Manifesto Coauthor David Keith on CBC Radio

Manifesto coauthor David Keith was interviewed on CBC Radio's 'The 180' with host Jim Brown. The segment opens with what Keith describes as the main takeaway of An Ecomodernist Manifesto:

The main argument of the manifesto is to point out, in a sense, what ought to be obvious: that technology really can be part of the solution to many environmental problems that people care about. That’s not to say that technology without any regulation or that untrammeled capitalism will solve everything; I don’t believe that at all. But that much of the places we’ve actually made progress on environmental problems has been fundamentally by technological change. 

Click here to listen to the full radio segment.

Can We Leave Nature Behind?

by Mark Buchanan

I'll admit that I find this view of “leaving nature behind” somewhat alarming. Living with nature has more direct emotional appeal to me. Even so, there's an undeniable coherence to the Ecomodermist arguments.  Preserving nature, while also ensuring that people thrive, would seem to require some kind of separation. Short of moving humans into outer space, it's hard to see how that can happen without human activities becoming more concentrated, intensive and contained.

On the other hand, I wonder if the Ecomodernists overstate the possibilities for leaving nature behind. Even if we do flock into cities, find unlimited, clean sources of energy, and learn to use energy more efficiently than ever, our total energy consumption may well keep growing as we find new ways to use it. Basic physics demands that more energy use always means more waste dissipated to the environment in one form or another -- heat, pollution, environmental damage.

So leaving nature behind, in the sense of freeing it from our impacts, might not be so easy. Can we really sequester all the damaging aspects of our activities, collecting them up like trash and neutralizing them in a set of small repositories, out of sight, and even outside of nature? That would be great. It also seems a little fantastic.

Read the full article here.

Want to Save Nature? Leave It Behind

by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, coauthors of An Ecomodernist Manifesto

But protecting the environment and saving more nature in the 21st century will not require that we get closer to nature. Rather, it requires that we get farther from it, through better technologies. Getting off of fossil fuels will require that we shift to better energy technologies, such as nuclear and solar energy which are clean, power-dense and abundant. Growing more food on less land with fewer environmental impacts will require better seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and things such as vertical greenhouses and laboratory meat that make us less dependent on land and water to grow food.

Ultimately, nature made useless is nature spared. On this 45th anniversary of Earth Day, let us resolve to leave nostalgic dreams of recoupling with nature behind and embrace instead an ecologically vibrant future in which all of humanity thrives by increasingly leaving nature alone.

Read the full article here.

Saving Wildlife by Embracing New Tech

by Barry Brook, coauthor of An Ecomodernist Manifesto

Intensifying resource use can decouple environmental impacts from human development. There are many successful examples of intensification and decoupling.

For instance, large swathes of North America and Europe have reverted to forest, after substitutions and technology-driven enhancements in agricultural productivity led to the abandonment of marginal farmland.

This trend might be further enhanced by the adoption of vertical farms and bio-engineered crops. Emerging plasma-arc torch technology can almost completely recycle and recover materials from solid waste.

There are also many instances where decoupling has not (yet) occurred, or where technological progress has enabled increasingly destructive environmental practices. Examples include the ongoing clearance of primary rainforest for biofuel production and the link between growing national wealth and net environmental impact. This has fueled critiques of the “techno-fix.”

Ecomodernists admit that technology itself is not a panacea, but we do hold that its judicious application and associated knowledge transfer can be incredibly effective. The alternative, “power down” solutions have proven to have limited social and political traction.

Read the full article here.

Decoupled Ideals

Humanity faces two fundamental challenges this century. The first is to lift billions of people out of poverty and give them the opportunity to live healthy and dignified lives. The second is to ensure that this development does not destabilize the climatic and ecological systems that have enabled the rise of humans and other life on Earth. The problem is that these two goals are increasingly at odds.

Reconciling the twin imperatives of conservation and development is not easy. ‘Sustainable development’ is a catchphrase that neatly defines what the world must ultimately achieve, but nobody knows precisely what it looks like at full scale. Later this year, governments will finalize a set of sustainable development goals to guide international aid, and in December global leaders will gather to discuss the latest climate agreement at a summit in Paris. Any deal will be burdened by inevitable compromises that allow space for polluting development as the world seeks better and cheaper solutions.

The latest attempt to create a framework for thinking about this dilemma comes from 18 environmental activists and academics, who published an ‘Ecomodernist Manifesto’ last week. The essay paints a hopeful picture of technological progress while placing importance on the kind of intensive development that has characterized humanity’s rise so far. Only by concentrating our impact within the urban, industrial and agricultural context can we achieve a “good Anthropocene,” or age of human influence, the authors argue.

Read the full article here.

Manifesto Calls for an End to “People Are Bad” Environmentalism

by Eric Holthaus

Thanks to abundant energy, the ecomodernists argue, humanity has done wonderful things: Life expectancy is on the rise, infectious disease risk has plummeted, natural disasters kill fewer people, and abject poverty is on the decline. Of course, those gains have not come without sacrifice: We’re losing species at an incredible rate, and climate change could add ever more stress on human and natural systems.

