Subject: [Homestead] Stewart Brand--provocative thoughts
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 08:43:57 -0700
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.”