Humans have been changing Earth’s landscapes at globally significant levels for at least 3000 years, and doing so by increasingly productive and efficient means, according to our new research challenging the claim that use of land by industrial civilization is destroying planetary ecology at an accelerating pace.

In the late sixties, India was the poster child of Third World poverty. In 1965, the monsoon rains failed to arrive, food production crashed, and much of the country was on the brink of starving. Asked for help, President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have told an aide, "I'm not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems." Johnson came around, but by the end of the decade India was viewed in the West as, at best, a basket case and, at worst, a "population bomb" that threatened the entire planet.

I think the controversy over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) represents one of the greatest science communications failures of the past half-century. Millions, possibly billions, of people have come to believe what is essentially a conspiracy theory, generating fear and misunderstanding about a whole class of technologies on an unprecedentedly global scale.

The idea that we are collectively on the brink of overstepping “planetary boundaries” that will render civilization unsustainable has been prominently propounded by a group of scholars around Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. In common with other scientific catastrophists, Rockström et al make much of the claim by Nobel prizewinning chemist, Paul Crutzen (2002) that the earth has entered a new geological period, the Anthropocene “in which human actions have become the main driver of global change” that “could see human activities push the Earth system outside the stable environment state of the Holocene with consequences that are detrimental or even catastrophic for large parts of the world” (Rockström et al 2009:472). A few sentences further on they assert that:

That women are the caretakers of a society’s virtue and morals might be one of the few ideas historically that can rival, in power and persistence, the idea of nature as the authentic source of virtue. It’s as if Rachel Carson stands between the meanings of women and the meanings of nature, and both radiate virtue towards and around her in a kind of closed system.

And this powerful vision of nature, as the central environmentalist trope has gotten us far. But it is long past time to move it away, to dislodge it, from the center of environmentalism. We owe so much to Rachel Carson. But I don’t think that her vision of nature can ultimately sustain a culture of environmentalism that will effectively arm us to create the clean, healthy world, full of healthy wild things and places, as well as healthy people.

Environmentalism is no longer about saving nature alone: increasingly, it's about saving people given their dependencies on nature (witness the sustainability movement) and since environmental problems are often symptoms of deeper social problems (witness dumping in Dixie). Yet concepts of nature still suffuse the movement—perhaps no longer just wilderness, national parks, and Gaia, but also a spirit of wildness, community gardens, and an optimal 350-ppm-CO2 atmosphere. It is not surprising that manifold notions of nature are found throughout contemporary environmentalism, since that is what environment means to most people.

Writing at the Huffington Post UK, Melissa Leach, director of the STEPS Centre at Sussex University, asks a provocative question:

When the cover of the Economist famously announced 'Welcome to the anthropocene' a couple of years ago, was it welcoming us to a new geological epoch, or a dangerous new world of undisputed scientific authority and anti-democratic politics?

The occasion for raising this question was Leach's participation last month in a United Nations meeting of experts on the development of new sustainable development goals. Leach describes a meeting in which scientific authority was invoked as the basis for closing down debates over policy and asserting the preeminent roles of experts in charting a course for future global development.

Almost every environmentalist would answer “yes” — and have pugnaciously strong opinions about what we should do (or stop doing) to avoid crossing such lines. But what does science tell us about Earth’s limits? Which are really science-based? Can innovation stretch any of them? Are they even useful for motivating policymaking and behavior change?

A world-class panel of scientists grappled with these questions last Thursday’s during “The Limits of the Planet: A Debate” — the final forum in this year’s “Nature and Our Future” discussion series, sponsored by The Nature Conservancy and held at The New York Academy of Sciences headquarters in lower Manhattan.

Breakthrough Senior Fellow Bruno Latour, the French anthropologist and sociologist, has been announced as the winner of the 2013 Holberg International Memorial Prize, one of the most distinguished awards in the arts and humanities. The prize committee recognized Latour as a “creative” and “unpredictable” scholar who has “undertaken an ambitious analysis and reinterpretation of modernity, challenging the most fundamental categories such as the distinction between modern and pre-modern, nature and society, human and non-human.”

