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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.
The problem I have is that there aren't any good replacements, nothing renewable comes close to the energy return of fossil fuels or nuclear (at current production).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Animal life came out of the oceans some 500 million years ago. For over half that time the land was dominated by dinosaurs. For perhaps 100,000 years the land has been dominated by humanity.
Yeah, we've done well.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
one can make similar arguments about oil deposits. in fact, for years, people have been claiming that we'll run out of oil in 20 years, and every 20 years, we still have oil to burn. why? because technology advances. oil reserves that were not economical or feasible to pump from 20 years ago are now very viable. we've got these nifty steam injection techniques that can extract from oil sands which have oil concentrations that are far below what previously would have been considered justification for even installing a well.
I'm sure the same could apply to uranium. What isn't viable today to process, could well be quite viable in 20 years if we approached the problem head on.
This is one issue that's always bugged the hell out of me about the wackier spectrum of environmentalists.
GM crops have the potential, hell, they're *necessary* for a great number of third world countries to be able to grow enough food to feed their people. And these guys are trying to stop that for the sake of nonsensical political motivations.
Then they go about using scare tactics, calling it "frankenfoods" and whatnot, as if there's something horrific about it. Excuse me, but we've been genetically modifying our crops for millenia. We've just gotten more sophisticated about it.
My problem with a lot of environmental thought is its all tied up in a package of garbage ideas. Efficiency good, but technology bad. Walmart is EVIL! SUVs are EVIL! Globalism is evil! What's wrong with the Nature Conservancy approach? Buy up the land while trying to respect property rights. Look for approaches that make economic sense to the locals so they are sustainable. Be more efficient without hating SUVs or even nuclear power. Why does it all have to be tied to some lefty anti-capitalist, anti-globalist worldview?
Certainly, some environmentalists have financial motives but the majority do not. When scientists are concerned about global climate change, they are publishing these warnings in the hope of drawing attention to what they genuinely perceive as a serious problem. Ditto for polution concerns, supplies of natural resources, biological diversity and ecosystem damage. These are FACTS.
In contrast, the news releases from industry which make their way across television and newspaper spread absolute lies. Examples:
- there is no global climate change (flies in the face of 90%+ of scientific opinion)
- business can continue as usual without worrying about environmental factors (a hope, for short term business as usual)
- the economy can survive $100 oil
- nuclear is the solution to our energy needs
Here's the important point: a lot of scientists work for industry. So they have a distinct bias. In many cases they are providing reports for their employer. So next time you run into a scientific report, check the source... not all scientists are funded equally."radical conservation in energy transmission and use"
He says this like it's an insignificant thing. It's not. We literally throw away approximately 60% of the energy used to produce electricity as "waste heat". And this is at the power station itself (including nuclear)!
We then go on to use most of the 40% of the energy we have actually transmitted to produce more heat. It's not what could be classed as clever.
Changing this single inefficiency in our energy generation sector would do the job. It's not even particularly radical, the solution is a couple of hundred years old, it's just that until very recently it's been cheaper to just pump in more oil, gas or coal.
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On population, he points out that global population is close to leveling off and is declining precipitously in many countries. Why? Mostly it is the unprecedented worldwide migration from rural villages to cities, where having lots of children is less of an advantage. If those concerned with sustainability get out ahead of this trend and help guide it, it could be an environmental blessing. Cities put people close together, reducing their collective energy use. They free up rural areas for wildlife and wilderness (if protections are put in place).
Regarding biotech: There's truth to this, though it's slightly facile. It does, after all, matter that GM has been developed by giant corporations and has been used primarily for their benefit. But the idea that the technology itself is intrinsically bad ... that doesn't make much sense to me. As Brand says, the proper reaction for greens ought to be to appropriate the technology and use it for their ends, particularly since, embrace or no embrace, it's gonna spread. Open-source biotech seems like a promising way for GM to do some environmental good. Brand offers some scenarios.
Ultimately, I suspect that urbanization, GM crops, and nuclear power are inevitable. If all we do is stand on the sidelines shouting "no, no, no!" the process will proceed without us, guided by the worst actors. The smartest thing that those of us concerned about the health of humanity and the planet can do is get involved and try to steer toward an outcome that is equitable and sustainable.
