Post-environmentalism: origins and evolution of a strange idea
Abstract
The publication of the Ecomodernist Manifesto in 2015 marked a high point for post-environmentalism, a set of ideas that reject limits and instead advocate urbanization, industrialization, agricultural intensification, and nuclear power to protect the environment. Where, how, and why did post-environmentalism come about? Might it influence developments in the future? We trace the origins of post-environmentalism to the mid-2000s in the San Francisco Bay Area and show how it emerged as a response to perceived failures of U.S. environmentalism. Through a discourse analysis of key texts produced by the primary actors of post-environmentalism, namely the Oakland, California-based Breakthrough Institute and its cofounders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, we show how the theory behind post-environmentalism mixes a deconstructionist trope familiar to political ecologists with a modernization core from liberal economics. We discuss the contradictions of post-environmentalist discourse and argue that despite its flaws, post-environmentalism can hold considerable sway because its politics align with powerful interests who benefit from arguing that accelerating capitalist modernization will save the environment. We conclude that political ecology has a much more nuanced take on the contradictions post-environmentalists stumble upon, disagreeing with those political ecologists who are choosing to ally with the agenda of the Manifesto.
Keywords: ecomodernism; ecological modernization; discourse analysis; environmental politics
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Anderson, K. and A. Bows-Larkin. 2013. Avoiding dangerous climate change demands de-growth strategies from wealthier nations. Comment on climate. https://kevinanderson.info/blog/avoiding-dangerous-climate-change-demands-de-growth-strategies-from-wealthier-nations/.
Asafu-Adjaye, J., C. Foreman, R. Pritzker, L. Blomqvist, D. Keith, J. Roy, M. Lewis, S. Brand, M. Sagoff, B. Brook, M. Lynas, M. Shellenberger, R. Defries, T. Nordhaus, R. Stone, E. Ellis, R. Pielke, Jr and P. Teague. 2015. An ecomodernist manifesto. Oakland: The Breakthrough Institute.
Bastani, A. 2019. Fully automated luxury communism. London: Verso.
Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Blaikie, P. and H.C. Brookfield. 1987. Land degradation and society. London: Methuen.
Blomqvist, L., T. Nordhaus and M. Shellenberger. 2015. Nature unbound - decoupling for conservation. Oakland, California: The Breakthrough Institute.
Buck, C.D. 2013. Post-environmentalism: an internal critique. Environmental Politics 22(6): 883–900.
Callahan, D. 2017. The givers: wealth, power, and philanthropy in a new gilded age. New York: Knopf.
Castree, N. 2014. Making sense of nature. New York: Routledge.
Castree, N. 2015. New thinking for a new Earth. Entitle. https://entitleblog.org/2015/11/30/new-thinking-for-a-new-earth/.
Collard, R.-C., J. Dempsey and J. Sundberg. 2015. A manifesto for abundant futures. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105(2): 322–330.
Collard, R.-C., J. Dempsey and J. Sundberg. 2016. The moderns' amnesia in two registers. Environmental Humanities 7(1): 227–232.
Collier, R. 2004. Venezuelan politics suit Bay Area activists' talents: locals help build Chavez's image, provide polling data. The San Francisco Chronicle 21 Aug.
Crist, E. 2016. The reaches of freedom: a response to 'An ecomodernist manifesto'. Environmental Humanities 7(1): 245–254.
Dryzek, J.S. 1992. Ecology and discursive democracy: beyond liberal capitalism and the administrative state. Capitalism Nature Socialism 3(2): 18–42.
Dryzek, J.S., R.B. Norgaard and D. Schlosberg. 2013. Climate-challenged society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dunlap, R.E. 2006. Show us the data: the questionable empirical foundations of "The death of environmentalism" thesis. Organization & Environment 19(1): 88–102.
Dunlap, R.E. and A.G. Mertig. 1997. Global environmental concern: an anomaly for postmaterialism. Social Science Quarterly 78(1): 24–29.
Environmental Progress. 2017. Why clean energy is in crisis. [accessed Sep 15 2017] http://www.environmentalprogress.org/why-clean-energy-is-in-crisis/.
Feng, K., S.J. Davis, L. Sun and K. Hubacek. 2015. Drivers of the US CO2 emissions 1997–2013. Nature Communications 6: 7714.
Forbes. 2016. Pritzker family. America's Richest Families. [accessed Mar 4 2018] https://www.forbes.com/profile/pritzker/.
