growth-critical debate of recent years (Jackson 2009; D’Alisa et al. 2014) has not changed this fundamentally. The central issue in election campaigns continues to be whether and to what extent governments and parties have contributed or intend to contribute to increasing prosperity and consumption.

Unfortunately, this very pleasant development, at least for most people in the industrialised countries and increasingly many people in emerging and developing countries, has its downsides. Prosperity and consumption are largely associated with negative consequences for the environment and for future generations. Products must be manufactured, transported and ultimately disposed of. Energy and resource consumption, emissions and waste are unavoidable consequences of consumption. Shorter useful lives, e.g., of furniture and household appliances, increase material throughput and worsen the environmental balance. The loss of biodiversity, the threat to cultural habitats posed by the dominance of globalised consumption and social problems are also part of the problem spectrum (Dauvergne 2008).

Already, the Club of Rome, in its report on the Limits to growth (Meadows et al. 1972), has pointed out that unlimited growth is impossible in a world with limited resources. The recognition of global environmental changes through growing prosperity and consumption (e.g., WBGU 1996) has reinforced this criticism of the emissions side of growth and its accompanying phenomena. In wide circles of Western societies, the position has prevailed that the mere continuation of production and consumption patterns oriented towards the quantitative growth ideal, with their consequences for the consumption of raw materials and emissions, is not compatible with the goal of a sustainable human civilization on planet Earth.

Nevertheless, the consumer spiral of growth continues to turn. In western countries, for example, the amount of clothing purchased has roughly doubled in the past 10 years. Electronic devices from computers to mobile phones to today’s ever-smaller mobile devices with Internet access are another area of significant growth that goes hand in hand with ever-shorter product life cycles. But there will also be further waves of growth in traditional areas such as the automotive market. The SUV (Sport Utility Vehicle) is a good example of how a new type of product has initiated a new wave of consumption worldwide. Another field of growing consumption with significant environmental impacts is tourism, which has experienced impressive growth rates since the 1960s. Knowledge of negative environmental consequences hardly results in corresponding action – environmental psychologists speak of “cognitive dissonances” here (Leggewie and Welzer 2009). The urgency of tackling environmental problems continues to grow.

10.2 Strategies for Sustainable Development

In order to achieve more environmentally-friendly developments (on further aspects of sustainability, cf. Kopfmüller et al. 2001), the strategic approaches of effectiveness, consistency and sufficiency have been shaping the scientific and social discussion (Huber 1995; Grunwald 2012):

  • efficiency strategies are aimed at providing a production or service with the lowest possible use of materials and energy. Increasing material and energy efficiency and resource productivity is intended to achieve a high degree of avoidance of material and energy losses, as well as problematic emissions. New or improved technologies, e.g., in the conversion of energy sources, new production processes and, in some cases, modified products, serve this purpose. There are also more general approaches, such as longevity, multiple use and strategies for more efficient recycling. As classic modernization concepts, these are considered to be largely capable of creating consensus, because they can be easily integrated into existing economic processes. Whether they are sufficient in the long term, however, is controversial. In many fields of application, for example, efficiency increases are used less for the improvement of environmental balance than for increased luxury and comfort, whereby the desired effect is reduced or disappears altogether (rebound effect, see Sorrell 2007) .

  • consistency strategies focus on a nature-adapted design of material flows and resource use:

    Consistent material flows are therefore those which, on the one hand, are conducted in a largely interference-free manner in the technical natural cycle or, on the other hand, agree with the metabolic processes of the surrounding nature in such a way that they fit into it relatively easily, even in large volumes (Huber 1995, translation A.G.).

A classic example is the bioeconomic idea of at least partially replacing fossil fuels with energy from renewable biomass. Thus, consistency strategies do not only aim at quantitative reductions of environmental pollution in the same manner as efficiency, but also at qualitative changes. The aim is to replace ecologically problematic material flows with more environmentally-friendly ones. This substitution is associated with major challenges for science and technology and requires the research, introduction and implementation of corresponding processes and technologies in production, energy supply and the use of raw materials.

