From Counterculture To Cyberculture:
The Life And Times Of Stewart Brand
http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/6231
March 12, 2010
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A curious blend of doom and optimism'
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/8238/
Veteran green Stewart Brand's new book proves a surprisingly useful
source of arguments and facts against green dogmas. But critics of
environmentalism should still be wary of him.
by Rob Lyons
February 2010
'Every day, I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about.'
Stewart Brand approvingly takes this line from a novel, True North,
and it sums up his own mindset - at least, to some extent. Brand was
one of the early, high-profile environmentalists. He graduated from
Stanford University in 1960 with a degree in biology, his specialty
being evolution and ecology. (One of his tutors there was Paul
Ehrlich, later author of The Population Bomb.) From 1966, Brand
campaigned for NASA to release a rumoured photo of the whole Earth, a
photograph finally taken in 1968, and an image that helped to inspire
the first Earth Day in 1970. His Whole Earth Catalog, first published
in 1968, provided details of suppliers for all the essentials of life
- if one wanted to be a treehugging hippy, that is.
Unlike many greens, however, Brand appears always to have been
something of a technophile, and he mixed with many of the people who
helped to create the World Wide Web. The journal he founded in 1974,
CoEvolution Quarterly, included many technological pioneers, and
promoted a positive attitude towards technology. If our thinking
about technology could be radically altered, the journal argued, it
could resolve many environmental problems.
In Whole Earth Discipline, this idea is expressed as a kind of
Jekyll-and-Hyde attitude towards the future. Brand manages to be both
profoundly reactionary and thrillingly optimistic. His mix of science
and misanthropy is reminiscent of James Lovelock (whom Brand refers
to frequently in the book as 'Jim').
The book's introduction is profoundly downbeat. Brand cites the
Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc's argument that warfare is
pretty much a natural state for humanity: 'In all societies from
hunter-gatherers on up through agricultural tribes, then chiefdoms,
to early complex civilisations, 25 per cent of adult males routinely
died from warfare. No one wanted to fight, but they were constantly
forced to choose between starvation and robbing the neighbours. Their
preferred solution was the total annihilation of the neighbors.'
LeBlanc's thesis is that such wars were necessary because humans
'always outstrip the carrying capacity of their natural environment
and then have to fight over resources'.
Peace breaks out when the pressure on resources is reduced, suggests
LeBlanc, either through a technological breakthrough or a major
plague. In that respect, the Black Death was good news for Europe. In
turn, after a period of relative peace in historical terms - over the
past three centuries, just three per cent of the world's people have
died in wars - Brand argues that the future could bring a shift back
to conflict if climate change sharply reduces the Earth's carrying
capacity. 'If we do nothing or not enough', writes Brand, 'we face a
carrying-capacity crisis leading to a war of all against all, this
time with massively lethal weapons and a dieback measured in
billions'. No wonder Brand now lives on a tugboat in San Francisco
Bay, a perfect vantage point to watch from as the proverbial
excrement hits the fan.
Brand clearly sees the monster of climate change at every turn. There
are lots of ways, he believes, in which the climate could suddenly
'tip' from our currently benign conditions into something much more
difficult to cope with. 'Climate is so full of surprises, it might
even surprise us with a hidden stability. Counting on that, though,
would be like playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded
but one.' Chatting to 'Jim' Lovelock on the phone, the Gaia theorist
warns Brand that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
has been too optimistic. Lovelock tells him: 'I don't think there's
much doubt at all now, amongst those few of us that have worked on
the problem, that the system is in the course of moving to its stable
hot state, which is about five degrees Celsius globally higher than
now.' Lovelock suggests that would leave the Earth with a carrying
capacity for human life of less than a billion people.
How can we stop this disaster occurring? Brand turns to materials
scientist Saul Griffith, who explains how we need to replace all our
methods of producing energy at present with very low-carbon
alternatives. Unfortunately, that task sounds close to impossible,
requiring that an area the size of America is covered in wind farms,
solar cells and sunlight-concentrating mirrors, biofuel tanks and
nuclear reactors. Griffith tells Brand: 'Industrially, humanity has
the collective capacity. But politically, I don't see how… But we
have to try. Why else bother to be human and be in this game?'
