6 ms·

An Ecomodernist Manifesto

38 points by dtawfik1 11y ago

ZenoArrow 11y ago
I'm sympathetic to this cause, but that introduction contains a lot of waffle. If the author is reading this, you can summarise the key driving forces for change as... 1. Cannot rely on infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources. 2. A better balance between human life and the rest of life on the planet relies on allowing nature to regrow without competing with human development. You don't need to have all the answers up front, the solution is going to evolve naturally once we agree on what why it's desirable to change and get the discussions going.
- stevetrewick 11y ago
  The authors summarise their disagreement with your 1 in TFA. Despite frequent assertions starting in the 1970s of fundamental “limits to growth,” there is still remarkably little evidence that human population and economic expansion will outstrip the capacity to grow food or procure critical material resources in the foreseeable future.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    So the suggestion is that because it hasn't been a problem for us already it won't be a problem in the foreseeable future? We can have an economy based on abundance rather than scarcity, but that's not going to be achieved overnight, the priority for now is to slow down the damage. To give an example, look at the problem of overfishing. Taking the attitude of the authors you could argue it's not causing us problems in the foreseeable future, but the longer we leave it the worse it gets, and our depletion of fish populations is directly linked to our consumption and growing our economy without addressing this problem is going to cause problems with decreasing the variety of life found in rivers, lakes, seas and oceans.
- logicchains 11y ago
  >Cannot rely on infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources. On a longer timescale this might not even be an issue if efficient technology is developed for interstellar travel and terraforming other planets.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    Why is a lack of infinite economic growth a problem? What do you hope to gain from it? As a side note, I'm all for space exploration, but I also appreciate why the prime directive from Star Trek is worth following.
    - DennisP 11y ago
      There are probably plenty of dead planets out there where the Prime Directive wouldn't apply. Or at least, plenty of dead asteroids that we can turn into orbital colonies.
      - ZenoArrow 11y ago
        I didn't say we wouldn't make use of other planets as places to live, but I believe we should respect the native life that almost certainly exists on some planets. I'm glad we're taking this attitude towards Mars at the moment, exploring but being careful not to bring Earth's lifeforms over to Mars to breed. In any case, my question still stands, what do you/we hope to gain from infinite economic growth?
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Personally, I don't think infinite economic growth will be a problem once we stop caring about it. Right now economic growth is something we measure and try to keep (and increase); e.g. some people look at the growth rates and try to create programs to make them go up. At some point I think we'll reach a level on which we can just stop caring and enjoy living. People will naturally want to improve lives for themselves and their children and yes, this would register as economic growth, but there's a significant difference between just observing it and trying to affect the metric on purpose.
avz 11y ago
One relatively new thought in the manifesto is the explicit disagreement with the old assertion that the finite resources of our planet cannot sustain continued economic growth. The fundamental reason why economic growth can continue at a fixed or even shrinking environmental footprint is that economic growth and environmental footprint measure different things. The former measures the creation of economic value while the latter measures the use of land and raw materials necessary to create that value. More and more economic value of what we consume derives not from land and raw materials but from human inputs like design, creativity, engineering and services. This means that a smaller amount of raw materials is necessary to produce one dollar of GDP than it used to. At the same time, more and more of the raw materials are reused via down-, re- or even up-cycling. In theory, a very sophisticated economy of a demographically stable society could thrive and grow entirely on a closed cycle of raw materials and fixed amount of land. Even if we don't get there we could still reduce our impact below environment's capacity for self-renewal. I think we must urgently stop the increase and soon begin shrinking our environmental footprint. The realization that there is no fundamental contradiction between continued economic growth (and all its perks including poverty reduction, scientific progress and continued human development) and the protection of our planet should highlight that this ambition is achievable.
- stillsut 11y ago
  Well for the U.S., agricultural production went from 90% of the population in 1860 to < 2% today. And we net export food. In developing countries, you're most likely to suffer a famine if you're a farmer. We can save the people, save the land, and grow the economy if we do this the right way. But it starts with acknowledging the fact that agriculture/ general "living off the land" as an individual is unsustainable with today's growth rates.
- stevetrewick 11y ago