  • sufficiency does not focus on the production and technology side of goods and services, but rather on the social demand side, especially among consumers (Schneidewind and Zahrnt 2013). Sufficiency means renouncing material goods and consumption or continuous quantitative growth. For some time now, such considerations have been gaining ground under the label degrowth, a concept that continues to demand greater attention (e.g., Jackson 2009; D’Alisa et al. 2014). They aid in the development of a changed understanding of prosperity, in which the orientation towards quantitative growth is replaced by qualitative growth objectives and post-material values such as fulfilment, solidarity, community and a clean environment. The protagonists refer to the results of happiness research, according to which satisfaction no longer rises above a certain level of prosperity. Correspondingly, changed lifestyles and consumption patterns should reduce the pressure of the human economy on the natural environment. However, this model is considered unattractive for large parts of the population and politically difficult to implement:

    A sufficiency strategy is therefore not connectable and resonant. It remains unrealistic unless extreme external crisis conditions force sufficiency qua normative power of the factual (Huber 1995, translation A.G.).

These strategic approaches are to be understood as ideal-typical in order to structure discussions for the solution of environmental problems. They are not mutually exclusive, but rather can be combined.

10.3 Green Growth or Farewell to Growth?

Bioeconomy can be understood as a combination of efficiency and consistency strategy. The fact that food, production and value chains are largely based on bio-based raw materials, whether renewable biomass or biogenic waste, brings these chains closer to natural cycles than they are in the fossil-based economy. This increase in consistency must be accompanied by efficiency in order to achieve environmentally sound overall balances. As a rule, it requires conversion processes on whose efficiency and raw material productivity the environmental balance decisively depends, e.g., the conversion of microalgae into usable raw materials or energy.

Although sufficiency strategies are not excluded in the context of bioeconomy, they are generally not mentioned. Bioeconomy could be understood as an attempt to go as far as possible with consistency and efficiency in the reduction of environmental pollution in order not to have to demand sufficiency in the first place. From this point of view, a continuation of the classical technology-driven growth paradigm would be possible. The current paradigm of growth, indifferent to environmental problems, would become “green” growth. Since the negative consequences of the human economy for the natural environment are obvious, the attribute “green” is increasingly being assigned to concepts of economic activity. Green New Deal, green economy and green growth are examples of conceptual considerations that focus on environmentally compatible economic restructuring (cf. Grunwald and Kopfmüller 2012). In the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the concept of the green economy is an environmentally compatible, growth-promoting and justice-promoting way of doing business. As part of their Green Economy Initiative (UNEP 2011), the UN delineates the reforms and political framework conditions with which the transition to a green economy can be realised and, in particular, financed. The green industry platform UNEP and the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) aims to bring governments, business and civil society together for joint activities to implement the green economy in the manufacturing sector.

These approaches are based on the conviction that the economic growth paradigm does not necessarily conflict with sustainability and environmental compatibility. Rather, it is possible to achieve green growth that is based on the sustainable use of natural resources and that is sustainable in the long term. The opening up of new green markets, the development of eco-innovations (Fussler 1999) and the management of ecosystem services should enable the development of new business fields under adequate framework conditions, and thus simultaneously facilitate growth and environmental protection (OECD 2011).

The bioeconomy seems to be the ideal approach to implementing the basic idea of green growth. It thus offers the opportunity to achieve economic growth in harmony with nature conservation and environmental protection (BMBF 2010). In particular, the above-mentioned combination of efficiency and consistency aspects and its strategy, strongly based on technology-based innovation, makes the bioeconomy not only scientifically and economically attractive, but also politically so. The hope here is that the rather politically uncomfortable sufficiency issues could be circumvented by rapid successes in the areas of efficiency and consistency. Bioeconomy, in this sense, promises the reconciliation of economy and environment without a fundamental change in growth-oriented thinking. Although controversies exist in this respect in regard to the bioeconomy, in the following, we will examine these issues through the lens of these political perspectives.

