Why should we simplify and downscale?
Most Deep Greens would tend to agree with a sentiment like that expressed in an article last week by Ben Ehrenreich:
https://newrepublic.com/article/161575/climate-change-effects-hurtling-toward-global-suicide
“We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide” . . . why we must do everything differently to ensure the planet’s survival.
But there is a valid debate with others who see things quite differently. They call themselves “eco-modernists,” and they believe humanity can solve the ecological (and social and economic) challenges we face by continuing on with “progress and development,” focusing on the best of the civilizational trajectories that have brought us to the Anthropocene, arguing that humans can protect nature and improve human well-being by developing technologies that decouple development from environmental impacts. Not simplification, but rather intensification of our activities can reduce harmful impacts. Technologies commonly recommended by eco-modernists include precision agriculture, microbial fertilizers, synthetic meat, genetically modified foods, electric vehicles, desalination and waste recycling, urbanization, carbon dioxide removal technologies, nuclear power plants and renewables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecomodernism
Their “Ecomodernist Manifesto” says: “To the degree to which there are fixed physical boundaries to human consumption, they are so theoretical as to be functionally irrelevant. The amount of solar radiation that hits the Earth, for instance, is ultimately finite but represents no meaningful constraint upon human endeavors. Human civilization can flourish for centuries and millennia on energy delivered from a closed uranium or thorium fuel cycle, or from hydrogen-deuterium fusion. With proper management, humans are at no risk of lacking sufficient agricultural land for food. Given plentiful land and unlimited energy, substitutes for other material inputs to human well-being can easily be found if those inputs become scarce or expensive.”
Let’s just conjecture that they could be more right than the eco-catastrophists. Between natural eco-self-regulation and human attention to the problems (and the pending population plateau due to the demographic transition) maybe ten billion people could live at the consumption level of today’s average middle-class American.
In order to do so, avoiding habitat destruction, most humans would have to live in high-tech megalopolis clusters.
* * * *
I think that’s a vision of an inherently alienated and solipsistic world. It’s too crowded, busy, noisy, mechanistic; too technology-dependent. It’s too hard to sustain.
It would be interesting if we could run an experiment where we see the two visions play out over a period of several centuries. Could eco-modernism possibly be objectively viable? If so, could it possibly be subjectively satisfactory?
My own focus tends to be on the latter question.
I just don’t like our lifeways. I think we need to go in the other direction.
