Stewart Brand has made a career of cool hunting. While not creative himself he has a gift for recognizing those who are and popularizing them. Though he doesn't understand the relevant issues and can be remarkably dim in his own writing (see Agricultural Problems, near the end), he has a good grasp of the obvious though he travels in circles that lack this skill. Now, nearly a decade after careful thinkers have reached similar conclusions, Brand is speaking Environmental Heresies. [via GlennReynolds.com]

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

Reversals of this sort have occurred before. Wildfire went from universal menace in mid-20th century to honored natural force and forestry tool now, from “Only you can prevent forest fires!” to let-burn policies and prescribed fires for understory management.

Better late than never I suppose. If Brand still has any influence his belated recognition of the obvious may be helpful. In fairness he may have grasped these things long ago but declined to make career limiting remarks. It's possible to be too cool and get labeled as a crank.

An interesting part of this article is recognition of the mythic dimension of paleo-environmentalism.

There are a great many more environmental romantics than there are scientists. That’s fortunate, since their inspiration means that most people in developed societies see themselves as environmentalists. But it also means that scientific perceptions are always a minority view, easily ignored, suppressed, or demonized if they don’t fit the consensus story line.

The environmental movement has long been deeply anti-science. Their views are romantic, mythic and see politics as a theology of salvation. As Brand notes, this is an intellectual problem of huge proportions.

They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is.

In a larger sense admitting mistakes is what being human is. Learning is impossible for those who can't admit error.

Though Brand has glimpsed the problem, he is true to form in being unable to understand the issues or anticipate consequences. For example, regarding population and urbanization:

The world population growth rate actually peaked at 2 percent way back in 1968, the very year my old teacher Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The world’s women didn’t suddenly have fewer kids because of his book, though. They had fewer kids because they moved to town. . .

Cities are population sinks. Although more children are an asset in the countryside, they’re a liability in the city. The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities. My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago. . . Environmentalists will be rewarded if they welcome it and get out in front of it. In every single region in the world, including the U.S., small towns and rural areas are emptying out. The trees and wildlife are returning. Now is the time to put in place permanent protection for those rural environments. Meanwhile, the global population of illegal urban squatters—which Robert Neuwirth’s book Shadow Cities already estimates at a billion—is growing fast. Environmentalists could help ensure that the new dominant human habitat is humane and intrudes on less of the surrounding environment.

Well, no. It wasn't moving to town that reduced the fertility rate. The same thing happened in rural cultures when they gained some wealth, education, health care and civil rights, especially for women. Longevity increases, infant mortality decreases, and human life becomes more valuable. Fewer children are needed or desired.

What does it mean to "put in place permanent protection for those rural environments". Who will do this protecting? How do they know what to do? Why would they do it? Brand has absolutely no clue about the processes and motivations for environmental preservation. The mess that has been made of public lands, especially western forests, should be enough to attract his attention and reveal the emptiness of his prescription. In thirty years he may at long last grasp this and write another "heresies" article. There is nothing environmentally benign about a depeopled wilderness indifferently guarded by uniformed staff in the pay of the state. This quasi-military occupation of conquered and depeopled lands has nothing to do with environmental preservation and remediation.

Urbanization is perhaps worse, at least for humanity. Cities are not healthy places to live. It is only very recently in human history that cities have been able to maintain population independent of continuous immigration from rural areas. That's why they are growing. People don't die as fast as new immigrants arrive. But that may soon change. The growing problem of trying to govern mega-cities reveals deep structural defects in the idea. A city is like a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) where animals are caged in small areas. Their food is brought to them and their wastes taken away. They are vulnerable to disruption when the supply chains are broken and threatened with drowning in their own effluvia. Crowding causes behavior problems and provides a perfect culture medium for the evolution of ever more virulent diseases.

Along with rethinking cities, environmentalists will need to rethink biotechnology. One area of biotech with huge promise and some drawbacks is genetic engineering, so far violently rejected by the environmental movement. That rejection is, I think, a mistake. . .

