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The Future of Environmentalism |
Stewart Brand is one of the great visionaries of our time. His latest book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, argues that ‘Being Green’ is no longer enough. Three profound transformations are underway on Earth: climate change, urbanisation and biotechnology. Unless environmentalists keep up with new science, and embrace tools and disciplines that they have traditionally distrusted – such as science and engineering – in order to forestall the cataclysmic deterioration of the earth’s resources, they will become part of the problem.
Brand shatters a number of environmental myths and argues that cities are greener than the countryside, nuclear power is the future of energy, and genetic engineering is the key to crop and land management. Through scientific rigor and blazing advocacy, Brand offers a bold and creative set of policies and solutions for producing a more sustainable society. He is in discussion with Brian Eno, musician and composer, cultural critic and writer who has a long-standing interest and involvement in new thinking about politics and the future.
Suggested hashtag for Twitter users: #foiecopragmatism
Quotes
“This brilliant, elegant treatise by a veteran defender of the Earth’s health will be a challenge to those parts of the environmental movement that loathe nuclear power, believe that cities are wasteful and dehumanising, distrust GM agriculture and technological ‘fixes’ ingeneral. But anyone with an open mind and a free spirit will be deeply stirred by Brand’s passionate realism and measured optimism. There isn’t much time, climate science keeps telling us. If that is the case, one urgent priority would be to read this deeply engaging book and be prepared to do some serious re-thinking”.
Ian McEwan on Stewart Brand’s new book
Audio
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Stewart Brand is the founder of and original editor of The Whole Earth Catalogue. He is the author of The Clock of the Long Now and How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, and is the Director of the Global Business Network in Emeryville, California. He lives on a tugboat in San Francisco Bay. His latest book is Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.
Brian Eno is an English musician, record producer, music theorist and visual artist, and one of the principal innovators of ambient music. He has worked with Roxy Music, David Bowie, John Cale, Cluster, Robert Fripp, David Byrne and many others. He produced three albums by Talking Heads, seven for U2, including The Joshua Tree (1987), as well as albums by Laurie Anderson, Coldplay, Paul Simon, Jon Hassell and Devo, among others. As an artist, Brian Eno pursues multimedia ventures in parallel to his music career, including art installations, public lectures and ‘Oblique Strategies’ (written with Peter Schmidt), a deck of cards in which each card has a cryptic remark or random insight meant to resolve a dilemma. He is a patron of Client Earth, the environmental NGO, and of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) which campaigns for nuclear disarmament. In 1996, Eno and others started the Long Now Foundation to educate the public about the very long term future of society.
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January 19th, 2010 at 10:38 am
“That’s me in the corner, losing my religion…”
So the future is nuclear….. To be honest, after reading James Lovelock and others, I had already (very reluctantly) accepted that this was something that we were going to have to swallow. As Brian Eno said, this is almost a matter of religion, rather than science, so I feel like a heretic.
However, I can’t help feeeling that if nuclear is the answer then we are asking the question far, far, too late. Isn’t this a little like discussing the optimum maintenance schedule for jet engines as the plane plummets out of the sky?
The emergency exits are at the rear of ther plane. Have a good flight.
January 19th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
I went with much anticipation to this talk and left feeling rather dispirited.
Stewart Brand’s central message was that the problems facing the world are so great that we have to do “whatever works” in order to tackle them. That means concentrating people in cities, and embracing GM, nuclear power and geo-engineering. We are changing the earth so profoundly anyway, he argued, that we might as well do more of it.
I am a big technological optimist myself and am certainly on the eco-pragmatist side of the movement. But I found Brand’s recipe – at least as he dished it out in Bristol – unfulfilling.
His was a totally technocratic version of the world, encouraging us to “focus on the numbers” and “just do what works”. There was no room for vision or values, just a managerial approach to engineering the status quo.
Brand told us to “put aside ideology” and ridiculed most environmentalists as luddites who “would have opposed the wheel”.
While I liked Brand’s willingness to slaughter sacred cows, I was troubled by what he didn’t say. Surely we need both technological answers and changed values? Surely the environment movement shouldn’t be shorn of all sense of vision? Is more of the same, just better managed, really enough?