The Case for Ecomodernism

by Michael Lind, author of The Promised Land: An Economic History of the United States

Many ecomodernists share the New Deal liberal tradition of support for state-sponsored technological innovation and public enterprise, symbolized by public agencies like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The true “neoliberals” among Greens are those whose vision of environmental progress involves taxpayer subsidies to rich people who invest in uneconomical solar and wind power production, via crony-capitalist scams like “renewable energy portfolios” and “cap-and-trade” pseudo-market, in which the public absorbs the costs of more expensive energy and private investors reap government-guaranteed profits.

Nobody would accuse Franklin D. Roosevelt of being a “neoliberal.” Here is Roosevelt in a speech he gave at Milton Academy in 1926, before he became governor of New York and president of the United States, describing the promise of advanced technology.

Roosevelt mocked those in his day who predicted falsely that the world was about to run out of energy sources:

Do you remember that only a few years ago we were worrying about the day, soon to arrive, when there would be no more coal, and , therefore, no more power or light? Scientists told us not to worry, that a substitute would be found in plenty of time to save us from utter freezing and darkness. Yet, if you look back to the newspapers of the time, you will find volumes written and spoken in favor of the careful conservation of coal, with dire predictions of the fate ultimately in store for the world.

Roosevelt accurately predicted: “Power and light will cost less and less, and our lives will be altered to meet their new cheapness.” Back in 1926, FDR also foresaw the possibility that technology would transform or eliminate traditional agriculture:

Finally, chemistry is entering into a new realm — the production of food by synthetic processes. We dislike the thought of substituting a farinaceous pill for our morning cereal, or a tablet for our eggs: we shudder at an apple or a peach made in twenty-four hours in a laboratory. Yet chemistry is to-day developing efficient substitutes for the fruits of the field and the yield of animal life; and it is more than possible that economic law will force upon our race a synthetic diet….If science can make one acre yield what ten did before, and at the same time decrease the demand for agricultural produce, there seems little possibility of checking the flow of the human race into urban communities, for those cities will have solved at last the question of their food supply.

FDR was right then, and the ecomodernists are right now. The technological intensification of food production, including perhaps even what Franklin Roosevelt in 1926 called “a synthetic diet,” can feed a world of billions of city-dwellers — while allowing many former farms and pastures around the world to revert to the wild. That is a vision of a good Anthropocene worth fighting for.

Read the full article here.

Economic Growth and Environmental Management in a Global Iriai

A Response from Robert Ellison of REA Engineering and Environment

Growth provides the resources for social progress and environmental conservation and restoration. Environmental management involves the strategic deployment of methods and technologies across landscapes, industries and infrastructure using multi-disciplinary science and theories and models of institutional structures – polycentricity – pioneered by Elinor Ostrom in real-world applications over the past 50 years. It involves bottom up management that can provide better outcomes for business and the environment – rather than top-down prescriptive methods from governments that are globally failing to conserve our environment. The bottom line is that we can grow economies and enhance environments.

There are three key ideas in advancing management of the global commons.

1. The problems of the environment and development are interrelated – biodiversity, population, land use changes and emissions of different gases and aerosols across a number of sectors.  Decoupling the developed and the natural worlds reduces climatic and ecological pressures on systems that –  through internal chaotic responses – are inherently unpredictable.

2. Economic growth provides resources for solving problems – restoring organic carbon in agricultural soils, conserving and restoring ecosystems, better sanitation and safer water, better health and education, updating the diesel fleet and other productive assets, replacing cooking fires with better ways of preparing food, etc.

3. The way to manage the environment is through informed decision making at multiple scales.  It requires creating a ‘polycentric‘ framework for applying multi-disciplinary environmental science to inform government, business and the community.

There have been various responses thus far and all of them seem confused about the mechanics of decoupling human development from natural systems.  In their hands it is more abstract concept than the nuts and bolts of sustainable development on which we have been working for decades.

I am an engineering hydrologist and environmental scientist. My essential skill set is in the quantification, impact analysis and mitigation of mobilization of sediment, nutrients and pollutants from mining, industry, agriculture and urbanization. Along with having some facility in technical and scientific communication that increasingly is my focus. I am an award-winning designer of ‘integrated urban water supplies’ – integrating stormwater management, water supply sources and sewage treatment and recycling to meet human needs efficiently while conserving downstream environments. Urban environments are ecosystems – that can be made interesting, species rich and attractive in their own right – and at the intersection with natural systems there are ecotones that are transitions to natural systems. The ecotones provide opportunities for deploying techniques and technologies by which we can mimic natural – that is predevelopment – downstream water quality and flows. This is the essence of ‘decoupling’ human development from natural systems, but it is not cheap.