  >More and more economic value of what we consume derives not from land and raw materials but from human inputs like design, creativity, engineering and services. This means that a smaller amount of raw materials is necessary to produce one dollar of GDP than it used to. Very much this. It isn't, however, a new insight to economics. That the limits to growth argument is a fallacy based on conflating increased value with increased resource use is standard economics but misunderstood by almost everyone else, hence the trend for physicists to write blog posts calling down derp on econ types. This is explored by Tim Harford in a piece on Freakonomics [0]. I would highly recommend Harford's book The Undercover Economist to anyone with even a passing interest in the field. It's one of those humbling books which demonstrates that everything you thought you knew about a subject was basically wrong. [0]http://freakonomics.com/2014/01/24/can-economic-growth-continue-forever-of-course/ http://freakonomics.com/2014/01/24/can-economic-growth-conti...
7952 11y ago
Given the understanding that the environment is unavoidably inked to humanity it seems a little doubtful that we can just decouple so absolutely. This is a common attitude in rural and urban planning where the world is neatly divided up into zones of urban, agriculture, industry, etc. Making room for nature in that kind of world is very difficult as it will always lead to a loss from another interests that are already in conflict with one another. It is particularly problematic in places like Sub-Saharan agriculture where people, nature, and agriculture are in such close proximity and these conflicts are a more of a social issue. I think it is better to have more fuzzy edges and make ecology an intrinsic part of development that people will want to defends. For example a new development should surrounded by a buffer of woodland/wetlands/grassland that will be valued by residents.
alexandrerond 11y ago
At least the writers confess they are moved by "deep love and emotional connection to the natural world". And from there I guess it's not too difficult to build up a dream that morally allows you to keep your current over-consuming habits which are trashing the planet, while claiming that you LOVE nature and at the same time not pissing off anyone by avoiding all politics to get in the mix. The ecological problem is a bit more complex that blind trust in technology and efficiency progress. Blind faiths, simplifications and master plans have added little (from ecomodernism to primitivism). The problems of democracy, discrimination and redistribution of wealth have a lot to say, but that's too tough for a cute little manifesto. They speak of technology "applied with wisdom", "with proper management". So I take that, until now, we have just mismanaged technology and applied it in dullest ways. Or I guess they have a secret plan on how to manage technology correctly from now on. Or perhaps they will come to realize that technology has and will always have a good and bad side, and that most of its consequences (good and bad) are often unforeseeable, and as such, hard to steer. Let's not even think of WHO actually controls technology. What's more, the "decoupling" of human well-being from human impact is a myth. The impact has just been transferred to third world countries where sure none of these ecomodernists live or probably ever visited. Lol when they take "New England" and "France" forests as examples. Any plans to bring up the 80% of undeveloped countries to the pace of the 20% with nice growing forests? None. This is the typical manifesto which is absolutely nothing new, sounds super nice, but changes nothing, provides nothing, and feels about right in the hands of the rich and ruling elites because it absolutely avoids to question any status-quo whatsoever.
- DennisP 11y ago
  Something they explicitly mention is nuclear power, which has a far smaller footprint on the environment than fossil fuels, but is often passed over by environmentalists wedded to a low-energy ideal.
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    Environmentalists are not wedded to a low-energy ideal, they're wedded to a non-polluting one. Speaking for myself, I'd be happy with, say, a P-B aneutronic fusion system and would vastly prefer this over solar or wind. But we don't have this right now, and solar or wind are the least polluting alternatives, and considerably cheaper to develop than nuclear options.
hxrts 11y ago
Bruno Latour's response to this text can be found here: http://entitleblog.org/2015/06/27/fifty-shades-of-green-bruno-latour-on-the-ecomodernist-manifesto/ http://entitleblog.org/2015/06/27/fifty-shades-of-green-brun...
- astazangasta 11y ago
  To this I say: what's wrong with the e-cigarette? Why NOT have your cake and eat it, too, if you actually can? There is no virtue in meaningless asceticism.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    > "There is no virtue in meaningless asceticism." Quite right. As a side note, that's not the case with e-cigarettes, the health risks are largely unknown and there appears to be a fair amount of variation in the chemical composition of the different brands. Here's a level-headed article about some of the early studies into e-cigarette health risks: http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/electronic-cigarettes-help-or-hazard-201109223395 http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/electronic-cigarettes-hel...
  - jcranmer 11y ago
    The very first time I saw an e-cigarette was an infomercial on tv. Its central message was "now you can smoke in a non-smoking environment," which rather pissed me off. E-cigarettes probably aren't particularly healthy--they're certainly not sufficiently clearly so that manufacturers will try to market them as such.
oneJob 11y ago
See: Systems Theory Sometimes the greatest harm is born out of the most sincere intentions. Anything founded on false, internally inconsistent premises will fail. Often, the longer it takes to fail, the more harm is done. Like it or not, humans cannot completely extricate themselves from "nature", unless we are talking packing up and migrating every last human off Earth to Mars. That's not happening; this won't work. Come to grips with that sooner, not later.
ilaksh 11y ago
http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage

