Stewart Brand on 'Environmental Heresies'

FleaPlus writes "The MIT Technology Review has an article predicting where the mainstream of the environmental movement may likely reverse its collective stance in the next ten years. The four areas discussed are population growth, urbanization, genetically-engineered organisms, and nuclear power. The article is written by Stewart Brand, known for creating the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL online community, and the Long Now Foundation. Brand also has some interesting comments regarding the sometimes-conflicting interaction between romantics and scientists in the environmental movement. There's an online debate between Brand and former DOE official Joseph Romm on TR Blogs." Frankly, unless humanity decides to undergo a massive collective personality change of not being consumption-focused, I don't see much other way around these particular issues. What we all need is an Arthur to keep us depressed and sleeping in darkened rooms to lower energy consumption.

Pragmatism

[stevesliva (648202)]

I'm glad someone has taken the time to lay this out. It has long been very frustrating to see environmentalist romantics fly in the face of reason in railing against genetically-modified plants as a possible solution to population pressures, or arguing against nuclear power as a clean energy source.

Increasing demand for power and other resources isn't going away. Time to suck it up and deal with imperfect solutions.

Re:Pragmatism

[Qzukk (229616)]

So tell me please - which problem das GM solve ?

The problem of dumping gallons of fertilizer and pesticide on each square foot of land?

The ideal purpose of GM (ie, when its not some company using it to sell farmers their "special" chemicals like the roundup-ready series) is not to create more food per acre, its to use less resources doing it.

Additionally in regions where there is a distribution problem, imagine being able to grow food in town, despite the poor land quality.

Re:The ideal purpose of GM (ie, when its not some

[YU Nicks NE Way (129084)]

Didn't read the article, did you? Go find the paragraph about flouridation.

Let me lay this out in short sentences. Herbicide resistant crops need less herbicide. That's not good for the chemical companies, but bad. Simultaneously, it has a net positive impact on farmers, food, and the environment.

Let me explain by analogy. I'm not a farmer -- but I do raise roses as a hobby. As you no doubt know, rose bushes are fundamentally unhealthy organisms which only thrive with massive doses of fertilizer, insecticide, and herbicide, so those of us who raise them know all about this.

Except for one thing: what you think you know isn't true. Older roses do require lots of support to thrive. More modern roses, with their huge flowers and bizarre growth patterns...don't. They've been selectively modified to resist the blights and infestations that killed older plants. They use the calcium in the soil more efficiently, and so don't need as much. They're stunningly healthy plants, designed to be raised in low maintenance gardens by amateurs.

As a result, if I'd grew the modern frankenplants, I'd spend more on the plants to start with, but far less on chemicals.

The same kind of thing applies in frankenfood. If I raise glycophosphate-resistant wheat, then I can apply a glycophosphate-based herbicide to the fields in quantities sufficient to kill the weeds without affecting the wheat. Guess what? That's less than ten percent of the amount I used to apply to the fields. Traditional preemergence applications had to persist in the soil long enough to affect the broad-leaf weeds, which meant applying enough to resist washing away. Applying postemergence means applying only enough to kill the weeds that are there right now. Monsanto will sell me less herbicide than they used to...not more.

no, taste issues more harvest/transport related

[ScentCone (795499)]

Actually, this usually has more to do with harvesting things prematurely for long-haul shipment, and then force-ripening (with gas exposure, etc) just prior to sale. The fruit, or vegetable in question doesn't have as long to properly ripen and generate the compounds that we enjoy as the familiar mature tastes.

This is driven mostly by the demand from less well educated (in culinary terms) shoppers wanting to see/feel crisp-looking produce of every variety on the shelf through every season, or with their unwillingness to pay what it costs for the more immediate transportation of those same items if they were left to ripen on the vine/tree, etc. Spend a little more on the same varieties at a higher-end store, and you'll get your flavor back. But you'll also be burning more fuel, because the produce was probably flown to you (unless it's grown locally).

Re:The ideal purpose of GM (ie, when its not some

[crmarvin42 (652893)]

Roundup was already one of the most popular herbicide when roundup-ready corn hit the market. Prior to GM corn being available farmers were applying the herbicide 4-5 time in good years and upto 8 times in really bad years. By using roundup-ready corn and roundup together farmers apply the herbicide at most 3 times befor the corn is tall enough to kill off weeds on its own by preventing the weeds from receiving enough light. The net result for monsanto is $ from both the pesticide and the seeds. Now most farmers, even prior to the advent of GM crops didn't save seeds because they would miss out on the genetic improvements from year to year. Seed companies practiced intensive selection for production traits prior to using GM to improve plant quality. Genes native to the plants confering resistance to mold, insect infestation, and improved growth were combined via controlled polination for decades prior to the GM revolution. The net gain for producers is time. 1 application of roundup as opposed to 4 applications in good years and even better in bad years. As we all know time is money, and as someone who has worked on family run dairy farms, (tip: most large "Factory Farms" are family owned and operated) there are never enough hours in the day to manage animals, crops, employee's, maintenance and the ever increasing paper work needed to run a farm. saving that much time is worth the premium paid for the seeds. Land is finite. Most farms cannot get larger with out buy land off of competitors aready using it to grow the same crops, and often the land is more valuable for urban sprawl than agriculture. The best way to make more money is to improve the efficiency of production via less input costs, or increased production from the same land. Most of the posts i've seen on this page are from the "non scientist" members of the environmentalist movements. Being a tech person is not the same as devoting your life to understanding the problems facing agriculture and attempting to solve them. As a Scientist associated with this problem (i'm a phd student in animals science) I'm constantly frustrated by the ignorance western peopls have concerning their own food supply and the arrogance seen from people despite there admited ignorance. the article may or may not be correct on the other points. I'm not associated with those fields but I am qualified to comment on the validity of the GM topic and they are right on the money

Re:Pragmatism

[ajs (35943)]

"What problems do GM plants solve?"

