Ecomodernism
Based on Wikipedia: Ecomodernism
What if the way to save nature is not to return to it, but to leave it behind entirely?
That provocative question sits at the heart of ecomodernism, an environmental philosophy that has been sparking heated debates since it burst onto the scene in the mid-2010s. Unlike traditional environmentalism, which often emphasizes living in harmony with nature, reducing consumption, and respecting ecological limits, ecomodernism makes a counterintuitive bet: that humanity's best chance of protecting the natural world lies in doubling down on technology, urbanization, and economic growth.
The core idea is something economists call decoupling. Imagine you could keep improving people's lives—better healthcare, more education, higher incomes—while simultaneously reducing the strain on forests, oceans, and the atmosphere. For most of human history, these two goals seemed fundamentally at odds. More people living better meant more land cleared for farms, more trees felled for fuel, more rivers dammed for power.
Ecomodernists argue that this tragic tradeoff is not inevitable. They point to emerging evidence that in some wealthy countries, the link between prosperity and environmental destruction has already begun to weaken. The trick, they say, is to intensify this process through deliberate technological choices.
The Nuclear Question That Started It All
Ecomodernism did not emerge from abstract theorizing. It was born from frustration.
Many of its early proponents watched with growing dismay as mainstream environmental organizations campaigned against nuclear power—a carbon-free energy source—while the practical result was increased reliance on natural gas and continued emissions. Germany's Energiewende, its ambitious energy transition policy, became a cautionary tale. Despite massive investments in solar and wind, the country's decision to shut down nuclear plants meant it remained heavily dependent on fossil fuels far longer than necessary.
This experience crystallized a question that would define ecomodernism: What if well-meaning environmentalists were accidentally making things worse?
The researchers and writers who would eventually coalesce around ecomodernist ideas came from a variety of backgrounds. Jesse Ausubel, a scientist at Rockefeller University, had been tracking long-term trends showing that developed economies were gradually using less land and fewer materials per unit of economic output. Vaclav Smil, the prolific Czech-Canadian energy analyst, had documented how technological improvements were steadily reducing the resource intensity of modern life. Stewart Brand, the countercultural icon who created the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1960s, had undergone his own evolution, coming to see cities and nuclear power as environmental solutions rather than problems.
What united these thinkers was a commitment to evidence over ideology. They wanted to know what actually worked to protect nature, not what felt right or aligned with preexisting political commitments.
The Manifesto
In April 2015, eighteen self-described ecomodernists published a document that would give the movement its name and clearest articulation. The signatories included scholars from the Breakthrough Institute (a California-based think tank that had become the movement's intellectual home), Harvard University, Jadavpur University in India, and the Long Now Foundation.
The Ecomodernist Manifesto made bold claims. It argued that humanity should deliberately shrink its environmental footprint not by limiting growth, but by concentrating human activity in ways that leave more room for wild nature. The path forward, they wrote, lay through technology, not around it.
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.
This was a direct challenge to decades of environmental thinking. Since at least the 1970s, a powerful current in the movement had emphasized limits—limits to growth, limits to consumption, limits to human ambition itself. Books like "The Limits to Growth" and "Small Is Beautiful" had argued that industrial civilization was on a collision course with planetary boundaries.
The ecomodernists said: what if those limits are not fixed? What if technology can push them back?
The Ecomodernist Toolkit
So what does ecomodernism actually look like in practice? The manifesto and subsequent writings outlined an ambitious technological agenda.
Start with food. Traditional agriculture is the single largest human alteration of the planet's surface. We have converted roughly half of Earth's habitable land to farming and grazing. Ecomodernists argue for intensification: using high-tech farming methods to produce more food on less land. This includes precision agriculture, where sensors and data analytics optimize every input. It includes vertical farms that stack crops in climate-controlled buildings, using a fraction of the water and land of conventional farming. It includes genetically modified crops engineered for higher yields and disease resistance. And increasingly, it includes cellular agriculture—growing meat directly from animal cells without raising and slaughtering livestock.
The goal is not technology for its own sake. The goal is land sparing. If we can produce the same amount of food on half the farmland, the other half can return to forest, prairie, and wetland.
