Stewart Brand on 'Environmental Heresies' 762
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Increasing demand for power and other resources isn't going away. Time to suck it up and deal with imperfect solutions.
Re:Pragmatism (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Pragmatism (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, it's interesting to watch the same mistakes in reasoning over and over again. A lot of the increase in demand for power and resources is artifically created. In other words, increase in demand for resource is not a necessity; it is a situation that exists due to the business environment.
With increased government levvies, and education on future impacts of piggish consumption, overall demand can actually decrease. But such is not go
Re:Pragmatism (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, let's see: GM food--an attempt to take our food supply, which is already dangerously genetically uniform, and make it even more genetically uniform--which, if science is our guide, makes it more vulnerable to pandemic. Yes, short term yields should be great. However, food supplies should be STABLE, not boom-and-bust.
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. Ye
Re:Pragmatism (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
The environmental extremists deserve about as much consideration as those lunatics from PETA.
Max
Bogus argument (Score:3, Insightful)
That is a very trite response. It is a common tactic in a debate to immediately jump to an extreme position. People aren't being told to give up electricity, just use less and be more efficient. This should be a laudible goal by anyone's standards. To say "but you use it!" is an asinine response. We have to function in the society w
Re:Pragmatism (Score:5, Insightful)
No, just because you don't do it, doesn't mean other people don't.
Re:Pragmatism (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pragmatism (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps you need to look closer. Those dorks riding scooters and bikes to work might actually be environmentalists. Live downtown? Same thing. Work from home? Entirely possible. You don't have to live off the grid in a house made of recycled tires (although I know someone who does) to be an environmentalist. It's not an all-or-nothing proposition, and not dedicating your entire life to being en
Re:Pragmatism (Score:3, Insightful)
Or you could be a middle aged, Bush-voting, ex-military, pickup truck owning redstater, basically your uber anti-hippie, and still ride a bicycle to work.
How, you ask? Because I like to ride my bike to work.
Re:Pragmatism (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Pragmatism (Score:3, Informative)
However I'd take issue with a couple of points.
My degree is in Biological Sciences, specializing in genetics, and while I am quite happy to eat GM food on health grounds, to say that rejection of the technology on environmental grounds is pure romanticism is overly harsh.
Back when I was doing my degree, (in the late 80s, just as the first GM plans were being worked o
Re:Pragmatism (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm intrigued by your unsupported assertion that GMOs carry 'genetic baggage' that puts them at a disadvantage to wild type crops. It's a lovely theory, but I'm not sure how you can assert it holds true for ALL GMO phenotypes.
The Cane toad isn't a a red herring, and I attempted to explain why.
Assuming you have a scientific background you should actuall
Re:Pragmatism (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Pragmatism (Score:3, Interesting)
Well if you ask a scientist if he knows what he is doing especially in his field of study, of course he will tell you he knows what he is doing, but at the same time the process they are involved in is making theories, testing theories, peer review tearing down
Re:Pragmatism (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The ideal purpose of GM (ie, when its not some com (Score:3, Insightful)
The "real world" purpose for GM is to increase the profitability of those companies in that market.
That's the marketplace in action, and unfortunately reducing resources has little to do with it, unless the resources reduced are procured from a competitor. I suspect similar reasoning is why medical cannabis is has been an issue between the DEA and alternative medic
Re:The ideal purpose of GM (ie, when its not some (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know who modded you up, but you don't deserve it, as your logic is fundamentally flawed.
They're not going to dump herbicides with "wreckless abandon" because doing so takes time and money. Farmers, like most people, don't want to spend either unproductively.
Can, but won't (Score:3, Informative)
Simple economics. Farmers are in business to make money. When you are talking about 2000 acres, the cost of everything adds up. When you can turn the sprayer down to half the volume and get the same results as before because you can use a different, stronger poison, that appears on the bottom line.
The typical suburban lawn gets at much chemicals as a 20 acre field. Homeowners care about their green lawn more than the environment, and the cost is so cheap they don't care. Farmers are using much more e
Re:The ideal purpose of GM (ie, when its not some (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pragmatism (Score:5, Informative)
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:
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Pragmatism (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: GM and Corn (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pragmatism (Score:3, Interesting)
"Montaso vs Schessmier" has already locked this into Canadian law by the Supreme Court of Canada, and since US law shares precedent with Canadian law, it's the law there too.
