(Image: Andrzej Krauze)
HOW can we best protect nature in an increasingly crowded world? Should we strive to live amidst it, sustainably and in harmony with it? Or should we embrace those technologies that would allow us to retreat to cities and let nature get on without us?
Most environmentalists favour the former, rejecting many interventions that could reduce the amount of land we need to occupy. But a new ecomodernist says our salvation lies in nuclear power rather than landscapes covered in wind farms; intensive agriculture supported by genetic engineering rather than organic farming with its ; and urban living rather than rural idyll.
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So saving nature requires wearing polyester rather than cotton, eating farmed fish rather than trawling the oceans, and living at high densities so nature can prosper beyond the city limits. By doing this we will occupy less space and can give much of it back to what one guru of ecomodernism, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University in New York, calls the “great restoration” of land and ocean.
The new manifesto is the brainchild of US environmental activists Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. Written with others at their think tank, the Breakthrough Institute in California, it is a blueprint for thriving in the Anthropocene, the era of modern human activity. The theme of the institute’s annual conference this week is the “good Anthropocene”, which seeks to “reject the idea that human societies must harmonise with nature to avoid economic and ecological collapse”.
We humans, they say, have progressively required less space. As the manifesto puts it, “early human populations with much less advanced technologies had far larger individual land footprints than societies have today”. Shifting cultivation – in which fields are rotated to allow their fertility to recover – took up a lot of land to grow a little food.
We sometimes imagine that serious planetary destruction began in the industrial era. But as much as occurred before this, when the population was less than a tenth of today’s.
The planet has no fixed carrying capacity because technology is not fixed. Neolithic toolmaking and the first farmers transformed how many humans the planet could support. And while the ecomodernists agree that the industrial revolution pushed our relationship with natural resources off balance, they say the way to restore it is by embracing technology not rejecting it.
Luckily the advances we need to do this are available. We know how to massively reduce our ecological footprint, through the use of low-carbon energy technologies, including nuclear, as well as through high-tech and materials recycling. In most of the rich countries of the world we have reached peak stuff. We require much less land, nitrogen fertiliser and water to grow every tonne of food. We consume less metal and other materials, while recycling more. Even our .
The manifesto argues that, while living standards and demand for goods among the poor of the world rise, “the total human impact on the environment… can peak and decline this century”.
But the conventional green path won’t deliver that, it insists. If we are serious about improving the lot of rural Africans then, as Shellenberger puts it, “offering a solar panel for every thatched roof is not going to cut it”.
The route to sustainability is through a “high-energy planet”, in which people in Africa can improve their lives and land use through energy-intensive farming. Shellenberger quotes conservation biologist William Laurance of James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, when he says that “we need to intensify agriculture in places that we have already developed rather than develop new places”.
This is an important agenda. It puts environmentalists on the side of the future rather than the past; on the side of optimism rather than pessimism.
But in some respects the ecomodernists are not ecomodernist enough. Amid the confidence in technology, there is an oddly romantic strain to their manifesto. In particular, the premise that we must cut ourselves off from nature. This is neither possible nor desirable.
“The ecomodernist premise that we must cut ourselves off from nature is neither possible nor desirable”
In the Anthropocene, there is no pristine nature. Even the rainforests of the Amazon and the Congo have been cleared by humans in centuries past. What we imagine to be pristine forest is recent regrowth, often deliberately planted.
Nature today is not very natural. The world is dominated by what some ecologists call “novel ecosystems” – partly random collections of species that are far removed from anything remotely pristine, and usually well endowed with invasive species brought in by humans. This is good news. It shows that nature is evolving and adapting to the world we have created.
I believe there is no going back. And I find it surprising that the ecomodernists don’t agree. Instead, they seem to be hooked on outdated notions of nature as passive, pristine and only able to prosper apart from us. We cannot have the Anthropocene on one side of the fence and the landscape of the Holocene – shaped by 11,000 years of early agriculture – on the other side.
The ecomodernists should banish their quest for some halcyon vision of rewilding. Of course we need to reduce our footprint, but a “good Anthropocene” will achieve that not by cutting us off from nature but by better integrating us into it. As the world’s most successful invasive species, we must take this path if we are to make the best of the age of humans.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The big green divide”