Energy follows similar logic. Ecomodernists strongly favor nuclear power, which produces vast amounts of electricity from tiny amounts of fuel with zero carbon emissions during operation. A single nuclear plant occupies perhaps a square kilometer while generating power equivalent to thousands of wind turbines spread across hundreds of square kilometers. This matters because energy infrastructure itself has an environmental footprint. The most land-sparing path to decarbonization, ecomodernists argue, runs through the atom.
They also embrace renewable energy, though with caveats about its land intensity. Solar and wind have improved dramatically and deserve massive deployment. But in a world serious about both climate change and biodiversity, nuclear power should not be off the table.
Urbanization is another pillar. Cities have an environmental reputation problem, conjuring images of smog, traffic, and concrete sprawl. But ecomodernists point out that city dwellers typically have smaller carbon footprints than their rural counterparts. They live in smaller spaces, drive less, share infrastructure more efficiently. Perhaps more importantly, dense cities concentrate human activity, leaving more countryside for nature. The most pro-wildlife thing many people can do, from this perspective, is move to a city.
The technological wish list extends further: desalination to reduce pressure on freshwater ecosystems, advanced recycling and circular economy systems, carbon capture to pull greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, artificial intelligence to optimize resource use, and even climate engineering—deliberate interventions in Earth's climate system—as a potential emergency measure.
What Ecomodernism Is Not
To understand ecomodernism, it helps to see what it opposes.
It is not degrowth. Degrowth advocates argue that wealthy countries must deliberately shrink their economies to achieve sustainability. Ecomodernists reject this, arguing that economic growth is compatible with environmental protection and remains essential for lifting billions out of poverty.
It is not population reduction. While some environmentalists have emphasized the need to stabilize or reduce human numbers, ecomodernists focus on technology and efficiency rather than demographic constraints. They note that population growth is already slowing as countries develop and women gain education and economic opportunity.
It is not laissez-faire economics. Despite accusations from critics, most ecomodernists call for substantial government investment in clean energy research, infrastructure, and deployment. The Breakthrough Institute has been particularly vocal about the need for public funding of energy innovation.
It is not what Stewart Brand memorably called the "soft energy path"—the vision of decentralized, small-scale, renewable energy that captured the imagination of 1970s environmentalists. Ecomodernists are skeptical of this romanticism. They argue that serious decarbonization requires large-scale, high-density energy sources, whether nuclear or concentrated renewables.
And it is not a return to nature. This is perhaps the deepest philosophical divide. Many environmentalists see humanity as part of nature, believe we should live within ecological limits, and value wilderness as something sacred and irreplaceable. Ecomodernists tend to see humanity as increasingly separate from nature—and argue that this separation should be embraced and accelerated. The less we depend on natural systems for our material needs, the more of those systems we can leave alone.
The Critics Strike Back
Ecomodernism has provoked sharp criticism from across the political spectrum.
From the left, critics argue that the movement ignores questions of power, inequality, and exploitation. Holly Jean Buck, an environmental scholar, points out that technological modernization has historically been "exploitative, violent and unequal." The industrial revolution that ecomodernists celebrate was built on colonialism, extraction, and the brutal exploitation of workers. Why should we expect the next round of modernization to be different?
Eileen Crist, a sociologist, offers a more philosophical critique. She argues that ecomodernism is built on an arrogant humanism that treats the nonhuman world as mere resources for human use. The Ecomodernist Manifesto, she notes, barely mentions the ongoing mass extinction of species—"a startling omission for an eco manifesto." From her perspective, ecomodernism represents the same worldview that created our environmental crisis, now dressed up in green language.
The degrowth economists published their own detailed response, arguing that the ecomodernists "provide neither a very inspiring blueprint for future development strategies nor much in the way of solutions to our environmental and energy woes." They remain skeptical that decoupling can happen fast enough, at a large enough scale, to prevent catastrophic climate change and ecological collapse.
Bruno Latour, the influential French philosopher of science, made a different argument at a Breakthrough Institute conference. The whole concept of "modernity" that ecomodernism celebrates, he suggested, is itself a myth—a story we tell ourselves that obscures the messy entanglements between humans and nature that have always existed and always will.
