When Have Humans Ever Looked At Something We Need, Or Just Want, And Just Walked Away?

[hatrack]

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The EcoModernists embrace the Anthropocene, but insist they do not believe Homo sapiens are at the center of everything. They love nature, they claim, and seek to create a human society so technologically advanced that there would be no need to raid the wild. In the EcoModernist view, it’s best to ramp up the rural exodus that’s already underway and concentrate ourselves in cities. Our urban efficiency would enable us to leave those places of extraction alone—to, as they write in their manifesto, “liberate the environment from the economy.” In our absence, it would thrive.

When the manifesto authors write, “cities both drive and symbolize the decoupling of humanity from nature,” they are partly right. At my Oregon barn, days would be filled with splitting and stacking the wood that fueled my stove, which cooked most of my food and heated my indoor space, along with the water in my outdoor shower thorough the long wet winters. Wood stoves are smoky and inefficient, horrible carbon emitters, but splitting the wood and stoking the fire kept me connected to the source. When I moved to New York, my illegal sublet didn’t even have a thermostat. I had no control over the temperature that broiled the small space, forcing me to crack open windows in the middle of blizzards. Yet my heat came from somewhere beyond the walls of my urban apartment. So it seems dreamy to believe that people might all move to the cities and no longer rely on any of the stuff “out there”—in the future habitat of the wooly mammoths—to keep us going.

The EcoModernists maintain that it’s wholly possible for humans to stay on one side of a boundary while wild things blossom in peace on the other, rejecting the idea that to avoid economic and ecological collapse, humans need to cooperate with nature. But when have humans ever looked at something we need, or even just want, and walked away? By some accounts, ninety-six elephants are poached every day in Africa, solely for their long, tapered tusks, a luxury coveted but useless. The self-importance of humans isn’t new. It bloomed, arguably, during the Enlightenment, when we began to figure out how the world works, the aura of mystery tumbling away from lightning strikes and earthquakes to reveal the mechanics underneath. In 1820, the English poet John Keats lamented our audacity when he wrote that science might as well “unweave a rainbow.” In 1968, environmentalist (and EcoModernist) Stewart Brand published the inaugural Whole Earth Catalog, the instruction manual for a new generation of do-it-yourselfers, writing: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

Yet we are not omniscient. Everything we learn today reveals what we didn’t know yesterday. We have indeed solved some of what the EcoModernists call wicked problems: We live longer. Fewer of us perish in childbirth. We know how to ward off epidemics by washing our hands, and how to unleash the power of antibiotics. But we have yet to figure out how to get this basic information to an appalling large segment of the human population—or why we should, when there is no money to be made. And many of these solutions merely resolve problems of our own making. So while the optimism was feverish at the Breakthrough Dialogue, after two days there I’d gone cold. God was dead in Sausalito. I didn’t mind that part, but what troubled me was how casually we’d usurped the duties we’d once ascribed to the deity. Among the EcoModernists, there was no sense of deep ecology. There was no acknowledgement of the iron law of unintended consequences. There was no humility.

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[daleanime]

1. kick, kick, kick....