In the decade that followed, we discovered a whole world of
researchers, scholars, and writers who were leveling similar critiques
as ours. Constructing a new ecological politics required first that we
deconstruct the old politics. Together with our Senior Fellows and other
friends and allies, we have done a lot of critical analysis of the old
environmental paradigm over the past 10 years.
From that, a new and relatively coherent way of thinking about energy
and the environment has gradually emerged. This week, a group of 18
environmental scientists, activists, and scholars, including the two of
us, coauthored An Ecomodernist Manifesto, a 25-page essay that can be downloaded or read online.
The manifesto offers an affirmative and optimistic vision for a future
in which we can have universal human development, freedom, and more
nature through continued technological and social modernization.The manifesto affirms the traditional environmentalist view that we should endeavor to shrink the human footprint to leave more Earth for nature. But it breaks from the idea that our goal should be harmonizing society with nature. Instead, the authors argue, our goal should be to increasingly "de-couple" human development from natural resource use.
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.
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