Join ecologist Stewart Brand as he presents a bold and creative set of solutions for producing a more sustainable society.
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Whole Earth Discipline
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Start The Week: Monday, February 1st, 2010
Stewart Brand, a pioneer of the 1960s environmental movement, tells Tom Sutcliffe that the green agenda is becoming outdated and sentimental, arguing that science and technology are the answer. The investigative journalist Felicity Lawrence warns that food science is prone to political and financial interference, and Dr Andrea Sella attempts to make chemistry exciting and entertaining. Throughout, Matthieu Ricard, dubbed by neuroscientists ‘the happiest man in the world’, spreads a little meditative calm.
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Stewart Brand: Rethinking Green — The Long Now
This talk was given at Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, California on Friday October 9, 02009.
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).
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 ice.
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.
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.