Biofortification is particularly useful for reaching the rural poor who grow the food they consume, and are therefore largely outside the reach of food fortification programmes, which work best in urban areas where most food is purchased in markets. Unlike supplements, biofortified vitamin A-enriched food and crops will continue to protect children from deficiencies in a sustainable way at little extra cost as they are harvested each year.

Michael Shellenberger, president and cofounder of the Breakthrough Institute, made the case for a new environmentalism on the Colbert Report last week.

The new environmentalism is defined by its embrace of technology as essential to human progress and overcoming environmental challenges such as climate change.

“That’s why we wrote this book — it’s called Love Your Monsters. It comes from this idea that we should treat our technologies like our children, like our creations,” Shellenberger explained. “When they fail us — when they disappoint us — you don’t abandon them, you improve them. You make them better.”

A Lecture to the Oxford Farming Conference on January 3, 2013.

I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

Linus Blomqvist, Director of Conservation and Development, will be speaking at the New York Academy of Sciences on Thursday, March 21st.

The last year has been an exciting one for the Breakthrough Institute. We grew to 30 Senior Fellows and 50 Breakthrough Generation Fellows, hired new staff and hosted our second annual Breakthrough Dialogue. We launched our revamped digital home at The Breakthrough. And we continued to make the case for the critical importance of innovation to environmental quality and economic growth, shaping public debates over the future of clean energy, the planetary boundaries paradigm, shale gas, carbon taxes, nuclear energy, and much more.

A growing movement of “modernist greens,” made up of cutting edge scientists and thinkers, innovative activists and policy experts, has reimagined environmentalism over the past decade and is today actively creating a powerful new ecological politics for the twenty-first century.

These efforts, profiled expertly by former Audubon editor Keith Kloor last week in Slate, are fashioning a “radical departure from the nature-centric framework that has long dominated environmental politics and policy.”

It is virtually impossible to discuss manufacturing, energy, infrastructure and related subjects from what I consider a center-left perspective without being challenged by anti-industrial or post-industrial Luddites who claim that the genuine progressive position is an amalgam of Mathusian anti-consumerism and energy austerity, often combined with support for old-fashioned, premodern methods of making artifacts and growing food.  I had thought that this debate was limited to the liberal left, and was surprised to learn, from an interview with Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa, that a similar debate occurs within the less familiar (to me) circles of the radical left.

Jeremy Grantham, a well-known presence in the financial world, recently published a World View column in the journal Nature in which he concludes that, “simply, we are running out’’ of almost all commodities whose consumption sustains modern civilization. There is nothing new about such claims, and since the emergence of a vocal global peak oil movement during the late 1990s, many other minerals have been added to the endangered list. Indeed, there is now a book called Peak Everything. What makes Grantham’s column – published under the alarmist headline “Be Persuasive. Be Brave. Be Arrested (If Necessary)” – worth noticing, and deconstructing, is that he puts his claims in terms more suitable for tabloids than for one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific weekly magazines.

I have criticized him before for investing in projects like sovereign libertarian island-states, but I am glad to see that Paypal founder Peter Thiel is investing in the worthy cause of in vitro food production. The sooner we manufacture most of our food from stem cells or chemicals, rather than grow it, the sooner vast amounts of land on the earth’s surface can be partly or wholly “re-wilded.”

By Emma Marris

Biologists with the United States Geological Survey recently captured a 17-foot Burmese Python in the Everglades and put it down because it was an invasive species. But should we “learn to love” these pythons, instead of try to root them out in the name of a “pure” Everglades? After all, the Burmese Python, first introduced to Florida through the exotic animal trade, is unlikely to go away entirely any time soon.

Join Breakthrough President Michael Shellenberger Tuesday, May 29th at Stanford University as he discusses our recently published ebook - Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. The talk will begin at 6:00 pm in building Y2E2, Room 382.

