In All that is Solid Melts into Air, the late American philosopher and socialist Marshall Berman’s classic celebration of fizzing, thrusting, transfiguring, luminous, contradictory modernity (and paean to his beloved New York), he describes the modern condition perfectly: “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us

This process of indirect land-use change is essentially why biofuels have proven to be no climate solution. The defenders of localism are in thus little different to the biofuels industry, clinging to a particular agricultural practice long after the evidence has shown it to actually exacerbate climate change.

Many scholars have articulated the centrality of the apocalyptic, of a loathing of modernity running through all varieties of fascism, and agrarian retreat as solution.

But just as sections of the earlier left made the mistake of not seeing the Soviet Union for the macabre wretch that it was, this now quite old, fifty-something New Left has made its own ideological mistakes. And the primary mistake we have made is the turn away from Promethean ambition and embrace of this basket of conservative, romantic

Between techno-utopianism and neo-luddism there is the aforementioned Promethean optimism that recognises that while at each stage of our history, as a result of our solving past problems, new problems are created, we then must work—and often work very hard indeed—to overcome them. As Deutsch argues, problems are inevitable. But problems are also

is time to abandon the pessimism, crippled ambition and human-hating of Heidegger, Adorno, the Counter-Enlightenment, the postmodernist academy and the primitivist left to return to the essence of socialist humanism: a celebration of our species’ proven capacity for moral and material improvement.

And move forward we must, in order to continue to expand human flourishing. So long as we do that, there are in principle no limits. Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!

But the reality is a great deal more complicated. Instead of the crude heuristic of ‘food miles’, if we are genuinely concerned about greenhouse gas emissions, we need to make sure we are actually doing good, not just feeling good. That means that we need to base such decisions on full life-cycle assessment (LCA) studies—a method of analysis that

So to wish for an end to humanity so that the rest of nature can thrive—as do those deep greens who describe the human race as ‘a cancer on the planet’ or those in the Earth First! Journal writing under the pseudonym Miss Anthropy in the late 1980s and early 1990s that AIDS was an environmentalist’s dream come, applauding nature’s way of cleansing