Time for a massive eco-rethink?

01/02/2010

Eco-biologist Stewart Brand argues cities, GM crops and nuclear energy can save the world

By Adam Forrest

Stewart Brand is one of the world’s leading and most controversial eco-biologists. As far back as 1966, the American campaigned to have NASA release the then-rumoured satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. Believing that the image would be a powerful symbol, he distributed buttons asking: “Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” Whole Earth Catalog, the 1968 book that inspired the rural back-to-nature movement of the 1970s, began with the words: “We are as gods and we might as well get good at it.”

His latest opus, Whole Earth Discipline, shatters his previous thinking as well as a huge raft of environmental ‘myths’. It begins: “We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it." Brand now believes cities are greener than the countryside and that the green movement must embrace technology and become prepared to tinker with the atmosphere. Nuclear power is deemed necessary and safe and he insists genetic modification is the key to land management and larger, more consistent crops in the developing world. Oh, and there could be too few people on the planet soon.

His contemporary James Lovelock has called the work “truly important”, One of Google’s founding directors Larry Brilliant says it “could be one of the most important books of the decade” and the musician and producer Brian Eno believes it “resets the terms for the discussion about climate change”.

The Big Issue caught up with Brand, now 71, on his recent visit to the UK.

Why are cities “becoming the greenest thing that humanity does for the planet”?
Cities concentrate markets and make everything very efficient. With the internet it was first thought people would move out of cities and go live in the country and get city-like behaviour online. It seems the opposite has happened – once people out in the countryside get online they discover the advantages of city-like behaviour and they want to get to the actual cities. Cities are environmentally attractive – they use much less energy, much less material [per person], especially in the developing world.

This process of urbanisation rescues land back for biodiversity?
As people there [in the developing world] move to cities, they’re not using up the land with subsistence agriculture. It means they’re getting their food from much more concentrated, much more efficient cash-crop agriculture. The land flourishes again, especially in the tropical parts of the world. A rainforest can be back to the way it was before it was cleared for farming in 20 years’ time. If the plants come back, other species reinhabit the area very, very quickly.

Received wisdom tells us we should fear over-population and scarcity of resources. Why do you believe that the most effective, environmental population programme would be “gently pro-natal”?
Typically, in cities, people have fewer children, they have more money to educate them and are more interested in educating them for city-type jobs. In the developed world, which is 80 per cent urban, all the places that are urban have well-below replacement level birth rates. The rest of the world is moving very rapidly in that direction. So by mid-century, population will peak and then start heading downward. I worry about things dropping too quickly. In Japan, where they never came out of the recession, they have a shrinking working-age population, an elder care crisis and no immigrants. Everybody complains about their immigrants but everyone is well served by their immigrants, including the UK and the US. They bring younger people and large families and that’s what you need if you’re going to have a productive generation.

You’re one of a number of experts who have come round to the necessity of nuclear power. Do you expect more converts?
It was a shift for me, seven, eight years ago to realise that nuclear power was a very important part of heading off emissions. The Obama administration is quietly pro-nuclear. The Democrats are becoming pro-nuclear. Over here you have the Labour government saying there’s a need for 10 new reactors. It’s changing, partly because people are taking climate change more seriously and partly because as we start down the path of more wind and solar and other renewables, people are realising it’s neither easy or enough. What most people don’t realise is how very little we use – the uranium is such a dense form of energy that it doesn’t need very much to create an enormous amount of electricity and as a result it doesn’t create much waste.

So far, huge geo-engineering projects – tinkering with the amount of carbon in the atmosphere or the amount of sunlight filtering through – are seen as fanciful ideas. Have we been too slow to take them seriously?
I think we have to think about radical things sooner than people expect. The US government isn’t putting money into the research and as far as I know neither is the government here in the UK. It may well be China takes a lead and everyone else will try to keep up. From what’s available, the two ideas that look promising right now are sending sulphur dust into the atmosphere, and cloud brightening [see sidebar, right]. We know stratospheric sulphates work to absorb and reflect sunlight on account of it happening with volcanic experiences [the
eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 is thought to have cooled the planet by half a degree Celsius the following year].

Some experts argue that we would be relying on civilisation remaining in an advanced enough state to maintain these schemes. If we couldn’t afford to keep them running, then temperatures could jump very suddenly again.
Yes, it’s one potential hazard of relying on the technology. The ideal would be that you do these things to buy yourself time, to give us a little slack while we keep cutting down emissions until they’re down to a level we’re happy with, and then you can stop the geo-engineering. But you have to try things and back off if it’s not going the way you want.