It shocks me that you even have to ask this question, but Ok, here's some of the items off the top of my head:

• Introducing natural pesticides that eliminate or reduce the use of man-made chemicals that injure both the environment and the health of the people consuming the food while lowering the cost of the food
• Making crops more hardy, avoiding massive price spikes (and thus dietary swings for the poor), when weather or disease wipe out a crop.
• Eliminating the need to selectively breed for survivability in cold storage, thus putting the selective breeding weight back on things like taste (tomatoes are a great example of the damage that such breeding has done... remember when they used to TASTE LIKE TOMATOES?)
• Increasing shelf-life, and therefore the range at which food can be reasonably delivered (this directly impacts the price of food in the third world, as getting food in place before it rots is a huge cost).
• Providing nutrients (e.g. iodine) which people in certain parts of the world tend to suffer from the lack of.

The list goes on, and is actually quite huge. There are ethical, legislative, and technical hurdles involved, but let's not try to pretend that this is in any way being done "just because", or for purely selfish reasons. This is potentially one of the most important steps man will take since the initial cultivation of crops.

Re:Pragmatism

[meringuoid (568297)]

Then there's nuclear (fission) power. Yes, it's clean and safe, relative to, say, coal. But there's the waste disposal issue. It hasn't been solved.

Has the waste disposal issue been solved for coal power plants? As far as I'm concerned, pumping that stuff into the atmosphere does not constitute safe disposal...

Re:Pragmatism

[maxpublic (450413)]

Ironically, coal plants produce far more radiation per MW than nuclear power plants do...and they dump it all into the atmosphere. Most greenies seem ignorant of that fact, or simply skip ahead to the entirely unfeasible "let's use solar/wind/whatever" combined with "live the way I live, or you're immoral scum" arguments.

The environmental extremists deserve about as much consideration as those lunatics from PETA.

Max

Re:Pragmatism

[Ithika (703697)]

So all those households that use geothermal springs, are super-insulated and made out of renewable materials, that have solar water-heaters or even photo-cells on the rooftops, that use energy-saver light bulbs, recycle their newspapers, bottles and cans, that walk to the shops two minutes away instead of taking the car, that commute using public transport ... are in my imagination?

No, just because you don't do it, doesn't mean other people don't.

Re:Pragmatism

[Rei (128717)]

As someone who knows a lot of what you would call "hippies", let me describe what they live like, since you seem grossly ignorant.

Transportation: The vastmajority of them are either part of a car co-op where they share a fuel efficient car, have a fuel efficient car themselves (often a hybrid), or use public transportation. Distance to shops varies; I know both urban and rural "hippies" ;)

Solar: Solar is out of the budget of most of them; however, the more affluent often do use some sort of renewable energy.

Waste: If they have any land, the majority of them have an organic garden, and compost. Almost all recycle; the net result is very, very little trash. You'd be surprised how little effort it takes once you get into the habit.

In short: you're completely mistaken. You're talking about the lifestyles about a vague class of people that you don't really know.

Re:Pragmatism

[Rei (128717)]

Reprocessing is not banned due to fears of contamination - it is banned, mostly, due to nuclear proliferation concerns. The next generation of anti-proliferation reactors might help alleviate this.

Of course, ideally, you'd have a breeder reactor that burns the Pu as it makes it. I'm a big fan of lead-bismuth designs - if something goes wrong, the very worst case is that your nuclear material gets encased a dozen or two feet inside a giant block of lead ;) No water, no liquid sodium; anti-proliferation; efficient breeding; hot enough for direct hydrogen generation in some designs; can operate on convection alone (although to be efficient you want to assist the convection process); etc. A great design, really.

Re:Pragmatism

[wayne606 (211893)]

I don't know what it means to "corrupt" the gene pool. The genes of all organisms are changing all the time and are selected for or against by environmental pressures. We're adding another type of "mutation" - GM - and using the same kind of environmental pressure farmers have been using for thousands of years to select for it. Nothing is different, qualitatively.

In any case, our best bet for saving the planet is decreasing the population. I don't know what a sustainable number might be but it's got to be a lot closer to 1G than 6G

Re:Pragmatism

[GileadGreene (539584)]

It might have helped if you'd RTFA. It covered many of the issues you are complaining about.

Re: GM and Corn

[BitterAndDrunk (799378)]

You are aware that we've been genetically modifying plants for years through a variety of processes, including (but not limited to) selective breeding?

Changing it at the genetic level through fancy techniques is not incredibly different than isolating a strain for its characteristics and cross pollinating it.

Corn isn't anywhere near what its original form is, being modified for years and years to be the tall vegetable we're accustomed to.

