The Environmental Debate, Third Edition

Politicizing the Environmental Debate, 2000–2017 269

Tasmanian tiger, and so on, as regrettable as

these events were, wasn’t the real mistake. It was

only the indicator of a deeper moral and cul-

tural malady.

Source: http://www.Slate.com/Dec. 2014/Ben Minteer, “Extinct

Species Should Stay Extinct: Why We Shouldn’t Depend

upon Technology to Turn Back the Clock.”

it would be to reverse the founding human mis-
take that inspired modern conservation.”
If only it were that easy.
But we can’t reverse the “founding human
mistake” by simply bringing back a few, or
even a few scores of lost species (as difficult as
that would be to pull off). That’s because wip-
ing out the passenger pigeon, the heath hen, the

Document 180: The Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015)

“An Ecomodernist Manifesto” is the work of 18 environmental activists, researchers, and philanthropists, most
of them associated with the Breakthrough Institute, including Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger (see
Document 156), Stewart Brand (see Document 179), and Mark Sagoff -(see Document 125). The tract is pro
technology, urbanization and urbanism, aquaculture, industrial agriculture, desalinization, and nuclear energy. It
puts forward the idea that humans need to embrace their impact on the environment and employ all the means in
their power to enable a more equitable division of the benefits of the modern world.

1
To say that the Earth is a human planet becomes
truer every day. Humans are made from the
Earth, and the Earth is remade by human hands.
Many earth scientists express this by stating that
the Earth has entered a new geological epoch:
the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans.
As scholars, scientists, campaigners, and cit-
izens, we write with the conviction that knowl-
edge and technology, applied with wisdom,
might allow for a good, or even great, Anthro-
pocene. A good Anthropocene demands that
humans use their growing social, economic, and
technological powers to make life better for peo-
ple, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural
world.
In this, we affirm one long-standing envi-
ronmental ideal, that humanity must shrink its
impacts on the environment to make more room
for nature, while we reject another, that human
societies must harmonize with nature to avoid
economic and ecological collapse.
These two ideals can no longer be recon-
ciled. Natural systems will not, as a general rule,
be protected or enhanced by the expansion of
humankind’s dependence upon them for suste-
nance and well-being.

Intensifying many human activities — par-

ticularly 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 envi-

ronmental 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.

Although we have to date written separately,

our views are increasingly discussed as a whole.

We call ourselves ecopragmatists and ecomod-

ernists....

Humanity has flourished over the past two

centuries. Average life expectancy has increased

from 30 to 70 years, resulting in a large and

growing population able to live in many differ-

ent environments. Humanity has made extraor-

dinary progress in reducing the incidence and

impacts of infectious diseases, and it has become

more resilient to extreme weather and other nat-

ural disasters.

Violence in all forms has declined signifi-

cantly and is probably at the lowest per capita

level ever experienced by the human species, the