66 EMMA O’KANE
increasing this knowledge should be prioritised over economic growth if humanity is
to survive in the Anthropocene. The case of Indonesia suggests the irreverence for
nature present in the ecomodernist manifesto is actually detrimental to development
for “as the circus moves on, the silence will resume” (Monbiot 2015). It is convenient
enough for the developed world to look the other way when undeniable effects of
climate change are destroying a distant environment. So long as these effects can be
contained in developing countries like Indonesia and away from the developed world,
the ecomodernist’s promotion of technological development can be sustained.
However, when such devastation inevitably moves beyond the boundaries of
countries like Indonesia, the ecomodernist’s argument becomes irrelevant.
The decoupling proposed by ecomodernism is impossible in the sense that humanity
has touched almost everything on Earth directly or indirectly. Consequently, nothing
is truly natural today. The wilderness that is so revered by different cultures across
the globe, is hardly the wilderness it was centuries ago. Departing only slightly from
anthropocentrism’s focus on human utility, we can appreciate, for example, the
beauty of Yosemite in California or the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, but we
are unwilling to forego our human dominance and ownership over these some-what
preserved wildernesses as doing so would restrict our usage as we, in the
Anthropocene, choose to utilise them. Therefore, these wildernesses have been
protected for human utility and not against it.
For 650,000 years, atmospheric carbon dioxide had never exceeded a level of
approximately 300 parts per million. However, since 1950 this level has increased to
an unmanageable level of 400 parts per million (‘Climate Change: How Do We
Know?’ 2015). Due to this, the wildernesses once known to Earth are disappearing,
such as the shrinking of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Antarctica lost
approximately thirty-six cubic miles of ice between 2002 and 2005. Glaciers are also
retreating across the planet (‘Climate Change: How Do We Know?’ 2015). When
climate change moves beyond the wildernesses to more directly affect humanity, our
anthropocentric interests are compromised and climate change as a human issue
becomes fully realised. However, even this concern is only based on the instrumental