Read the full response here.

Atomkraft? Ja bitte! Manifesto Featured in Top German Newspaper

by Winand von Petersdorff

In mid-April of this year a group of scientists, journalists, and environmentalists went public with the Ecomodernist Manifesto. It is a call for a pragmatic, technology-oriented politics of environmental protection. The authors break away from the romantic perception of human lives in sustainable harmony with nature. Instead, the key is to decouple the environment and humans. The simple, good idea is to intensify agriculture, energy and human settlement so that humans require less land. Land productivity becomes a holy duty in order to protect parts of nature from human influence.  

There is a solution for this kind of highly-intensive, emissions-free energy supply. It's called nuclear power. "Most forms of renewable energy are, unfortunately, incapable of doing so," argue the Manifesto authors. The scale of land use and other environmental impacts that are associated with biomass and many other forms of renewable energy arouse major doubts that they can bring the world closer to a solution. 

The major exception is a new generation of highly efficient solar cells in combination with new storage technology. This all may be difficult to swallow for large portions of the German environmental movement. They prefer to stay in their ideological antinuclear backwater.

Note: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is one of Germany's top newspapers, with the second largest national circulation. The original article is in German. Thanks to Marian Swain for translation help.

Manifesto Coauthor Barry Brook Interviewed on ABC

If someone said they wanted to make cities bigger, intensify agriculture, embrace nuclear power, and expand genetic engineering –– would you consider them an environmentalist?

Manifesto coauthor Barry Brook was interviewed by Fran Kelly on ABC Radio out of Australia. Listen to the full episode here. 

Also on ABC, journalist Sara Phillips breaks down the "7 Ways Environmentalists Have Had it Wrong," including fear of technology and opposition to GMOs. Read the full article here.

Edward Abbey and Ecomodernism

by Ben A. Minteer, an environmental ethicist and conservation scholar, who holds the Arizona Zoological Society Endowed Chair at Arizona State University, Tempe.

The desire to balance wild and civilized animates some of [Edward] Abbey’s best and most mature work. Not surprisingly, it’s also his most careful and restrained.

But there’s a further problem with calling Abbey a charlatan for rhapsodizing about being alone in the wilderness while at the same time feeling isolated, even lonely. It reveals a naïve understanding of the psychological complexity of the human experience of solitude and belonging in the wild in the modern age.

As historian Patty Limerick points out, Abbey, like many of us, wanted isolation and he wanted kinship; it was part of a series of paradoxes that he wrestled with throughout his work — and, we might say, throughout his life. For him, there was no contradiction between loving solitude and craving companionship, between recognizing the partly constructed nature of the wild while cherishing its authenticity, between passionately defending wild country and throwing empty beer cans out of a gas guzzler on the highway. (That last one may have been one paradox too many. Nobody’s perfect.)

Abbey’s calls to exercise restraint and self-control on the landscape, to protect wild country not just from destruction, but also from other forms of significant human manipulation and control, remain vital today more than 25 years after his death.

I think Abbey’s arguments take on even greater importance in light of current trends in environmentalism celebrating a more aggressive vision of human stewardship on the planet, philosophies that travel under banners like “EcoModernism” but that in truth often describe a kind of eco-prometheanism: a celebration of human power and technological ingenuity on a world increasingly said to be of our own making.

Unlike the new EcoModernists, Abbey took a much different lesson from the fact of human influence on the landscape, a conclusion that was evident to him decades before any fancy scientific talk about the Anthropocene. 

In a 1987 letter to Wilderness magazine, Abbey made it clear that our ability to change and manipulate the wild wherever it existed wasn’t justification for taking these actions. “Simply because humankind have the power now to meddle or ‘manage’ or ‘exercise stewardship’ in every nook and cranny of the world,” he wrote, “does not mean that we have a right to do so. Even less, the obligation.”

It’s an insight we’d do well to heed today, even in — and maybe especially in — the age of humans.

Read the full article here.

What Direction Ecomodernism?

