Reader’s Corner

It is clear we must re-examine some basic assumptions before we can realign human behavior with natural processes:

  * Is capitalism really good for the planet?
  * Are we defining “growth” properly?
  * Does happiness require more GDP? Or is there a way to measure “balance”?
  * Should we reinvent the whole food system for health reasons?
  * Are democracy and ecologically correct decisions compatible?

It is much simpler to go along with ideas that seem to have worked, mostly, for a long while, and are besides shared by friends and family and others who are part of our cohort. We can speak to each other in a sort of shorthand, and recognize each other by our outward and visible signs—usually the products we buy and use in public. But are those fundamental ideas still resonant with reality? Things change, evolve. Our ideas should too.

Longtime environmentalists can perhaps benefit from a hard look at some of our bedrock notions, including these, the very ones Brand addresses in Whole Earth Discipline:
  Cities are bad
      * Brand points out that cities are ecologically (in terms of impact on planet resources) much more efficient than dispersed populations, which is good news because by mid-century we’ll be 80 percent urban, as rural subsistence farming becomes unsustainable. Once everybody’s in the city, the natural countryside recovers.
  Nukes are bad
      * The need for power is huge, resource wars are looming as a result of climate change, and we need a huge solution to the impact of carbon emissions. Nukes work. There are new nuclear technologies that offer much less of a waste issue. Nukes—micro-reactors are one option—are the only reasonable alternative to extraordinarily climate-harmful coal plants.
  Genetic agricultural engineering: evil
      * Using GE as a tool for positive change, rather than an emblem of “technology” that by definition can’t be trusted. It works, and it has worked. It’s a moral issue, certainly, but the science is not, by environmentalists, well understood.
  Let nature be
      * It’s too late for that: we need to creatively and intelligently manage and sustain and care for nature, proactively and intelligently, rather than set it aside.

Rethinking and recalibration are hard, and there is a lot about this book that will be argued, vehemently. Brand, a challenging but trusted thinker, is a good place to start an essential re-thinking process. Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog (he says he “was Mr. Natural for a while”) and Coevolution Quarterly were innovative crystalizations and guides to the “back to the land” movements of the late ‘60’s and early ‘70s, and an early warning signal about the societal implications of the use of computers—which at the time, I dismissed entirely as hare-brained oddness.

Reinvention: are we up for that? We’d really best get started.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist’s Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Viking: New, $25.95; Powell’s used, $17.95; Amazon print, $17.13; Kindle, $9.99.

Stewart Brand’s TED Talk about the ideas included in this book.