The Scarcity in "Abundance"

Hand me the star pills.

The online discourse around the new book Abundance has been interrupted by the Trump administration, whose manufactured global economic collapse rendered the book’s title sadly ironic. Even so, I expect we’ll hear more about Abundance — and the nascent “abundance movement” — as the U.S. midterm elections approach and opponents of the Trump agenda try out new messaging.

After having read the book (I know! I’m old-fashioned) I’m happy to endorse several of the core points made by authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson:

• The housing crisis in the U.S., and the resulting epidemic of homelessness in West Coast cities, is a moral outrage and a humanitarian emergency. Since West Coast states and major cities are led by Democrats, the housing crisis is also a massive political liability for any organized opposition to Trump.

• Progressives tend to get caught up in process and lose sight of their primary goals. That’s contributed to a tangle of regulatory “green tape,” most notoriously in California, that arguably does little for conservation and makes the housing crisis impossible to address.

• Labyrinthine regulations have also slowed the deployment of renewable-energy technologies, which are more efficient, less expensive, and, given the deepening climate crisis, more urgently needed than ever.

• In light of the above, governments at every level — along with the public and private institutions that support research, innovation, and development — should spend more time asking what needs to be built and removing the obstacles to building it.

I appreciate Klein and Thompson’s call for a general attitude adjustment among progressives, who have gotten accustomed to treating “no” as a victory. And I agree that Democratic leaders, in particular, must adopt a can-do approach to urban housing and climate-stabilizing technologies. My trouble with Abundance is that it packages these much-needed perspective shifts as an all-encompassing vision.

In the introduction to Abundance, Klein and Thompson imagine that in 2050, you, the reader, “live in a cocoon of energy so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can barely find it on your monthly bill.” The apples and tomatoes in your refrigerator were grown on a nearby vertical farm. Your chicken and beef come from cellular meat facilities. Your drone-delivered “star pills,” which slow the aging process and ward off addiction, are made in automated, zero-gravity factories that orbit the planet. And so on.

Advanced technologies, in this world, “spare countless acres for forests and parks” and allow land once used for livestock grazing to be “rewilded.” The “parched cities” of Phoenix and Las Vegas are “erupting in green foliage,” suggesting that an abundant future is also liberated from biogeography.

All this is strongly reminiscent of the Ecomodernist Manifesto, which in 2015 argued that “knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene.” The manifesto made much of the possibilities of “decoupling,” in which high technology enables economic growth without a corresponding increase in environmental destruction. Likewise, the introduction to Abundance (and the illustration on its cover) depicts a world where technology has allowed humans to intensify their impact on limited areas and essentially withdraw from the rest of the planet.

Both ecomodernists and abundance adherents see advanced technologies as a primary tool for addressing our many crises. Through the power of human innovation, they argue, we can produce more clean energy, house more people, use fewer resources, and take up less space. The authors of Abundance, in particular, encourage U.S. political leaders to embrace a “liberalism that builds.”

We certainly do need to focus our talent for innovation on planetary problems (instead of on, say, more and better food-delivery apps). Suggesting that innovation alone will save us, though, only encourages the human hubris that got us into this fix. Abundance makes a persuasive case for cities as centers of innovation; creative collaborations still thrive on physical proximity. I’d argue that rural places are crucial centers of conservation: conservation of habitats, conservation of the practical skills needed to protect and restore them, conservation of human connections with other forms of life, and, perhaps most importantly, conservation of the sense of humility that comes from living in a landscape your species didn’t build.

The Ecomodernist Manifesto, anticipating this objection, imagined that in its decoupled world, many communities would still choose to share land with other species rather than spare it for them, or “choose to have some services — like water purification and flood protection — provided by natural systems.” Even as nature becomes more amenity than necessity, the manifesto continued, humanity must establish a “deeper emotional connection” to “wilderness, biodiversity, and a mosaic of beautiful landscapes.” How this seemingly paradoxical task could be accomplished was unclear. Abundance, for its part, all but ignores life beyond city limits: wildlife and habitat are never mentioned, and trees, rivers, and ecosystems appear rarely and almost always metaphorically. This star-pilled populace inhabits an entirely human world.

Look, I get it. Our times demand simple, sticky messages, and progressives love to complicate their messaging almost as much as they love to complicate municipal permitting processes. For all of our sakes, though, please don’t pretend that your manifesto or slogan will solve everything. “Decoupling” is a useful technical term. “A liberalism that builds” could be an effective slogan for a West Coast mayoral campaign. But humanity needs politics that build, politics that protect, and politics that restore. And we need politicians who can argue, with humility and heart, why we need all three.

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Extinction is (Still) Forever

You’ve probably seen the news about the birth of three “dire wolves” and the consequent “de-extinction” of the Pleistocene species. Those pups are very cute, but they are not dire wolves, and “de-extinction” is not a thing! Researchers at Colossal Biosciences, a private company, sequenced DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and 72,000-year-old skull, then used that information to edit the genome of a modern gray wolf. They implanted embryos with the edited genome in surrogate dogs, which gave birth to pups that are approximately the size and color of dire wolves. This is a notable — if ethically fraught — scientific accomplishment, and animals with engineered or hybrid genomes could conceivably contribute to conservation by filling the ecological role of extinct species. But these “dire wolves” are designer dogs, “de-extinction” is a marketing term, and extinction is still forever. (This is starting to feel as pedantic as pointing out that Frankenstein is the doctor, not the creature, but I’m sticking with it. And he is the doctor, dammit.)