There has yet to be a public debate among environmentalists about genetic engineering. Most of the scare stories that go around (Monarch caterpillars harmed by GM pollen!) have as much substance as urban legends about toxic rat urine on Coke can lids. Solid research is seldom reported widely, partly because no news is not news. A number of leading biologists in the U.S. are also leading environmentalists. I’ve asked them how worried they are about genetically engineered organisms. Their answer is “Not much,” because they know from their own work how robust wild ecologies are in defending against new genes, no matter how exotic. They don’t say so in public because they feel that entering the GM debate would strain relations with allies and would distract from their main focus, which is to research and defend biodiversity.

Genetic engineering is perhaps the clearest example of the anti-science, romantic and mythic character of the environmental movement, but not the only example.

Now we come to the most profound environmental problem of all, the one that trumps everything: global climate change. Its effect on natural systems and on civilization will be a universal permanent disaster. It may be slow and relentless—higher temperature, rising oceans, more extreme weather getting progressively worse over a century. Or it may be “abrupt climate change”: an increase of fresh water in the north Atlantic shuts down the Gulf Stream within a decade, and Europe freezes while the rest of the world gets drier and windier. (I was involved in the 2003 Pentagon study on this matter, which spelled out how a climate change like the one 8,200 years ago could occur suddenly.)

But wasn't that the end of the last ice age when melting ice dams released massive fresh water lakes from the continents very suddenly? What caused the global warming that ended that ice age? Do we regret it? Was it a "profound environmental problem" or "a universal permanent disaster"? Only if you dislike humans and regret civilization. This is just gloomy talk, the antidote for happy talk, but just as mistaken. It's another "toxic rat urine on Coke can lids" myth that cripples the environmental movement.

Taking responsibility for managing the atmosphere is part of the evolution of civilization. Just as we have made progress in managing the urban/industrial waste stream that once made our rivers toxic we have made progress in managing atmospheric emissions. A good part of that was the transition to fossil fuels, reducing the far larger emissions from burning biomass for energy. Wood, peat and dung yield less energy but emit more carbon in a variety of forms, not just gasses but also particulates. We need to continue to evolve to even lower carbon energy sources. How?

...everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize energy production. Kyoto accords, radical conservation in energy transmission and use, wind energy, solar energy, passive solar, hydroelectric energy, biomass, the whole gamut. But add them all up and it’s still only a fraction of enough. Massive carbon “sequestration” (extraction) from the atmosphere, perhaps via biotech, is a widely held hope, but it’s just a hope. The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power.

Obviously, but don't dismiss carbon sequestration since it is a key technology in atmospheric management. To do the job we need to be able to increase or decrease concentrations of various gasses in response to natural changes in circumstances.

And let's not get crazy again. Nuclear energy may be the only current technology sufficient to the need but that is rapidly changing. For example, recent advances in Thermoelectricity due to advances in nanotechnology provide a glimpse of a very different energy future. We can reasonably expect other energy related advancements from synthetic opportunities enabled by increased ease and speed of communication. Progress will result from an unexpected combination of disciplinary approaches. It may be advances in computing, materials science, synthetic biology, or any combination of them all that yields the unexpected advances. Expect, but don't predict, the unexpected.

» The Mythic Dimension from Crumb Trail
See Cool Hunting at M&M for yet another muddled rant about the foolishness of the politicized paleo-environmental movement and predictions of coming change.......[read more]
Tracked: April 8, 2005 09:46 AM
» Why Do I Keep Mucking Up? from The Uneasy Chair
"That guy who just keeps singin' can't somebody shut him up? I don't know for the life of me where he comes up with this stuff." -- "Grandpa's Interview," Neil Young, Greendale Gary Jones tees off on Stewart Brand's cool...[read more]
Tracked: April 9, 2005 07:54 AM