The central question is whether this provides a realistic picture of the potentials of the bioeconomy, but also of its feasibility and the consequences of its realisation. Can the major environmental problems be overcome by means of the bioeconomy? What contributions can the bioeconomy make here, and to what degree? Will sufficiency perhaps be dispensable and the debate on degrowth become meaningless if the bioeconomy is implemented on a large scale? Can we think of unintended side effects of a massive use of the bioeconomy that remain underexposed in view of the noble goals in the debate so far? Would the bioeconomy set in motion a new spiral of exploitation of life by the economy, which, in the long run, might stand in the way of “ways to make peace with nature” (Meyer-Abich 1984)? Is, perhaps, the bioeconomy even seen ideology-critically as only an attempt by powerful actors from politics, economics, science, business and special interests to seize power under the noble mantle of environmental compatibility (Gottwald and Krätzer 2014)? The following substantial and fundamental points of criticism appear to be of particular relevance:

  1. 1.

    Degrowth debate: In the current debate on degrowth (e.g., Jackson 2009; Dietz and O’Neill 2013; D’Alisa et al. 2014), not only is the possibility of further unlimited growth critically questioned, but the overall sense of it is also cast in doubt. The concern is that, with means based solely on efficiency and consistency, and thus on technological progress, such as the bioeconomy, a fundamentally unsustainable economic and social model might be maintained, instead of being changed at its roots (Blühdorn 2007).

  2. 2.

    Respect for life: With the bioeconomy, further steps would be taken on the way to the complete economization of life, which would run counter to the environmentally compatible existence of humans on planet Earth: “The term ‘bioeconomy’ does not mean an ecologization of the economy, but an economization of the biological, i.e., the living” (Gottwald and Krätzer 2014, translation A.G.). The reevaluation of all living things into the raw material “biomass” is a logical step on a fateful path, which only accelerates the destruction of the basis of human existence (Gottwald and Krätzer 2014).

Both points contain central questions that certainly cannot be conclusively assessed at present. In the following, the first point of criticism will be discussed in more detail. The currently intensively discussed ecomodernistic approach (Manifesto 2015), which, in relation to the alternative of growth or post-growth, is partly – but not completely – associated with the bioeconomy, serves to structure the arguments, so that its consideration allows for a differentiated view.

10.4 Bioeconomy and Ecomodernism

It is instructive to use the current debate on ecomodernism as a background for locating the bioeconomy in the debate on suitable strategies for solving the major environmental problems. The ecomodernist Manifesto (Manifesto 2015) is entirely within the framework of classical-modern ideas of progress, which ultimately go back to David Hume and Francis Bacon and which seek to achieve the most complete possible emancipation of human civilization from nature by technical means. Instead of drawing a conclusion from the global environmental crisis as to the necessity of a “reversal” from the path of classical modernity, its message is that humanity should not stop halfway, or even turn back, but rather should proceed consistently, and even accelerate. As justification, the authors point out that technical progress to date has already led to a considerable reduction in per capita consumption of nature, e.g., the amount of land needed to feed a human being:

Greater resource productivity associated with modern socio-technological systems has allowed human societies to meet human needs with fewer resource inputs and less impact on the environment (Manifesto 2015).

According to the authors, it would be a mistake to reverse this trend. On the contrary, it must be accelerated in order to achieve more environmentally-friendly development. This can be well illustrated by nutrition: While organic farming, which is usually regarded as more environmentally-friendly, aims at extensifying agriculture, and is thus dependent on a higher land requirement, ecomodernists recommend a highly concentrated, and thus necessarily industrially organised, food industry, which gets by with extremely little land and satisfies the demand for food as completely as possible through technical means. Accordingly, theirs is a vision of a human society that organises itself largely independently of natural resources (Grunwald 2018). A growing world population with increasing prosperity should be made possible on less and less land and using smaller and smaller amounts of raw materials. If we think this through to the end, the planet Earth would be divided into two parts: the smallest possible part of the earth’s surface would be used by humans in highly densely populated settlements with highly intensive agriculture or synthetic food production and highly efficient production of goods, while the other and largest possible part would consist of nature, which would largely be left to its own devices and exempted from human use.

