Breakthrough Journal Is Now The Ecomodernist

Ten years ago, the Breakthrough Institute published the Ecomodernist Manifesto, co-authored by 18 researchers, theorists, and advocates, with the goal of inspiring what they called, “A good anthropocene.” The authors aimed to create an ecological alternative to environmentalism and correct the view that humanity must “harmonize with nature to avoid economic and ecological collapse.”

Since the publication of the Ecomodernist Manifesto, the Breakthrough Institute has been the central hub around which the ecomodernist community has evolved, intellectually and institutionally. We hosted more than a decade of Breakthrough Dialogues where we convened fellow travelers, alongside many of our loudest critics, to explore the possibilities, realities, and limitations of ecomodernism. And we’ve worked assiduously to make ecomodernism live in the world, through our advocacy of nuclear energy, large-scale, technological agriculture, and material and energy abundance.

The Breakthrough Journal played an important role in all of those efforts, as an outlet for long form writing and journalism that explored the tensions and contradictions that have increasingly rendered contemporary environmentalism toothless, tendentious, mendacious, and malthusian in roughly equal measure. And as a place where heterodox authors could offer new ways of thinking about ecological politics, global modernization, and what it would mean for both humans and nature to thrive.

Early issues of the Breakthrough Journal launched the heated debates over so-called New Conservation, which sought to reconcile land use and biodiversity conservation practice with human development, ultimately giving way to decoupling for conservation and ecomodernism, EO Wilson’s Half-Earth Project, and a new appreciation for lands-sparing and industrial agriculture. The Journal likewise sparked debates over what we at Breakthrough called “The Good Anthropocene” and the possibility of positive futures for both humans and nature. It was in the pages of the Journal that Emma Marris, Margot Finn, Rachel Laudan, Jennifer Bernstein, and others published a new kind of eco-foodie journalism, arguing that slow and local food were luxury pursuits, not vectors for economic justice.

Definitive essays punctuated the Journal’s publication: Nils Gilman on the fascist undercurrents of the climate apocalypse; Mark Sagoff on environmentalism’s fundamental narcissism; Steve Rayner and Dan Sarewitz on environmental science’s tendency to allow myths and models to eclipse reality and empiricism; Chris Foreman on the cynicism of environmental justice. And of course the Journal also featured a seminal essay from the famed philosopher Bruno Latour, who offered a rereading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein urging societies to cherish our technological monsters. Throughout its run, the Journal was the exclusive venue constructing a non-catastrophist environmental politics, featuring work on earth-making, novel ecosystems, rewilding, de-extinction, geoengineering, and other meliorist monsters taboo elsewhere in environmental discourse.

Ten years on, the ecomodernist project is far less tenuous than it was. Whether proselytized under the banner of ecomodernism, climate pragmatism, or abundance, ecomodernist commitments to decoupling, innovation, and building a prosperous, materially abundant, and technologically advanced future are far more explicit and legible in ecological discourse and politics than they were a decade ago.

That shift, in turn, demands a different kind of outlet. Ecomodernism is now both much bigger than the Breakthrough Institute and more confident in its convictions. We will always endeavor to remain epistemically open, to question our own assumptions, and avoid descending into the empty slogans and comfortable verities that characterize so much present day discourse. But where the Breakthrough Journal was about challenging and deconstructing the old environmental paradigm, our new publication, The Ecomodernist, will be more about building the new one.

That paradigm sees the Earth as an open system, not a closed one. It rejects climate catastrophism and embraces environmental meliorism. It posits that the choices that humans face are not between ecological collapse or green transformation. They are rather more prosaic choices, between more or less hospitable environments and more or less biodiversity. Ecomodernism sees humans as earthmakers, not nature destroyers. The choices we face, not all at once but everywhere all the time, are about what sorts of natures we wish to preserve, or to create.

In these matters, our technological powers give us more and better choices. And our modernity gives us knowledge and self-awareness. But neither gives us wisdom. That, we firmly believed, can only be forged through discourse, debate, and democracy. The Ecomodernist is the banner under which, henceforth, we will make our contributions to all three.

As The Ecomodernist we will continue to publish regular analyses and essays on environmental politics, agriculture, nuclear energy, critical minerals, biotechnology, and much more.

A few things will be different though.

First, we are opening up paid subscriptions for our subscribers and followers to support our work and join the ecomodernist community. While we remain committed to keeping our analyses and writing free to all, paid subscribers will be able to comment on our pieces and continue the conversation with our editorial staff and analysts. We see this as an opportunity to build an active community of ecomodernists that goes beyond IRL networks. The proceeds from our substack will go directly to improving our publication.

Second, we will be expanding who contributes to The Ecomodernist. Breakthrough Institute staff and leadership will remain primary authors, but we will also publish external authors and thinkers who can advance ecomodernism through both agreement and disagreement.

We at the Breakthrough Institute believe that nothing is timeless. Some institutions and organizations must die to be reborn. The end of the Breakthrough Journal does not signal the end of its usefulness. More than a decade of thinking and writing will remain available on thebreakthrough.org, where many of the pieces from the last year, and all the way back to 2011, can still inform new political movements and post-environmental thought.

Please join as we launch The Ecomodernist.