Is the “Ecomodernist Manifesto” the Future of Environmentalism? By Michelle Nijhuis June 2, 2015 https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/is-the-ecomodernist-manifesto-the-future-of-environmentalism
Meet the ecomodernists: ignorant of history and paradoxically old-fashioned George Monbiot https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2015/sep/24/meet-the-ecomodernists-ignorant-of-history-and-paradoxically-old-fashioned The ecomodernists talk of “unproductive, small-scale farming” and claim that “urbanisation and agricultural intensification go hand in hand.” In other words, they appear to believe that smallholders, working the land in large numbers, produce lower yields than large farms.
Former smallholders, in other words, having left the land, will find employment in the formal economy, in urban jobs created by others. But it seldom works like this.
The economic miracles in South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and (with a long delay caused by Mao’s Great Leap Backwards) China were built on the back of land reform, that distributed land formerly owned by a tiny elite to a much wider proportion of the population. In these nations, people used the money they made from farming to diversify into small-scale industry. Their economic transformation was not handed down from on high but built up from below.
In many other parts of the developing world, rural depopulation has resulted not in a smooth transition to the formal urban economy, but in a highly precarious existence on the economic margins, and a reliance on the informal economy, much of which remains connected to family businesses in the countryside. What the economodernists describe as “relieving agricultural workers of a lifetime of hard physical labour” is experienced by millions as underemployment and desperate insecurity.
AN ECOMODERNIST MANIFESTO http://www.ecomodernism.org/ A MANIFESTO TO USE HUMANITY'S EXTRAORDINARY POWERS IN SERVICE OF CREATING A GOOD ANTHROPOCENE. the manisfesto https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5515d9f9e4b04d5c3198b7bb/t/552d37bbe4b07a7dd69fcdbb/1429026747046/An+Ecomodernist+Manifesto.pdf Intensifying many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry, and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world is the key to decoupling human development from environmental impacts. THese socioeconomic and technological processes are central to economic modernization and environmental protection. Together they allow people to mitigate climate change, to spare nature, and to alleviate global poverty
Cities occupy just one to three percent of the Earth’s surface and yet are home to nearly four billion people. As such, cities both drive and symbolize the decoupling of humanity from nature, performing far better than rural economies in providing efficiently for material needs while reducing environmental impacts.
The growth of cities along with the economic and ecological benefits that come with them are inseparable from improvements in agricultural productivity. As agriculture has become more land and labor efficient, rural populations have le the countryside for the cities. Roughly half the US population worked the land in 1880. Today, less than 2 percent does.
Taken together, these trends mean that the total human impact on the environment, including land-use change, overexploitation, and pollution, can peak and decline this century. By understanding and promoting these emergent processes, humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the Earth — even as developing countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty ends.
Urbanization, aquaculture, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, and desalination are all processes with a demonstrated potential to reduce human demands on the environment, allowing more room for non-human species.
Modernizing processes are far from complete, even in advanced developed economies. Material consumption has only just begun to peak in the wealthiest societies. Decoupling of human welfare from environmental impacts will require a sustained commitment to technological progress and the continuing evolution of social, economic, and political institutions alongside those changes.
Decoupling of human welfare from environmental impacts will require a sustained commitment to technological progress and the continuing evolution of social, economic, and political institutions alongside those changes.
Accelerated technological progress will require the active, assertive, and aggressive participation of private sector entrepreneurs, markets, civil society, and the state. While we reject the planning fallacy of the 1950s, we continue to embrace a strong public role in addressing environmental problems and accelerating technological innovation, including research to develop better technologies, subsidies, and other measures to help bring them to market, and regulations to mitigate environmental hazards. And international collaboration on technological innovation and technology transfer is essential in the areas of agriculture and energy