Customer Reviews

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

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This is the most revealing and compelling of Stewart Brand's writings to date, and I've read pretty much everything he has written in the past 40+ years. Brand is a conceptual artist whose medium is words. He specializes in developing, creating, and promulgating interesting and useful perspectives. Somehow he always manages to find whatever is exciting, important, or cool about whatever he is investigating and to reframe the subject at hand to make you want to learn more. His reframings are powerful. They are aimed to give you a new and improved perspective and point of view, and that is what they do, but they do so with your informed consent.

A lot of people have looked into squatter cities and shanty towns, but Brand does a better job of showing how they are part of an organic and evolutionary and even in some ways positive, optimistic process than most others I've read. There has been a lot of shouting on all sides of the debate on nuclear energy -- this is a really good attempt to get the pros and cons on the table in rational discourse and (mostly) dispense with the flame wars. Same goes for the discussions of genetically engineered crops and geo-engineering. We desperately need a much higher quality public dialog on all these subjects, and this book is a real contribution toward putting all these issues on the table in a discussable format. Stewart is right -- the time for allowing ideology and sentimentality to stand in front of what science is telling us is over, and we are going to be forced as a society to make some difficult decisions relating to the future of our climate and the management of our ecosystems. It is going to require massive involvement and a high level of innovation on the part of many actors, and it is going to require a lot of people to stretch their thinking and give up old prejudices. I don't know if Stewart is right about all the assertions in this book, but the nice thing is, neither does he, and he knows that and comes right out and says so. Loosely held opinions strongly stated. The service of this book is to unwedge the conversation, steer between Pollyanna and Chicken Little, and focus on the important issues that are surely coming our way.

I was interviewing George Soros as the Dow rapidly shed 300 points and crashed through the 10,000 level.

"Is this it?" I asked.

Soros shrugged --- a very calm reaction from an investor who might have seen his portfolio shrink by hundreds of millions of dollars in a matter of minutes.

I lost much less that day, but I had a different reaction --- panic. The thing to do, I concluded, was to trade my beloved Classic 6 in Manhattan for a self-sustaining house in the country. Ten acres would suffice, as long as they had decent water, land suitable for a large garden and enough sunlight for the solar panels.

I bought a URL for the web site I planned to launch: [...]. This was no back-to-the-land hippie retreat. I would be stepping into the smart future: small town/rural purity (Woodsmoke) with the 21st century benefits of a fast Internet (Broadband) and Amazon.com's free shipping.

Given all that, you will understand that I was quite stunned to read "Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto" --- by Stewart Brand, creator of the 1960s and 1970s classic, the "Whole Earth Catalog" --- and discover that the last place its author would have me go is back to the land.

In these pages, Stewart Brand lays out a mind-blowing vision for the planet's salvation: migration to the cities, power generated by mini-nuclear reactors, healthier crops through genetic engineering.

This may well be the most important book I'll read this year. Certainly, it's the most aggressively optimistic book that's also closely reported --- Brand's a student who shows his work. Granted, a lot of it is technical. Skip those pages. Just read with a pencil. Mark what seems important and/or drives you crazy. Start reading more science news --- Brand recommends NewScientist --- and keep an open mind. That is, get ready to abandon your own long-held views. And be just as ready to disagree with Brand.

The book starts with climate change --- not as a phenomenon to debate with those who don't believe it's real, but as a factor in warfare, which has historically often followed changes in climate. In the past, "wholesale carnage was common, and so was cannibalism." But in the last three centuries, historians have found, only about 3% of the world's population dies in warfare. And in our own century, war has become absolutely humane --- we now kill only enough of the enemy to guarantee victory.

But what if we experienced severe climate change? "Humanity would revert to its norm of constant battles for diminishing resources," Brand writes. "Peace lovers would be killed and eaten by war lovers."

Now that he has your attention --- and with that image, he certainly has mine --- Brand makes his case for a Green movement that is smart about science. In other words, based on facts, not emotion. Rachel Carson, he notes, was a hero for her anti-pesticide book, "Silent Spring". But after DD was banned worldwide, malaria took off in Africa, possibly killing 20-30 million children. So he wishes us to consider the direct --- and indirect --- consequences of:
-- "We're now excessively carbon-loading the atmosphere toward inferno."
-- "Cellphones are the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history."
-- For the next three decades, the world will be demographically split: in the global north, old cities full of old people; in the global south, new cities full of young people.
-- "A white roof saves the building's tenant 20% in cooling costs."
-- Because of its nuclear plants, France exports power to coal-burning countries.

But the big phenomenon for Brand, in his new way of thinking, is this: "The takeoff of cities is the dominant economic event of the first half of this century." And when we met in New York for a short interview, that's where we started.

You see more and more people moving to cities. Why do you applaud that?