You’re enthusiastic about genetically-modified (GM) crops or, as you call it, genetic engineering (GE). Why should we stop worrying?
It’s an extension and a refinement of agriculture. You’re fine-tuning crops we’ve been breeding artificially for centuries. In the developing
world, in tropical areas, where they use a much wider variety of crops, those crops have not been as improved as in the developed north, so
there’s a lot of room for improvement. Genetic engineering allows you to make that improvement inexpensively and quickly. With more and more precise capabilities, you can really fine-tune these things for the locality, to make the crops do exactly what you want.

There is still a perception that only big corporations have gained from their use.
It’s not the case at all. The first wave of significant transgenic crops came from corporations. But it’s now offering lots of opportunities. The tools are becoming more and more available and it’s becoming more of an open world. I expect that people will be down in their garden shed doing their own genetic engineering soon enough.

You’re pretty hard on the green groups which campaigned against GE crops and GE food supplies in Zambia during droughts a decade ago. Any regrets about referring to the environmental movement turning “sociopathic” in Africa?
When I found out that Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth were frightening African nations from not only developing these GE crops, but from eating the results, as if they were some kind of poison, I thought – that really is irresponsible. There’s no excuse for it and they’ve got to be called on it. It’s social injustice. I don’t like to see people in the north telling people in the south not to eat food for a stupid reason like that.
 
Do you see a problem with the way the environmental movement engages with science?
The problem is that when scientists see environmentalists talk anti-science, they begin to think in an anti-environmentalist way: “They’re wrong about this, they’re wrong about that, so I’m not interested in talking to them.” It’s horrible because you want them talking. We need good environmentalists acting on good information science is developing. We’ve seen it with climate, but not enough with nuclear or genetic crops.

Is there any reason to believe green ideas are becoming less associated with politics of the left?
We’re seeing in the United States that a lot of churches are taking on the cause in defence of what they’re calling “God’s creation”. Scientists like Edward Wilson are working with them on that. It doesn’t matter about who was right about evolution – we don’t even need to discuss that. It’s a way of moving forward, and pretty soon you’ve gotten away from the ideology on both sides.

Do you still consider yourself an environmentalist?
I’m a life-long environmentalist and my criticism of fellow greens is they’re often not green enough. We’re getting new facts all the time and if people try to fit new facts into old ideologies, we’re not going to fit facts to reality.

Whole Earth Discipline (Atlantic, £19.99) by Stewart Brand is out now

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P Geo-engineering: five schemes that could save the world

1. Send sulphur into the stratosphere
Using sulphate aerosols seems the easiest and most attractive of the big global dimming solutions. Oxidised droplets of sulphur absorb and reflect sunlight, as observed when caused by volcanic eruptions such as Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 (global temperatures cooled by half a degree Celsius the following year). The aerosols could be sprayed from the air or shot into the stratosphere from the ground.

2. Dump iron into the oceans
Oceans absorb vast quantities of CO2. If we fertilised parts of the ocean with iron, it allows phytoplankton to breed rapidly, which then increases the rate of CO2 absorption from the atmosphere into the water. Iron could be released by ships sailing around the oceans. But the carbon makes its way to the ocean floor, which could later be released in giant burps of harmful methane.

3. Plant charcoal in the ground
Climate theorist James Lovelock believes the massive burial of charcoal could be another big fix. The non-biodegradable material, once buried in the soil, could pull down hefty quantities of carbon that would otherwise be released. This bio-char would be created by agricultural waste, which would unfortunately have to be burned. Some are also sceptical about whether it could be achieved on a usefully large scale.

4. Set up reflecting mirrors in space
It’s still science-fiction, of course, but in theory the amount of solar radiation hitting the Earth could be reduced by up to two per cent by introducing a giant sun shield between it and the Sun. A variety of sizes and materials have been proposed – satellite-like mirror film or giant glass lenses. But no one has solved the problem of getting 20 million tonnes of lenses into space.

5. Create cloud cover  with ocean spray
A fleet of ocean-going cloud machines could also increase the Earth’s reflective abilities. By adding more water droplets, from atomised sea water, to the strato-cumulus clouds, ocean clouds could be brightened enough to offset a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. James Lovelock believes there are far fewer potential adverse side-effects than other schemes, but 1500 ships may be required to do the job.