In their Breakthrough Journal essay, "Conservation in the Anthropocene," Peter Kareiva, Michelle Marvier, and Robert Lalasz showed that conservation is losing the war to protect nature despite winning the battle to create parks and game preserves. While the number of protected areas has risen, species in wild places have fallen. Conservationists must shed their 19th Century vision of pristine nature, the authors wrote, and seek a new vision, one of "a planet in which nature exists amidst a wide variety of modern, human landscapes."

In a new Breakthrough debate, a host of passionate 21st Century conservationists face off with the authors over the resilience of nature, corporate partners, and the state of conservation today.

The Essay:
"Conservation in the Anthropocene," by Peter Kareiva, Robert Lalasz, and Michelle Marvier.
Read a summary of the essay here.

UPDATE: The debate continues at the New York Times. John Lemons, an emeritus professor of biology and environmental sciences at the University of New England, has taken Kareiva to task at Andrew Revkin's Dot Earth blog.

Kareiva has replied here.

In "Evolve," Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus argued that only by embracing modernization and technological innovation can we overcome this century's formidable environmental problems. Humans have long been co-creators of their environment, and what we call "saving the Earth" will require creating and re-creating it again and again for as long as humans inhabit it.

In a new Breakthrough Debate, two scholars lend criticism to this new "modernization theology."

The call to put "faith" in modernization is cause for concern, contends Jon Christensen, executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. "The troubling history of modernization gives us every reason to be deeply suspicious of anyone who suggests we should simply take it on faith," he writes.

In another response, Leslie Paul Thiele, professor of political science and director of sustainability studies at the University of Florida, argues against a "black and white" view of technology. "The issue is not about being for or against technology," he writes. "The question is this: do we invest in the education and empowerment of citizens such that they can wisely -- which is to say, selectively -- utilize technology in ways that help sustain both a high quality of life and a healthy environment?"

The Essay:
"Evolve," by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus.

The Responses:
"The Myth of Prometheus," by Leslie Paul Thiele.

"Oh Me of Little Faith," by Jon Christensen.

By Mark Lynas, author of "The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans". Original post here.

It is a truth universally acknowledged - amongst my friends and relations at least - that organic agriculture is better for the planet. Environmentally-conscious consumers typically are prepared to pay a hefty premium for organic meat and vegetables, whilst baby foods are nearly all organic these days - reflecting the equally widespread belief that organic is healthier due to the absence of synthetic pesticides and fertilisers. Everyone wants the best for their young children, and the best must surely be the most natural.

These beliefs are remarkably persistent, despite strong scientific evidence which refutes them. That natural necessarily equals more safe than artificial is a fallacy. In 2009 a major study for the UK Food Standards Agency found that there was no nutritional or health benefits to organic. Indeed there is strong counter-evidence, as relatives of those who died from eating organic bean sprouts in Germany last year can attest - as I understand it, the bean sprouts likely harboured toxic e-coli bacteria passed on via animal manure added to the parent plant. This use of manure rather than synthetic fertilisers is celebrated by organic proponents, but likely caused dozens of deaths and thousands of injuries in this instance. (Imagine if the sprouts had been GMO!)

By Carl Pope. Original post at Green on HuffingtonPost.com.

I don't think I have Dengue Fever - no symptoms yet. But my use of mosquito repellent in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, didn't work totally. One clan of local mozzie's flew in silently, at mid-day, close to the ground, and instead of biting once, left a neat row of burning bumps.

Returning to the US, I discovered, in a remarkable and gripping New Yorker piece, that my antagonists were exotic intruders to Brazil - Aedes aegypti, Egyptian mosquitoes, which arrived several hundred years ago from Africa, probably with slavers. Aegypti brought with it yellow fever and dengue, "break bone" fever, for which there is no prevention and no effective treatment - you either get a little sick, or very sick, or die. (Most stunning factoid in the article - mosquito bites may be responsible for half of the deaths in human history - to yellow fever and dengue, add malaria, filariasis, chikungunya, encephalitis, Nile fever and host of others.)
 

