THE SUBSTITUTE AND THE EXCUSE: Growing Sustainability, Growing Sugarcane in São Paulo, Brazil

Amid climate change and produced unevenness in geopolitical development, the question of how sustainability and growth might be brought together is a concern for many scientists of renewable energy in the Global South. This article explores answers offered by scientists in São Paulo, Brazil, who make renewable fuels and materials from sugarcane. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and tracing the “material of growth,” the article analyzes the traffic between sugarcane biological growth, industry growth, and economic growth in the context of the crop's history of colonial expansion and environmental destruction. It argues that some scientific practices lay the molecular foundations for a substitutive “sustainable growth” that replicates petro-extractivist growth. Others allow for further permutations of how sustainability and growth might go together, particularly when scientists use sugarcane renewables as an excuse to develop other research aims. The article contributes to anthropological understandings of science, energy cultures, technical practices, and transition.