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

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

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

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.

Re:Pragmatism

"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

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

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

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

GM crops

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

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.

Environmental package deal

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

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

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.

GMO rice that removes herbicides

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.

Radical conservation

"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.

Hopefully Nuclear Power

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.

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

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

• 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

Re:Nuclear Energy

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

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

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

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:Bah, why bother?

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:Urbanization

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.

Re:I'll trust an environmentalist over industry

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.