Environmental Heretic

Stewart Brand On Nuclear Energy, Genetically Modified Foods, And Climate Engineering

In 1968 Stewart Brand published the first issue of his pioneering Whole Earth Catalog. It opened with the words “We are as gods and we might as well get good at it,” expressing both an acceptance of humankind’s scientific innovations and a critique of what humanity had so far done with all this technology. More than forty years later those words still summarize Brand’s views on our responsibilities to the planet and to each other.

The catalog, which won a National Book Award in 1972, published reviews of tools — broadly defined — that might be of use to people looking for do-it-yourself alternatives to a suburban supermarket-and-department-store existence. Many of the featured items appealed to the burgeoning back-to-the-land movement, such as hand tools, organic-gardening books, and camping equipment, but there were also high-tech products, including a $4,900 programmable calculator.

In addition to editing the Whole Earth Catalog — and later CoEvolution Quarterly, which became the Whole Earth Review — Brand has participated in many climactic shifts in the culture. He was present at the beginning of the Haight-Ashbury scene in San Francisco, promoting a music festival where the Grateful Dead played one of their first gigs. He had a role in the early environmental movement, campaigning for nasa to release an image of the entire earth from space to promote awareness of the planet’s fragility and isolation. And in 1985 he cofounded, with Larry Brilliant, the “Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link,” or well, which was a predecessor to the online communities of today.

Now Brand is once again pushing for a paradigm shift with his recent book Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. In it he challenges many environmentalists’ core tenets, most notably by embracing genetic engineering and reversing his long-held opposition to nuclear energy. Though many agree with him that nuclear power is the best way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions — including President Barack Obama and former Greenpeace leaders Patrick Moore and Stephen Tindale — Brand has met strong resistance from some friends and colleagues. But the seventy-two-year-old self-avowed “environmental heretic” believes his critics will come around.

Born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1938, Brand soon discovered a world much bigger than his Midwestern town, thanks to his Vassar-educated mother’s fascination with outer space and his advertising-copywriter father’s interest in ham radio. Together they gave their son a strong sense of the possibilities offered by technology. Coming of age during the height of the Cold War, Brand also feared that technology would lead humankind to destroy itself. He studied ecology and biology at Stanford University, where he found a mentor in Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. Ehrlich’s work with butterflies helped to popularize the idea of coevolution, which holds that a change in one organism can trigger changes in others. The idea influenced Brand’s thinking about how society evolves.

After graduating in 1960, Brand began two years of active service as an infantry officer and became an army photographer. After his military service ended, he spent time on Indian reservations and married a Native American. He also took lsd as a participant in a legal psychological experiment and started hanging out with the Merry Pranksters, devotees of novelist Ken Kesey whose escapades were chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Brand found another mentor in engineer and futurist Buckminster Fuller, whose book Ideas and Integrities introduced Brand to the concept of a “comprehensive designer,” someone who works outside narrow specialties, looking at the larger system and determining how new technologies might become “tools for human happiness.” It was one of the inspirations for the Whole Earth Catalog.

In the mideighties Brand began working with large corporations and went on to cofound the Global Business Network, a consulting firm that helps businesses, nonprofits, and governments develop long-term strategies that take into account potential social, technological, political, economic, and environmental changes. In 01996 Brand founded the Long Now Foundation, whose main initiative is to build a ten-thousand-year mechanical clock to promote long-term thinking and responsibility. That date isn’t a typo but a way of writing the year that Brand says helps us conceptualize the distant future. “Once you have the perspective of decades and centuries,” he writes, “problems that seemed unsolvable become solvable, and pressing urgencies fade away to expose what is crucial.”

Brand has written a number of books, including 1974’s Two Cybernetic Frontiers (which included one of the first uses of the term “personal computer”); The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT; How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They’re Built; and The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. I spoke to him in Los Angeles, just hours before he was scheduled to do a radio interview. He was energetic, focused, and optimistic. When I followed up by telephone a couple of months later, he was at his home, a sixty-four-foot tugboat docked in the Sausalito, California, marina. As he was saying something that might spark disagreement from colleagues, a hailstorm hit Sausalito. “Do you think that was a message?” Brand asked, laughing. “My deity is weather. It’s the only one I actually believe in.”

Cooper: You say that, since we’re responsible for climate change, we should be able to fix it. Do you think we have the time?

Brand: I think we have thirty years before we face disaster: Europe, North America, and China becoming unable to grow food, mega wildfires, melting glaciers. Reversing current problems before something catastrophic happens will probably require buying time with climate-engineering approaches, such as putting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere the way volcanoes do, to reflect more sunlight back into space. We’ve still got to get the carbon-dioxide levels down — along with methane, nitrous oxide, and the rest of it — but that will take a long time, because there’s so much industrial and political momentum to overcome. Many climatologists who were originally opposed to direct intervention in the climate are now saying we may have to do some form of “global dimming” to buy time. They’re astounded that there’s been such a slow and limited response to their warnings.

