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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

Some of you have been interested in alternative lifestyles long  
enough to have read The Whole Earth Catalog. The guy behind that  
project was Stewart Brand. Here are some of his current thoughts that  
I find provocative, excerpted from the article. If you prefer to read  
the whole thing, go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/science/earth/27tier.html? 
pagewanted=1&8dpc&_r=1

An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies’
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: February 27, 2007

Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he  
helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects  
that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear  
power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start  
appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about  
“frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering.

He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which  
sounds rather improbable — or at least it would if anyone else had  
made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the zeitgeist,  
never underestimate Stewart Brand.

He is now promoting environmental heresies, as he called them in  
Technology Review. He sees genetic engineering as a tool for  
environmental protection: crops designed to grow on less land with  
less pesticide; new microbes that protect ecosystems against invasive  
species, produce new fuels and maybe sequester carbon.

He thinks the fears of genetically engineered bugs causing disaster  
are as overstated as the counterculture’s fears of computers turning  
into Big Brother.

“Starting in the 1960s, hackers turned computers from organizational  
control machines into individual freedom machines,” he told  
Conservation magazine last year. “Where are the green biotech  
hackers?” . . . . “Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great  
thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad  
thing about coal waste is that you don’t know where it is and you  
don’t know what it’s doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody’s  
atmosphere.” . . . . Mr. Brand predicts that his heresies will become  
accepted in the next decade as the scientific minority in the  
environmental movement persuades the romantic majority. . . . “My  
trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades  
go by,” he says. “I keep seeing the harm done by religious  
romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained  
pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the  
scientific frame of mind.” . . . “Any time that people are forced to  
acknowledge publicly that they’re wrong, it’s really good for the  
commonweal. I love to be busted for apocalyptic proclamations that  
turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. In 1973 I thought the energy  
crisis was so intolerable that we’d have police on the streets by  
Christmas. The times I’ve been wrong is when I assume there’s a  
brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more  
resilient than I thought.” . . . Old-fashioned rural simplicity still  
has great appeal for romantic environmentalists. But when the  
romantics who disdain frankenfoods choose locally grown heirloom  
plants and livestock, they’re benefiting from technological advances  
made by past plant and animal breeders. Are the risks of genetically  
engineered breeds of wheat or cloned animals so great, or do they  
just ruin the romance? . . . “I get bored easily — on purpose,” he  
said, recalling advice from the co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix.  
“Jim Watson said he looks for young scientists with low thresholds of  
boredom, because otherwise you get researchers who just keep on  
gilding their own lilies. You have to keep on trying new things.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/science/earth/27tier.html? 
pagewanted=1&8dpc&_r=1