Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Recently an alternative approach to environmental protection has been championed by John Asafu-Adjaye, Jesse Ausubel, Andrew Balmford, Stewart Brand, Ruth DeFries, Nancy Knowlton, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, and others. It has been called Ecomodernism, Ecopragmatism, Earth Optimism, and the Blue-Green or Turquoise movement, though we can also think of it as Enlightenment Environmentalism or Humanistic Environmentalism.³

Ecomodernism begins with the realization that some degree of pollution is an inescapable consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. When people use energy to create a zone of structure in their bodies and homes, they must increase entropy elsewhere in the environment in the form of waste, pollution, and other forms of disorder. The human species has always been ingenious at doing this—that’s what differentiates us from other mammals—and it has never lived in harmony with the environment. When native peoples first set foot in an ecosystem, they typically hunted large animals to extinction, and often burned and cleared vast swaths of forest.⁴ A dirty secret of the conservation movement is that wilderness preserves are set up only after indigenous peoples have been decimated or forcibly removed from them, including the national parks in the United States and the Serengeti in East Africa.⁵ As the environmental historian William Cronon writes, “wilderness” is not a pristine sanctuary; it is itself a product of civilization.

When humans took up farming, they became more disruptive still. According to the paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman, the adoption of wet rice cultivation in Asia some five thousand years ago may have released so much methane into the atmosphere from rotting vegetation as to have changed the climate. “A good case can be made,” he suggests, that “the people in the Iron Age and even the late Stone Age had a much greater per-capita impact on the earth’s landscape than the average modern-day person.”⁶ And as Brand has pointed out (chapter 7), “natural farming” is a contradiction in terms. Whenever he hears the words natural food, he is tempted to rail:

No product of agriculture is the slightest bit natural to an ecologist! You take a nice complex ecosystem, chop it into rectangles, clear it to the ground, and hammer it into perpetual early succession! You bust its sod, flatten it flat, and drench it with vast quantities of constant water! Then you populate it with uniform monocrops of profoundly damaged plants incapable of living on their own! Every food plant is a pathetic narrow specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands of years to a state of genetic idiocy! Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!⁷

A second realization of the ecomodernist movement is that industrialization has been good for humanity.⁸ It has fed billions, doubled life spans, slashed extreme poverty, and, by replacing muscle with machinery, made it easier to end slavery, emancipate women, and educate children (chapters 7, 15, and 17). It has allowed people to read at night, live where they want, stay warm in winter, see the world, and multiply human contact. Any costs in pollution and habitat loss have to be weighed against these gifts. As the economist Robert Frank has put it, there is an optimal amount of pollution in the environment, just as there is an optimal amount of dirt in your house. Cleaner is better, but not at the expense of everything else in life.

The third premise is that the tradeoff that pits human well-being against environmental damage can be renegotiated by technology. How to enjoy more calories, lumens, BTUs, bits, and miles with less pollution and land is itself a technological problem, and one that the world is increasingly solving. Economists speak of the environmental Kuznets curve, a counterpart to the U-shaped arc for inequality as a function of economic growth. As countries first develop, they prioritize growth over environmental purity. But as they get richer, their thoughts turn to the environment.⁹ If people can afford electricity only at the cost of some smog, they’ll live with the smog, but when they can afford both electricity and clean air, they’ll spring for the clean air. This can happen all the faster as technology makes cars and factories and power plants cleaner and thus makes clean air more affordable.