Re:Pragmatism

[Lord Ender (156273)]

You just identified yourself as one of the romantics instead of one of the rational scientists. Spouting off your silliness has a negative impact on your movement because people will tend to assosciate reasonable scientific thought with your emotional non-thought.

Your unsupported assumptions that "natural" is somehow ideal and that humanity should be limited suggest that you are basing your opinions on some mysticism, superstition or religion, rather on scientific skepticism.

Re:Pragmatism

[sketerpot (454020)]

"Designed to sell more of their own pesticides"? Genetically modified food reduces the need for pesticides, as well as reducing the amount of farmland we have to use. Perhaps you're thinking of "Roundup-ready" crops which are immune to the plant-killer "Roundup". The thing there, though, is that Roundup is one of the most environmentally friendly ways to kill weeds that I know of, and Roundup-ready crops make it possible to use Roundup instead of less friendly herbicides.

GM crops

[Yusaku Godai (546058)]

This is one issue that's always bugged the hell out of me about the wackier spectrum of environmentalists.
GM crops have the potential, hell, they're *necessary* for a great number of third world countries to be able to grow enough food to feed their people. And these guys are trying to stop that for the sake of nonsensical political motivations.
Then they go about using scare tactics, calling it "frankenfoods" and whatnot, as if there's something horrific about it. Excuse me, but we've been genetically modifying our crops for millenia. We've just gotten more sophisticated about it.

Re:GM crops

[hey! (33014)]

I read this article in dead tree form some weeks ago.

One of the choice bits was Brand's assertion that left wing opposition to GM foods is a mirror image of right wing opposition to water flouridization. The right doesn't like flourdization because it comes from the government. The left doesn't like GM foods because they come from industry.

Re:GM crops

[cherokee158 (701472)]

The real danger of genetically engineered ANYTHING is that you risk creating a monoculture, which could make an entire food crop or species vulnerable to rapid extinction under adverse conditions.

The more specialized a species becomes, the more it needs a tightly defined environment in which to exist. If anything happens to change its environment...and it will...it can have catastrophic consequences.

Engineered plants and animals can also overwhelm other wildlife in the same niches of the ecosystem, despite precautions, and throw the entire ecosystem out of balance. (In much the same way that non-native animals introduced to closed ecosystems can have very disruptive results...witness the Cane toad plague in Australia)

Mother nature has spent millenia sorting out which species are best adapted to survive on our planet, and she does so without prejudice. Can you say the same for a profit-minded food corporation?

Insightful? What complete bollocks!

[Colin Smith (2679)]

GM crops make a negligible difference to third world countries. The yields on GM crops are only marginally better than for regular crops, the difference is only significant for those huge agribusinesses who have tens of thousands of acres of the stuff.

It's war, corruption, disease and import tariffs which decimate the farming populations of third world countries. What they need is good stable government and fair trade with the developed world, not GM crops.

Re:GM crops

[by Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect us to do? Invade your country, overthrow the corrupt leadership, and establish a transitionary government until your citizens have the chance to draft a new constitution and elect a representative governing body? Why keep doing that when the rest of the world just shits all over us for doing so?

Re:GM crops

[RealAlaskan (576404)]

... if you plant a patch of GM corn, you cannot use the seeds of the plants to grow new corn.

That is a huge problem. I'd advise subsistance farmers to stay away from store-bought seeds.

They just don't grow.

You'd better hope they don't grow, because if they do grow, you have even worse problems. Just ask the Canadian [savethepinebush.org] farmers [i-sis.org.uk] sued [non-gm-farmers.com] by Monsanto [organicconsumers.org].

On Sept. 11 2001 about 3500 people died in New York. On that same day 44000 children died in Africa of hunger. Is there a war on hunger? NO.

If you folks would like us to invade, overthrow your dictators for you, colonize and Americanise you, just say the word and we'll put you on our list. The whole process might take 100 years or more, and if you don't whole-heartedly embrace the Americanisation part, it just won't work (e.g., the Phillipines). Be aware that the list is already very long, and there is just no way that you're going to get ahead of Iran and North Korea, who have already signed up for the ``get civilized or get dead'' package.

It might be quicker and easier for you to get rid of your Mugabes [66.102.7.104] yourself.

Environmental package deal

[by Anonymous Coward]

My problem with a lot of environmental thought is its all tied up in a package of garbage ideas. Efficiency good, but technology bad. Walmart is EVIL! SUVs are EVIL! Globalism is evil! What's wrong with the Nature Conservancy approach? Buy up the land while trying to respect property rights. Look for approaches that make economic sense to the locals so they are sustainable. Be more efficient without hating SUVs or even nuclear power. Why does it all have to be tied to some lefty anti-capitalist, anti-globalist worldview?

Nuclear vs. Coal

[sznupi (719324)]

Too bad that people don't realise that coal based energy production is much more hazardous to inveroment...furthermore, it's not only about what people typically understand as pollution, but also also radioactive "waste"! (typical nuclear plant doesn't release them to biosphere; typical coal plant releases some amount of it - radioactive elements that were in its fuel) And meanwhile almost 100% of electricity here comes from coal, and worst of all, 2/3 of it is brown coal :/ And probably public will block construction of nuclear power plant, that is planned in the next ~10/15 years...

