In recent years, Brand, 71, has begun to rethink his earlier opposition to nuclear power and has embraced genetic engineering, geoengineering of the earth’s climate system, and other issues that were anathema to the traditional environmental movement. This evolution of his thinking has led to his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.
(…) Environmental journalist Todd Woody met Brand in his book-lined office — located nearby in a beached fishing boat on the Sausalito waterfront — and conducted the following interview for Yale Environment 360.
Yale Environment 360: Who did you write this book for?
Stewart Brand: For two versions of environmentalists — the ones who already know their environmentalism and the ones who are finding out their environmentalism because of climate change.
An assertion I make in the first chapter is that in light of climate change everybody’s an environmentalist. And in light of climate change people who already know they’re environmentalists are facing a changed situation. And I’m trying to help adjust the course in light of the situation and the technologies that are emerging.
e360: Is the environmental movement ideologically stuck in the 1970s?
Brand: It’s moved on in some areas. The environmental movement used to hate cities and is now halfway toward loving cities. The Sierra Club has been very active in supporting compactness in cities. Environmentalists don’t call themselves ecologists any more, and that’s good.
(…) e360: Do you have concerns that support for geoengineering will be used by others as an excuse to carry on with business as usual?
Brand: (…) Suppose we had energy that had that quality of way more than we could use or need, and it was clean.
There is another set of people in the environmental movement who are what I’m calling calamatists, who feel that industrial civilization has committed crimes, sins against nature, and retribution is coming and we must repent, reform, and redeem ourselves in light of these terrible crimes and this terrible sin.
The way you can tell if someone is of that mode is to raise this: Suppose we had clean, squanderable energy available, what do you think of that? The ones that have that frame of mind would say that is the worst thing that could happen.
Again, I think that is not a perspective that makes a lot of sense in the developing world. You can go to African peoples and say what do you think of clean, squanderable energy, they would say, “Yes please. How soon?â€
Please continue reading the Brand interview — this is one of the better interviews. Unfortunately most journalists are completely clueless on these issues.
Better late than never, I suppose, but I have a hard time shaking the feeling that some of these are motivated more by the opportunity to cash in on their public conversions, which seem to come at the point in their careers where they have become irrelevancies in the Green movement.
I understand your concern — certainly there is a cash and social incentive to do the lectures, the books, etc. But since we can’t know what is in another’s mind, we have to use our “black box toolkit” to model what is powering their motivators. In the case of Stewart Brand I am very comfortable that he is completely sincere. He has done his homework — e.g., on the limits of renewables and the risk-benefit case for nuclear generation. His logic is sound and internally consistent.
I’ve been observing Brand’s development w/r/t energy policy for some five years — I’ve seen the effort he has invested in learning. If you’ve not seen or heard the 2006 SALT debate (Seminars About Long Term Thinking) that Stewart organized between Peter Schwartz and Ralph Cavanagh check it out. The topic is Nuclear Power, Climate Change and the Next 10,000 Years.
Others such as Patrick Moore I don’t know much about.
Recently I’ve been reading (and listening) my way through Bill Gates new blog Gates Notes. Check out this one Bill Gates backs nuclear power and the importance of affordable energy for the poor. Bill has been doing serious homework as well, coming out with perspectives much like Brand. He has four podcasts on energy policy that I think are revealing of his thought process.
I suppose I find it easier to believe that Brand is a true convert, the Whole Earth crowd in general were not doctrinaire anti-technology in any way. Certainly one could imagine them throwing their support into LFTR, for example without too much of a streach.
However, I am not sure of others. Moore I knew obliquely and met several times through mutual acquaintances. This was in his Vancouver days before Greenpeace became a household name, and I was not impressed. I suppose that tends to color my opinion of green-to-nuclear converts.