The failure to account for different environments points to the main problem with the planetary boundaries framework: it only measures environmental change as negative -- as progression toward supposed biophysical boundaries -- and never as positive, either for humans (e.g., more food) or environments (e.g., higher yields resulting in less deforestation).

By Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow Erle Ellis. Originally published at This Is Africa, a publication of the Financial Times Limited.

Long before Malthus, "the population bomb", "population overshoot" and the "planetary boundaries", ancient sages portrayed humanity as confronted with imminent collapse in the face of environmental limits and as degraders of nature overall (i.e."Earth's life-support systems"). Without halting population growth, pollution, or other harmful activities, humanity would collapse and nature along with it. While contemporary scientists, policymakers and the public are generally aware that this formulation profoundly oversimplifies the situation, it remains the core message behind the efforts of many of those concerned with improving environmental decision-making, both locally and globally.

The current human situation is certainly riskier than ever. Our populations have never been larger, nor have our consumption of resources or impact on nature. There is growing scientific consensus that human alteration of Earth's climate, biosphere and indeed the entire Earth system has gone so far that it has forced the entire planet into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Yet there are multiple reasons why the conventional environmental message - that "humanity must halt its transgression of environmental limits or face catastrophe" - will not move us towards a more sustainable approach to Earth stewardship.

Breakthrough Generation

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"The intellectual rigor and the real-world pragmatism of Breakthrough Generation Fellows give me hope."

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For questions or applications, contact generation [at] thebreakthrough.org.

The planetary boundaries hypothesis - embraced by United Nations bodies and leading nongovernmental organizations like Oxfam and WWF - has serious scientific flaws and is a misleading guide to global environmental management, according to a new report by the Breakthrough Institute. The hypothesis, which will be debated this month at the UN Earth Summit in Brazil, posits that there are nine global biophysical limits to human development. But after an extensive literature review and informal peer review by leading experts, the Breakthrough Institute has found the concept of "planetary boundaries" to be a poor basis for policy and for understanding local and global environmental challenges.

We live on a human planet, in an era of our own making: the Anthropo-cene. Pristine nature is largely a thing of the distant past. As it approaches ten billion, the global population is becoming increasingly wealthy, urban, and well-connected. At the same time, economic moder-nization and technological evolution is continuing apace. The "Age of Humans" is an age of opportunities but also hard choices.

The Conservation and Development Program – through in-house research and in collaboration with its network of innovative thinkers – seeks to offer pragmatic new frameworks and tools for navigating these challenges.

The Breakthrough Journal essay that called for a dramatic shift among conservationists has sparked further debate at the New York Times.

Peter Kareiva -- the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy -- and coauthors Robert Lalasz and Michelle Marvier wrote that conservation was failing and needed to adopt a more human-centered approach.

Last week the Breakthrough Journal published four responses to Kareiva et al. and a rejoinder by the authors. Now John Lemons, an emeritus professor of biology and environmental sciences at the University of New England, has taken Kareiva to task at Andrew Revkin's Dot Earth blog.

Peter Kareiva, Robert Lalasz, and Michelle Marvier assert that in the 21st Century, "conservationists will have to jettison their idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness... and forge a more optimistic, human-friendly vision... Conservation will likely continue to create parks and wilderness areas, but that will be just one part of the field's larger goals." Unfortunately, their article was written 100 years too late. -- By Kierán Suckling

Conservation is improving in its treatment of indigenous communities and attitudes toward people. But we should not go overboard with self-congratulation on this front. The change is neither complete nor a done deal. Conservation must not fall back into the ideological and impractical fortress mentality, a mentality that is insensitive to humans with needs that might supersede biodiversity. -- Peter Kareiva, Robert Lalasz, and Michelle Marvier respond to their critics.

