Tom Young

There is a well-documented dichotomy in the environmental movement between the old school who are concerned with halting humanity's encroachment on the natural world, and a new breed who believe technology will solve our problems and allow for sustainable growth.

To my mind, there are actually three camps.

First, those who would really rather not have humans around at all, thank you very much. The planet is the most important thing and we will ruin it so long as we are here.

Second, those who believe that the planet is important, but so are humans. The two should reach a balance and live in harmony.

Third, those who believe humans are more important than the planet. It should be viewed as a stepping stone in the relentless march of the species. Yes, we should preserve it for as long as it is useful to us but it, and all that is upon it, is essentially subservient to our needs.

In a prominently placed comment piece in the Guardian two weeks ago, Paul Kingsnorth – who describes himself as an environmentalist and a poet – revealed himself to be hovering somewhere a little closer to the first category than the second. Let's take a look at his viewpoint and then I will tell you why I think he is wrong.

Kingsnorth claims that wind farms represent the dilution of the environmental movement by our continuing obsession with technology.

"The challenge posed by climate change is not really about technology. It is not even about carbon. It is about a society that has systematically hewed its inhabitants away from the natural world, and turned that world into a resource. It is about a society that imagines it operates in a bubble; that it can keep growing in a finite world, forever," he writes.

"When we clamour for more wind power stations in the wilderness, we perhaps think we are helping to slow this machine, but we are actually helping to power it. We are still promoting, perhaps unintentionally, the familiar mantras of industrial civilisation: growth can continue forever; technological gigantism will save us; our lives can go on much as they always have."

Kingsnorth then brings his argument to a thundering close:

"In the end, climate change presents us with a simple question: are we going to live within our means, or are we, like so many civilisations before us, going to collapse? In that question lies a radical challenge to the direction and mythologies of industrial society. All the technology in the world will not answer it."

Kingsnorth's view of technology appears rooted in the 1800s. Perhaps he shares the views as well as the occupation of many of the romantic poets of that era, who saw mills and factories as an ugly blight upon the land and longed for the quiet rolling hills of yore.

Just because something – a wind farm – is considered by some to be an eyesore and requires a movement of the natural landscape to install it, we will not be led inevitably to the collapse of civilisation.

Technology does not always mean bigger, louder, more resource-intensive. Throughout the enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution it often did, but now it can quite obviously mean other things: quieter, more efficient, smaller. Think of electric cars. Think of the internet. Think of the synthetic development of algae as a fuel.

Technological progress is not necessarily an unrelenting march towards the destruction of the earth. Technology uses fewer natural resources than it once did, if taken on a relative basis. It allows us to sustain greater amounts of human population with fewer resources, as evidenced by the oft-criticised intensive farming techniques and GM foods that are already addressing potential food shortages.

Human technological progress does not mean inevitable destruction of the planet – in fact, it can mean the exact opposite.

But more important (and controversial – Ed), however, is the fact that even if it does, it will be worth it – as long as we manage to save ourselves.

The branch of green thinking that likes to hold the planet in terms of near-godly reverence, and to think of human progress as a plague upon it, is baffling.

Human beings are the most incredible and complex animal to have evolved from the primordial soup. We are capable of conceiving of not only the physical laws that govern our world, but also those of worlds far beyond, worlds we have never visited. We are worth preserving, more so than the earth itself.

And we are highly endangered.

Since the beginning of earth, there have been five extinction events. Each one has wiped out 97 per cent of all life on earth. Other species had their chance, and now they are gone.

We do not know when another such event might arrive. It could be tomorrow. There is no reason why it should not be equally as deadly as its five predecessors.

The only way to ensure survival of such an event is to get off the planet, quick. Time is of the essence, and any resource we use in the process is a resource well spent. Build a colony on Mars, in space, on the moon. Astronomer Royal Martin Rees calls it as important a step as the move from sea to land.

We must preserve the planet if we can. We must maintain biodiversity if we can. But only insofar as they help us to move on.

Think of it like this: it is inevitable that an extinction event will one day wipe out most life on earth. It is also inevitable that one day the sun will implode and our planet will wither and die. What is not inevitable is that on that day we will still be on it.