The tradition that treats ecological limits as a political fact rather than a technical externality — holding that an economy premised on indefinite material growth on a finite planet is not merely risky but incoherent, and that the question of how to live within limits is a question about political order.
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) began the modern argument, and its method mattered as much as its content: she demonstrated that a diffuse, delayed, statistically visible harm could be made politically legible. The Club of Rome's Limits to Growth (1972) put the case in systems-modelling terms, Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful (1973) in economic and moral ones, and Arne Naess distinguished a deep ecology that grants nature standing in its own right from a shallow environmentalism concerned only with human welfare. Murray Bookchin's social ecology added the claim that the domination of nature originates in the domination of humans by other humans, tying the ecological question to the anarchist one.
The tradition's central split is over growth. Ecomodernists argue that decoupling, nuclear power and intensification let a wealthy world shrink its footprint while getting richer; degrowth and post-growth thinkers, including Kate Raworth's doughnut framework, argue that decoupling has never been demonstrated at the required rate and that rich economies must plan for contraction. A second split is distributional: environmental justice scholarship charges that mainstream environmentalism was built by the affluent around wilderness and amenity, and was slow to notice who actually lives beside the refinery.
Its credibility problem is its own forecasting record. Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968) predicted mass famines that did not arrive, and he lost a public wager to Julian Simon on resource prices in 1990. Defenders argue the warnings changed the behaviour that would have produced the outcome, which is a genuinely difficult claim to test — and critics reply that an unfalsifiable defence is precisely the problem.