Brand argues that the task is not impossible, but requires absolute
urgency. 'Forty years ago, I started the Whole Earth Catalog with the
words, "We are as gods, and might as well get good at it." Those were
innocent times. New situation, new motto: "We are as gods and have to
get good at it." The Whole Earth Catalog encouraged individual power;
Whole Earth Discipline is more about aggregate power.'
This mix of climate change panic and politics, based on the demand
that 'we must do this, because the science says so', has become the
mainstay of environmentalism for the past couple of decades. But just
when I was tempted to toss the book away - the recycling bag seemed
an apt receptacle - Brand then spent the bulk of it laying into some
of the totems of the environmental movement. If you took a scalpel to
the introduction and the last part of the book, what you would be
left with is a source book of facts and arguments on the failings of
environmentalist ideas that could easily be renamed The Debater's
Guide to Why Greens Talk Rubbish.
Brand opens this section with a defence of cities. A familiar theme
of recent years has been the realisation amongst many greens that
cramming people into cities reduces their 'ecological footprint'
considerably. Brand talks about this as if the aim should be to
quarantine as many polluting humans as possible in urban areas.
Nonetheless, he does recognise that there are human advantages of
cities, too, and does a pretty good job of updating Marx and Engel's
dictum from The Communist Manifesto that capitalism had rescued
people from the 'idiocy of rural life'. To that end, Brand quotes the
words of BR Ambedkar, the leader of the 'untouchables' who helped to
write India's constitution in the Forties. Ambedkar described
villages as a cesspool, 'a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and
communalism'.
Brand recounts how his own 'Gandhiesque romanticism about villages'
was turned upside down by the head of the Global Fund for Women in
2001, who remarked at a conference: 'In the village, all there is for
a woman is to obey her husband and relatives, pound millet, and sing.
If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get
education for her children.' Rural and small-town life sucks, it
seems, and people are voting with their feet. Brand notes how he asks
travellers returning from remote places for their impressions, and
gets the same universal report: 'The villages of the world are
emptying out, everywhere.' In the past few years, the world has
passed an important milestone: today, more people live in cities than
in the countryside.
The upshot of this is that not only do people have a lower
eco-footprint, but there are simply fewer of them, too. Brand notes
that fertility rates plummet when people move to towns. In the
impoverished countryside, women must have lots of children to provide
a family workforce, give parents security in old age and, more
brutally, because so many children die in their first few years of
life. In the city, where space is at a premium, but where there are
also many different means of support, the opposite is true: small
families are better. Already, the assumption that world population
will peak at nine billion is being questioned. Indeed, for a host of
developed countries, declining population is a serious possibility as
birth rates fall well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per
woman. Even in the developing world, the rise of the city has meant
that birth rates are dropping much faster than expected. You might
decide to live in a remote village and pretend that this is a greener
way of life, but Brand argues well that this impression is the exact
opposite of the truth.
Brand is similarly scathing of the rejection of nuclear power. This
section is, to some extent, a mea culpa: Brand was as vigorous in
opposing nuclear as any other environmentalist in the Seventies. Yet
a cool look at nuclear's safety record shows that those green fears
were totally misplaced. Nuclear is in fact far safer than other forms
of power production. The stumbling block for many environmentalists,
as Brand notes, has always been the issue of nuclear waste. Yet a
trip with the board of his Long Now Foundation to Yucca Mountain
Repository, 100 miles north-west of Las Vegas, changed Brand's view
completely. There is simply no need to bury waste in a vault that
will last for 10,000 years when the waste can be stored at or near
the surface safely. Moreover, there's every chance that in the
not-too-distant future, that waste could be reused as fuel. Why make
assumptions about the needs or capabilities of future generations now?
With waste disposal reinterpreted as a manageable problem, and
nuclear looking like a safe, reliable, low-carbon energy source,
Brand notes: 'My opinion on nuclear had flipped from anti to pro. The
question I ask myself now is, What took me so long? I could have
looked into the realities of nuclear power many years earlier, if I
weren't so lazy.' Now Brand sides with the daddy of climate change
alarmism, James Hansen, who wrote to President Obama as he took
office in 2009: 'The danger is that the minority of vehement
anti-nuclear "environmentalists" could cause development of advanced
safe nuclear power to be slowed such that utilities are forced to
continue coal-burning in order to keep the lights on. That is a
prescription for disaster.' While Hansen is a fine one to be talking
about irrational panic mongering, it is no surprise to find that more
and more greens are changing their positions on nuclear.