Industrial safety

[kebes (861706)]

Just to add to this post... as someone who has worked in a nuclear reactor, I'd like to comment on the safety of nuclear vs. coal/petroleum industries. In addition to nuclear releasing far less pollution into the environment (and all its waste being very localized and contained), there is the issue of worker safety.

The nuclear industry is very well regulated. Worker safety (and radiation exposure) is meticulously monitored and recorded. Because the entire system is so paranoid and regulated, it is very safe. The most dangerous thing about working in a nuclear plant is conventional industrial accidents (like a crane falling on you). The risk increase due to the presence of nuclear power is minimal.

It is very strange that the public would be shocked and horrified if 10 people were killed in a nuclear power plant accident. However, many more than that are injured or killed every year in the coal/petroleum industry (think of fires on oil rigs, etc.) because this industry is far less safety-oriented. (It's also worth reminding that nuclear power is "more expensive" than other power sources mostly due to this level of regulation.)

The number of injuries/deaths in the nuclear power industry, per year, is small compared to other power industries (and indeed compared to most industries in general). So from the point of view of worker safety, nuclear (in its current, regulated form) is the best.

I'll trust an environmentalist over industry

[bigberk (547360)]

In the past few years I've woken up to the power of this thing called money, as a driving force in human motivation (at least in societies where material wealth is valued over social relationships). Money makes people say anything and do anything, for their personal gain. It's really a very powerful force, and it trumps logic, common sense, and in many cases, morals.

Certainly, some environmentalists have financial motives but the majority do not. When scientists are concerned about global climate change, they are publishing these warnings in the hope of drawing attention to what they genuinely perceive as a serious problem. Ditto for polution concerns, supplies of natural resources, biological diversity and ecosystem damage. These are FACTS.

In contrast, the news releases from industry which make their way across television and newspaper spread absolute lies. Examples:

• there is no global climate change (flies in the face of 90%+ of scientific opinion)
• business can continue as usual without worrying about environmental factors (a hope, for short term business as usual)
• the economy can survive $100 oil
• nuclear is the solution to our energy needs

Here's the important point: a lot of scientists work for industry. So they have a distinct bias. In many cases they are providing reports for their employer. So next time you run into a scientific report, check the source... not all scientists are funded equally.

Re:I'll trust an environmentalist over industry

[mizhi (186984)]

there is no global climate change (flies in the face of 90%+ of scientific opinion)

Actually, I don't think anyone doubts that there is global climate change. What differs scientist to scientist are the causes of said change.

business can continue as usual without worrying about environmental factors (a hope, for short term business as usual)

This is true, but if you talk to responsible businessmen, they understand this. The problem is that people expect returns on their investments uberquickly, sometimes in short amount of time than is required to make ecologically sound expansions in production.

the economy can survive $100 oil

Why, in principle, can't the economy survive $100 oil? Perhaps not in its current form, but there's no universal law that says barrels of oil must be below $100.

nuclear is the solution to our energy needs

How is this a lie?

Here's the important point: a lot of scientists work for industry. So they have a distinct bias. In many cases they are providing reports for their employer. So next time you run into a scientific report, check the source... not all scientists are funded equally.

Unfortunately, what trickles down to us, non-experts, is some journalist's interpretation of highly complex work. We often get only half the story, and the half we get is usually incorrect.

You also can't blithely ascribe bias to pure monetary gain. Scientists differ on causes and solutions. Science isn't always a clean field and there are periods of time where no one really knows what the fuck the correct answer is. Call it scientific evolution; the debate and refinement of theories until the correct ones remain. What matters at the end of the day is how well other scientists are able to replicate results and if the theories stand the test of time. Those that don't, will be forgotten, or relegate to crack-pot conspiracy theorists. If a scientist sells his objectivity to the highest bidder, then they will eventually be discovered and his theories and work discredited.

The key point is that neither you (I'm assuming) nor I have the expertise required to make that call. We have to wait for what those in the field finally decide, if they ever come to a consensus.

GMO rice that removes herbicides

[G4from128k (686170)]

This article [sciencenews.org] describes a GMO rice that is herbicide resistant. Scientists spliced in a human enzyme that is very effective at crunching toxins to create rice that can withstand a wider variety of weed-killers. This lets farmers rotate their weedkillers to reduce the chance that the weeds evolve resistance.

The GMO rice provides two other important environmental benefits. First, the new enzyme is so efficient at detoxifying the herbicide that the resulting rice is relatively herbicide free (non-modified rice contains 20X more residual herbicide). Second, the GMO rice extracts herbicide from the soil, meaning less herbicide in run-off.

h2g2 Geek Cred dropping

[KMitchell (223623)]

What we all need is an Arthur to keep us depressed and sleeping darkened rooms.

Unless the odd grammar above somehow changes the meaning of the sentence, I think Marvin was who you were going for there...

As long as I'm nitpicking, when I think of "an Arthur" I think of http://www.thetick.ws/car8.html

Radical conservation

[Colin Smith (2679)]

"radical conservation in energy transmission and use"

He says this like it's an insignificant thing. It's not. We literally throw away approximately 60% of the energy used to produce electricity as "waste heat". And this is at the power station itself (including nuclear)!

We then go on to use most of the 40% of the energy we have actually transmitted to produce more heat. It's not what could be classed as clever.

