An icon of the environmental movement outlines a provocative approach for reclaiming our planetAccording to Stewart Brand, a lifelong environmentalist who sees everything in terms of solvable design problems, three profound transformations are under way on Earth right now. Climate change is real and is pushing us toward managing the planet as a whole. Urbanization—half the world's population now lives in cities, and eighty percent will by midcentury—is altering humanity's land impact and wealth. And biotechnology is becoming the world's dominant engineering tool. In light of these changes, Brand suggests that environmentalists are going to have to reverse some longheld opinions and embrace tools that they have traditionally distrusted.…
"Stewart Brand is the god of the environmental movement. He invented pretty well everything you’ve ever heard of in California in the 1960s. He started a campaign for the Apollo mission to show us pictures of the whole planet. He handed out badges with ‘Why Haven’t We Seen The Whole Earth Yet?’ and the Apollo mission had sort of forgotten to take pictures, in fact, though it’s now the most iconic of all the images that came out of the space race. In this book, he describes how one of the things he did was spawn a back-to-the-land movement with people growing their own vegetables and forming communes. He says that people like him did that, and it was muddy and dirty and no fun and we all drifted back to the cities and got proper jobs and made friends. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The thing I love in this new book is that it’s a paean for three things he thinks the environmental movement should adopt and has got wrong. One is nuclear power, the other is GM food and the third is cities. He says urbanisation is a good thing because it’s all about people moving from the countryside into cities where there’s opportunity and they can raise their living standards and escape the stifling social aspects of villages. He has wonderful images and slides of what’s happening. He thinks that favelas and slums are not terrible sinks where people are miserable and dying – these are places where poor people are coming in, getting better off and moving out. They are engines for creating slightly better living standards for the poor. More than half the world now lives in cities and they are places of ferment and innovation with technology etc. The exciting thing about what Steward Brand is saying is that the urbanisation revolution that’s continuing is a good thing, not a bad thing. Exactly. Self-sufficiency is another word for poverty. I like that. That’s really good. Somebody said to me the other day that they think the reason for this is that the past is certain; we know we survived it and we are descended from the successful people in the past. But the future is uncertain. Anything could happen. You’re right. We are going to die. There’s a huge element of narcissism in this. Whenever I hear the phrase ‘We stand at a turning point in history’, my hackles rise. Everybody thinks they stand at a turning point. This tipping point, turning point metaphor that privileges your own generation in a form of chosen race is purely narcissistic and wrong. Yes, that’s nice. Thank you for that. I’m going to steal it but I’ll credit you, I promise."