Brand reserves his greatest scorn for those who oppose genetic
engineering of crops. He provides chapter and verse on the advantages
of developing new foods in this way, noting at the start of this
section: 'I dare say the environmental movement has done more harm
with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing
we've been wrong about. We've starved people, hindered science, hurt
the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial
tool. In defence of a bizarre idea of what is "natural", we reject
the very thing Rachel Carson encouraged us to pursue - the new
science of biotic controls. We make ourselves look as conspicuously
irrational as those who espouse "intelligent design" or ban stem-cell
research, and we teach that irrationality to the public and to
decision makers.' In the chapters on genetics, Brand provides as good
a popular defence of GM crops as you're likely to find, and it is
particularly striking to find it coming from a green viewpoint.
Given his technophilic outlook, Brand worries about the dominant
romantic philosophy of the green movement. 'The romantics identify
with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The
romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant
power, and dismissive of any who appear to stray from the true path.
They hate to admit mistakes or change direction… [scientists] are
easily ignored, suppressed or demonised when their views don't fit
the consensus story line.' He notes the relentless paradigm of
decline that began long before there were environmentalists - in
Rousseau, Nietzsche, Spengler and Heidegger amongst others - that
finds its strongest contemporary expression with environmentalists.
Brand even frets about the comfortable fit between green ideas and
Nazism. Brand notes that the biologist Ernst Haeckel, who coined the
term oekologie back in 1866, 'championed eugenics and selective
euthanasia to purge an imperilled Europe of "degenerates such as Jews
and Negroes"'. There is no necessary connection between
environmentalism and Nazism by any means, but as one of Brand's
colleagues notes, 'there are lots of ways in which the two movements
can and have connected historically'.
Given the almighty kicking that Brand gives to some green shibboleths
and to some of his past fellow travellers, you might think that he
should start to question some of his other ideas, too. Is climate
change, for example, really the global disaster waiting to happen
that Brand suggests? His point that scientists - even within the
green movement - who question the 'consensus' are 'ignored,
suppressed or demonised' might have some consequences for the state
of climate science, too. Perhaps he should have more sympathy for
those scientists who (often tentatively) suggest that there are
problems with the mainstream outlook on global warming.
But I suspect there is an element of ditching the past going on here,
too. Environmentalism is now keen to be seen to be pro-science, a
technocratic and pragmatic paradigm for running future societies; it
is a 'big idea' that the political establishment can get behind, but
one that is potentially very flexible in policy terms. It's betrayed
in Lovelock's rather pompous phrase about the 'few of us that have
worked on the problem' and Hansen's dismissive quote marks around
'environmentalists' in his letter to Obama. This is really about the
formation of a new elite that thinks it knows what is good for us.
(Clearly, though, Brand has a self-confessed track record for not
knowing what's best for us.)
The last thing this new elite needs is a bunch of unwashed
treehuggers running around and embarrassing them. Another Nazi
parallel springs to mind: once its job was done, and the Nazis had
wormed their way into government, Hitler was pretty quick to dispose
of Ernst Rohm's uppity Sturmabteilung or 'brownshirts'. In other
words: thanks very much for beating up the communists, now fuck off
and die (literally). Brand's assault on his erstwhile colleagues is
in its own small way a reflection of a 'Night of the Long Knives'
within the green movement.
Critics of the green movement would be wise to be cautious about
Brand. At heart, he is still a green who wants to prostrate human
society to the problem of climate change and thinks the real problem
we face is too many people chasing too few resources. But the middle
sections of Whole Earth Discipline are still a great read for anyone
who believes in the capacity of humanity to understand and control
nature in order to improve our lot. Just don't forget the scalpel.
--
Whole Earth Discipline, by Stewart Brand, is published by Atlantic Books.
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