So it turns out that JD Bernal was just as much of an eco-modernist as
Leon Trotsky, even though he had much better grasp of the ecological
dimension in general. From Foster's "Return of Nature":
The approach to environmental issues adopted in "The Social Function of
Science" and, later (but to a lesser extent), in "Science in History"
thus displayed at times the modernizing (and ecomodernizing) vision
almost universal at the time, the age of mega-projects in the United
States, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. Here, problems of
overpopulation were seen as solved through the development of new hybrid
crops and new technological methods, including greater irrigation that
required big dams and diversion of rivers. In a more grating and
shortsighted observation from today's perspective, Bernal in 1939 in
"The Social Function of Science" pointed to the possibility of planned
climate change, based on Soviet attempts to tame the Arctic. As he put
it, in terms that cannot but strike today's reader, some eighty years
later, as naïve (the dialectics of unintended consequences seems to have
failed him here): "By an intelligent diversion of warm ocean-currents
together with some means of colouring snow so that the sun could melt
it, it might be possible to keep the Arctic ice-free for one summer, and
that one year might tip the balance and permanently change the climate
of the northern hemisphere."
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