Sprawl....
There are good things and bad things about packing people together. There are good ways and bad ways to do it. The city sprawl that most environmentalists would be talking about is where everyone lives in their huge house in the suburbs with their chemical fertilized lawns and their SUV's driving downtown to work every day. This is very wasteful way to 'pack people together'. Small city in Canada called Calgary has more land mass than most larger cities, with fewer people. Lots of crop land was destroyed to sprawl people out in the city. Now all this land is lawn or highway instead of farm. This increases the per-person ecological footprint.
The kind of packing people together that is better is where most people live in Apartment Buildings/Condos near to where they work, they don't have lawns or SUVs and they are able to walk to work and to the grocery store. This reduces the per-person ecological footprint.
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will be the first thing reversed.
It's high time the top brass of the environmental movement admit that stopping Nuclear power was a mistake that has lead to greater devastation of the environment by coal plants.
Even the nuclear waste issue pales in comparison to the the ecological damage coal plants have caused and will keep causing until we replace them (finally) with much cleaner nuclear technologies like Pebble Bed. Coal of course has it's own waste issues.
The anti-nuclear power movement has been one of the best examples of the law of unintended consequences in our times.
So tell me please - which problem das GM solve ?
The problem of dumping gallons of fertilizer and pesticide on each square foot of land?
The ideal purpose of GM (ie, when its not some company using it to sell farmers their "special" chemicals like the roundup-ready series) is not to create more food per acre, its to use less resources doing it.
Additionally in regions where there is a distribution problem, imagine being able to grow food in town, despite the poor land quality.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Has the waste disposal issue been solved for coal power plants? As far as I'm concerned, pumping that stuff into the atmosphere does not constitute safe disposal...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Ehrlich may have underestimated the ability of technology to increase food production on the short term but I think he was right in principle. It is my understanding that the large fish population in the Atlantic is a minor fraction of what it was only 30 years ago. That is an epic planetary die-off that has already occurred in an extraordinarily short time. World-wide human starvation hasn't been seen (yet) because we are still in the transition process of stripping the planet bare. Why do we need _any_ population increase to finish the job?
Haven't people heard the story about passenger pigeons:
"It was Alvin Jones who told us about the Pigeon Roost Prairie which was near the Jones homestead. He said so many pigeons stopped to roost in the pines in this are that they broke the limbs off the trees and the trees died, so there was a prairie there. There wasn't a living tree for 150 acres, and it was called Pigeon Roost Prairie. That was virgin pine timber they killed. The pigeons were almost as big as a chicken, not the homing pigeon; they were two or three times larger, about the size of a pheasant. Not thousands of pigeons but millions of pigeons! I tried to learn all I could about this pigeon migration. I was interested in it. It was something to think about. There would be so, many they would darken the sun for three days, all going north."
http://www.ulala.org/P_Pigeon/Texas.html
Aren't people curious about how primitive cultures were able to feed themselves with sharpened sticks? I suspect it was because going down to the brook to spear a carp was only somewhat more inconvenient than going down to the freezer to find something to thaw.
Like boiling frogs, the human lifespan is only 70+ years. Perhaps it is too short for people to actually experience ecological change and ingrain any feeling for the issue. As long as there is soylent green, some people will call it a balanced ecology. Others think more diversity is valuable.
The point is that the planet was already damaged by population and industry before anyone on Slashdot was born. We should be discussing whether we are at the planetary coup de grace stage, not congratulating ourselves on how population isn't a problem.
(AND, if we didn't have so many people, there would be one less argument for both GMO and nuclear.)
No, just because you don't do it, doesn't mean other people don't.
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I don't know what it means to "corrupt" the gene pool. The genes of all organisms are changing all the time and are selected for or against by environmental pressures. We're adding another type of "mutation" - GM - and using the same kind of environmental pressure farmers have been using for thousands of years to select for it. Nothing is different, qualitatively.
In any case, our best bet for saving the planet is decreasing the population. I don't know what a sustainable number might be but it's got to be a lot closer to 1G than 6G
It might have helped if you'd RTFA. It covered many of the issues you are complaining about.