Frank, A.G. 1966. The development of underdevelopment. Monthly Review 18(4): 17–31.
Frase, P. 2017. By any means necessary. Jacobin 15 Aug.
Funtowicz, S. and J.K. Ravetz. 2018. Post-normal science. In Castree, N., M. Hulme and J.D. Proctor (eds.). Companion to environmental studies. London: Routledge. Pp. 443–447.
Galluzzo, A. 2018. The singularity in the 1790s: toward a prehistory of the present with William Godwin and Thomas Malthus. b2o: an online journal 17 Sept.
Goldstein, J. 2018. Planetary improvement: cleantech entrepreneurship and the contradictions of green capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hamilton, C. 2016. The theodicy of the "good Anthropocene." Environmental Humanities 7(1): 233–238.
Harvey, D. 1996. Justice, nature and the geography of difference. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Harvey, D. 2001. Spaces of capital: towards a critical geography. London: Routledge.
Heynen, N.C., M. Kaika and E. Swyngedouw (eds.). 2006. In the nature of cities: urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism. London: Routledge.
Hornborg, A. 1998. Towards an ecological theory of unequal exchange: articulating world system theory and ecological economics. Ecological Economics 25(1): 127–136.
Horowitz, M. 2007. Two environmentalists anger their brethren. Wired 25 Sept.
Huber, M.T. 2019. Ecological politics for the working class. Catalyst: a Journal of Theory and Strategy 3(1).
Huber, M.T. 2019b. Ecosocialism: dystopian and scientific. Socialist Forum. Winter.
Inglehart, R. 1981. Post-materialism in an environment of insecurity. American Political Science Review 75(4): 880–900.
Isenhour, C. 2016. Unearthing human progress? Ecomodernism and contrasting definitions of technological progress in the Anthropocene. Economic Anthropology 3(2): 315–328.
Kallis, G. 2017. Socialism without growth. Capitalism Nature Socialism 30(2): 186-206.
Kallis, G. 2019. Limits: why Malthus was wrong and why environmentalists should care. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kallis, G. and H. March. 2015. Imaginaries of hope: the utopianism of degrowth. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105(2): 360–8.
Klein, J. 2008. Why Barack Obama is winning. Time. Oct. 22.
Klein, N. 2014. This changes everything: capitalism vs. the climate. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Kuznets, S. 1963. Quantitative aspects of the economic growth of nations: VIII. Distribution of income by size. Economic Development and Cultural Change 11(2, Part 2): 1–80.
Kysar, D.A. 2008. The consultants' republic. Harvard Law Review 121: 2041–2262.
Lakoff, G. 2004. Don't think of an elephant: progressive values and the framing wars—a progressive guide to action. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.
Lakoff, G. 2010. Why it matters how we frame the environment. Environmental Communication 4(1): 70–81.
Latour, B. 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. 2004. Politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. 2016. Fifty shades of green. Environmental Humanities 7(1): 219–225.
Lomborg, B. 2001. The skeptical environmentalist: measuring the real state of the world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lynas, M. 2015. Ecomodernism launch was a screw-up of impressive proportions. The Guardian, Sep 30.
Martínez-Alier, J. 2002. The environmentalism of the poor: a study of ecological conflicts and valuation. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Martínez-Alier, J., G. Munda and J. O'Neill. 1998. Weak comparability of values as a foundation for ecological economics. Ecological Economics 26(3): 277–286.
Mehta, L. (ed.). 2010. The limits to scarcity: contesting the politics of allocation. London: Routledge.
Nordhaus, T. 2016a. What is to be done? Trump and ecomodernism. Breakthrough Blog. https://thebreakthrough.org/articles/what-is-to-be-done.
Nordhaus, T. 2016b. Back from the energy future. Foreign Affairs.
Nordhaus, T. 2017a. Impossible environmentalism: green groups promote utopian fantasies. USA Today, Sep 7.
Nordhaus, T. 2017b. Debate is all to the good. but beware turning ecomodernism into a nuclear cargo cult... @TedNordhaus.
Nordhaus, T. 2018. Looooong Thread 1. @jamesonmcb recent post on Green New Deal and the case for public power has been delightfully disorienting for a lot of folks, especially those who don't know @thebti history that well.https://twitter.com/SamEBNHPR/status/1075451086918610946 …. @TedNordhaus.
