A new environmental agenda is picking up kudos and converts, but possibly at the expense of many traditional environmental wellness experts. Environmental modernism, as it is known, is based on the belief that technology is the solution for the planet’s wellbeing and not the problem. The agenda goes that harnessing innovation and entrepreneurship can save the planet and environmentalists who don’t buy into that are exacerbating the problem through their Arcadian sentiments.
According to Fred Pearce, author of The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth, ‘The modernists wear their environmentalism with pride, but are pro-nuclear, pro-genetically modified crops, pro-megadams, pro-urbanization and pro-geoengineering of the planet to stave off climate change. They say they embrace these technologies not to conquer nature, like old-style 20th century modernists, but to give nature room. If we can do our business in a smaller part of the planet — through smarter, greener and more efficient technologies — then nature can have the rest…the modernists are also the proponents of rewilding, the restoration of large tracts of habitat and the reintroduction of the species that once lived there…With technology, they say, we can more painlessly usher in the return of the wild, because more land can be liberated.’
So what’s the problem, you ask? ‘This is deeply heretical for many mainstream environmentalists,’ Pearce asserts. ‘Should we condemn the modernists for hijacking and subverting environmentalism in the name of capitalist and consumerist greed? Or do we concede they may have a point. The one certainty, I think, is that we cannot ignore it. The debate has to be joined.’ One point up for discussion certainly is how to do conservation of nature. Modernists says that the existing conservation strategies we have in place simply do not work, as human activity spreads relentlessly. Therefore, we need to make more intensive use of the land we do take, so that more land can be left unfenced.
Linus Blomqvist of the Breakthrough Institute, which is run by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger who gained prominence a decade ago with their critique of the green movement The Death of Environmentalism, argues that even as consumption rises and the world’s population continues to grow, ‘land use can peak out in the next two decades.’ There aren’t any environmentalists who wouldn’t applaud that. However, to achieve it, Blomqvist says we require many things that they are conventionally less keen on, such as the further spread of large-scale industrial agriculture, accelerated urbanization, and a switch out of using “renewable” biological resources.
Pearce explains, ‘The modernist approach to conservation is to seek out technological substitutes for crops. We should, they say, give up cotton in favour of polyester or whatever else the chemists can come up with to clothe us. We should turn our noses up at wild fish and embrace aquaculture instead. Farmers should discard organic fertilizer in favour of chemicals.’ The question remains, then; are they right? Pearce asserts, ‘In truth, some degree of environmental modernism is part of the worldview of all but the most fundamentalist greens. Whether driving a Prius, putting solar panels on our roof, or installing a low-flush toilet, we are buying into a version of the eco-modernists’ call for environmental efficiency to be a watchword of conservation.’
However, he continues that there is much that can be criticized in the modernists’ playbook. ‘Technology often doesn’t deliver even its own prospectus,’ Pearce says. ‘Some say the Green Revolution, which doubled global food production in the late 20th century, has now stalled. And it may not just be the Green Revolution. Canadian futurologist Vaclav Smil, speaking at the Sausalito event, argued that “all the essential technologies” of modern life are at least a century old. He noted, for example, that the basic process of manufacturing nitrogen fertilizer from the air “hasn’t changed since 1894.” And if mainstream environmentalists have a weakness for Arcadian myths, then the modernist agenda too has its own blind spots and contradictions. A strict effort to rewild nature and to cut our use of nature for ecosystem services would surely rule out using forests as carbon sinks. Do the modernists really oppose that? And if they make an exception here, then where does the boundary lie?’
