NEW STATESMAN
Whole Earth Discipline: an Ecopragmatist Manifesto – Stewart Brand
Reviewed by Becky Hogge
20th January 2010
Round the world trip
…Whole Earth Discipline: an Ecopragmatist Manifesto is a rich, compelling guide to how old wisdom can combine with new technologies to help civilisation survive man-made climate change. But it should be read as much for its dissection of the way ideologies distort decision-making on science and technology. Why, for example, did the anti-statist right oppose fluoridation and the anti-corporate left oppose genetically modified crops? “A political agenda is . . . poor at solving problems,” writes Brand. “Accustomed to saving natural systems from civilisation, Greens now have the unfamiliar task of saving civilisation from a natural system.” The ensuing ideological backflip will spread its own kind of chaos – a chaos budding ecopragmatists must learn to sidestep.
The book proposes three ideological heresies about to break on the shores of environmental consciousness. These concern urbanisation, GMcrops and nuclear power. The earth’s population became mostly urban in 2007. The dream of going back to the land – an ideal that Brand won fame for promoting in The Whole Earth Catalogue, a kind of Sears for hippie communes – is wrong-headed, because cities turn out to be the green option.
Urbanisation slows population growth (as more women choose education and opportunity over large families), concentrates resource needs and gradually empties rural areas of subsistence farmers, allowing planned approaches to agriculture that reduce environmental impact and leave room for “natural” ecosystems that will mitigate climate harm…
Whole Earth Discipline: an Ecopragmatist Manifesto
Stewart Brand Atlantic Books, 336pp, £19.99
From the comments
David, thanks for posting this review of Stuart Brand’s book. I’ve been a follower of Brand’s The Long Now Foundation for many years, and I think this is one of the most important books of recent times (along with Parlberg’s brilliant Starved for Science and Ronald and Adamchak’s Tomorrow’s Table), as it begins
the process of uncoupling fundamental idealism about what is best for the ‘environment’ with what is actually going to make a difference to improving the natural and human worlds. As in all cases, there is a great disconnect between the goals of what we could do if we started this whole human endeavour afresh
(which is how many of the environmental NGOs operate), and what we can do to make a real difference here and now based on the looming environmental and human catastrophes of rapid climate change. As Brand summarises brilliantly in the book, everything in life is a comparison of risk and reward, yet this is so
commonly overlooked in the polarised arguments of both the anti and pro GM lobby groups. Thank you again for such a great resource as GMO Pundit, and I encourage
your readers to go and read this book!