38 points by dtawfik1 11y ago

I'm sympathetic to this cause, but that introduction contains a lot of waffle. If the author is reading this, you can summarise the key driving forces for change as... 1. Cannot rely on infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources. 2. A better balance between human life and the rest of life on the planet relies on allowing nature to regrow without competing with human development. You don't need to have all the answers up front, the solution is going to evolve naturally once we agree on what why it's desirable to change and get the discussions going.

stevetrewick 11y ago
The authors summarise their disagreement with your 1 in TFA. Despite frequent assertions starting in the 1970s of fundamental “limits to growth,” there is still remarkably little evidence that human population and economic expansion will outstrip the capacity to grow food or procure critical material resources in the foreseeable future.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  So the suggestion is that because it hasn't been a problem for us already it won't be a problem in the foreseeable future? We can have an economy based on abundance rather than scarcity, but that's not going to be achieved overnight, the priority for now is to slow down the damage. To give an example, look at the problem of overfishing. Taking the attitude of the authors you could argue it's not causing us problems in the foreseeable future, but the longer we leave it the worse it gets, and our depletion of fish populations is directly linked to our consumption and growing our economy without addressing this problem is going to cause problems with decreasing the variety of life found in rivers, lakes, seas and oceans.
logicchains 11y ago
>Cannot rely on infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources. On a longer timescale this might not even be an issue if efficient technology is developed for interstellar travel and terraforming other planets.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  Why is a lack of infinite economic growth a problem? What do you hope to gain from it? As a side note, I'm all for space exploration, but I also appreciate why the prime directive from Star Trek is worth following.
  - DennisP 11y ago
    There are probably plenty of dead planets out there where the Prime Directive wouldn't apply. Or at least, plenty of dead asteroids that we can turn into orbital colonies.
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      I didn't say we wouldn't make use of other planets as places to live, but I believe we should respect the native life that almost certainly exists on some planets. I'm glad we're taking this attitude towards Mars at the moment, exploring but being careful not to bring Earth's lifeforms over to Mars to breed. In any case, my question still stands, what do you/we hope to gain from infinite economic growth?
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Personally, I don't think infinite economic growth will be a problem once we stop caring about it. Right now economic growth is something we measure and try to keep (and increase); e.g. some people look at the growth rates and try to create programs to make them go up. At some point I think we'll reach a level on which we can just stop caring and enjoy living. People will naturally want to improve lives for themselves and their children and yes, this would register as economic growth, but there's a significant difference between just observing it and trying to affect the metric on purpose.

avz 11y ago

One relatively new thought in the manifesto is the explicit disagreement with the old assertion that the finite resources of our planet cannot sustain continued economic growth. The fundamental reason why economic growth can continue at a fixed or even shrinking environmental footprint is that economic growth and environmental footprint measure different things. The former measures the creation of economic value while the latter measures the use of land and raw materials necessary to create that value. More and more economic value of what we consume derives not from land and raw materials but from human inputs like design, creativity, engineering and services. This means that a smaller amount of raw materials is necessary to produce one dollar of GDP than it used to. At the same time, more and more of the raw materials are reused via down-, re- or even up-cycling. In theory, a very sophisticated economy of a demographically stable society could thrive and grow entirely on a closed cycle of raw materials and fixed amount of land. Even if we don't get there we could still reduce our impact below environment's capacity for self-renewal. I think we must urgently stop the increase and soon begin shrinking our environmental footprint. The realization that there is no fundamental contradiction between continued economic growth (and all its perks including poverty reduction, scientific progress and continued human development) and the protection of our planet should highlight that this ambition is achievable.

stillsut 11y ago
Well for the U.S., agricultural production went from 90% of the population in 1860 to < 2% today. And we net export food. In developing countries, you're most likely to suffer a famine if you're a farmer. We can save the people, save the land, and grow the economy if we do this the right way. But it starts with acknowledging the fact that agriculture/ general "living off the land" as an individual is unsustainable with today's growth rates.
stevetrewick 11y ago
>More and more economic value of what we consume derives not from land and raw materials but from human inputs like design, creativity, engineering and services. This means that a smaller amount of raw materials is necessary to produce one dollar of GDP than it used to. Very much this. It isn't, however, a new insight to economics. That the limits to growth argument is a fallacy based on conflating increased value with increased resource use is standard economics but misunderstood by almost everyone else, hence the trend for physicists to write blog posts calling down derp on econ types. This is explored by Tim Harford in a piece on Freakonomics [0]. I would highly recommend Harford's book The Undercover Economist to anyone with even a passing interest in the field. It's one of those humbling books which demonstrates that everything you thought you knew about a subject was basically wrong. [0]http://freakonomics.com/2014/01/24/can-economic-growth-continue-forever-of-course/ http://freakonomics.com/2014/01/24/can-economic-growth-conti...