A Response from Jeff Filipiak, a lecturer in history at the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley

On the level of ideas, ecomodernism would decrease the importance of the “precautionary principle.” Both the intellectuals of the movement, and average activists, have been drawn to the movement in part by a hope that through the movement they can limit the adoption of large-scale technological innovations (particularly chemical use) which, they fear, are dangerous and unproven.

Ecomodernists, on the other hand, appear to place their hopes, and greater decision-making power, in the hands of corporations which activists have often seen (rightly or wrongly) as creating threats to health and the environment. Potential conflicts over this issue are sharp: one of leading promoters of the agricultural intensification which ecomodernists advocate is Monsanto, a lightning rod for environmentalist criticism today as in the past. As the American producer of PCBs, Monsanto played a significant role in the rise of concerns about hazardous waste; concern about PCB waste also inspired the protests in Warren County, North Carolina, which helped give birth to the awareness of the Environmental Justice dimensions of waste and health issues.

For these reasons and others, social justice advocates might worry that ecomodernism might be less even inclusive than environmentalism, a movement that has already rightly been criticized for being dominated by white males. Roger Gottlieb asserts that women active on environmental issues often were particularly concerned about the dangers of nuclear power and toxics; the Manifesto offers little role for those with such concerns.

More broadly, by proposing the “decoupling of humanity from nature,” ecomodernists risk abandoning what has been both a key means of identifying problems (having people notice pollution), and of motivating support of the movement. From the organic growers who contacted Rachel Carson to anti-pollution activists to Lois Gibbs, concern for the local environment (and local dangers to human health) has been central to motivating people to become active in the movement. Recent works by Christopher Sellers and Adam Rome demonstrate how closely tied the movement was to local communities.

One of the most prominent themes in nature writing has long been the encouragement of individuals to get out and know nature, whether it be locally or in distant places. Richard Louv’s popular 2005 book argued that we need to increase the ability of children to play in nature, because if children do not do so they will be unlikely to want to preserve nature. In contrast, Ecomodernists suggest diminishing the personal relationship with nature, removing people (at least for the most part) from much of the landscape. And the authors say little about their connections to nature; David Gessner complained about 2004’s Break Through, by two of the manifesto’s authors that he didn’t “encounter a single rock or tree or bird” in the book. The manifesto’s authors place less importance on ideas and experiences because they believe that “humans are as likely to spare nature because it is not needed to meet their needs as they are to spare it for explicit aesthetic and spiritual reasons.”

On the other side of that decoupling, ecomodernism challenges recent scholarship in the environmental humanities and wilderness management that argues that humans need to see less separation between themselves and wildness. Environmental historian William Cronon, in his 1996 essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” suggested that wilderness ideas had misleading aspects, and that “the core problem of wilderness is that it distances us too much from the very things it teaches us to value.” He ended his essay with a call for people to instead perceive themselves as making a home in nature, as a means of acting responsibly. The essay sparked a divisive debate, but it inspired many who felt that environmentalists focused too much on distant wild places. Ecomodernists, on the other hand, present a vision which removes more people from rural communities, and which appears to seek to increase the role of wilderness areas from which people have been removed. They seek to “to re-wild and re-green the Earth,” at a time when most environmentalist scientists have shifted towards trying to figure out how species can coexist with humans and human management.

Read the full response here.

Integral Environmentalism

by Jeff Salzman, integralist, teacher at The Integral Center, and host of The Daily Evolver podcast

In the integral world, we often emphasize the miracles of development and the evolution of consciousness, culture and technology that arise through it. But development also exacts great costs in the degradation of the natural world, atmosphere and oceans. We also suffer a psychological toll of being alienated from the natural cycles of the earth, and oftentimes from each other. And of course some say that development is much worse than that — it is our doom.

But it may be more accurate to say that something new is being born. As societies develop populations become more urban and have fewer children, which results in a smaller ecological footprint. We see that in first world countries carbon dioxide emissions are beginning to drop, the air and water is ever cleaner, trees and biomass are increasing, and the number of wild animals is stable — even as human populations increase (through longer life spans and immigration) and economies grow. It’s not all bad news.

We have to make the wellbeing of everyone a top priority. We have to give everyone the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of modernity, or else we don’t get to enjoy them ourselves. It’s the Bodhisattva vow: nobody gets enlightened until everybody gets enlightened. This commitment naturally comes online as we develop. God is good at keeping us focused not only our where our individual growth lies, but the growth of humanity as a whole. ~Jeff Salzman

Historically, we see ecological awareness come online as an effort to protect one’s own tribe, clan or country (thus the U.S. Clean Water and Clean Air Acts of the1970’s, as well and the clean-up efforts in China and other 2nd world countries today). This impulse matures as we become world-centric, and begin to see the all the earth and all the life it supports is sacred and worth preserving.