Changing this single inefficiency in our energy generation sector would do the job. It's not even particularly radical, the solution is a couple of hundred years old, it's just that until very recently it's been cheaper to just pump in more oil, gas or coal.

Re:Radical conservation

[Colin Smith (2679)]

Lets take Helsinki Energy as they are about as good as it gets in the field:

http://www.helsinginenergia.fi/en/tuotanto/benef it s.html

Heating:
http://www.helsinginenergia.fi/en/heat /heating.htm l

Cooling. Rather than running AC:
http://www.helsinginenergia.fi/en/heat/coolin g.htm l

88% overall efficiency in fuel usage. 90% reduction in electricity consumption due to Air Conditioning.

Instead of centralising your power station and then shipping electricity hundreds of miles, put generation near demand. If necessary gassify coal to allow cleaner generation.

In terms of a 100 year old technology, the first commercially run district heating system was in New York:
http://www.jamestownbpu.com/heat/history.ph p

BTW, it wasn't invented in New York. New York was the first commercial system. It isn't more common because coal and oil is increadibly cheap in America.

Environmental orthodoxy

[karvind (833059)]

Yep, yep, probably, and maybe. These are the environmental orthodoxies I've always felt most uncomfortable with, and Brand has captured why with concise, forceful arguments.

On population, he points out that global population is close to leveling off and is declining precipitously in many countries. Why? Mostly it is the unprecedented worldwide migration from rural villages to cities, where having lots of children is less of an advantage. If those concerned with sustainability get out ahead of this trend and help guide it, it could be an environmental blessing. Cities put people close together, reducing their collective energy use. They free up rural areas for wildlife and wilderness (if protections are put in place).

Regarding biotech: There's truth to this, though it's slightly facile. It does, after all, matter that GM has been developed by giant corporations and has been used primarily for their benefit. But the idea that the technology itself is intrinsically bad ... that doesn't make much sense to me. As Brand says, the proper reaction for greens ought to be to appropriate the technology and use it for their ends, particularly since, embrace or no embrace, it's gonna spread. Open-source biotech seems like a promising way for GM to do some environmental good. Brand offers some scenarios.

Ultimately, I suspect that urbanization, GM crops, and nuclear power are inevitable. If all we do is stand on the sidelines shouting "no, no, no!" the process will proceed without us, guided by the worst actors. The smartest thing that those of us concerned about the health of humanity and the planet can do is get involved and try to steer toward an outcome that is equitable and sustainable.

Hopefully Nuclear Power

[MichaelPenne (605299)]

will be the first thing reversed.

It's high time the top brass of the environmental movement admit that stopping Nuclear power was a mistake that has lead to greater devastation of the environment by coal plants [climateark.org].

Even the nuclear waste issue pales in comparison to the the ecological damage coal plants have caused and will keep causing until we replace them (finally) with much cleaner nuclear technologies like Pebble Bed. [mit.edu] Coal of course has it's own waste issues. [energyjustice.net]

The anti-nuclear power movement has been one of the best examples of the law of unintended consequences in our times.

The big change will be soil quality.

[waffleman (697097)]

Soil quality is a very big and very basic issue that no one talks about. Our agricultural fields are dying, folks. I'm sorry I'm only offering anecdotal evidence in this post, but I remember 20 years ago in southern Ontario seeing what crop yields were like and the difference today is bizarre. Fields that were then very fertile are now just gray dust. They suffer horribly from erosion and require huge amounts of chemical fertilizer to get a barely minimal yield.

These are not isolated, ignorant farmers who just plant corn. These farmers are doing their hardest to follow best practices and be competitve in the agri-industry, and honestly, they're still killing their land. Unless we make a big change in how soil quality is treated, our ability to produce food is going to take nose dive. It's simple.

And don't start on the vegetarianism rant. In North America, plant production with the overuse of petroleum based chemical fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides is what is killing soil - not grazing.

Strongly disagree about population growth

[smchris (464899)]

Ehrlich may have underestimated the ability of technology to increase food production on the short term but I think he was right in principle. It is my understanding that the large fish population in the Atlantic is a minor fraction of what it was only 30 years ago. That is an epic planetary die-off that has already occurred in an extraordinarily short time. World-wide human starvation hasn't been seen (yet) because we are still in the transition process of stripping the planet bare. Why do we need _any_ population increase to finish the job?

Haven't people heard the story about passenger pigeons:

"It was Alvin Jones who told us about the Pigeon Roost Prairie which was near the Jones homestead. He said so many pigeons stopped to roost in the pines in this are that they broke the limbs off the trees and the trees died, so there was a prairie there. There wasn't a living tree for 150 acres, and it was called Pigeon Roost Prairie. That was virgin pine timber they killed. The pigeons were almost as big as a chicken, not the homing pigeon; they were two or three times larger, about the size of a pheasant. Not thousands of pigeons but millions of pigeons! I tried to learn all I could about this pigeon migration. I was interested in it. It was something to think about. There would be so, many they would darken the sun for three days, all going north."

http://www.ulala.org/P_Pigeon/Texas.html

Aren't people curious about how primitive cultures were able to feed themselves with sharpened sticks? I suspect it was because going down to the brook to spear a carp was only somewhat more inconvenient than going down to the freezer to find something to thaw.

