(2005-04-19) Environmental Heresies

Stewart Brand hopes the Environmentalism movement will change its attitudes in 4 areas: Population Growth, Urbanization, genetically engineered organisms (GM Food), and Nuclear Power.

DavidRoberts scratches at some of the items.

Update: Tim OReilly blogs a recent talk by Stewart focusing on the Urbanization ideas.

Jul'2006 - Brand on Urbanization again.

• New squatter cities usually look like human cesspools and often smell like them... But the squatter cities are vibrant. Each narrow street is one long bustling market of food stalls, bars, cafes, hair salons, churches, schools, health clubs, and mini-shops of tools, trinkets, clothes, electronic gadgets, and pirated videos and music. What you see up close is not a despondent populace crushed by Poverty but a lot of people busy getting out of poverty as fast as they can... Two recent books have penetrated the clouds of wrong theory about squatter cities because the authors spent time actually living in the shantytowns... Contrary to a common assumption, the UN researchers and Robert Neuwirth found that the wretched quality of housing in squatter cities is never the main concern of the inhabitants. Indeed, when governments and idealistic architects provide Public Housing, those buildings often turn into the worst part of the Slum-s. The people who build the shanties take pride in them and are always working to improve them. The real issues for the squatters are location - they want to be close to work - and what the UN calls "security of tenure." They need to know that their homes and community won't suddenly be bulldozed out of existence. Another piece of conventional wisdom that turns out to be wrong concerns crime. Far from being the hotbeds of criminal activity that everyone assumed, the squatter cities are often victimized by criminals from outside, because they have no protection by government police.

• This migration, "on the whole, acts to alleviate poverty in both the urban and rural sectors," wrote geography professor Ronald Skeldon in 1997. He explained that the urban "informal sector, with its capacity to create an almost infinite variety and number of activities" and its "considerable potential for Self Organization... can create a dynamic economy and society."... Thus the bottom line in the UN report: "Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic Poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city."

• "The provision of water standpipes (Clean Water) may be far more effective in enabling Women to undertake income-earning activities than the provision of skills training."

Sept'2009 update: SEED magazine interview - We need science to understand the climate dynamics much better. We've got better data and better Model-s than we used to, but when the predictions of the models fail, they fail in important and scary ways... Then on the engineering level, direct intervention--GeoEngineering--is going to be necessary sooner than most people think or expect. Research there is absolutely essential because to make a mistake on the planetary scale is not something you want to do. Money and effort going into the 10 or 12 geoengineering schemes we have so far, plus developing new ones, is of the essence. At the same time, government involvement is crucial because governments decide infrastructure what the price of various energy forms is going to be. The American, European, Chinese, and Indian governments need to make coal expensive. If they don't, coal will be burned until we all cook.

Oct'2009 update: now (Oct15) in book form as Whole Earth Discipline ISBN:0670021210. In the previously-noted interview, he says I'm doing an online annotated version. It will go live at the same time that the book publishes in October. Basically, the sections of every chapter that are footnoted will be immersed in the research material with lots of live links and photos, diagrams, charts, and so on. So anyone who wants to see my sources can go straight there and draw their own conclusions... And I'll try to keep updating the book. I've already got some additional levels of understanding from people like George Church and Larry Brilliant. I'll just add that to the online version.