“But didn’t early cultures also have a sacred relationship with the earth?” you might ask. Well, they may have engaged in nature worship, but that was about nature protecting them, not them protecting nature.

As An Ecomodernist Manifesto points out, “Early human populations with much less advanced technologies had a far larger individual land footprint than societies have today.  Consider that a population of no more than one or two million North Americans hunted most of the continent’s large mammals into extinction by the late Pleistocene while burning and clearing forests across the continent in the process. Extensive human transformations of the environment continued through the Holocene period. As much as three quarters of all deforestation globally occurred before the industrial revolution.”

This challenges a basic tenet of postmodern, green-altitude environmentalism, the “pre-trans fallacy” that says the way forward for humanity is to go back to the way it was in premodern and even pre-agricultural times. This is of course is completely unachievable short of the collapse of civilization and a major human die-off — which is why there are some people in the environmental movement that actually wish for a “great collapse.”

As we push up against the limits of a finite planet, there are two competing views: 1) the modernist view that development is constructive and 2) the postmodernist view that development is destructive. What we see as integralists is that both sides of this pole reside in the first-tier altitude stack. As such, they think that their view is the only correct one and that people who hold the other view are co-opted, deluded, naive or stupid. Welcome to the politics of environmentalism! But from an integral perspective, again, it’s not all bad news. We see that the powerful conflict in these polarities is fruitful. Indeed, it is the engine of the dialectic of progress. We fight with our ideas but we have sex with them as well, creating more sophisticated, integrated perspectives.

Read the full article and listen to the podcast episode here.

Ecomodernists Spark Rhetorical Heat

by Matthew Nisbet

For these ecomodernists, progress requires respectful engagement with a diversity of voices and ideas. "Too often discussions about the environment have been dominated by the extremes, and plagued by dogmatism, which in turn fuels intolerance," they write.

Yet their call for respectful debate and critical reflection has been met with intense hostility by many of their counterparts on the left. At Climateprogess.org, the blogger Joseph Romm dismissed the manifesto as an Orwellian time waster and encouraged his readers to skip any discussion of its ideas. In her book, Klein writes that ecomodernists are either "dishonest or delusional," as they advocate a "doubling down on exactly the kind of reckless, short-term thinking that got us into this mess."

In a recent essay at Aeon magazine, the Duke University law professor Jedediah S. Purdy accused ecomodernists of being nothing more than "branding opportunists," sloshing "around old plonk in an ostentatiously shiny bottle," all in an effort to win speaking and consulting fees.

In a blog post last year, the philosopher Clive Hamilton, of Charles Sturt University, in Australia, declared that by promoting the possibility of the "good Anthropocene," ecomodernists are "unscientific and live in a fantasy world of their own construction." In Earth Island Journal last month, he dismissed the recent manifesto as "detached and dreamy, and blind to the hard truths of political combat."

On the road to managing the many threats we face in the Anthropocene, grassroots activism and political reforms are important, as is the quest for a more advanced arsenal of technological options and a reconsideration of our economic goals. But so too is investment in our capacity to learn, discuss, question, and disagree in ways that constructively engage with uncomfortable ideas.

Yet most academics and journalists avoid challenging the powerful forms of groupthink that have derailed our efforts to combat climate change. In this regard, attacks on those who question cherished assumptions have had a powerful chilling effect. We therefore depend on risk-taking intellectuals like the ecomodernists to lead the way, identifying the flaws in conventional wisdom, and offering alternative ways of thinking and talking about our environmental future.

In such roles, argued Michel Foucault, the function of the intellectual is to "question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people’s mental habits, the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to re-examine rules and institutions."

Conversely, as the sociologist Amitai Etzioni has warned, in the absence of risk-taking intellectuals challenging assumptions, those working on complex problems like climate change may "be lacking in reality testing, be slower in adapting … policies and viewpoints to external as well as domestic changes, and be more ‘ideological.’"

Reading Klein, it is clear that she is not confident that the mass movement she calls for and the deep structural reforms that "change everything" are achievable. Instead, like radical intellectuals of movements past, her utopian vision serves an important political function, creating space for the more pragmatic, less revolutionary ideas of the ecomodernists and others.