Like boiling frogs, the human lifespan is only 70+ years. Perhaps it is too short for people to actually experience ecological change and ingrain any feeling for the issue. As long as there is soylent green, some people will call it a balanced ecology. Others think more diversity is valuable.

The point is that the planet was already damaged by population and industry before anyone on Slashdot was born. We should be discussing whether we are at the planetary coup de grace stage, not congratulating ourselves on how population isn't a problem.

(AND, if we didn't have so many people, there would be one less argument for both GMO and nuclear.)

Brand is selling out

[Baldrson (78598)]

• His emphasis on urbanization as the way to control population is not only inhumane but ultimately ineffective.
  • It is inhumane because, except for a few notable exceptions, people are not well adapted to urban environments. The reason their fertility falls is similar to the reason the fertility of zoo animals falls. They are in an unnatural environment.
  • It is ineffective because:
  • Those exceptional cultures/genes that are adapted to the urban environment will, at a human ecology level, just eat the populations that can't adapt to urban environments and then go on exponentiating. He likes pointing out that "even" Mormon fertility is dropping but doesn't bother pointing out that other groups are reproducing at way above replacement levels within the urban setting. He knows better than to claim there is no human biodiversity at work in the cosmopolitan environments. His comments on invasive species demonstrates he sees how ecological panmixia destroys diversity by promoting unsustainable ecologies. Human ecologies are no different.
  • The most sociopathic urban cultures which Brand's "savvy" environmentalism is sadistically exponentiating will continue the destruction of the countryside and general environment because:
  • They will still need the photosynthetic basis for their food chain.
  • The food will have to be transported to the cities, requiring more transportation cost for each food calorie consumed.
  • Those cultures hey will lack the ability create new sources of food since they'll be purely political animals capable of manipulating and effectively eating other human groups but without the connection to the land of the humans they have digested.

His reliance on nuclear energy as the solution to the greenhouse emission problem betrays exactly the sort of lack of creativity just described. Natural ecosystems need not suffer substantial presence of intensive agriculture and global warming CO2 can be sequestered from the atmosphere in the process.

Agriculture need not be land intensive. In fact, it can be removed from the vast majority of existing ecosystems with a relatively minor amount of innovation in food processing and packaging.

On about 108 acres, Earthrise Farms in the Imperial Valley desert, California is producing 67kg of protein per square meter per year using relatively little water. This is better than 20 times the yield of soybeans and includes one of the broadest spectrums of amino acids of any known source of protein. The crop is spirulina, a blue green algae that is a source of nutrition at the base of the aquatic food chain. They have been doubling their production every 5 years but have limited themselves to a niche market in health food or "nutriceuticals". The primary technology they need developed to make this protein directly consumable by humans as a staple of the diet is removal of nucleic acids -- something that may be feasible as an extension of their centrifugal drying process. In any case, it is an excellent feed stock for animals and can displace many times its own acreage in conventional agricultural uses.

The late John Martin at Moss Landing hypothesized in 1987 that large sections of the tropical Pacific were ready to support ecosystems nearly as abundant as the oceans off the coast of Peru except for the lack of one key nutrient: Iron. In 1995, subsequent to his death, his team tested "the Iron hypothesis" by spreading a half ton of iron sulfate (available in huge cheap quantities as a byproduct of iron smelting) over a wide area of ocean. The south Pacific ocean turned from "crystal clear electric blue", virtually devoid of life, to duck pond green. They produced 25,000 tons of biomass for a factor of 50,000 gain from fertilizer to biomass. Once the ocean desert bloomed with phytoplankton, zooplankton, the next link up the food chain, began grazing. Had they kept going, zooplankton grazing fish could have been introduced, such as anchovies, but they terminated the ferti

I predict a more unified left

[sam_handelman (519767)]

Should the environmental movement favor nuclear power?

Who cares!

The four subjects he raises are fringe distractions from the major policy questions which have the largest impact on our environment, which are merely a symptom of wider deficits in our nation's democratic culture.

Population growth is becoming a non-issue.

I favor nuclear power as long as the details are right - if the public is going to take all the risks, we shouldn't allow some private entity to reap the profits off of it.

I favor genetically modified organisms which are designed in a way that benefits farmers and/or the environment, rather than maximizing the profits of entrenched power.

Likewise, urbanization is fine if it leads to prosperity, but as a result of people being driven off of the land by thugs (e.g. Columbia) it is a bad thing.

The devil is in the details, as has always been the case. In ten years time the details may have changed enough that the present situation becomes unrecognizable; so I think trying to predict what we will be trying to do ten years from now is futile and silly.

This isn't to bash futurism generally - we can't know what to work towards now if we don't have some concept of what the future will be like. But trying to predict the future of activism? Waste of time.

Getting tired of low fertility scare tactics

[dara (119068)]

Population is the most important issue in politics for me, so I read the section on this topic (but skipped the rest). I'm so tired of the descriptions of "doom and gloom" that will happen with low fertility rates and a shrinking population - these authors are a mirror image of the mistakes they claim that past environmental authors have made in predicting the future.

There are some scientific facts on population that are rarely disputed:

1] The earth has a finite carrying capacity

Actual numbers will vary anywhere from 1 to 10 billion people, but it's obvious that constraints on food, water, energy, pollution sinks do constrain the number of us. My opinion is that the number is less than we are now, but we are getting by (some of us anyway) because of unsustainable oil and water use. Perhaps we could get by on renewable energy with around 2 billion people.

