At a yeasty site for deep-think environment writing one of the business's more pugnacious agitators today provides full-throated denunciation of the dominant, nature-hugging wing of environmental activism. It is worth reading for how he hammers his ideas home, and the many links to further information.
Yale e360 – Fred Pearce: New Green Vision: Technology As Our Planet's Last Best Hope ; Or, how to save the wild by minding our own business.
This the journalistic equivalent of a literature review, in that it gathers up info and hot spots already out there in the environmental wing of the chattering classes, and a call for action. His focus is on a growing clan that is green yet "pro-nuclear, pro-genetically modified crops, pro-megadams, pro-urbanization and pro-geoengineering of the planet to stave off climate change." His piece provides shouts-out that a lot of tracker readers might guess: Steward Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, and Mark Lynas. He left out Roger Pielke Jr., but you get the drift. The nostalgia-for-nature and small farms wing, aiming to live on the land lightly and typified by the jut-jawed Bill McKibben, are likely to get scant pleasure from Pearce's polemic.
The piece extolls a future human civilization not bent not on returning to nature, as so many with long-term survival in mind think necessary. Rather it foresees a brighter path: to turn our backs on nature. To be sure, he recognizes that elements of both instincts exist in the hearts of most environmental activists. The important point is that human footprint could actually shrink, but with the built world far more heavily built than today. We'd have little reliance on wild game (ocean fish) and forests or scattered organic farms, but be aggressively focussed on intense industrial agriculture, synthetic materials, skyscraping cities, and closed energy and materials loops. In turn we'd have less mining, less screwing around with the common atmosphere, and less sprawl. In return, we'd supposedly be able to designate larger, coherent piece of Earth to more or less find for themselves. Goodbye zoos, hello rewilding. you know, a real Buffalo Commons, big game migration trails stretching for hundreds of miles throughout the nation, wolves roaming Europe, a Siberian Pleistocene park. Maybe even some genetically revived species. Was that a passenger pigeon flapping past? Whoo, watch out, that saber-toothed cat is coming our way! Rather than reincorporating with nature and sharing the land with it, we're to spare a huge chunk altogether. We'd likely visit, but not take much home.
His passage on punctuated equilibrium, as devised by Stephen Jay Gould (and, one might add, Miles Eldridge) to expand Darwin's notion of biological evolution, is particularly fine. Here, it applies to economic and industrial evolution with capitalism the engine. Here's the line I like, as Pearce describes the work of Joseph Schumpeter, early-20th century economist. "Capitalism is drivfen not, as Adam Smith said, by incremntal efforts ot cut costs and boost profits in a competitive market, but by the pursuit of game-changing technological transformation."
Meaning of course that we got into our over-consumptive, CO2-belching mess thanks to such past disruptions as fossil combusting engines, mass production, the microcomputer, strip mining, chemical fertilizer production, and vast highway networks. A bunch more disruptive but planet (and human) friendly disruptions might get us out. He writes of the new movement's beliefs, "Existing conservation strategies simply do not work. Human activity spreads inexorably. What is needed is to use the land we take more intensively, so that more can stay unfenced."
We're gonna need a lot more patents.
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