The growth paradigm is not called into question. The widespread belief that the finite nature of resources and the limitation of the capacity of the environment to absorb emissions are on an inevitable collision with limitless growth (Meadows et al. 1972) is, in principle, doubted in ecomodernism:

Despite frequent assertions starting in the 1970s of fundamental ‘limits to growth’, there is still remarkably little evidence that human population and economic expansion will outstrip the capacity to grow food or procure critical material resources in the foreseeable future. To the degree to which there are fixed physical boundaries to human consumption, they are so theoretical as to be functionally irrelevant (Manifesto 2015).

Therefore, some say, one should not talk about limits to growth, but about the growth of limits (Fücks 2011). As long as the finiteness of resources has not been proven and their quantity cannot be stated beyond doubt, finiteness must not be used as an argument for self-decision. In view of the limited resources in principle, however, ecomodernism ascribes the central role in solving resource and environmental problems to technical progress:

With proper management, humans are at no risk of lacking sufficient agricultural land for food. Given plentiful land and unlimited energy, substitute for other material inputs to human well-being can easily be found if those inputs become scarce or expensive (Manifesto 2015).

This vision, not to say utopia, is obviously based on a great deal of trust in technological advancement. This is also expressed in the so-called range rule of sustainability in dealing with non-renewable resources (Kopfmüller et al. 2001): According to this, the consumption of non-renewable resources may only be described as sustainable if the temporal range of the resource into the future does not decrease. This seems paradoxical, because each use reduces the available stock – at least if no measures for recycling are planned. The rule can only be complied with if technical progress enables such a considerable increase in the efficiency of the consumption of this resource in the future that the inevitable reduction in the stock as a result of consumption does not have a negative effect on the temporal range of the remaining stock. A certain minimum speed of technical progress is therefore assumed here.

In ecomodernism, beyond the high expectations of technical progress, it is assumed that no relevant unintended side effects will be associated with the efficiency-enhancing technologies and measures, which would counteract the expected positive effects of technical progress and, for example, entail new environmental problems. This is a very delicate premise, since the occurrence of unintended consequences is regarded as a characteristic of modern society, and modern technology in particular (e.g. Grunwald 2019).

It is interesting to observe that the European idea of bioeconomy occupies an alternative position compared to American ecomodernism. Of the three above-mentioned strategies for coping with environmental problems, ecomodernism most relies, and even then only in part, on the idea of efficiency when a reduction in per capita nature demand is specified as the goal, while, at the same time, continuing to grow. However, the reliance on nuclear energy and the resulting unlimited energy supply can even be understood as meaning that efficiency is no longer even important. Efficiency is evidently only an issue in a scarce economy, but not in a world of energy surplus. Even the idea of consistency is alien to ecomodernism, although it is not excluded in principle. If the goal of solving environmental problems is to decouple human civilization from the natural environment, which is made possible by technological progress, it makes no sense to focus on the compatibility of anthropogenic and natural material flows and to make efforts and use resources for this purpose. Consistency is irrelevant in this model.

Bioeconomy, on the other hand, makes consistency a constituent feature. Its programme is not the technically possible decoupling from nature, but the technically possible better adaptation of the human economy to natural cycles, material flows and organisational principles. This also has consequences for a forward-looking ethical assessment (Grunwald 2018).

10.5 Hostility to or Alliance with Nature?

The fact that the possibilities of technical progress for solving environmental problems are to be used within the framework of a responsible strategy that anticipates the potential unintended consequences is unlikely to be doubted ethically. Controversies extend to what precisely “responsible” should mean, which unintended consequences must be expected in which scenarios, how to weigh the environmental relief objectives pursued against possible side effects, and which measures promise the best overall impacts. These are the normal challenges for a technology assessment (Grunwald 2019), as they are processed on the basis of concrete technologies and context-related requirements. At this point, further imperatives for action that go beyond individual technologies and contexts are to be considered and classified:

  1. 1.