Population is the most important issue in politics for me, so I read the section on this topic (but skipped the rest). I'm so tired of the descriptions of "doom and gloom" that will happen with low fertility rates and a shrinking population - these authors are a mirror image of the mistakes they claim that past environmental authors have made in predicting the future.
o rder/2127rank.html, you will see there are still quite a few countries that have fertility rates above 2.1. (By the way, saying 2.1 is steady state assumes an average infant mortality rate that is pretty high. If you want the human race to all move into a the modern industrialized world, something under 2.05 is required). Granted, I don't have the plots of all countries fertility rates over time and some of these countries near the top may be declining, but I see absolutely no way we can declare success now. I expected better out of Technology Review, the magazine where I first learned about fuel cells for automotive use.
There are some scientific facts on population that are rarely disputed:
1] The earth has a finite carrying capacity
Actual numbers will vary anywhere from 1 to 10 billion people, but it's obvious that constraints on food, water, energy, pollution sinks do constrain the number of us. My opinion is that the number is less than we are now, but we are getting by (some of us anyway) because of unsustainable oil and water use. Perhaps we could get by on renewable energy with around 2 billion people.
2] Large numbers of humans cannot leave the earth
There is no way we could move even 1/1000th the world population off the earth even if there was someplace to go. The resources/pollution needed to do this make it a non-starter for addressing population growth.
3] Adjustments need to be made to run an economy with a declining population growth
Not impossible, but obviously it is harder to operate a system that is shrinking instead of growing. Tricks like using lots of workers to support fewer retirees won't work. Any pyramid scheme seems great when you are on the growth side, but I'd prefer not to have the human race crash like a big pyramid scheme.
4] Fertility rates can be adjusted by government action
Coercive measures while espoused by some as necessary have been avoided in very successful transitions to lower fertility (e.g. Iran). We have less experience with going the other way, but some countries (e.g. Singapore) are trying incentives to raise the fertility rate. I see no reason that these rates can't be successfully adjusted if for some reason, 50 years from now, the world wide fertility rate dips down well below 2 and stays there so long that our population goes below 2 billion.
Now, back to the article:
In each country listed: Japan, Germany, Spain, Russia (I think) and Italy, they could stand to lose 30% of their population anyway. I think the U.S. is too crowded and Europe has much higher densities (and Japan is worse) in terms of population per arable land unit.
"It turns out that population decrease accelerates downward just as fiercely as population increase accelerated upward, for the same reason."
What does this mean? If you measure the increase or decrease of an exponential function (what he's talking abut here) as a percentage, then of course they have the same fierceness, but there is no concept of acceleration (percentage growth is constant). If you measure the amount in absolute numbers, then exponential increase is accelerating, but exponential decrease is always decelerating.
As far as fertility going down everywhere, we in the U.S. are now at 2.08 and this is going up (albeit slowly). We were closer to 2 about 5 years ago I think. If you look at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rank
Dara
Reprocessing is not banned due to fears of contamination - it is banned, mostly, due to nuclear proliferation concerns. The next generation of anti-proliferation reactors might help alleviate this.
;) No water, no liquid sodium; anti-proliferation; efficient breeding; hot enough for direct hydrogen generation in some designs; can operate on convection alone (although to be efficient you want to assist the convection process); etc. A great design, really.
Of course, ideally, you'd have a breeder reactor that burns the Pu as it makes it. I'm a big fan of lead-bismuth designs - if something goes wrong, the very worst case is that your nuclear material gets encased a dozen or two feet inside a giant block of lead
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.
Actually, this usually has more to do with harvesting things prematurely for long-haul shipment, and then force-ripening (with gas exposure, etc) just prior to sale. The fruit, or vegetable in question doesn't have as long to properly ripen and generate the compounds that we enjoy as the familiar mature tastes.
This is driven mostly by the demand from less well educated (in culinary terms) shoppers wanting to see/feel crisp-looking produce of every variety on the shelf through every season, or with their unwillingness to pay what it costs for the more immediate transportation of those same items if they were left to ripen on the vine/tree, etc. Spend a little more on the same varieties at a higher-end store, and you'll get your flavor back. But you'll also be burning more fuel, because the produce was probably flown to you (unless it's grown locally).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.