For the past 30 years, those who pointed to the inherent weaknesses and contradictions in traditional approaches to conservation were treated at best as marginal, and at worst, as anti-environmental. How things are changing. Peter Kareiva, Robert Lalasz, and Michelle Marvier herald the pragmatic arrival of this kind of critical thinking into the mainstream. But there also lurk challenges and contradictions in Kareiva et al.'s insufficiently articulated vision of the economy. -- By Paul Robbins

We applaud Peter Kareiva, Robert Lalasz, and Michelle Marvier for broadening the constituency of the conservation movement, but regret that the message of "Conservation in the Anthropocene" seems at odds with their larger objective. For a reader outside the conservation community, the paper is likely to reinforce the misconception that the conservation movement is fueled by a dogmatic, nature-before-people ideology. At the same time, a reader within the conservation community is likely to chafe at the incompatibility of the authors' arguments with the consensus of best available science and with the scientific process in general.

We agree that conservation leaders should seek opportunities to come to the table with corporations. But engagement with industry introduces new risks, including the possibility that nonprofit organizations will damage their own credibility and the credibility of the movement through association with corporate "greenwashing" schemes. Effective negotiation, both with industry and with policy makers, requires a positive and forward-looking vision, along with a strategy for risk management. Unfortunately, we feel that neither a vision nor strategy have been outlined in the authors' paper, although we strongly suspect the authors are in a position to significantly inform both.

In "Conservation in the Anthropocene," Peter Kareiva, Robert Lalasz, and Michelle Marvier argue that conservation needs to move beyond parks and protected areas. While their arguments and examples are drawn from terrestrial ecosystems, much of their article is relevant to marine ecosystems, my field of study, and the new frontier for conservation. -- By Ray Hilborn

In the two years since climate treaty talks fizzled in Copenhagen, the international community finally seemed to be learning from its mistakes. A growing number of NGOs and academics pointed to the lack of cheap and clean alternatives to fossil energy as the underlying cause of the failure of Kyoto, cap and trade, and the Emissions Trading Scheme in Europe. Business leaders like Bill Gates called for radical energy innovation as the key to feeding and electrifying the planet -- without over-heating it. And in a recent BioScience article, a number of prominent ecologists issued a manifesto calling for an international embrace of "planetary opportunities" like urbanization and agricultural innovation, two keys to truly sustainable development. 

by Haripriya Rangan

In "The Global Green Brahmins Versus the New India," Siddhartha Shome falls into the same trap as those he critiques. By employing simple oppositional categories -- modernity versus tradition, progress versus stagnation, Babasaheb Ambedkar versus Mahatma Gandhi -- Shome misses the multitude of realities that exist in India today.

Sometime around 2014, Italy will complete construction of seventy-eight mobile floodgates aimed at protecting Venice's three inlets from the rising tides of the Adriatic Sea. The massive doors -- twenty meters by thirty meters, and five meters thick -- will, most of the time, lie flat on the sandy seabed between the lagoon and the sea. But when a high tide is predicted, the doors will empty themselves of water and fill with compressed air, rising up on hinges to keep the Adriatic out of the city. Three locks will allow ships to move in and out of the lagoon while the gates are up.

By Robert Dello-Russo

In, "The Planet of No Return," Erle Ellis contends that "hunting-and-gathering was not displaced for lack of wild animals and foods, but due to the superiority of agriculture."

I disagree. Ellis's view of the rise of agriculture is a classic myth that has been propagated by non-archaeologists for generations -- the "better mousetrap" theory of agriculture. My own archaeological research suggests the opposite.

Take the commitment to agriculture in North America. We have good evidence that maize arrived in the American Southwest about 3,800 years ago. Yet, in the archaeological record, we do not see the sustained development of maize-based communities until about 1,500 years ago. If agriculture was so much better than hunting-and-gathering (H&G), what was everybody doing in the intervening 2,300 years?
 

Erle Ellis, who authored "Planet of No Return" for Issue 2 of the Breakthrough Journal, replies here to responses from Bill McKibben, Nils Gilman, Robert Dello-Russo, Ronnie Hawkins and Francisco Seijo.