Cooper: Has the slow response been due more to political pressure or to general inertia?

Brand: Unfortunately climate change has become a partisan issue, at least in the U.S. and Europe. If liberals and environmentalists think something is critically important, conservatives automatically dismiss it. They’re blinded by the mistaken idea that climatologists have some sort of hidden liberal agenda.

I’m trying to convince the conservatives and the environmentalists to follow the science right across the board, not just where it’s convenient or supports their ideology. And the science itself needs to move forward quickly. We do not have enough data, especially in terms of how the oceans affect the climate. We don’t have climate models that can predict what will happen or even understand some things that are already happening, such as the melting of Arctic ice.

Cooper: The public seems to be falling in line with the global-warming deniers.

Brand: I don’t think there’s been much movement either way. Although Al Gore won prizes for his global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, polls show that people’s concern over climate change hasn’t budged even 1 percent since its release. When people are concerned with other issues, as they are now, climate change drops down the priority list. Northerners look out and see snow and think, What warming? But those in drought-afflicted areas will have no problem at all believing that global warming is happening.

It remains to be seen whether recent erratic weather patterns are part of a long-term trend toward more-violent weather. James Hansen at nasa makes a good case that powerful storms come from global warming: the northern atmosphere stays cool because the melting ice is keeping the ocean cold, while the temperate zones get warmer, and the increasing contrast between the warm and cold makes for fiercer weather. I say maybe, maybe not. Any change in weather patterns that lasts less than ten years can’t be blamed on climate change yet.

Cooper: You want us to trust scientists, but don’t they often fall prey to groupthink, career motivations, and the desire to be famous, or simply to be declared right?

Brand: Scientists are like everyone else in those respects, but in order to stay in their profession, they’re obliged to admit mistakes, put up with a lot of argument, seek out better data, and sometimes give up their pet theories. That doesn’t happen much in politics or literature or even history, but it happens in science all the time.

Cooper: You’ve critiqued the environmental movement for its reluctance to embrace climate engineering.

Brand: Some environmentalists have a knee-jerk response that says we must not play god or intervene in nature. But if climate change is as serious as environmentalists are saying, then our responses to it need to be effective in the time we have. People who live in the developing world are moving toward using more grid power and electricity, thus putting more carbon into the atmosphere. That’s why nuclear power, which doesn’t create much carbon pollution, looks good to me. Climate change is a planetary problem, and the responses need to be planetary.

Cooper: You’ve said that the green agenda is outdated, in large part due to “eco-pessimism.”

Brand: The environmentalist stance has long been one of heroic despair: We’re in the midst of a tragedy. Civilization is going to hell, and all we can do is stand proudly and hopelessly against that trend. The essence of a tragedy is that it cannot be fixed; it’s this horrible situation that you’re stuck in.

I want to get people out of that tragic frame of mind and into a scientific, adaptive frame of mind. Emotion and ideology have a place, because they supply a lot of power to the movement, but in terms of guiding policy, I think the challenges we face are serious enough that emotion and ideology should be left out of the picture for a while. They’re not serving us well.

Cooper: Environmental writer Bill McKibben says that the “end of nature” began two hundred years ago with the Industrial Revolution. You say it began ten thousand years ago with the development of agriculture.

Brand: Agriculture was a large enough event that it started to impinge upon atmosphere and climate, and it certainly impinged on the amount of so-called wilderness. Today somewhere on the order of 40 percent of all the ice-free land on the globe is dedicated to agriculture. It’s had the most disastrous effect on the environment of any human activity.

Cooper: Some would think the Native Americans had a hands-off approach to the environment, but you quote author Charles Mann, who says that before the Europeans came, the North American continent was a “managed landscape,” and afterward it was an “abandoned garden that the Europeans misinterpreted as wilderness.”

Brand: In North America and elsewhere in the world, indigenous people were using fire to amend the landscape on a large scale and improve access to game — in essence as a very large form of gardening. Mann’s 1491 describes the continent just before Columbus showed up and discusses how the Native Americans were “terraforming” the Amazon, smoldering their plant and agricultural waste and amending the charcoal into the soil, turning infertile tropical soil into very fertile soil that’s still there thousands of years later.

Cooper: How did your personal experience with Native Americans shape your thinking?

Brand: In the early sixties, when I was a young guy just out of the army, I hung out on Indian reservations in the summers. I was in the Native American Church and went to peyote meetings and even ran some for whites. I married an American Indian, Lois Jennings, who’d grown up in Washington, DC. During that time I developed a connection to the earth. The Native Americans have skills that have helped them live here for a very long time, and they are willing to impart those skills to us.

