Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene

by Michael Shellenberger (Editor), Ted Nordhaus (Editor), Bruno Latour (Contributor)

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

Genres: Politics, Environment, Science, Nonfiction, Technology, Climate Change, Essays

102 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 27, 2011

About the author

Michael Shellenberger is an American author and former public relations professional. His writing has focused on the intersection of climate change, the environment, nuclear power, and politics.
He is a co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, co-founder of the California Peace Coalition, and the founder of Environmental Progress.

Reviews

[Joao Nicolodi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not saying the authors (the book consists on a gathering of articles by different self-called "post-environmentalists") aren't engaged on environmentalism itself, but this piece is all about the critique of everything environmental movements have done so far (from Malthusians and Thoreauists, to ecological economists and conservationists), using obviously questionable ideas to demoralise very good and proven ones.

It is strongly based on the argument that human civilization has forever escaped doom because of its creativity and tendency for new technologies and inventions. This idea is indeed a logical and historically based one, and has worked more or less fine over the last 50,000 years (or 12,000 if we only take the civilized humankind into account) - which, when we take into account the history of life, is not nearly an acceptable timespan to begin with. Problem is: the issues we had to overcome were either presented by other human groups or small and local environmental problems (and we don't even have a good history here - the fact that the deforestation on Pascoal Island was climate driven and not human made only changes the point: maybe we did not blew the climate there and then, but the climate pretty sure blew us).

I get the concerns about the efficacy and efficiency of the alarmist type environmentalism, for we are in a profit driven system, in which alienation plays one of the biggest role, and in a time of patriotic ideologies. Thus, talking of union, governmental regulation, degrowth or economic stabilization, a total shift on the status quo and global movements for lifestyle changes is a dangerous and bold move - as we can see in this book, getting even its fair share of friendly fire. But it is hard to believe that we can count on entrepreneurs to either avoid man made climate change or to undo it - if even possible - knowing that money has always been invested on a few people's problems - which would create great frictions between poor and rich countries and even internal problems.

The most flawed argument in the whole book in my opinion, though, is the critique on the precautionary principle. Never has any organized society had the reach to affect at once the whole of global environment, which makes this a completely new situation and creates possibilities for the future that we can't even conceive. If even in local terms ignoring the precautionary principle is socially and environmentally risky (coming from a Brazilian, in the wake of a mineralogical disaster that took over 300 lives), the impacts of uncalculated actions on global scale (even if we take nature's resilience into account, which is arguable) might be irreversible and disastrous.
Human civilization cannot afford risking everything for the sake of profit, for the veneration of entrepreneurship and the for the sake of the system we live in.

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and useful for debate, but just an odd, odd series of arguments here.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is solidly in the middle for me. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. It had moments of surprise for me, it increased my knowledge in this area, and it provided me with a new perspective on a subject I thought I knew pretty well. I never thought of environmentalists/liberals as being anti-technology! But this book provided me with lots of evidence on this point. I’m sure that this is not the case for ever environmentalist/liberal. This book has, however, made a strong case for technology’s ability to aid humanity in environmentalism, and that the potentially unexpected side-effects and risks are worth it for the end result. I can say that I agree for the most part, though I do remain slightly skeptical.

I am counting this book as my "book published before Jan. 1st, 2019 with fewer than 100 reviews on Goodreads" entry for Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge 2019.

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book provides a very provocative set of anti-luddite, anti-malthusianist texts for those of us with environmental concerns, not willing to forego the current status of human technology.

An excellent piece to provide counterarguments in the current discussions on biopolitics, "Love your monsters" is a fascinating collection of essays quite suitable for those of us who have grown tired of the apocalyptic environmental discourse, providing a perspective in which human progress [and the welfare of the ecosystem] depends entirely on the love we profess to our technology and the necessity to care for it so we can prevent the [ecological] damages it may cause.

[Cedric Akl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers another side of environmentalism that is on the side of economic growth than liberal ideas. Some ideas turn out to be very interesting and convincing and I believe that when coupled with other "traditional ecological" ideas can be fruitful.

[Annegret · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are three very interesting essays in here that intentionally go against the grain of liberal environmentalism. Great stuff to argue with. Some of the pieces, especially the one on conservation are just weird.

[Ron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short, snappy book about the religious zeal of some of the environmental activists, who forego the most useful and practical solutions due to the penance oriented view of many of its adherents.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Breakthrough Institute has a mission that half genius and half madness: fixing the environmental movement. In this volume, Shellenberger and Nordhaus introduce a group of deep thinkers on the anthropocene; the geological era when human activity composes a primary part of planetary cycles. The core theme is that we cannot retreat from technology, and that to survive in the 21st century, we must embrace our monsters, and become good stewards of the Earth.


I buy this, but I wonder how effective "Love Your Monsters" is at reaching those who haven't drunk the Breakthrough kool-aid. Shellenberger and Nordhaus are ex-Berkeley hippies, and their critiques of the Left's post-material culture, which is intrinsic elitist and self-contradictory, are spot on, but how influential are Greens, and how many are going to be converted by hippie punching? It's fun, but I want to see Breakthrough reach out to the pro-fossil fuel conservatives who are standing in the way of transforming the energy system, and the vast unengaged middle that has no idea what's going on, politically or technologically.


((Disclosure: I served as a Breakthrough Generation Fellow in the summer of 2011))

[Eileen Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book because it challenged a lot of the ideas I've come to accept as the "environmentalist position", but found that a good portion about *how* people come to these positions was omitted. For example, the argument about the liberal position on GMOs being akin to Jonathan Swift's modest proposal leaves out the fact that the liberal position on GMOs is not necessarily anti-technology, but a reaction to the corporate culture of Monsanto and future food security. The loss of this security to a corporation like Monsanto could very well have the same result as denying this technology in the first place. Many political reasons for liberal positions were not discussed in a similar manner, until a vague mention at the end of the book. In many cases the liberal position is not necessarily "anti-technology" but more often anti-corporate and against losing freedom to the control of the corporations that often wield the technology. I did appreciate, however, the reminder that many liberal positions, however they are arrived at, are essentially elitist and detrimental to people in lower socio-economic classes.

[Upom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A breath of fresh air when it comes to environmental politics. Shellenberger and company write in response to an environmental movement that has largely become anti-technology and anti-modernization. The book states that as opposed to the traditional solution of limit consumption and use of everything, what society ought to be aiming for is "modernizing modernization". The way forward according to the book is to use technology to solve the problems of the planet as opposed to alienating technology as most of modern environmentalism has done; that is, we should "love our monsters." Criticizing traditional precepts used by environmentalists including conservation, ecological economics, and the exaggerated fragility of our environment, the book shows there is a 3rd way to dealing with the environment that both embraces modernity and the environment. If you have any interest in the environment, this book provides fresh insights in how we should approach the question of saving the planet.