Brand built his case for rethinking environmental goals and
methods on two major changes going on in the world. The one that
most people still don’t take into consideration is that power is
shifting to the developing world, where 5 out of 6 people live, where
the bulk of humanity is getting out of poverty by moving to cities and
creating their own jobs and communities (slums, for now).
He noted that history has always been driven by the world’s
largest cities, and these years they are places like Mumbai, Lagos,
Dhaka, São Paulo, Karachi, and Mexico City, which are growing 3
times faster and 9 times bigger than cities in the currently developed
world ever did. The people in those cities are unstoppably
moving up the “energy ladder” to high quality grid
electricity and up the “food ladder” toward better
nutrition, including meat. As soon as they can afford it,
everyone in the global South is going to get air conditioning.
The second dominant global fact is climate change. Brand
emphasized that climate is a severely nonlinear system packed with
tipping points and positive feedbacks such as the unpredicted rapid
melting of Arctic=2
0ice. Warming causes droughts, which lowers
carrying capacity for humans, and they fight over the diminishing
resources, as in Darfur. It also is melting the glaciers of the
Himalayan plateau, which feed the rivers on which 40% of humanity
depends for water in the dry season—the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra,
Mekong, Irrawaddy, Yangtze, and Yellow.
Global warming has to be slowed by reducing the emission of
greenhouse gases from combustion, but cities require dependable
baseload electricity, and so far the only carbon-free sources are
hydroelectric dams and nuclear power. Brand contrasted nuclear
with coal-burning by comparing what happens with their waste
products. Nuclear spent fuel is tiny in quantity, and you know
exactly where it is, whereas the gigatons of carbon dioxide from coal
burning goes into the atmosphere, where it stays for centuries making
nothing but trouble. Brand declared that geological sequestering
of nuclear waste has been proven practical and safe by the ten years
of experience at the WIPP in New Mexico, and he paraded a series of
new “microreactor” designs that offer a clean path for
distributed micropower, especially in developing countries.
Moving to genetically engineered food crops, Brand noted that
they are a tremendous success story in agriculture, with Green
benefits such as no-till farming, lowered pesticide use, and more land
freed up to be wild. The developing world is taking the lead
with the technology, designing crops to
deal with the specialized
problems of tropical agriculture. Meanwhile the new field of
synthetic biology is bringing a generation of Green biotech hackers
into existence.
On the subject of bioengineering (direct intervention in
climate), Brand suggested that we will have to follow of the example
of beneficial “ecosystem engineers” such as earthworms and
beavers and tweak our niche (the planet) toward a continuing
life-friendly climate, using methods such a cloud-brightening with
atomized seawater and recreating what volcanoes do when they pump
sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, cooling the whole world.
Green aversion to technologies such as nuclear and genetic
engineering resulted from a mistaken notion that they are somehow
“unnatural.” “What we call natural and what we
call human are inseparable,” Brand concluded. “We live
one life”.

Check out Stuart Brand’s recommendations for books and websites at: www.sbnotes.com.