7952 11y ago

Given the understanding that the environment is unavoidably inked to humanity it seems a little doubtful that we can just decouple so absolutely. This is a common attitude in rural and urban planning where the world is neatly divided up into zones of urban, agriculture, industry, etc. Making room for nature in that kind of world is very difficult as it will always lead to a loss from another interests that are already in conflict with one another. It is particularly problematic in places like Sub-Saharan agriculture where people, nature, and agriculture are in such close proximity and these conflicts are a more of a social issue. I think it is better to have more fuzzy edges and make ecology an intrinsic part of development that people will want to defends. For example a new development should surrounded by a buffer of woodland/wetlands/grassland that will be valued by residents.

alexandrerond 11y ago

At least the writers confess they are moved by "deep love and emotional connection to the natural world". And from there I guess it's not too difficult to build up a dream that morally allows you to keep your current over-consuming habits which are trashing the planet, while claiming that you LOVE nature and at the same time not pissing off anyone by avoiding all politics to get in the mix. The ecological problem is a bit more complex that blind trust in technology and efficiency progress. Blind faiths, simplifications and master plans have added little (from ecomodernism to primitivism). The problems of democracy, discrimination and redistribution of wealth have a lot to say, but that's too tough for a cute little manifesto. They speak of technology "applied with wisdom", "with proper management". So I take that, until now, we have just mismanaged technology and applied it in dullest ways. Or I guess they have a secret plan on how to manage technology correctly from now on. Or perhaps they will come to realize that technology has and will always have a good and bad side, and that most of its consequences (good and bad) are often unforeseeable, and as such, hard to steer. Let's not even think of WHO actually controls technology. What's more, the "decoupling" of human well-being from human impact is a myth. The impact has just been transferred to third world countries where sure none of these ecomodernists live or probably ever visited. Lol when they take "New England" and "France" forests as examples. Any plans to bring up the 80% of undeveloped countries to the pace of the 20% with nice growing forests? None. This is the typical manifesto which is absolutely nothing new, sounds super nice, but changes nothing, provides nothing, and feels about right in the hands of the rich and ruling elites because it absolutely avoids to question any status-quo whatsoever.

DennisP 11y ago
Something they explicitly mention is nuclear power, which has a far smaller footprint on the environment than fossil fuels, but is often passed over by environmentalists wedded to a low-energy ideal.
- astazangasta 11y ago
  Environmentalists are not wedded to a low-energy ideal, they're wedded to a non-polluting one. Speaking for myself, I'd be happy with, say, a P-B aneutronic fusion system and would vastly prefer this over solar or wind. But we don't have this right now, and solar or wind are the least polluting alternatives, and considerably cheaper to develop than nuclear options.

hxrts 11y ago

Bruno Latour's response to this text can be found here: http://entitleblog.org/2015/06/27/fifty-shades-of-green-bruno-latour-on-the-ecomodernist-manifesto/ http://entitleblog.org/2015/06/27/fifty-shades-of-green-brun...

astazangasta 11y ago
To this I say: what's wrong with the e-cigarette? Why NOT have your cake and eat it, too, if you actually can? There is no virtue in meaningless asceticism.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  > "There is no virtue in meaningless asceticism." Quite right. As a side note, that's not the case with e-cigarettes, the health risks are largely unknown and there appears to be a fair amount of variation in the chemical composition of the different brands. Here's a level-headed article about some of the early studies into e-cigarette health risks: http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/electronic-cigarettes-help-or-hazard-201109223395 http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/electronic-cigarettes-hel...
- jcranmer 11y ago
  The very first time I saw an e-cigarette was an infomercial on tv. Its central message was "now you can smoke in a non-smoking environment," which rather pissed me off. E-cigarettes probably aren't particularly healthy--they're certainly not sufficiently clearly so that manufacturers will try to market them as such.

oneJob 11y ago

See: Systems Theory Sometimes the greatest harm is born out of the most sincere intentions. Anything founded on false, internally inconsistent premises will fail. Often, the longer it takes to fail, the more harm is done. Like it or not, humans cannot completely extricate themselves from "nature", unless we are talking packing up and migrating every last human off Earth to Mars. That's not happening; this won't work. Come to grips with that sooner, not later.

ilaksh 11y ago

http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage