Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene [Kindle Edition]

Michael Shellenberger (Editor), Ted Nordhaus (Editor)

Book Description

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

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The best thinking about the implications of the Anthropocene idea that I have seen is found in a new e-book, "Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene," published by the Breakthrough Institute." -- Salon.com

Product Details

• File Size: 678 KB
• Print Length: 102 pages
• Publisher: Breakthrough Institute (November 27, 2011)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B006FKUJY6
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #275,684 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Provocative and indispensable December 3, 2011

By R. Stone

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Anyone seeking a realistic and clear-eyed understanding of the essential challenges of our time would be well served to read this important book. While much has been written on the environmental problems that confront modern civilization, this book looks at viable solutions that are well within our grasp as soon as we begin to see the world as it is and not as we might like it to be. It's both a wake up call and a challenge to much of what passes for conventional wisdom among those of us who consider ourselves environmentalists. A powerful and very readable call to arms, full of thought provoking ideas that will likely lead to some stimulating conversation with your friends. Highly recommended!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tour de Force of Fresh Political Thinking January 29, 2013

By Mark Caine

Format:Kindle Edition

The Breakthrough Institute, where this book's authors are based, calls itself a 'small think tank with big ideas'. This volume lives up that description, providing a concise but incisive critique of dominant paradigms of environmental thought. It's a call to arms for anyone concerned about the environment but uninterested in the misanthropy, defeatism, and techno-pessimism that so many environmental thinkers have proffered over the years.

For me, the highlights of this book were the title essay by Bruno Latour, a French sociologist famous for his groundbreaking work on scientific culture and actor-network theory, and Dan Sarewitz's piece on 'Liberalism's Modest Proposals'.

An important environmental thinker in his own right, Latour continues the analysis offered in his 'Politics of Nature' with a morality tale connecting the story of Frankenstein with our neuralgic relationship with technologies such as nuclear power and GMOs. Like much of Latour's work, it's both playful and deadly serious. His conclusion is poignant: like Shelley's Frankenstein, new technologies cause problems not because we create them, but because we abandon them after doing so. Technology is not inherently good or bad: technology outcomes are determined by how well we manage the technologies concerned. By learning how to be better stewards of advanced technologies, we can improve our ability to take advantage of their promise while mitigating possible risks.

Dan Sarewitz's piece is also sharp and provocative. Sarewitz, one of the leading experts on the relationship between science and technology, discusses the pitfalls of modern day liberalism, not as a conservative foe of progressive ideas but as a progressive watching regretfully as the American progressive movement remains mired in stale, uninspiring thinking.

On the whole, this is one of the freshest, most exciting political tomes of the last few years. Anyone hoping to see a bright future for our planet - and all those who inhabit its - would be well advised to give this a read.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fresh Air February 5, 2013

By Iddo Wernick

Format:Kindle Edition

This collection of essays sets out to deconstruct the assumptions that developed within the American environmental movement of the 1960s. Many of the environmental policy ideas of the 90s and 00s were grounded in 60s and 70s visions of looming resource scarcity and Western shame for a colonial/imperial past. Sometimes the ideas took shape as policy, always as rhetoric. These essays address that rhetoric and probe the underlying assumptions of the modern environmental movement.

The volume addresses issues of environmental import at large scales, from social attitudes to technology, to international and domestic energy policy, to how human need and government policy affect land use. At times the tone is academic, at times polemical, sometimes with an edge. The political writing (primarily that of the editors) is strong - informed and compelling. In general, the essays provide a historical perspective of decades and centuries in coming to their conclusions. The ideas presented have political overtones, but they are not pulled from the headlines.

This may pose a problem. On the one hand, the arguments run the risk of being oversimplified - the authors are not advocating "Drill Baby Drill". At the same time, some of the arguments may be too nuanced for the political immediacy they wish to inspire. Taken together however they complement one another and contribute to the roots of an American political movement of techno-optimist-environmentalism, what Stewart Brand calls the Turquoises.

An essay on the 19th century novel Frankenstein provides a title for the book. Its author, Bruno Latour, maintains that the tragedy of the monster was his abandonment, not his creation. He argues that technologies need nurturing, as do children. They may fail us, but we should not reject them because of their inevitable failures. We should, and must, innovate our way out of them. The analysis, while intriguing, may remain short of compelling for those with vivid literary images of technology getting out of control and the resulting unintended consequences.

The essays by Siddhartha Shome and Peter Kareiva et al. reveal tensions that exist between international conservationists working to protect land from development and the indigenous populations whose land stands to be protected. The authors describe cases where local populations oppose development bans on the local use of resources if it compromises their ability to make a living. Other essays also highlight the separation between environmental objectives and other social objectives, especially when the two may be in conflict.

In his essay, Erle Ellis, focuses on the historical dynamic of the human interaction with nature to produce food. While acknowledging the potential threats from modern agriculture, he draws attention to the history of innovation in agricultural technology and the opportunity for using that technology to further reduce pressure on natural habitats. In laying out his argument, Ellis emphasizes the importance of active human responses to potential threats as opposed to treating humanity as captive to inevitable ecological catastrophe.

Mark Sagoff's essay offers an excellent account of the history of Ecological Economics, a sub-field that emerged in the early 1980s with the aim of combining the systematic study of natural ecosystems and human economies. Sagoff argues that through its history, this sub-discipline has relied excessively on models (both ecological and economic) that may be self-consistent, but produce questionable results. In this essay and others, the author appeals to what actual people want and how people actually rely on technology to improve their daily lives. The thinking here aligns itself with recent advances in the area of behavioral economics , a field that stresses rational choice as well as more primal factors as guiding human choice.

Daniel Sarewitz targets the environmental community for an overreliance on "science" as producer of unqualified truths about the behavior of complex systems such as the Earth's climate. Certainty is really the purview of those promoting their chosen solution, not those trying to understand a scientific problem. American liberalism is also held liable for its attempt to encourage higher energy prices that predominantly hurt the poor. Policies that promote energy scarcity in the future will deprive social equity for billions of Earth's inhabitants. How can such policies be part of a progressive agenda?

The theme that emerges favors pragmatism over alarmism as the strategy for success in attracting and maintaining favorable environmental public opinion. A broader social perspective becomes evident, one more resonant with contemporary right-of-center American politics. Politically, the message eschews "experts". Scientifically, it criticizes the activities of the current environmental-academic complex whose premise is that nature is always reducible to (economic) system models that have predictable features. In the legal/policy sphere, the argument is for a more libertarian approach to environmentalism, that stresses protection against damages to person and property.

This scholarly-political tract offers a breath of fresh air whether one agrees with the thrust of its arguments or not.

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