Stewart Brand on 'Environmental Heresies'

FleaPlus writes "The MIT Technology Review has an article predicting where the mainstream of the environmental movement may likely reverse its collective stance in the next ten years. The four areas discussed are population growth, urbanization, genetically-engineered organisms, and nuclear power. The article is written by Stewart Brand, known for creating the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL online community, and the Long Now Foundation. Brand also has some interesting comments regarding the sometimes-conflicting interaction between romantics and scientists in the environmental movement. There's an online debate between Brand and former DOE official Joseph Romm on TR Blogs." Frankly, unless humanity decides to undergo a massive collective personality change of not being consumption-focused, I don't see much other way around these particular issues. What we all need is an Arthur to keep us depressed and sleeping in darkened rooms to lower energy consumption.

Comments

Re:Nuclear Energy

[meringuoid]

You are not an environmentalist, or you would know that the few decades time is if the entire world switched over the Nuclear all at once for 100% of it's energy needs

And also it assumes that we do no reprocessing, and we make no use of thorium. There's enough thorium on Earth to keep the breeder reactors running for... well, as near forever as you need it to be.

Re:Pragmatism

[ajs]

"What problems do GM plants solve?"

It shocks me that you even have to ask this question, but Ok, here's some of the items off the top of my head:

• Introducing natural pesticides that eliminate or reduce the use of man-made chemicals that injure both the environment and the health of the people consuming the food while lowering the cost of the food
• Making crops more hardy, avoiding massive price spikes (and thus dietary swings for the poor), when weather or disease wipe out a crop.
• Eliminating the need to selectively breed for survivability in cold storage, thus putting the selective breeding weight back on things like taste (tomatoes are a great example of the damage that such breeding has done... remember when they used to TASTE LIKE TOMATOES?)
• Increasing shelf-life, and therefore the range at which food can be reasonably delivered (this directly impacts the price of food in the third world, as getting food in place before it rots is a huge cost).
• Providing nutrients (e.g. iodine) which people in certain parts of the world tend to suffer from the lack of.

The list goes on, and is actually quite huge. There are ethical, legislative, and technical hurdles involved, but let's not try to pretend that this is in any way being done "just because", or for purely selfish reasons. This is potentially one of the most important steps man will take since the initial cultivation of crops.

Re:The ideal purpose of GM (ie, when its not some

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Didn't read the article, did you? Go find the paragraph about flouridation.

Let me lay this out in short sentences. Herbicide resistant crops need less herbicide. That's not good for the chemical companies, but bad. Simultaneously, it has a net positive impact on farmers, food, and the environment.

Let me explain by analogy. I'm not a farmer -- but I do raise roses as a hobby. As you no doubt know, rose bushes are fundamentally unhealthy organisms which only thrive with massive doses of fertilizer, insecticide, and herbicide, so those of us who raise them know all about this.

Except for one thing: what you think you know isn't true. Older roses do require lots of support to thrive. More modern roses, with their huge flowers and bizarre growth patterns...don't. They've been selectively modified to resist the blights and infestations that killed older plants. They use the calcium in the soil more efficiently, and so don't need as much. They're stunningly healthy plants, designed to be raised in low maintenance gardens by amateurs.

As a result, if I'd grew the modern frankenplants, I'd spend more on the plants to start with, but far less on chemicals.

The same kind of thing applies in frankenfood. If I raise glycophosphate-resistant wheat, then I can apply a glycophosphate-based herbicide to the fields in quantities sufficient to kill the weeds without affecting the wheat. Guess what? That's less than ten percent of the amount I used to apply to the fields. Traditional preemergence applications had to persist in the soil long enough to affect the broad-leaf weeds, which meant applying enough to resist washing away. Applying postemergence means applying only enough to kill the weeds that are there right now. Monsanto will sell me less herbicide than they used to...not more.

Re:Pragmatism

[sketerpot]

"Designed to sell more of their own pesticides"? Genetically modified food reduces the need for pesticides, as well as reducing the amount of farmland we have to use. Perhaps you're thinking of "Roundup-ready" crops which are immune to the plant-killer "Roundup". The thing there, though, is that Roundup is one of the most environmentally friendly ways to kill weeds that I know of, and Roundup-ready crops make it possible to use Roundup instead of less friendly herbicides.

Re:The ideal purpose of GM (ie, when its not some

[crmarvin42]

Roundup was already one of the most popular herbicide when roundup-ready corn hit the market. Prior to GM corn being available farmers were applying the herbicide 4-5 time in good years and upto 8 times in really bad years. By using roundup-ready corn and roundup together farmers apply the herbicide at most 3 times befor the corn is tall enough to kill off weeds on its own by preventing the weeds from receiving enough light. The net result for monsanto is $ from both the pesticide and the seeds. Now most farmers, even prior to the advent of GM crops didn't save seeds because they would miss out on the genetic improvements from year to year. Seed companies practiced intensive selection for production traits prior to using GM to improve plant quality. Genes native to the plants confering resistance to mold, insect infestation, and improved growth were combined via controlled polination for decades prior to the GM revolution. The net gain for producers is time. 1 application of roundup as opposed to 4 applications in good years and even better in bad years. As we all know time is money, and as someone who has worked on family run dairy farms, (tip: most large "Factory Farms" are family owned and operated) there are never enough hours in the day to manage animals, crops, employee's, maintenance and the ever increasing paper work needed to run a farm. saving that much time is worth the premium paid for the seeds. Land is finite. Most farms cannot get larger with out buy land off of competitors aready using it to grow the same crops, and often the land is more valuable for urban sprawl than agriculture. The best way to make more money is to improve the efficiency of production via less input costs, or increased production from the same land. Most of the posts i've seen on this page are from the "non scientist" members of the environmentalist movements. Being a tech person is not the same as devoting your life to understanding the problems facing agriculture and attempting to solve them. As a Scientist associated with this problem (i'm a phd student in animals science) I'm constantly frustrated by the ignorance western peopls have concerning their own food supply and the arrogance seen from people despite there admited ignorance. the article may or may not be correct on the other points. I'm not associated with those fields but I am qualified to comment on the validity of the GM topic and they are right on the money

Re:Nuclear Energy

[fyngyrz]

The only problem I see with Nuclear power is what to do with the waste.

This problem has been solved. The waste is processed into what amount to vitrified glass blocks which have stable storage lifetimes in the thousands of years. There is no way short of intentional refinement for waste stored in this manner to re-enter the environment in the relatively short term, unlike liquid or cannister based storage mechanisms. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that in a thousand years or so, we'll have a lot better idea of what to do with the blocks themselves, if indeed anything need be done. We've only had nuclear power for half a century or so, after all.

The correct choice at this time seems to be a combination of pebble bed reactors, which are highly resistant to serious problems such as meltdown or explosive failure, and vitrified glass waste storage insofar as waste storage turns out to be required. Pebble bed reactors are somewhat different from the reactors we're used to thinking about, particularly in that they repeatedly re-process their own fuel, continually converting "waste" from the previous stage into still more energy.

The primary problem is political and environmentalist fearmongering (to the extent that it is not just ignorance, which I am perfectly will to credit both politicians and environmentalists with.) People will believe anything, especially if it comes with a nice, high energy dose of hysteria.

The secondary problem is that building nuclear power plants -- any kind -- is a long, drawn out proceedure. If we started today, money no object, the public all about supporting it, it'd still be quite a few years before the putative new plants began to benefit the infrastructure. Compound this with the fact that we're not going to start today, or at any time in the foreseeable future, and the fact that money is a severe problem, the public is in no way supportive, and the future for reasonable nuclear energy generation appears mighty bleak.