My goal with "Planet of No Return" was to explain the emergence of the Anthropocene and its implications for the future of humanity.¹ It seems that the brevity and provocative nature of my essay have managed to inspire remarkably diverse criticisms.

Ronnie Hawkins likens my thinking to that of "a sentient bacterial culture confidently asserting" that "perpetual growth" is possible "while sucking dry its petri dish." In transferring this textbook biological metaphor (the inevitable collapse of exponentially growing bacteria populations) to the dynamics of human systems, we see a perfect example of the failures of old-school environmental thinking.²

Erle Ellis begins his essay, "The Planet of No Return," with a worshipful paean to humanity's powerful ability to exploit the natural environment:

We have seen what we can do, and it is awesome. In just a few millennia, humanity has emerged as a global force of nature -- a networked system of billions of individuals creating and sustaining an entirely new global ecology. We live longer than ever, and our average standard of living has never been higher. These unprecedented achievements clearly demonstrate the remarkable ability of our social systems and technologies to evolve and adapt.

In Ellis's view, there can be no question that on average, and in the aggregate, the past, present, and future deserve to be conceptualized as thoroughly positive, claiming that "human societies are likely to continue to thrive and expand, largely unconstrained by any hard biophysical boundaries to growth." In particular, he expresses blithe confidence in our ability to indefinitely increase food production.

But his claims are historically blinkered. In fact, the last "few millennia" have not seen a continuous uninterrupted expansion of agricultural productivity. Until about 1800, all agricultural civilizations, from Babylon to Rome to the Maya to China, were fated with repeated crises of production that resulted in massive famines and catastrophic collapses in political order.

In his hubristic essay, "The Planet of No Return," Erle Ellis argues, "The perennial concern that human civilization has exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth's natural systems and may thus be fundamentally unsustainable" is a notion that "rests upon a series of assumptions that are inconsistent with contemporary science." Yet Ellis fails to identify this series of assumptions or present well-articulated arguments against the validity of what they might claim. Indeed, Ellis takes issue with only one widely shared assumption: he apparently disagrees that there are any "natural" or "biophysical" limits that could ultimately constrain "the human enterprise." Ellis's overall argument, crudely put, seems to be that we've so far gotten away with our increasingly frenetic human activities and the toll they are taking on the biological systems of the planet, so we will surely continue to do so in the future.

I found Erle Ellis's piece, "The Planet of No Return," badly overblown, even on points where I'm in basic agreement. For instance, I've written a good deal about the huge challenges posed by corporate overfishing to the earth's marine resources. But his claim -- one of the few quantifiable facts in the piece -- that "wild fish and wild forests have almost disappeared, receding into the depths of our ancestral memory" -- is simply not true. The most recent figures I can find are for 2005, when the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations reported that 93.3 million tons of fish were landed as a result of commercial fishing in wild fisheries, compared with 48.1 million tons produced by fish farms. It's true that that number is off the peak of 96 million tons set in 2000, but "almost disappeared" is typical of the airy disregard with which Ellis treats actual data. (He cites three papers in a footnote after his sentence about fisheries, but none contain numbers supporting his claim that they've disappeared; in fact, the latest FAO data indicates 260 million human beings employed in this phantom pursuit). If this seems picayune fact-checking, it in fact reflects a problem for his more fundamental argument, since it indicates that we're still mostly living off the fat of the incredibly fecund land we were born onto, even as we trash it.

By Francisco Seijo

Anthropogenic climate change represents one of the greatest and swiftest transformations the earth has experienced. Some scientists argue that since the advent of the industrial era, humanity has caused enough biotic, sedimentary and geochemical changes to the planet that we have left the Holocene and entered a new geological phase: the Anthropocene. The implications of this geologic event for the future of life on earth are unclear. Understandably, some scientists have interpreted this wholesale transformation of the planet's climate and biosphere systems as a sign that humanity is reaching, or has already exceeded, the limits of the planet's carrying capacity.