The environmental journalist George Monbiot has been particularly scathing. In an essay titled "Meet the ecomodernists: ignorant of history and paradoxically old-fashioned," he argued that the movement's faith in technology serves to justify continued growth and consumption. As countries become richer and more urbanized, he noted, their citizens often become less concerned about environmental impacts, not more. Ecomodernism, in his telling, provides a sophisticated rationalization for ignoring inconvenient ecological realities.
The Deeper Divide
At its heart, the debate over ecomodernism reflects a deeper disagreement about human nature and our place in the world.
Ecomodernists are optimists about technology. They believe that the same ingenuity that created our environmental problems can solve them. They look at the arc of history and see a species that has repeatedly overcome apparent limits through innovation. When we ran short of whale oil, we invented kerosene. When horses could no longer move us fast enough, we built automobiles. When the ozone layer began to thin, we banned chlorofluorocarbons and it started to heal. Why should climate change and biodiversity loss be any different?
Their critics see this optimism as dangerous naivety—or worse, as ideology masquerading as pragmatism. Clive Hamilton, in his book "Growth Fetish," argues that faith in technological salvation is essential to the reproduction of capitalism. It allows us to believe we can have endless growth on a finite planet, conveniently avoiding questions about who benefits and who pays the costs. Rob Wallace warns of "red washing capital"—using the promise of future socialist technology to justify the destructive technologies of the present.
Chris Smaje, writing on the Dark Mountain website, puts it bluntly: the modernization that ecomodernists celebrate "may have liberated many people from bondage, oppression and hard labour, but it has also subjected many to the same forces." The benefits of technological progress have never been evenly distributed. Why should we expect clean energy and precision agriculture to be different?
The Uncomfortable Questions
Neither side in this debate has fully satisfying answers to some uncomfortable questions.
For ecomodernists: If technology is the answer, why has technological progress so far coincided with accelerating extinction rates, rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and collapsing fish stocks? Decoupling may be happening in some metrics in some rich countries, but global environmental indicators continue to worsen. How long can we wait for the promised technological solutions while the damage accumulates?
For their critics: If not technology and growth, then what? Degrowth in wealthy countries might be morally defensible, but what about the billions of people who still lack basic necessities? Should they be denied the improvements in life expectancy, education, and material comfort that industrialization has brought to the rich world? And if limits are real and binding, how do we make the decisions about who gets what?
Perhaps the most challenging question cuts across the debate entirely: What kind of world do we actually want?
Ecomodernists envision a future of gleaming cities, vertical farms, and nuclear power plants, with restored wilderness just beyond the urban edge—a high-tech garden carefully managed by humanity. Their critics imagine something different: perhaps smaller-scale communities more directly connected to the land they inhabit, or perhaps something we cannot yet imagine, born from a fundamental transformation in how humans relate to the rest of life on Earth.
These are not purely technical questions that can be resolved by more data or better models. They are questions about values, about meaning, about what makes a human life worth living and a planet worth preserving.
Where Things Stand
Ecomodernism remains a minority position in the environmental movement, but its influence has grown. Some of its ideas—particularly around nuclear power and high-tech agriculture—have gained traction as climate change has become more urgent. The recognition that wealthy countries need massive investments in clean energy innovation has become mainstream, even if the ecomodernist label has not.
Meanwhile, the Breakthrough Institute continues its work, and a newer organization called WePlanet has spread ecomodernist ideas internationally. Academic debates continue in journals and at conferences. And the questions that ecomodernism raises—about technology, nature, progress, and limits—show no signs of being resolved anytime soon.
Perhaps that is as it should be. The challenges of the twenty-first century—climate change, mass extinction, feeding ten billion people—are genuinely hard. They probably require both the technological optimism that ecomodernists champion and the critical attention to power and inequality that their opponents emphasize. The debate itself may be more valuable than either side winning.
What seems clear is that we cannot simply return to some imagined premodern harmony with nature. That world, if it ever existed, is gone. Eight billion people cannot live as hunter-gatherers. The question is not whether to use technology, but which technologies, deployed how, governed by whom, for whose benefit.
Ecomodernists have one answer to that question. Their critics have others. The Earth, spinning through space with its thin film of life clinging to the surface, waits to see which visions we choose to pursue—and which consequences we are willing to accept.