This is the point Anon above was trying t
Urbanization (Score:3, Insightful)
The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities.
as part of his observation that urbanization is slowing population growth (which he contends is slowing growth).
Actually, my observation is exactly the opposite. I seem to hear more sympathy for packing everyone together than for spreading them out in the modern environmentalist rhetoric. That's why "sprawl" has become a cuss-word among this bunch.
For another example, look at the current opinion of Walmart. Just today I heard an NPR story [npr.org] about Walmart that criticized them for their environmental impact (pollution and rainwater runoff from their parking lots, plus the extra air pollution from people driving there, I guess).
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.
Re:Urbanization (Score:4, Insightful)
That could have something to do with the fact that such things are positive in some contexts and negative in others.
Re:Urbanization (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Urbanization (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Urbanization (Score:3, Interesting)
But once you get to the sort of density where Wal-Mart likes, they've centralized some of the shopping but you still have to take a car to get there. Which means you have to own a car, so you're already paying to buy it, insure it, maintain it, regardless of how many miles you drive. So you might as well tak
Re:Urbanization (Score:3, Interesting)
I went to a zoning board meeting to get a fence permit. I was stuck at this meeting until almost 1AM because some anti-sprawl activist group had about 20 speakers present to speak out against the environmental destruction that a Walgreens (!) would reap on an already bustling commercial corridor. They were demanding building moratoriums
Re:Urbanization (Score:3, Insightful)
That is because suburban sprawl is not the same as the supposed environmental aesthetic of "loving villages." Far from it. Suburban sprawl is "spreading out" in all the wrong ways. It consumes land inefficiently and expands the footprint of existing urban areas indefinit
GM crops (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:GM crops (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not a contradiction (Score:3, Informative)
Please don't spread misinformation.
Roundup is basically a chemical called glycophosphate. While Monsanto-sponsored studies found it to be pretty much non-toxic in animals, as a reflex, I take corporate-sponsored studies with a grain of salt. (Anyone who does not, is foolish).
But while toxic effects are arguable, one thing is not: glycophosphate is water soluable. As such, roundup does *not* stay in the
Re:GM crops (Score:3, Insightful)
They are specifically engineerd so that you can only use them once. So if you plant a patch of GM corn, you cannot use the seeds of the plants to grow new corn. They just don't grow. So now you have to buy the corn from the company every year, thereafter. And, worse, if the GM corn cross-polinate a field next-door, half that crop cannot reproduce anymore either.
So the American companies are not in i
Re:GM crops (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:GM crops (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Insightful? What complete bollocks! (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Insightful? What complete bollocks! (Score:3, Interesting)
Dwarf Wheat (Score:3, Insightful)
GM is little more than deliberately engineered advantageous mutation.
Re:GM crops (Score:3, Insightful)
Currently, GM crops are predominatly crops made resistant to a particular potent and extremely nasty chemical which can then be sprayed all over the countryside as the farmers know their crops won't die.
The fact that everything else dies, and the land is made totally uninhabitable to any non-GM'ed plant or animal, sometimes for many years, is ignored in pursuit of
Re:All our food is genetically engineered (Score:3, Interesting)
Selective breeding isn't simply shuffling genes around. Instead it's taking the "most desirable" of the cu
Environmental package deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Environmental package deal (Score:3, Interesting)
I wrote that as a joke, but thinking about it, it's true. SUVs are today's form of conspicuous consumption. "Look, I can afford to buy a huge, expesive, gas guzzling car! Look at Me!!" Its just the same as the European old school upper class who would eat until they threw up and then eat again. Vans have more cargo space than SUVs, and no one ever uses them to offroad. SUVs are all about the statement: I'm cool, I drive a big expensive car.
But Walmart... now t
Nuclear vs. Coal (Score:5, Interesting)
Industrial safety (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'll trust an environmentalist over industry (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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.
Re:I'll trust an environmentalist over industry (Score:3, Insightful)
And your post is an example of why I *won't* trust environmentalists.
Your first point is an issue of trusting scientists, not environmentalists -- a policy you reject in your final paragraph. Which is it? Only trust them when they come to pre-approved conclusions? And your second is more slogan than argument.
The last two, however, are more objectionable. What is your argument that the economy cannot survive $100/bbl oil? It's now four times higher than just a few years ago -- why does the next doubling sp
GMO rice that removes herbicides (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:GMO rice that increases herbicide sales (Score:3, Insightful)
h2g2 Geek Cred dropping (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.helsinginenergia.fi/en/tuotanto/bene
Heating:
http://www.helsinginenergia.fi/en/hea
Cooling. Rather than running AC:
http://www.helsinginenergia.fi/en/heat/cooli
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.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.
