Stuart Brand has written a remarkabe book.
Whole Earth Discipline, An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. Footnotes and excerpts on a special website.
It flies in the face of much conventional wisdom and deserves to be talked about at length.even better, read it, thnik about it, then read it again.
Here the main thrust:
Cities are green. By 2050, 80% of the world's population will live in cities. That is good news because cities typically carry a lower carbon footprint per inhabitant than rural areas. Also, rural space will be freed up for nature restoration projects.
Nuclear energy is green. Alternative energies will be incapable of ensuring the baseload energy requirements of the coming decades. And even if they did, it would come at a huge cost. Clean coal is anything but reality. Nuclear has the power to generate enough electricity for the electric transport society. Nuclear is safe. There has not been a single nuclear accident nearly 25 years (also compare to Chinese coal mines).
GM (or GE) food is green. Agriculture has been about genetic modification since Day One. GM crops simply increase the speed of evolution and are more selective and exceedingly precise about which traits of the crop are modified. GM crops allow to reduce the use of pesticides and other harmful agricultural methods.
Geoengineering may well become a major civilisation shaper of the coming years and, who knows, its potential saviour.
You may not agree. Initially, I was skeptical about the nuclear bit. It now looks a lot more enticing and I will do some research around this.
Increasingly, though, it looks like the old Green Movement is fighting a bit of a rear guard battle in the face of climate change and our other little challenges.
Stuart Brand has written a remarkable book. I will read it again.
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