WHOLE EARTH DISCIPLINE: AN ECOPRAGMATIST MANIFESTO
By Stewart Brand
Viking, $25.95, 336 pages
REVIEWED BY MAX SCHULZ in the Washington Times
"If Greens don’t embrace science and technology and jump ahead to a leading role in both, they may follow the Reds into oblivion."
That’s strong, hard-hitting stuff. However, the author who derides environmentalists as anti-intellectual Luddites and compares them to communists isn’t Michelle Malkin or Glenn Beck. It’s Stewart Brand, one of the world’s leading environmentalists and a founder of the modern green movement.
…The green left’s policy prescriptions arise from a reflexive opposition to the things that have built our technologically advanced, urban society.
Hence, the greens have made theirs a movement of opposition. They oppose large-scale energy development and consumption. They push a regulatory structure that clamps down on private corporations and landowners in a bid to stop them from despoiling the environment. They oppose scientific efforts to improve food production to feed billions because that just means supporting more people who do damage to the planet.
Mr. Brand’s "Whole Earth Discipline" says, in effect, that it isn’t enough just to oppose. In fact, in some instances, that opposition has been disastrous.
"I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we’ve been wrong about," he writes. "We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool."
He notes that "Silent Spring" author Rachel Carson, patron saint of the modern environmental movement, actually encouraged pursuing the science of biotic controls, i.e. genetic engineering, but that greens have rejected that counsel in defense of a bizarre idea of what is "natural.
BOOKS: ‘Whole Earth Discipline’ – Washington Times