2] Large numbers of humans cannot leave the earth

There is no way we could move even 1/1000th the world population off the earth even if there was someplace to go. The resources/pollution needed to do this make it a non-starter for addressing population growth.

3] Adjustments need to be made to run an economy with a declining population growth

Not impossible, but obviously it is harder to operate a system that is shrinking instead of growing. Tricks like using lots of workers to support fewer retirees won't work. Any pyramid scheme seems great when you are on the growth side, but I'd prefer not to have the human race crash like a big pyramid scheme.

4] Fertility rates can be adjusted by government action

Coercive measures while espoused by some as necessary have been avoided in very successful transitions to lower fertility (e.g. Iran). We have less experience with going the other way, but some countries (e.g. Singapore) are trying incentives to raise the fertility rate. I see no reason that these rates can't be successfully adjusted if for some reason, 50 years from now, the world wide fertility rate dips down well below 2 and stays there so long that our population goes below 2 billion.

Now, back to the article:

In each country listed: Japan, Germany, Spain, Russia (I think) and Italy, they could stand to lose 30% of their population anyway. I think the U.S. is too crowded and Europe has much higher densities (and Japan is worse) in terms of population per arable land unit.

"It turns out that population decrease accelerates downward just as fiercely as population increase accelerated upward, for the same reason."

What does this mean? If you measure the increase or decrease of an exponential function (what he's talking abut here) as a percentage, then of course they have the same fierceness, but there is no concept of acceleration (percentage growth is constant). If you measure the amount in absolute numbers, then exponential increase is accelerating, but exponential decrease is always decelerating.

As far as fertility going down everywhere, we in the U.S. are now at 2.08 and this is going up (albeit slowly). We were closer to 2 about 5 years ago I think. If you look at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ranko rder/2127rank.html [cia.gov], you will see there are still quite a few countries that have fertility rates above 2.1. (By the way, saying 2.1 is steady state assumes an average infant mortality rate that is pretty high. If you want the human race to all move into a the modern industrialized world, something under 2.05 is required). Granted, I don't have the plots of all countries fertility rates over time and some of these countries near the top may be declining, but I see absolutely no way we can declare success now. I expected better out of Technology Review, the magazine where I first learned about fuel cells for automotive use.

Dara

I wonder...

[PsiPsiStar (95676)]

If I was Monsanto's competitor, could I legally produce and release roundup-resistant weeds to nullify the benefits of roundup-ready soybeans?

Why nuclear?

[figa (25712)]

Brand's first two assumptions are not necessarily correct. I consider myself an environmentalist, and I've been aware for several years now that the global population is flattening out. I regularly use his argument against racist anti-immigrant Malthusians on the right.

When I moved to an urban area, I recognized instantly that I was lowering my environmental impact. I do not drive, I take up less land, and I take advantage of economies of scale for shipping and distribution of goods. I also have more options for recycling and co-op purchasing. Environmentalists are opposed largely to suburban sprawl that destroys habitats, wastes water for lawns, and makes mass transit impractical.

Brand writes off environmentalists' opposition to GM crops and nuclear power as romantic, but an environmentalist would just as easily paint his glowing portrait of these technologies as naive scientific idealism. It's unfortunate that Brand is unwilling to see the highly rational thinking behind environmentalists' opposition to GM and nuclear power.

Food and power "shortages" are in large part economic, which is to say they're a distribution problem, or ultimately a political problem. As an environmentalist, I do not see an inherent or immediate need for GM crops or additional nuclear power. I'm aware that we could already feed everybody on Earth with existing agricultural technologies, but we lack the political and economic will. Further, I do not trust corporations sponsoring genetic research. They are motivated by profit, not by environmental conservation, and will gladly wipe out everything that can't sue them on their way to profitability.

Environmentalists have already seen corporations do massive damage to the environment, and there is no reason to believe that corporations have changed in any way. 50 years ago, scientists were using the same food shortage arguments to back the introduction of pesticides, hormones, and chemical fertilizers into the food chain. I would rather not see a repeat of DDT with GM crops, and as corporations gain legal impunity, I see no reason to trust them or the scientists in their employ. Rather, I would like to see an emphasis on organic, sustainable farming, with a slow, balanced introduction of GM species after careful scientific peer review and heavy governmental oversight. Unfortunately, we do not currently have the political structure to provide trustworthy governmental oversight of GM foods, and until we do, it would be better in my opinion to hold off.

As for nuclear power, there are better options that have been ignored or underfunded in favor of GE's and MIT's pet projects. Whether it's tidal generators, solar, wind power, or bioenergy, I think it's worth focusing first on technologies that don't produce toxic wastes that will be around for thousands of years and can be used to make weapons, no matter how "safe" they are. It's not that nuclear energy is heresy, it's that it looks like a poor stopgap measure when we're on the way to genuinely sustainable power. Rather than invest in a nuclear power problem, it would be better to promote sustainable power and conservation in the meantime.

Re:Nuclear Energy

[nelsonal (549144)]

The problem I have is that there aren't any good replacements, nothing renewable comes close to the energy return of fossil fuels or nuclear (at current production).