Re:Radical conservation (Score:3, Interesting)
Despite what Adam Smith and his intellectual successors say, there is really no proof that this convergence to efficiency exists. It is basically taken on faith and also what is efficient on one side may be inefficient on the other (e.g. in the short term energy producers save money, in the long term society or the economy loses due to increased cost and environmental degradation).
Also note that there is probably no true market
Environmental orthodoxy (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Cognitive dissonance,anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Their answer is "Not much," because they know from their own work how robust wild ecologies are in defending against new genes, no matter how exotic"
"The second greatest cause of extinctions is coming from invasive species, where no solution is in sight. Kudzu takes over the American South, brown tree snakes take over Guam . . ."
So why is kudzu a problem if wild ecologies are so good at defending against new genes?
It takes a village, not! (Score:3, Interesting)
My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated.
When I read this I thought of Hillary Clinton's memorable tome, "It Takes a Village". In retrospect it was about a prescient as Bill Gates' "The Road Ahead". Did she get anything right?
The big change will be soil quality. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:The big change will be soil quality. (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, agri-business beef production involves keeping animals on feedlots, often in barns. In this case the manure becomes a waste by-product that is produced in such great quantities so as to throw off the ecological balance of the area. In some cases, where there are huge cattle farms, manure is polluting the land and the water.
The answer to the problem is to have smaller farms produ
Strongly disagree about population growth (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Re:Strongly disagree about population growth (Score:3, Informative)
They didn't. Prior to the agricultural revolution meat only made up 10% of the average persons diet. The other 90% consisted of fruits and vegetables. Humans were lousy hunters but fairly good gatherers.
Even so, starvation was so common it happened once every three years, on average.
AND, if we didn't have so many people, there would be one less argument for both GMO and nuclear.
Feel free to kill y
Brand is selling out (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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/rank
Dara
I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why nuclear? (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Why nuclear? (Score:3, Insightful)
Tidal generators and wind power require huge amount of dispersed equipment. The environmental damage they cause will be spread over a wide area. We already know that wind power actively kills flying animals. I suspect that tidal generators will also be damaging to sea life.
Another example is hydroelectric. Dams are now causing more greenhouse warming due to their emmissions of methane than they save in reduced CO2
Technological romanticism (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nuclear Energy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nuclear Energy (Score:3, Interesting)
Am I the only person to have noticed the success of wind power these days?
Current state-of-the-art wind turbines (1.5+ MW) are able to compete with other power sources on equal terms (and before you rant about PTCs, Production tax credits, remember that other power sources also receive massive direct and indirect subsidies). I don't know how you calculate your "energy return", but I hope you include e
Re:Nuclear Energy (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is why Shell *lied* about their proven reserves back in 2000, because they thought they could use this nifty new technique, which ended up collapsing the reservoirs, causing it to be MORE difficult to get the oil out.
Get your head out of the clouds. Oil is NOT a sustainable resource.
Re:Nuclear Energy (Score:3, Insightful)
Alright, since I don't know the current figures on Uranium deposits/Uranium consumption
I'll accept that that might be true. However even if all Nuclear power gave us was another
two decades woundn't that buy us time to transition from an oil infrastucture to an
infrastucture based
Re:Nuclear Energy (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Umm, US oil peaked in the early '70's (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nuclear Energy (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nuclear Energy (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
The geographic requirements for nuclear power plants and long term nuclear waste storage are just about opposite.
Re:Nuclear Energy (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Bah, why bother? (Score:3, Funny)
Dinos: "we died off after 300 Million years"
Joe Bob: "ha! We can beet that!"
Re:Bah, why bother? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, one reason is to consider our quality of life before we are wiped off the face of the planet (if that even happens). This kind of attitude is like saying "I'm going to die eventually anyway, so why bother keeping myself healthy and enjoying life?"
It is also unecessarily alarmist. Environmentalists are often accused of being hyst
Re:Is Hemos drunk? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great (Score:4, Insightful)
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:It seems to me that (Score:3, Insightful)
CapeWind [capewind.org] is one of the local (to me) organizations dedicated to providing actual information about the benefits, rather than the info that the people with more money than sense will give you.
-Jesse
Re:Reversing? I doubt it (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Soooooo (Score:3, Funny)