    Bioeconomy in the sense of ecomodernism: Technical progress should be accelerated as a key contribution to solving environmental problems.

  2. 2.

    Ecomodernism alone: Environmental problems should be tackled by decoupling human civilisation from nature.

  3. 3.

    Bioeconomy alone: Technical progress should be geared towards consistency with natural material flows and cycles.

  4. 4.

    Efficiency and consistency: Other measures, such as a departure from the growth paradigm or behavioural changes, do not need to be pursued, at least not urgently.

At this conceptual level, bioeconomy and ecomodernism both see technical progress not only as a necessary condition for sustainable development, but also as a sufficient condition. They thus burden technical progress and its possibilities with total responsibility for solving environmental problems. Criticism at this level therefore affects both approaches equally. However, the differences in premises 2 and 3 allow for a differentiated ethical assessment.

Any acceleration of technical progress reduces the chances of learning from experience with new technology, even with unintended consequences or insufficient fulfilment of expectations, for further action. Acceleration increases dependence on technological progress and reduces the chances of being able to think about alternatives or complementary measures at all. It creates factual constraints and undermines consideration of alternatives, which is essential for informed decisions on how to proceed. Ill-considered demands for acceleration also ignore the questions of the risks associated with trust in technological progress and the options that remain if trust in technological progress turns out to be unjustified.

Hans Jonas (1979) warned against risking “the whole thing” on a bet. However, the ecomodernist position does exactly that: it relies completely on technical progress and does not place any demands on technology other than to continually increase efficiency. In doing so, it makes future developments in the Anthropocene dependent on this trust in technical progress being justified. If this hope were not fulfilled, however, “the whole,” in the sense of Hans Jonas, would be endangered, since no other option would be available as an alternative. This is nothing more than the position of a moral hazard-maker who bets everything on one card. The ecomodernist position in its purest form is thus ethically unjustifiable (Grunwald 2018). The dominant hope in ecomodernism of solving problems through technical progress must be supplemented. In terms of ethical responsibility, precautions must be taken in the event that its techno-optimistic assumptions are not realised or are only realised in part.

The bioeconomy also relies on technical progress, but has more far-reaching requirements for the environmental compatibility of future technology. By demanding consistency with natural processes, environmental compatibility is to be virtually integrated into the agenda of further technological development. Problem solving is not expected from technical progress itself, but from technical progress that is aligned with the principle of consistency. Here, one can connect to an idea of the highly technicoptimistic Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. According to this, technology should no longer be developed and used against nature, an approach that Bloch sees and criticizes as characteristic of traditional modernity (Bloch 1985). Bionics, the orientation of technical solutions towards models from nature, can also be used to refer to the concept of alliance technology by Ernst Bloch (von Gleich et al. 2007). Instead of viewing nature as an enemy and trying to bring it under complete control, as was the goal of the Bacon project (Schäfer 1993), technology should be pursued in alliance with it. This early thought appears compatible with the bioeconomy’s demand for strategic consistency of human economic activity with natural material flows. In this way, the bioeconomy appears to be more responsible and ethically sustainable than the ecomodernist position in its purest form.

However, the potential of the bioeconomy is also not guaranteed, nor is the absence of counterproductive side effects of its implementation. Therefore, a one-sided strategy based on bioeconomy would ultimately be problematic in terms of responsible ethics. Even if the prospects of coping with, or at least mitigating, environmental problems appear to be better, in principle, than those in ecomodernism, which is based on an accelerated “continuation as before” approach, due to the higher demands on environmental compatibility, options must also be provided or developed here in the event that expectations are not met. This applies, in particular, to post-growth strategies that use social or sociotechnical innovations to ultimately target other values of action, other lifestyles and behavioural patterns, but also other value chains and social incentive systems (Jackson 2009; Dietz and O’Neill 2013; D’Alisa et al. 2014). Against this background, the expectations in political and economic institutions appear to be one-sided (► Sect. 10.3). A discussion between the different positions of the bioeconomy on possible combinations of a technical bioeconomy based on technical efficiency and consistency with social science considerations on adequate lifestyles and value patterns seems overdue.

