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In late September, I and a few other people attempted to launch a new environmental political movement here in the UK and managed to alienate most of our potential supporters on the very first day. The movement is “ecomodernism”, an attempt to transcend some of the political polarisation in current environment debates.
At the risk of oversimplifying, environmentalism has for decades advocated that human societies need to be reintegrated into natural systems, using renewable energy, organic farming, etc. Ecomodernism proposes instead that “decoupling” from natural systems using technologies such as nuclear power and plant genetic engineering is a better way to support billions of people while reducing our impact on nature.
We already have an Ecomodernist manifesto, and we were hopeful for a movement-building week. Our aim was to appeal to a broader constituency of people who feel that traditional green politics is too negative and moralising, but who aren’t comfortable with the right wing’s dismissiveness of environmental problems and insistence that the free market will solve everything. But through a poor choice of divisive speakers and some some bad press, we managed to aggravate potential supporters.
The realist in me agrees that our ecomodernism launch last week was a massive political screw-up. But the idealist in me persists: is it possible that by refusing to respect the tribal rules of the game we can start to find ways to transcend them? Perhaps not, polarisation seems to be the political zeitgeist of our time.
Our small attempt at ideological depolarisation was ill-timed. But that does not mean it is doomed. I hope.
Read full, original post: Ecomodernism launch was a screw-up of impressive proportions
