An Ecomodernist Manifesto

Overview

About thirty pages, a short manifesto published online in 2015 by eighteen scientists, writers and environmentalists associated with the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based environmental research organization, including prominent signatories John Asafu-Adjaye, Stewart Brand and Ted Nordhaus, published freely at ecomodernism.org rather than through a conventional print publisher, reflecting the document’s intended function as a public, widely shareable statement of position rather than an academic treatise aimed primarily at specialist readers.

The manifesto stakes out a position genuinely distinct from, and in significant tension with, a substantial and influential strand of environmental thought that has typically emphasized reducing human impact through dispersal, reduced consumption and closer harmony with existing natural systems. Against this more familiar environmentalist instinct, the ecomodernist authors argue that humanity can most effectively protect wild nature by intensifying rather than softening its own activities, concentrating human presence and resource use in ways that leave larger areas of the planet substantially free from direct human exploitation.

The argument

Decoupling as the central concept. The manifesto’s organizing concept, decoupling, describes the process by which human wellbeing becomes progressively less tied to a proportional environmental footprint, allowing rising standards of living to coincide with declining, rather than increasing, total environmental impact. The authors argue that several ongoing trends, urbanization, agricultural intensification, and a shift toward energy-dense power sources, are already producing measurable decoupling, and that deliberately accelerating these trends represents the most promising available path toward genuine environmental protection.

Urbanization and agricultural intensification. The manifesto argues that concentrating human populations in dense cities, rather than spreading settlement more thinly across the landscape, actually reduces per-person environmental footprint by making efficient shared infrastructure, transportation and resource use considerably more achievable than dispersed settlement allows. Similarly, the authors argue that intensifying agricultural production on smaller, more efficiently farmed areas, rather than expanding cultivation more extensively across additional land, allows substantially more land to remain uncultivated and available for wild ecosystems, directly inverting an assumption that lower-intensity, more extensive farming necessarily serves environmental protection better.

Nuclear power and energy density. Among the manifesto’s most specific and most directly contested technological positions is its explicit endorsement of nuclear power as one of the most promising available paths toward decoupling human energy consumption from a large physical and environmental footprint, arguing that nuclear energy’s extraordinary output relative to the land and resources required makes it considerably more environmentally efficient than lower-density alternatives, despite the public anxiety about safety and waste that has historically limited its broader adoption.

Rejecting limits to growth. The manifesto directly and explicitly rejects a foundational position held by a substantial portion of the broader environmental movement, that genuine human flourishing requires accepting deliberate limits to economic growth and material consumption. The authors argue instead that continued technological and economic development is not merely compatible with environmental protection but actually necessary for achieving it, since only continued development, properly directed toward decoupling, can generate the resources, technologies and efficiencies genuine environmental protection at global scale actually requires.

The Anthropocene reframed. Running throughout the manifesto is a broader reframing of humanity’s transformative planetary impact, sometimes described by the term Anthropocene, not as an unambiguous catastrophe to be reversed or minimized, but as a condition to be actively and deliberately managed through continued technological development, a considerably more optimistic and more interventionist stance than much environmental writing addressing the same basic planetary transformation typically adopts.

How to read it

Read the manifesto’s central decoupling concept as the interpretive key organizing its more specific claims about urbanization, agriculture and energy; nearly every subsequent argument in the document follows from applying this single underlying principle, that human wellbeing and environmental impact can be progressively separated through deliberate technological and economic choices, across different specific domains.

Notice how directly and how explicitly the manifesto positions itself against a substantial, influential strand within environmentalism itself, rather than against environmental concern generally; the document’s genuine argumentative target is less climate skepticism or indifference to environmental harm than a specific vision of environmental protection through reduced human footprint and closer harmony with existing natural systems.

Pay close attention to the manifesto’s specific technological endorsements, particularly nuclear power, as concrete, falsifiable claims rather than as vague aspirational language; the authors take genuinely contested empirical and political positions on specific technologies that many broader environmental statements deliberately avoid committing to.

Consider the manifesto’s brevity and its deliberate choice of online rather than conventional print publication as reflecting its intended function as a public rallying document meant for wide circulation and debate, rather than as an extensively argued or fully evidenced academic treatise, a genre choice that shapes both its persuasive strategy and its vulnerability to charges of oversimplification.

Read this manifesto alongside more traditional degrowth or limits-to-growth environmental arguments to see the genuine, substantive disagreement within environmentalism the manifesto is directly engaging, since understanding what specifically the ecomodernist position rejects sharpens understanding of what it actually proposes as an alternative.

Questions it raises

• Does the manifesto’s central decoupling concept hold up against the practical difficulties of actually achieving sustained separation between economic growth and environmental impact at the global scale and pace genuine climate stabilization would require?
• How persuasive is the manifesto’s specific endorsement of nuclear power as an environmental solution, given the considerable public anxiety, regulatory obstacles and cost challenges that have historically limited nuclear energy’s broader adoption regardless of its theoretical energy-density advantages?
• What are the genuine political and practical obstacles to the kind of dense urbanization and agricultural intensification the manifesto advocates, particularly in already densely populated developing regions where land use patterns and agricultural practices reflect deeply established economic and cultural structures?
• Does the manifesto’s rejection of limits to growth adequately engage with the strongest arguments for degrowth or limits-based environmental approaches, or does it construct a somewhat simplified version of that position more vulnerable to the manifesto’s own preferred technological alternative?
• How should a reader weigh the manifesto’s optimistic technological framing of the Anthropocene, planetary transformation as a condition to be actively managed, against more cautionary environmental perspectives that treat the same transformation as evidence of the need for restraint rather than continued intensification?
• Given that this manifesto represents a specific, contested position within environmentalism rather than a consensus statement, what would a genuinely fair comparative assessment of ecomodernism against its strongest environmentalist alternatives, degrowth, deep ecology, more conventional sustainability frameworks, actually require?