The bioeconomy is promising, but it alone does not guarantee a more environmentally-friendly technology and economy in the future. This follows solely from the well-known problem of rebound effects, of which there are more than enough examples of disappointed expectations for environmental relief (Sorrell 2007). It should also be remembered that bioeconomic production lines and value chains are by no means environmentally neutral, as the example of energy crop cultivation, with its ecological side effects, shows. In principle, therefore, the overall ecological balance must also be examined in bioeconomic approaches so that it can be regarded as a sustainable bioeconomy (► Chap. 9).

10.6 A Learning Process on the Concept of Sustainability

The promises of the bioeconomy are wide-ranging. There is no doubt that it has great potential to contribute to a better environmental balance of human activity. There are also reasons to assume that a more sustainable economic future cannot be achieved without the kinds of technology and value creation that are fundamentally bioeconomically oriented. However, the word “potential” must be taken seriously here: From today’s perspective, these are possible contributions to solving environmental problems. It is therefore necessary to ask under which conditions the potentials presented today can be turned into real future solutions.

It goes without saying that there is a more or less high degree of uncertainty about the future arrival of expectations for the bioeconomy. There are no automatisms that turn technical potentials into real contributions to environmentally compatible development. Realising potentials is not a purely technical matter, but rather a political, economic and general social matter of considerable complexity. Since assessments of these hypothetical potentials inevitably guide decisions, e.g., on the political promotion of bioeconomy, not only do the prospects of success and realisation need to be critically examined, but so do the possible negative consequences and risks. They, too, are hypothetical, but this should not stand in the way of an early engagement with them in the sense of an early warning of the technology assessment (Grunwald 2019) in order to mitigate or prevent them.

A future design of the bioeconomy from environmental and sustainability aspects would thus include the following steps:

  • Analysis of the (positive and negative) sustainability potentials of the different directions of the bioeconomy and the innovation paths envisaged in each case at the earliest possible stages of development.

  • Investigation of the degree and the expression of their prospects of success in problem-solving, as well as their limits.

  • Development of prospective innovation paths in view of promoting, as well as inhibiting, factors, e.g., embedded in scenarios of an increasingly bioeconomy-based economy.

  • Critical consideration of their premises with regard to the sustainability of quantitative growth and relations to post-growth and sufficiency strategies.

  • Analysis of the factors on which it depends as to whether the positive sustainability potential can be realised or whether the sustainability risks can be managed at an early stage, with special consideration given to rebound effects (Sorrell 2007).

  • Comparison with the potentials of non-bio-based techniques to achieve greater environmental compatibility and sustainability or analyses of the possible combinations of bio-based and non-bio-based techniques.

  • Continuation and concretisation of this multi-stage process in the course of the further development of the bioeconomy.

The design of the bioeconomy should thus form a continuous learning process, oriented towards the normative model of sustainability (Grunwald 2004), in which design goals, implementation options, innovation paths and unintended effects are discussed. In the bioeconomy, it is important to combine technological development and innovation on the one hand with research into and reflection on their hypothetical consequences on the other – in particular, the potential for solving major environmental problems. These learning processes, which take place concretely at the various interfaces between politics, the public, science, industry and technology, incorporate scientific knowledge and ethical orientations. The picture of a more environmentally-friendly economy, including the bioeconomy, is gradually emerging, step by step. Only in this process will it become clear how big the contribution of the bioeconomy will really be in solving the major environmental problems. Future-ethical precautionary arguments therefore call for both a careful opening up of this path in regard to its options and precautions to be taken in the event that expectations cannot be fulfilled, or can only be fulfilled to a small extent, and the choice of other strategies of sustainable development.