Nordhaus, T. 2019a. The empty radicalism of the climate apocalypse. Issues in Science and Technology 35(4): 69–78.
Nordhaus, T. 2019b. Climate change requires big solutions. But baby steps are the only way to go. Foreign Policy. Summer.
Nordhaus, T. and M. Shellenberger. 2007. Break through: from the death of environmentalism to the politics of possibility. First edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Nordhaus, T. and M. Shellenberger. 2011. Evolve. Orion Magazine.
Nordhaus, T., M. Shellenberger and L. Blomqvist. 2015. George Monbiot is wrong to suggest small farms are best for humans and nature. The Guardian, 25 Sep.
Obama, B. 2011. Remarks by the President in State of Union Address.
Pauli, G.A. 2010. The blue economy: 10 years, 100 innovations, 100 million jobs. Taos, NM: Paradigm Publications.
Pellizzoni, L. 2018. The commons in the shifting problematization of contemporary society. Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia 2/2018.
Phillips, L. 2015. Austerity ecology and the collapse-porn addicts: a defence of growth, progress, industry and stuff. Winchester: Zero Books.
Phillips, L. and M. Rozworski. 2017. Planning the good Anthropocene. Jacobin 15 Aug.
Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the twenty-first century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pinker, S. 2018. Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. New York: Viking Press.
Robbins, P. 2012. Political ecology: a critical introduction. London: Wiley.
Robbins, P. 2016. Some combination of socialism, nuke power, de-extinction, cooperatives, nat gas & geo-engineering was what I had in mind. ;) @angarabaylari. @PaulRobbins15.
Robbins, P. 2018. Is less more … or is more less? Scaling the political ecologies of the future. Plenary, the POLLEN conference, Oslo, June 2018. Video.
Robbins, P. 2019 in press. Is less more … or is more less? Scaling the political ecologies of the future. Political Geography 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.04.010.
Robbins, P. and S.A. Moore. 2015. Love your symptoms: a sympathetic diagnosis of the Ecomodernist Manifesto. Entitle blog 19 June.
Rostow, W.W. 1960. The stages of economic growth: a non-Communist manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Salleh, A. 1997. Ecofeminism as politics. Nature, Marx and the postmodern. London: Zed Books.
Selden, T.M. and D. Song. 1994. Environmental quality and development: is there a Kuznets curve for air pollution emissions? Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 27(2): 147–162.
Shellenberger, M. 2017. Why I changed my mind about nuclear power. TEDx Berlin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak
Shellenberger, M. 2018. California for all: my plan to save our state. Gubernatorial campaign platform, CA.
Shellenberger, M. 2019. Why renewables can't save the planet. Quillette 27 Feb.
Shellenberger, M. and T. Nordhaus. 2004. The death of environmentalism: global warming politics in a post-environmental world. Oakland, CA: The Breakthrough Institute.
Shellenberger, M. and T. Nordhaus. 2015. Want to save the planet? Say bye-bye to nature: Column. USA Today, 22 Apr.
Sletto, B. 2008. The knowledge that counts: institutional identities, policy science and the conflict over fire management in the Gran Sabana, Venezuela. World Development 36(10): 1938–1955.
Stern, D.I. 2004. The rise and fall of the environmental Kuznets curve. World Development 32(8): 1419–1439.
Sullivan, S. 2017. What's ontology got to do with it? On nature and knowledge in a political ecology of the ‘green economy'. Journal of Political Ecology 24(1): 217–242.
Swyngedouw, E. 2010. Apocalypse forever? Theory, Culture & Society 27(2–3): 213–232.
Symons, J. 2019. Ecomodernism: technology, politics and the climate crisis. Cambridge: Polity.
Szerszynski, B. 2016. Getting hitched and unhitched with the ecomodernists. Environmental Humanities 7(1): 239–244.
Temper, L., D. del Bene and J. Martinez-Alier. 2015. Mapping the frontiers and front lines of global environmental justice: the EJAtlas. Journal of Political Ecology 22(1): 255–278.
Vogel, S. 2016. Thinking like a mall: environmental philosophy after the end of nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wallerstein, I. 2004. World-systems analysis: an introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Worden, L. 2012. Counterculture, cyberculture, and the Third Culture: reinventing civilization, then and now. In Boal, I., J. Stone, M.J. Watts and C. Winslow (eds.). West of Eden: communes and utopia in northern California. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2458/v26i1.23238