Environmentalists chastise humanity for transgressions against Nature. We are told that by creating technologies, we have sinned. But if humanity has sinned, it is not through the act of creation. Instead, we sin when we fail to care for our technologies. We should not stop creating; rather, our goal should be to never stop innovating, inventing, creating, and intervening. Instead of turning our backs on modernization, we must learn to modernize modernization. This challenge demands more of us than simply embracing technology and innovation. It requires exchanging the modernist notion of modernity for one that sees the process of human development as neither liberation from Nature nor as a fall from it, but rather as a process of becoming ever more attached to, and intimate with, a panoply of nonhuman natures.

On March 26, 1974, dozens of women from the small village of Reni in the Uttarakhand Himalayas confronted a crew of out-of-town loggers. Accounts vary as to whether the women actually hugged the trees, but they successfully prevented the loggers from chopping them down. In the years that followed, the Chipko movement would become an international media sensation. "Tree hugger" entered the lexicon as an all-purpose signifier for environmental sympathies. But the Chipko movement became iconic in rough proportion to the degree to which it became detached from the actual events that transpired in Uttarakhand. From the start, Chipko was driven by a desire among villagers for local autonomy and economic opportunity.

Conservation is losing the war to protect nature despite winning one of its hardest fought battles -- the battle to create parks, game preserves, and wilderness areas. The worldwide number of protected areas has risen dramatically, and yet we are continuing to lose species and wild places at an accelerating rate. In spite of these failures, most conservationist organizations have chosen to double down on the parks model. This constitutes a failure of imagination. Conservation must seek a new vision, a planet in which nature exists amidst a wide variety of modern, human landscapes. But for this to happen, conservationists will have to jettison their idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness and forge a more optimistic and human-friendly vision.

Visit almost any city in the US or elsewhere today, and you are likely to find restaurants from all corners of the world: Indian, Thai, Italian, American, you name it. Clearly, gastronomical diversity within cities has increased hugely over the past couple of centuries. Now go to a city in another country -- and the range of cuisines on offer is likely to be nearly identical. This is a hallmark of globalization: increased diversity locally, decreased diversity globally. As Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow Erle Ellis and colleagues show in a recent paper, the same phenomenon also applies to plants.

Ideas about ecological collapse, earth in the balance, and nature batting last exert great influence in popular culture, and yet mainstream ecology and economics have rejected the theories upon which those concepts rest. Ecological economics was born in the 1980s in reaction to Reagan's use of cost-benefit analysis to attack environmental laws, and as a reconstruction of neo-Malthusian warnings against economic growth, which were discredited by the agricultural Green Revolution and the work of economist Amartya Sen in the 1960s and 70s. The ecological economists argued that economic growth wore out the potential of ecosystems to sustain life, and that only an economic steady state (no growth) economy could save human civilization. They used the laws of thermodynamics to misdescribe the earth as a closed system. And they relied on highly abstracted cybernetic "systems" theory of the fifties to dress up an old religious idea that all of nature exists in a Great Chain of Being where every piece is perfect and necessary, and that any alteration of it could cause the system to collapse. The rise and fall of ecological economics is a call for greens to abandon religious conceptions of nature and stop using scientism to justify political and moral preferences.

Over the last decade, the idea that we have entered the Anthropocene, the age of humans, has become inappropriately entangled with the belief that human civilization is fundamentally unsustainable. We are transgressing "planetary boundaries" it is said, and thus must return to natural, Holocene-era limits. Yet the history of human civilization is also a history of changing nature to support human populations. Just as the Stone Age did not end due to lack of stones, hunting-and-gathering was not displaced for lack of wild animals and foods, but due to the superiority of agriculture. Humans have no more reason to return to the Holocene than early agriculturalists had to return to the Pleistocene. The true significance of the Anthropocene is not that we must return to the Holocene to survive, but rather that the continuation of Holocene-era nature depends on human civilization.

These are demoralizing times for anyone who cares about the global environment. Emissions trading, the Kyoto treaty, and sustainable development have all failed. And yet climate change, deforestation, and species extinction continue apace. What lessons can we draw from the failure of environmentalism — what must we do now?

