Stewart Brand's Four Heresies

Environmental guru, Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, makes an intentionally provocative prediction in the May 2005 issue of M.I.T.'s Technology Review.

He begins by observing that the environmental movement has been dominated by romantics who "are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path." This is a good thing, he suggests, when it comes to building mass movements. 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."

It may sound like Brand is setting himself up to deny global warming, but he's too smart for that. Instead, he predicts that within a decade "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."

More than half of the world's population now lives in cities, and wherever urbanization increases, birth rates decrease. "Worldwide, birthrates are in free fall. Around one-third of countries now have birthrates below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) and sinking. Nowhere does the downward trend show signs of leveling off." Environmentalists, Brand argues, should welcome massive migration to mega-cities, since it will stabilize global population and allow for restoration of depopulated rural areas. Instead of romanticizing rural villages, which he notes are often sexist and fundamentalist, greens should work on making places like Mumbai, Istanbul, and Mexico City healthy and just.

Next, Brand proposes that the left's rejection of genetically-modified foods is not based on well-reasoned scientific argument, but on knee-jerk suspicion of anything produced in the labs of a multinational. Now, people are right to be suspicious of corporations, but Brand is right to insist that we need to base our final judgments on evidence, not rumor or guilt by association. After all, there are plenty of corporate products we'd be lost without, like computers. So instead of demonizing "frankenfoods," he suggests, we should take control of genetic codes away from the biotech bosses, the same way "open source" hackers have done with computer software.

Brand's most controversial proposal, though, is that we need to get over our "quasi-religious aversion" to nuclear power since it represents the best available solution to the global warming. "There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective,” Brand told the New York Times. “Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don’t know where it is and you don’t know what it’s doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody’s atmosphere.”

Brand was once a radical anti-nukes campaigner, but he now argues that the "industry is mature, with a half-century of experience and ever improved engineering behind it. Problematic early reactors like the ones at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl can be supplanted by new, smaller-scale, meltdown-proof reactors like the ones that use the pebble-bed design. Nuclear power plants are very high yield, with low-cost fuel."

Whether Brand is right or not about his four heresies, his rational and scientific approach to environmental questions is a badly needed corrective to the Romantic primitivism that too often dominates the movement. "Within the environmental movement, scientists are the radical minority leading the way. They are already transforming the perspective on urbanization and population growth. But their radicalism and leadership will have to increase if humanity is to harness green biotech and step up to its responsibilities for the global climate."