Meet the ecomodernists: ignorant of history and paradoxically old-fashioned

The people behind a manifesto for solving environmental problems through science and technology are intelligent but wrong on their assumptions about farming and urbanisation

Beware of simple solutions to complex problems. That is a crucial lesson from history; a lesson that intelligent people in every age keep failing to learn.

On Thursday, a group of people who call themselves Ecomodernists launch their manifesto in the UK. The media loves them, not least because some of what they say chimes with dominant political and economic narratives. So you will doubtless be hearing a lot about them.

"A growing manufacturing base has long been a crucial way to integrate a large, low skilled population into the formal economy, and increase labour productivity. To grow more food on less land, farming becomes mechanised, relieving agricultural workers of a lifetime of hard physical labour."

"Cities both drive and symbolise the decoupling of humanity from nature, performing far better than rural economies in providing efficiently for material needs while reducing environmental impacts."

"It turns out that while density does equal efficiency, "megacity" does not necessarily equal density. Megacities do encompass those places that we typically associate with dense and culturally vibrant urban centres: New York City, Tokyo, London. But what's not often taken into account is the fact that to keep them running, these cities also require surrounding areas such as industrial lands, ports, suburbs. In other words, the environmental benefits of a city's dense urban core can be outweighed by the resource-inefficient, yet essential, areas on its periphery. They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin."

"The long-term evolution of social, economic, political, and technological arrangements in human societies toward vastly improved material well-being, public health, resource productivity, economic integration, shared infrastructure, and personal freedom."

"A word you won't find in the Ecomodernist Manifesto is inequality. ... There is no sense that processes of modernisation cause any poverty. ... There's nothing on uneven development, historical cores and peripheries, proletarianisation, colonial land appropriation and the implications of all this for social equality. The ecomodernist solution to poverty is simply more modernisation.

"... From ancient Mesopotamia to modern China the evidence is clear: development implies underdevelopment, material wealth implies material poverty, freedom implies slavery and so on. These couplets are not two ends of a historical process, with modernisation ringing the death knell for the misery of the past, but contradictions within the modernisation process itself."