With the 2016 US elections on the horizon, ecomodernists are "providing arguments for people in the middle to hold on to so they can have some kind of environmental vision," Paul Robbins, director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told Slate. "You’ve got to have some kind of position, and they’re offering them something to jump at. It’s not like they’re going to jump on Naomi Klein’s bandwagon."

In navigating a path forward on our tough, new planet, our success depends on constructively grappling with diverse perspectives. Through this approach we can hold our own convictions and opinions more lightly, pursuing the very best of the many ideas available.

Read the full article here (subscription required).

Ecomodernism, Technology, and Path Dependency

A Response from Tom Miller, documentary filmmaker whose new film is Our Place on Earth

The Ecomodernist Manifesto has sparked a lot of debate lately.  Many liken them to "techno-optimists" — those who believe technology and the market will be our saviors. A different reading might interpret that ecomodernists are calling for 1) a realistic acceptance of our human dependency on technology and its impact on the natural environment and 2) to work together and find pragmatic long-term approaches that utilize technology in ways that alleviate stress on the environment.  

…

Putting aside the debate on any of the above approaches, let's look at Our Place on Earth's experience in the field with two of these technologies as they relate to climate change. On the small Caribbean island of Barbuda aquaponics are being studied as a viable food source due to the impacts of declining ocean fish populations and the high costs of importing food. In this context, aquaponics produces fish for human consumption and the recycled water is used to grow vegetables, thus reducing the community's dependence on declining natural fish stocks and imported food.

In Bequia, desalination provides drinking water during disasters. And while expensive, the desalination facility also reduces the local impact of drought — a major issue across the Caribbean. Both technologies have the potential to allow local residents to remain in their small island communities and without which, forced migration may be a more likely alternative.  

However, like many technologies that at first glance seem like "miracle cures," desalination and aquaponics have their downsides and can lead to maladaptation and path dependency. (Path dependency here refers to decisions that limit future climate adaptation options by locking investments into options that are not easily adjusted to changes in future conditions.) Aquaponics is extremely energy-intensive, and without substantial investment in alternative energies like solar, communities may be stuck using fossil fuels to power their facilities. The gains in producing local food may be negated by the increased energy expenditures and the health risks associated with burning fossil fuels. The decision to move to aquaponics may in fact replace one path dependency with another — shifting from importing food to importing fuel. Like aquaponics, the same is true in the case of desalination.

And herein lies the difficulty of balancing present and future needs with available technologies.  Increased droughts due to the effects of climate change will prove the desalination plant on Bequia very useful to the local community. But the universal application of these technologies may not always reduce human demands on the environment. Counter to the context in Bequia, the desalination plant at Wonthaggi, Victoria, Australia, and the corresponding Sugarloaf Pipeline water transportation project are concerning examples of path dependency. In addition to reducing incentives for behavior change by reducing water consumption, the desalination plant is estimated to triple the annual operation emissions of Melbourne's water supply and sewage treatment. (In 2008, Melbourne water emitted 284,500 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, and it is estimated that upon completion, the plant's annual emissions will rise to over 900,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.) 

Understanding the implications of technological solutions requires an understanding of potential tradeoffs and path dependencies. Further, it requires a recognition that not all technologies provide the same benefits at all scales and locations — not all technologies are universally beneficial. Decision-making in the absence of this type of localized information runs the risk of solving one problem by creating another.   

The ecomodernist viewpoint may appear at first glance both naive in its reliance on technology and dismissive of the role of politics in creating effective change. However, they appear to be calling for the collaborative exploration of new ideas and long-term plans for a future that recognizes both our human dependence on technology, and the costs of that dependence on our natural environment. We hope that this exploration recognizes there is no technological silver bullet and all implementation requires adapting technology to local needs and contexts.

Read the full response and learn more about the film here. 

Energy is at the Heart of 'An Ecomodernist Manifesto'

Excellent story on An Ecomodernist Manifesto on ABC Radio out of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Click here to listen to the full broadcast.

An Ecomodernist Manifesto is upbeat, it’s high-tech, but interestingly, it has history on its side…[Joseph Tainter] made the point that every major transition in human history has involved humans consuming more energy, not less: the industrial revolution, the agricultural revolution, the shift from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. We have enormous challenges ahead of us, but one thing [Tainter] says is that to assume that we will voluntarily choose to use less energy assumes that we will not confront problems. We’ve got huge problems and energy is at the heart of this manifesto.