How can we best protect nature in an increasingly crowded world? Should we strive to live amidst it, sustainably and in harmony with it? Or should we embrace those technologies that would allow us to retreat to cities and let nature get on without us? Most environmentalists favour the former, rejecting many interventions that could reduce the amount of land we need to occupy. But a new ecomodernist manifesto says our salvation lies in nuclear power rather than landscapes covered in wind farms; intensive agriculture supported by genetic engineering rather than organic farming with its lower yields; and urban living rather than rural idyll. So saving nature requires wearing polyester rather than cotton, eating farmed fish rather than trawling the oceans, and living at high densities so nature can prosper beyond the city limits. By doing this we will occupy less space and can give much of it back to what one guru of ecomodernism, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University in New York, calls the "great restoration" of land and ocean.
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