Cooper: What were the peyote meetings you ran like?

Brand: The whites were coming to it cold. All of the Native Americans who went to these meetings had been prepared by hearing about them all their lives. By the time they’re finally brought in, they’re well versed in the whole tradition.

I worked with a group of artists in New York State and later with a group of psychiatric clients on a hilltop overlooking the Pacific. What impressed me in both cases was that the design of the ritual was so strong that it worked even with non-Indians who had no preparation. It just works, and you don’t have to be part of some particular tribe or tradition to get value out of it.

Cooper: What kind of value?

Brand: Native Americans refer to the peyote as “medicine.” You take it because you’re not as well as you should be. It’s also seen as a way to keep drunks off the booze — which is a big problem in many tribes. If some people are going off to college or to war, the tribe will have a peyote meeting in their honor, so they will know that the whole tribe is behind them. And it’s a way of dealing with illness, both physical and mental. It’s not used lightly or recreationally. It’s a big hassle to stay up all night and eat this absolutely vile-tasting cactus [laughs] or drink the tea. Vomiting is normal. It tastes about as bad as anything. There’s a reason the peyote cactus has no spines: it doesn’t need them.

Cooper: What’s particularly skillful about the way that Native Americans relate to the land?

Brand: They have this odd mix of reverence and humor. Anytime they’re telling you about something really sacred, they’re also laughing at themselves. There’s a comfortable, sane multimindedness about their approach. Take the Zuni Shalako ceremony, for example. It’s a profound and serious ritual, but there are also these clowns called “mudheads.” They wear cloth sacks over their heads and have knots over their eyes that look like assholes. They make fun of everybody, including the gods. It’s the sacred and profane blended together.

Cooper: What are some misconceptions about Native Americans?

Brand: There’s a notion that all natives everywhere have bonded with nature in this perfect way. In some sense it’s true, but in a lot of ways it’s not, because everywhere humans have settled, the first thing they’ve done is kill and eat everything large or threatening. The first people who came to North America across the Bering Strait were able to kill off the mastodons and other large mammals that were here, and they changed the landscape. We can imagine what is missing in North America by going to east Africa, with its beautiful patchwork landscape of savannah mixed with forest and grassland and plenty of large herbivores and carnivores. It’s ecologically much richer. And all of that was destroyed by the first peoples who came to this continent.

Cooper: Speaking of ecological diversity, you advocate creating an “all-species inventory.” Why is this important?

Brand: I got involved with Edward O. Wilson, who coined the term “biodiversity” to describe the state of having many different kinds of life. We don’t even know how many different species there are, because we’ve never cataloged them the way we have the stars. I cofounded the All Species Project with my wife, Ryan Phelan, and Kevin Kelly, whose idea it was. It’s now called the “Encyclopedia of Life” and is taking advantage of technology like bar coding for rapid identification of species and subspecies.

We are finally getting the ability to inventory microbial life, which is the most numerous form of life. It’s basically been a mystery to us all these years because most microbes could not be cultured in a lab. We have a great personal stake in understanding microbial biology. Remember, nine-tenths of the cells in the human body are microbes. They are in the thick of a lot of disease processes. They are responsible for the makeup of most of the atmosphere. Once we understand these creatures, we’ll be a lot further along in understanding how climate works and what we need to do and not do to keep the climate relatively stable. It’s crucial, for example, to figure out how sensitive microbes are to air-temperature changes and the acidification of the oceans. That will tell us a lot about how climate change might actually play out. It may be good news, and the oceans will provide much more of a buffer than we realize. How much they balance these various gas ratios in the air remains to be seen.

Biotech is the main emerging technology now. There are various attempts to turn coal directly into methane using microbes, thereby saving a lot of carbon that would otherwise go into the atmosphere. A company called Amyris is working with engineered microbes to make both malaria treatments and jet fuel. Steven Chu, the secretary of energy, likes to say that if we can get the cocktail of microbes that live in the hind gut of the termite working for us, we can turn a sheet of paper into usable hydrogen. A lot of this technology is biomimicry at its best. By tweaking a couple of genes here and there, we can avoid having huge solar-power, wind-power, or agricultural footprints on the land. Biotechnology has been around for a long time. Diabetics have been taking insulin from engineered microbes for twenty-five to thirty years now. Most of the cheese we eat and the beer we drink comes from engineered microbes.

Cooper: Could cataloging all species in any way threaten undiscovered species?

Brand: The discovery of a new species almost always promotes protection. These are not hunters doing the research; these are scientists who are studying the kinds of habitat that let such species exist and are helping to make sure those habitats get preserved. The Endangered Species Act is a direct result of such discoveries.

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