Re:Nuclear Energy

[fireduck (197000)]

one can make similar arguments about oil deposits. in fact, for years, people have been claiming that we'll run out of oil in 20 years, and every 20 years, we still have oil to burn. why? because technology advances. oil reserves that were not economical or feasible to pump from 20 years ago are now very viable. we've got these nifty steam injection techniques that can extract from oil sands which have oil concentrations that are far below what previously would have been considered justification for even installing a well.

I'm sure the same could apply to uranium. What isn't viable today to process, could well be quite viable in 20 years if we approached the problem head on.

Re:Nuclear Energy

[amightywind (691887)]

In a few decades time, the cheap U ores would have run out, and the remaining deposits would absorb more energy to extract a gram of U than that gram can ever hope give back.

Over reliance on Nuclear energy can easily turn us away from looking at real alternatives. That's my gripe with Newkiller. Not some quasi-religious aversion.

And what are those real alternatives pray tell? Not solar power, wind power, conservation - that rickety tripod of enviromentalist dogma. Your statement that Uranium availability is in decline is absurd. The same Chicken Little arguments were used by environmentalists in the '70's about oil, and came to nothing. Uranium is still in plentiful supply on the Earth's surface and, for the very long term, in asteroids.

It is good to see environmental pseudo-science challenged in articles like this.

Re:Nuclear Energy

[meringuoid (568297)]

You are not an environmentalist, or you would know that the few decades time is if the entire world switched over the Nuclear all at once for 100% of it's energy needs

And also it assumes that we do no reprocessing, and we make no use of thorium. There's enough thorium on Earth to keep the breeder reactors running for... well, as near forever as you need it to be.

Re:Nuclear Energy

[Jonathan_S (25407)]

It seems to me that we should build the plants next to Yucca Mountain type facilities and use the national grid to transmit power to everywhere

The problem with that is nuclear plants really need access to a fair amount of water for cooling purposes; but long term storage facilities are focused on avoiding water, since it attacks the stored waste.

The geographic requirements for nuclear power plants and long term nuclear waste storage are just about opposite.

Re:Nuclear Energy

[fyngyrz (762201)]

The only problem I see with Nuclear power is what to do with the waste.

This problem has been solved. The waste is processed into what amount to vitrified glass blocks [nap.edu] which have stable storage lifetimes in the thousands of years. There is no way short of intentional refinement for waste stored in this manner to re-enter the environment in the relatively short term, unlike liquid or cannister based storage mechanisms. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that in a thousand years or so, we'll have a lot better idea of what to do with the blocks themselves, if indeed anything need be done. We've only had nuclear power for half a century or so, after all.

The correct choice at this time seems to be a combination of pebble bed reactors [answers.com], which are highly resistant to serious problems such as meltdown or explosive failure, and vitrified glass waste storage insofar as waste storage turns out to be required. Pebble bed reactors are somewhat different from the reactors we're used to thinking about, particularly in that they repeatedly re-process their own fuel, continually converting "waste" from the previous stage into still more energy.

The primary problem is political and environmentalist fearmongering (to the extent that it is not just ignorance, which I am perfectly will to credit both politicians and environmentalists with.) People will believe anything, especially if it comes with a nice, high energy dose of hysteria.

The secondary problem is that building nuclear power plants -- any kind -- is a long, drawn out proceedure. If we started today, money no object, the public all about supporting it, it'd still be quite a few years before the putative new plants began to benefit the infrastructure. Compound this with the fact that we're not going to start today, or at any time in the foreseeable future, and the fact that money is a severe problem, the public is in no way supportive, and the future for reasonable nuclear energy generation appears mighty bleak.

Re:Bah, why bother?

[meringuoid (568297)]

We did better than the dinosaurs.

Animal life came out of the oceans some 500 million years ago. For over half that time the land was dominated by dinosaurs. For perhaps 100,000 years the land has been dominated by humanity.

Yeah, we've done well.

Re:Great

[LarsWestergren (9033)]

Well, (from TFA) he has a degree in biology, and was involved in a Pentagon study on climate change. Oh, and he just got an article published in the Technology Review. You might have heard of it.

Also, eating muesli and selling organically grown tat (what's that?) doesn't disqualify someone from being an expert on these things, so quit the ad hominems.

What are YOUR qualifications by the way? Good Slashdot karma?

Re:Urbanization

[pestie (141370)]

I guess my point is that the "environmental movement" is a little conflicted; they apparently either like or dislike centralization and efficiencies of scale, depending on the context.

That could have something to do with the fact that such things are positive in some contexts and negative in others.

Re:Urbanization

[psin psycle (118560)]

Sprawl....

There are good things and bad things about packing people together. There are good ways and bad ways to do it. The city sprawl that most environmentalists would be talking about is where everyone lives in their huge house in the suburbs with their chemical fertilized lawns and their SUV's driving downtown to work every day. This is very wasteful way to 'pack people together'. Small city in Canada called Calgary has more land mass than most larger cities, with fewer people. Lots of crop land was destroyed to sprawl people out in the city. Now all this land is lawn or highway instead of farm. This increases the per-person ecological footprint.

The kind of packing people together that is better is where most people live in Apartment Buildings/Condos near to where they work, they don't have lawns or SUVs and they are able to walk to work and to the grocery store. This reduces the per-person ecological footprint.