This week in Environmental Studies, we examined four essays from the ebook Love Your Monsters, a compilation of technologically optimistic challenges to classical environmental thought. The book begins with the essay “Evolve” by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, that heavily criticizes traditional environmentalism as elitist ecotheology, positions all human development as natural, and recommends “replacing the antiquated notion that human development is antithetical to the preservation of nature with the view that modernization is the key to saving it” (216-217). They conclude by offering nuclear power, geoengineering, desalination plants, genetic engineering, and lab grown meat as the answers to our most pressing current ecological problems. With these prescriptions for modernity’s ills, Nordhaus and Shellenberger are making a very deliberate stand against environmentalism, advocating the solutions most offensive to traditional “green” values. Their controversial statements stand with few facts to back them up, and they brush over complex debates about these solutions’ costs and negative effects with platitudes about unintended consequences being inevitable and frequently positive. Siddhartha Shome’s essay, “The New India Versus the Global Green Brahmins,” takes a similarly overwhelmingly positive view of modernization, seeing it as inevitable and finally breaking the caste system’s cycle of desperate poverty. Like Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Shome spends quite a bit of the essay polemicizing against traditional green movements, criticizing Western and Indian environmentalists as distant elites, glorifying the poverty of others. Additionally, Shome attacks icons of environmentalism and local sustainability, claiming the tree-huggers of the Chipko movement were fighting for their economic well-being, and that Gandhi and Shiva reinforced the Indian caste system.
The essays by Bruno Latour and Erle Ellis, “Love Your Monsters,” and “The Planet of No Return,” offered more nuance and a less confrontational tone, though they were still firmly situated within the technological optimism of the compilation. Latour’s essential argument is that humanity must not turn away from technology in the face of the ecological problems it has caused, and rather must love this monster we have created for the good of the Earth. He argues that the idea of a nature separate from humans (from both an environmentalist and a modernist viewpoint) is false. While he sharply condemns the notion of technological stagnation and a deliberate minimization of humanity’s footprint, Latour also offers a criticism of the failures of modernist emancipation, stating, “It was simply too limited: it excluded nonhumans. It did not care about unexpected consequences; it was unable to follow through with its responsibilities; it entertained a wholly unrealistic notion of what science and technology had to offer… and a totally absurd notion of what creation, innovation, and mastery could provide (409-411). Erle Ellis focused on the notion of an Anthropocene, “a new geological epoch shaped by humans (676). He argues that neo-Malthusian models are fundamentally flawed, ignoring the ability of humans to extract ever more intensively and productively over time. In his view, “as far as food and other basic resources are concerned, we remain far from any physically determined limits to the growth and sustenance of our populations. For better or for worse, humans appear fully capable of continuing to support a burgeoning population by engineering and transforming the planet” (759-761).