Bernie Michalik's posterous site

Here's some very rough notes I have taken on Brand's book so far.

* I am really enjoying reading this book. I was up until 4 am reading it. Brand writes in a casual way, but he has lots of facts to back him up, and he argues well the case he makes for ecopragmatism. As a pragmatist myself, I am inclined to agree with this line of thinking. I'd like to know what others thing.

* I was very excited to grab a copy of Stewart Brand's new book: "Whole Earth Discipline". I've been a fan of his thinking since the 1970s when I used to read CoEvolution Quarterly and then the Whole Earth Review. As on reviewer wrote, he is iconoclastic, especially when it comes to the environment/Green movement. Indeed, he had an essay titled "Environmentalism is Poison" (I believe) where he took to task some ideas with regards to environmentalism. It was a great essay, and one of those that stayed with me until this day. This book is related to that essay and carries forward some of those ideas, but is firmly planted in this time.

* I am half way through the book, but so far the overall argument Brand is making is a strong one. First he argues that cities are actually a green concept. and while he doesn't flinch from some of the darker aspects of cities, he also sees them overall as a strongly positive. I have to agree with that. I like that Brand sees slums in a positive light. He sees them in comparison to what is left behind when one arrives and what they promise, not to what they are. Obviously slums have problems, and not all slums offer a better future (I am thinking of slums like Cite de Soleil in Haiti). But slums are really a response to the overwhelming demand of people in a place to have a better life, and to risk a better life, even living in the legal netherland of the slum.

* Talking about cities first is important, because that sets up his next argument, which is the need to ramp up nuclear energy. The need to ramp up on nuclear energy can really stand apart from the need for cities, but they go hand in hand. More people in urban environments mean that you can deliver power more effectively to people and get them away from burning renewable energy which contributes more to global warming. I'm not doing the argument justice here: like I said, these are rough notes...the book makes a stronger case than this post will. This is about as far as I have read so far. I am impressed by the arguments that Brand makes so far. I am looking forward to it reading the rest of it.

Some thoughts:

Brand said if global warming occurs the way some predict, the Earth isn't in trouble, species on the earth, including us, are in trouble. Which is true. The earth can run hot and it can run cold. And it can run alot hotter than we would like it to be, and even if it were catastrophic for us, it would not necessarily be catastrophic for every species on the planet, or the planet itself.

While he makes a good case for nuclear, it is also the best case. The problem I see is that if global warming predictions are wrong, we have alot of potentially dangerous material around, no matter how much better nuclear technology is today. Brand also sees things in terms of problems and solutions, and as I have argued with people before, in continuous systems, there are no solutions to environmental problems, only temporary states. Some states are good for humans, some, not so good. In some ways the continual warming of the planet (up to the last few hundred years) have been good for humans, since we may have avoided an ice age. But an ice age isn't a "problem", it's a "state". The challenge is to manage the states in a way that is optimal for us and other living things.

I think an implicity contradiction in the book is the idea on one hand that the population is decreasing but on the other hand we need to take drastic action to deal with this. I think the population contraction is a good thing, and I don't know if his suggestions for leveling it off is a good thing. Just like we need less rural populations (as he argues), I also think we could use less cities. Cities are not natural phenomena. They are as much a response to manmade conditions like trade and technology. Less people could mean less cities. That wouldn't be a bad thing.

Brand also argues somewhat that war is the result of dealing with limited resources. I think that there is a strong case for that, but not the only case. Wars are more complex than that these days, and an abundance of natural resources doesn't necessarily mean that war will occur.