The Reaches of Freedom: A Response to An Ecomodernist Manifesto

Abstract

An Ecomodernist Manifesto's ardent recommendations on some of the most salient ecological and social quandaries we face are motivated by a future world of " vastly improved material well-being, public health, resource productivity, economic integration, shared infrastructure, and personal freedom. " 1 The Manifesto calls for building a global civilization that is cosmopolitan, connected, and high-tech, in which all people enjoy social and political freedoms and can partake of other liberties that modernity valorizes, especially access to goods and technologies, mobility, and diverse opportunities. The world that the Manifesto hopes to see globalized is one where modern privileges are shared—from longevity and a modern standard of living, to rule of law and liberation from want. This world of universal prosperity can be achieved, the authors claim, on an ecologically vibrant planet. For the Manifesto such a future is well worth pursuing as it realizes a core value: human freedom. The Manifesto's point of view—the social-material-natural world it envisions and that world's promise of freedom for all—is a humanism. Humanism is a Western sociocultural platform centered on human affairs, values, and wellbeing, and aspiring to the achievement of human dignity and the realization of human potential. Freedom is the precondition for the highest expression of the human and thus the ultimate value of humanism. Humanist goals are realized as authoritarian regimes fall, democratic forms of governance are instituted, a spirit of coexistence and tolerance becomes universally normative, poverty is abolished, and education, medical care, and leisure and the arts spread around the globe. All these goals are explicitly articulated and promoted in the Manifesto. Further, the authors' unabashed optimism for the future echoes historical humanism's affirmation of humanity's heroic capacity for progress and self-renewal. It is not incidental, of course, that humanism is at the heart of the Manifesto: humanism and modernity co-emerged, and it was the elaboration of the ideals of the former that enabled the latter to declare a decisive break from the past. The Manifesto augments