Every output is improving
Ted Nordhaus 15, Founder and Executive Director of the Breakthrough Institute and Co-Author of An Ecomodernist Manifesto, Michael Shellenberger, Founder and President of Environmental Progress, Former President of the Breakthrough Institute, and Linus Blomqvist, PhD Student in Environmental Economics and Science at UC Santa Barbara, Former Director of the Conservation and Food & Agriculture programs at the Breakthrough Institute, “George Monbiot is Wrong to Suggest Small Farms Are Best for Humans and Nature”, The Guardian, 9/25/2015, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/25/george-monbiot-is-wrong-to-suggest-small-farms-are-best-for-humans-and-nature
Without question, the journey from subsistence economies to modern livelihoods is not an easy one and moving from the farm to the city does not guarantee a better life, at least in the short term. But the last two centuries offer ample evidence that by just about every metric of human health, freedom, and material well-being, urbanisation, industrialisation, and agricultural modernisation are processes that have been overwhelmingly positive for humans.
Moreover, as a leading proponent of rewilding, we hope that Monbiot will think a bit harder about where all those rewilded landscapes in which, he hopes “nature is allowed to do its own thing, in which it can be to some extent self-willed, driven by its own dynamic processes” are likely to come from. On a planet of 7, going on 9 billion people, agricultural modernisation and intensification are clearly the most plausible path to leaving more of the Earth to nature.