The answer, according to the authors of the new document, is to “liberate the environment from the economy.” Ecomodernists argue that by focusing the human footprint into cities and prioritizing high-efficiency agriculture and energy production, we'll be able to retreat from nature and let it recover. Now, that’s easier said than done, and likely to come with a whole set of unintended consequences, but I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for discussion purposes. They list “urbanization, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, aquaculture, and desalination” as technologies that can reduce the overall human footprint and leave “more room for non-human species.”

Whether humanity will decouple the economy from our environmental overreach in time to maintain a planet worth preserving is another question. Confronted with this reality, humans of the 21st century have a choice, according to ecomodernists: further intensify our low-carbon-energy use and hope for a technological breakthrough (like sucking carbon out of the air) or retreat from modernity and risk civilizational backsliding. Their choice is clear: “We embrace an optimistic view toward human capacities and the future.”

Read the full article here.

What Can We Do to Save the Birds?

by Margaret Wente

“Lots of environmental problems have got much better as people have gotten richer,” says Canadian environmental scientist David Keith, who’s one of the scientists who backs the manifesto. I don’t have space here to list all his credentials, but let’s just say he’s among the smartest guys in the world. “Air pollution is substantially better in the last 40 years because of the Clean Air Act. Clean air has added about a year and a half to the lives of the average Canadian or American,” he told me. “We understand how to do these things. Wealth and good governance matter.”

Economic development, the manifesto argues, is indispensable to save the planet. The key is to “decouple” development from nature by using nature more intensively. We must intensify human activities such as farming, energy extraction, forestry, and settlement – as we are already doing – so that we can leave more of the natural world, and the spaces we love, alone. The most productive and efficient way for people to live is not in some rural Edenic paradise (where small numbers of hunter-gatherers, it should be noted, were very good at wiping out whole species) It’s in densely packed cities.

The public seldom hears this perspective, because the media tend to give the airtime to folks like Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben. And that’s a shame, because these thinkers offer a far more creative, rational and optimistic way to move forward.

Read the full article here.

The Environmentalists' Civil War

by Robert Bryce

The absolutist, pro-sprawl outlook touted by [Bill] McKibben and his allies provides a stark contrast to the pro-human outlook the ecomodernists support. Perhaps the key line of their manifesto is in the concluding sentence, which says they want to “achieve universal human dignity on a biodiverse and thriving planet.”

Toward that end, the 18 signers of the manifesto — a group that includes Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, as well as Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, and the University of Tasmania’s Barry Brook — support increased energy use. They note, rightly: “Climate change and other global ecological challenges are not the most important immediate concerns for the majority of the world’s people. Nor should they be. A new coal-fired power station in Bangladesh may bring air pollution and rising carbon dioxide emissions but will also save lives.”

That’s it exactly. While the absolutists want one of America’s most prestigious universities to sell some of its investments — with the only goal being to stigmatize the world’s biggest and single most important business — the ecomodernists are arguing not only that greater global energy consumption is inevitable, but that it’s good, that more energy use will allow more people in the developing world to live fuller, freer lives. As part of that, they are adding, rightly, that nuclear energy must be a central element of climate policy if we are going to reduce the rate of growth in global carbon dioxide emissions.

Click here to read the full article.

‘Pragmatic’ environmentalists pin hopes on a technological fix

by Graham Lloyd

An international group of scientists from some of the world’s leading institutions has declared a new era of environmentalism that is pro-human and pro-nature, and says better use of technology is the answer to conserving the wild world.

The group, which sees nuclear power as a key to tackling climate change and future sustainability, says “old-style” environmental groups must learn the lesson of why developing nations are looking to China to fund future coal-fired power generation.

International support for the creation of a China-led regional infrastructure bank has been widely viewed as a way for regional economies to avoid US restrictions on lending to new coal plants by established bodies such as the World Bank.

The US has been isolated on the China bank initiative, which has the support of Australia and other traditional US allies.

A provocative “Ecomodernist Manifesto” signed by respected scientists and environmentalists from the US, Britain, India and Australia says “plentiful access to modern energy is an essential prerequisite for human development and for decoupling development from nature”.

Barry Brook, professor of envir­onmental sustainability at the University of Tasmania, said: “China and other developing countries need cheap and concentrated energy and today that comes from coal and gas.

“We can’t ignore that reality.”

Click here to read the full article (subscription required).

An Environmentalist Call to Look Past Sustainable Development

by Eduardo Porter

On Tuesday, a group of scholars involved in the environmental debate, including Professor Joyashree Roy and Professor Barry Brook, Ruth DeFries of Columbia University, and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., are set to issue what they are calling the “Ecomodernist Manifesto.”

The “ecomodernists” propose economic development as an indispensable precondition to preserving the environment. Achieving it requires dropping the goal of “sustainable development,” supposedly in harmonious interaction with nature, and replacing it with a strategy to shrink humanity’s footprint by using nature more intensively.

Click here to read the full article