Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [6]
Where ecotheology imagines that our ecological problems are the consequence of human violations of a separate “nature,” modernization theology views environmental problems as an inevitable part of life on Earth. Where the last generation of ecologists saw a natural harmony in Creation, the new ecologists see constant change. Where ecotheologians suggest that unintended consequences of human development might be avoidable, proponents of modernization view them as inevitable, and positive as often as negative. And where the ecological elites see the powers of humankind as the enemy of Creation, the modernists acknowledge them as central to its salvation.
Modernization theology should thus be grounded in a sense of profound gratitude to Creation — human and nonhuman. It should celebrate, not desecrate, the technologies that led our prehuman ancestors to evolve. Our experience of transcendence in the outdoors should translate into the desire for all humans to benefit from the fruits of modernization and be able to experience similar transcendence. Our valorization of creativity should lead us to care for our cocreation of the planet.
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The risks now faced by humanity are increasingly ones of our own making and ones over which we have only partial, tentative, and temporary control. Various kinds of liberation — from hard agricultural labor and high infant mortality rates to tuberculosis and oppressive traditional values — bring all kinds of new problems, from global warming and obesity to alienation and depression. These new problems will largely be better than the old ones, in the way that obesity is a better problem than hunger, and living in a hotter world is a better problem to have than living in one without electricity. But they are serious problems nonetheless.
The good news is that we already have many nascent, promising technologies to overcome ecological problems. Stabilizing greenhouse emissions will require a new generation of nuclear power plants to cheaply replace coal plants as well as, perhaps, to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and power desalination plants to irrigate and grow forests in today’s deserts. Pulling frontier agriculture back from forests will require massively increasing agricultural yields through genetic engineering. Replacing environmentally degrading cattle ranching may require growing meat in laboratories, which will gradually be viewed as less repulsive than today’s cruel and deadly methods of meat production. And the solution to the species extinction problem will involve creating new habitats and new organisms, perhaps from the DNA of previously extinct ones.
In attempting to solve these problems, we will inevitably create new ones. One common objection to technology and development is that it will bring unintended consequences, but life on Earth has always been a story of unintended consequences. The Venice floodgates offer a pointed illustration. Concerns raised by the environmental community that the floodgates would impact marine life have been borne out — only not in the way they had feared. Though the gates are still under construction, marine biologists have announced that they have already become host to many coral and fish species, some of which used to be found only in the southern Mediterranean or Red Sea.
Other critics of the gates have questioned what will happen if global warming should raise sea levels higher than the tops of the gates. If this should become inevitable, it is unlikely that Venetians would abandon their city. Instead they may attempt to raise it. One sweetly ironic proposal would levitate the city by blowing carbon dioxide emissions 2,000 feet below the lagoon floor. Some may call such strong faith in the technological fix an instance of hubris, but others will simply call it compassion.