Stewart Brand's Four Environmental Heresies

Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue (those of us over 50 remember it), has a presentation in which he advocates 4 environmental heresies - that cities are green, nuclear power is good, genetically modified foods are a boon, not a curse, and geoengineering is the way to stop climate change. I'm not a believer in anthropogenically-caused climate change, but that doesn't prevent the rest of the presentation from being fascinating. Here's some of what what Mike Shellenberger says about it:

You don’t have to agree with all of this. The geoengineering proposal he offers makes me as nervous as the Superfreakonomics proposal (though research on it is a no-brainer). On geoengineering he warns, “If we taboo it completely we could lose civilization.” And though I appreciate Stewart’s sense of urgency, I don’t care for the apocalyptic rhetoric.

But these are really quibbles. His overall presentation of how to create a low-carbon energy-powered world that supports the emergence of the vibrant global South is inspiring, provocative, and merits a much wider discussion in the press than we have seen to date. I assume and hope the book will be widely reviewed, and Brand widely profiled.

There’s tons of surprises in it. I learned of the key role cities play in reducing birth rates. The migrating poor “don’t even have to get rich and the population drops.” Later he says, “Nuclear energy has done more to dismantle nuclear weapons than anything else.” Half of our nuclear electricity (which is 20 percent of our electricity) is from dismantled Russian nuclear warheads, soon to be joined by U.S. dismantled warheads.

There are only three low-carbon baseload power sources: hydro, nuclear and — are you listening Marty Hoffert? -- space solar. The new nuclear plants are far, far more sophisticated than the ones we had 50 years ago. Many countries are, happily, buying these new reactors, including micro-reactors.

On biotech, Brand is blunt: “My fellow environmentalists have been irrational, anti-scientific, and very harmful.” They have blocked biotech’s spread in the place that has needed it most, Africa. But the continent “has finally gotten out from under the thumb of Greenpeace Europe and Friends of the Earth, and biotech is moving rapidly through Africa.” The key bioethicist organization has taken up biotech twice, he says. Both times they said it was “moral imperative” to make biotech more widely available.

He updates the words that Ted and I quoted in the last chapter of Break Through.

“The first words of the Whole Earth Catalogue were ‘We are as gods and might as well get good at it.’ The first words of Whole Earth Discipline are ‘We are as gods and have to get good at it.’”

On the back of “The Whole Earth Discipline,” Paul Hawken says his mind was changed by Brand.

I can see why.