Skip to main content

An Ecomodernist Manifesto

By June 14, 2015July 17th, 2015Uncategorized

18 Western Scientists have published their views on climate change and the future  on their website http://www.ecomodernism.org.. The introduction to their Ecomodernist Manifesto  states:

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 citizens, we write with the conviction that knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene. A good Anthropocene demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.

 In this, we affirm one long-standing environmental 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 scientists affirm that there is a technological solution to the problem of greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere. However they also acknowledge that there is currently no consensus as to how this is to be achieved.

They also make the point that we cannot turn back the clock and revert to a self-sufficient lifestyle. Over 50 % of us now live in urban areas. We are all dependent on the extra food supplied by the massive increase in agricultural efficiency that has occurred over the last 250 years.  There is simply not enough arable land on the planet for us to survive using the old inefficient farming methods.

They believe that the continued application of capitalism, science and humanistic values that has delivered so much health and alleviation of poverty in the last two hundred and fifty years can also solve the problems of the next 100 years. The current economic system just has to be controlled with the purpose of lessening its effects on the nature and the environment. In this they are taking a position opposite to Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything and the Green Party, who indentify capitalism as one of the causes of  global warming.

However, both the left and right, of those who accept climate change as a problem, give no hint as to how the solution is to be achieved. It is evolution, the competitive struggle between humans and communities of humans that drives society forward.  And evolution is blind; it has no purpose or direction. It is true that of all the species in the animal kingdom, only humans have the capability of altering the course of evolution.  However the over- exploitation of the planet will only cease if all peoples of the world are able   to unite  behind the great purpose of saving the planet for our children.  This will only happen with the world-wide promotion and acceptance of an eco-friendly philosophy of life.