In this provocative collection of essays edited by the authors of “The Death of Environmentalism,” leading ecological thinkers put forward a vision of postenvironmentalism for the Anthropocene, the age of humans. Over the next century it is within our reach to create a world where all 10 billion humans achieve a standard of living that will allow them to pursue their dreams. But this world is only possible if we embrace human development, modernization, and technological innovation.

In the conservation and environmental communities, technologies like nuclear power and GMOs are usually spoken of as threats to the environment and biodiversity, or at best as superficial "techno-fixes" that "fail to address the root cause of problems." In a recently published paper in Biological Conservation, Barry Brook (blog) and Corey Bradshaw (blog) ask if this aversion to technological solutions is tantamount to ignoring a way of dealing with the ultimate, rather than just proximate, drivers of biodiversity loss. Conservation might be winning battles, but it's losing the war. Can this be changed?

Steady-state economics as promulgated by the likes of Herman Daly is founded on the belief that the physical size of the economy cannot grow forever, as it will eventually reach the limits of the biosphere. An analysis of UK data shows that for nearly a decade, UK GDP has been growing whilst resource throughput, or material consumption, has remained steady or even decreased. This is the first ever apparent evidence of absolute decoupling between economic growth and materialconsumption in an advanced economy, and as such, undermines the widespread claims that economic growth is inherently unsustainable. But the implications might not be as significant as they appear.

The urgent need to provide energy access to the billions of "energy poor" around the world is currently making a strong comeback on the international development agenda, but fears linger that the resulting increase in energy consumption will wreak havoc on the environment and many climate change models bank on the continued dependence of a large proportion of people in developing countries on traditional energy sources such as biomass. However, a review of empirical and modeling studies shows that these fears are largely unfounded, and that improving energy access may in fact contribute to both climate change mitigation and resilience.

The International Energy Agency has estimated that achieving universal electricity access by 2030 would have "little impact on energy demand, production or CO2 emissions." Providing electricity to an additional 1.2 billion people and access to clean cooking fuels to 1.7 billion people, over and above business-as-usual, they predict, will result in global emissions only 0.8% higher than the baseline scenario.[1] The World Bank comes to a similar conclusion, claiming that "increasing access to electricity services and clean cooking fuels in many low-income developing countries...would add less than 2% to global CO2 emissions".[2]

In the fall of 2006, honey bees began dying in strange and unsettling ways. Scientists named the phenomenon "Colony Collapse Disorder" and journalists quickly began to point to pesticides as the likely culprit. With the benefit of time, it has become clear that the story was a lot more complicated than that. But the rush to judgment and the end-of-days narratives it spawned should serve as a cautionary tale for environmental journalists eager to write the next blockbuster story of environmental decline.

I've been teasing friends and family that global warming has done wonders for northern California. The summer has been sunny and hot (for northern California). Little rain. Gorgeous Mediterranean meals at 6 pm after work. Plums, blackberries, peaches, and tomatoes -- all ripe for the picking and eating.

Alas, nobody has hesitated to remind me that dry days are upon us, and Mike Madison writes in today's Sunday Times that we should remember that the first year of the drought is always lovely:

[T]he first year of a drought is a gift to the farmer. Our apricot trees flowered under clear skies, the bees did their job, and in June we harvested a record crop. I sold fresh apricots, I dried apricots, and my wife put up 800 jars of apricot jam: straight apricot, apricot with lime, apricot with saffron. The other crops in the district -- olives, walnuts, almonds, plums -- are on the same track, heading for a record harvest.

But there is a dark side to this. If the first year of a drought is a gift, the second year is a worry, and the third year is a crisis. That crisis has a twist to it. In the third year, the lakes and reservoirs are empty, and not only is water in short supply, but so is electricity, for with empty reservoirs there is no flowing water to turn the hydroelectric turbines. We get power failures that frustrate irrigation and every other sort of industry. The farmers age a lot in those years.