Cities innovate faster as they grow bigger. They create enormous problems, but they also create solutions faster. Cities seem to know how to get out of their own way.

What's driving the attraction of cities?

Globally, the evolution of cell phones. Once people in the bush have smart phones, people can see the wealth creation in cities.

Won't this lead to more urban gridlock?

People don't move from the country to the capital cities. They go to the nearest city.

Okay, climate change. Care to predict the year when, if we haven't taken radical steps, it becomes just too late to save the planet for humans life?

No, because you can't find a hard edge.

Explain, please.

I used to think rising sea level was not significant. You can, after all, walk back from water. Then I realized most of the wealth and productivity and expensive real estate is on the coasts. In San Francisco, real estate along the shore is susceptible to inches. So rising water is more serious to those people than drought. Very simply, the rich will say: "Stop this!"

And for those who don't live on the coasts?

Ten years of drought would have an effect. At 15 years you realize it's not going away. And once drought stays, the area does die.

In either scenario, climate is the story.

It's the ongoing story: What does climate change mean to us?

But people don't want to hear it. Why?

People turn away from news that confuses them. And these problems resist easy understanding. There's much to disagree about on almost point. Like: every year, carbon comes out of the atmosphere. Does it go to oceans or continents?

You mention the good that would follow if we all painted our roofs white. Give me five more things that we can, as individuals, do to retard climate change.

In my "Whole Earth" days, that would be my focus. Now I don't think about painting your roof white, I think about painting whole cities white.

Can you see that time?

Soon enough, I can see streets that will be embedded with solar cells.

And our power coming from mini-nuclear plants?

Micro-reactors are game changers. China is talking about building 400.

This conversation unsettles me. On one hand, you speak of urgency. On the other, you're very calm. Why aren't you screaming?

I'm a biologist. That comes with a kind of fatalism.

Working out the ideas for this book, when do you realize you were making a break with your past?

As I was pursuing urbanization, I realized there was a nest of good news in what had been treated as bad news. As a journalist, this is what you look for --- suddenly I had a story. And my changed sense of "green" is a piece of that story. That's one advantage of being 70 and having been in the public eye for 40 years.

So is "Whole Earth Discipline" a repudiation of the "Whole Earth Catalog"?

The "Catalog" was not, as some thought, counter-culture. It was counter-counter culture. It matched the passion of the hippie movement with reasoned responses. "Discipline" is the same game.

I have long considered myself to be a pragmatist without a cause. Nonetheless, I have been fully convinced by reading this book that the time to start a major overhaul in the way we think about global issues is RIGHT NOW. Stewart Brand does a fantastic job laying the facts bare in a way that will convince anyone from the most rational pragmatist to the most ardent environmentalist that we need to start fixing our civilization RIGHT NOW. Not only that, but we must use every tool and technology that we have invented to help us achieve this goal.

His warnings are dire, but hopeful. His advice is strongly worded, but entirely justified. If you are looking for a rational voice in the debate about climate change, genetically modified organisms, the overpopulation "problem" and other issues whose specter is now cast over the future of our species, you must read this book.

It is rare to find a book that is balanced, informative and wholly engaging -- this is one of them.

When Stewart Brand captured a generation's imagination 40 years ago with The Whole Earth Catalog, his motto was "We are as gods, and might as well get good at it." With this book, as humankind confronts climate change and other vast, urgent threats largely of its own making, the motto has matured: "We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it." Brand's magisterial tour of urbanization, biotechnology, climate change, energy and agriculture is a feast of surprises, unorthodox opinions, startling insights, wry observations, and moments of reverence and wonder that will inspire and energize productive, practical people everywhere, whether they consider themselves green or not. I don't know if there is a National Book Award for manifestos ... but hey, there wasn't a National Book Award for catalogs when Brand's first great book won, back in the day. And never mind prizes; Whole Earth Discipline offers us a way for humankind to save its own skin.

Don't read this book if you are looking for another confirmation that you have been right all along. Whether you are a Green Party tree hugger or a pro-nuke conservative, you will find parts of this book that will delight you and parts that will annoy you. This is a book that will make you think. If you want to participate in the ongoing conversation about global warming, energy production and environmentalism, you need to read it.

I'm not well informed enough to comment on whether or not Stewrt Brand is correct in all of the assertions he makes in this book. I don't keep up with the science and technology- and I certainly have no knowledge of the personalities in the Green movement that he uses as his foils. That's not what interested me in this book.

What sparked my interest is reading a book by a man who has changed him mind on so many things. Cities are good. Nuclear power is Green. Genetic engineering should be embraced by environmentalists.

What brought him here?

Two things: A conviction that climate change is a true and present danger to the planet, and that human beings are a part of nature, not some awful thing that should be eradicated. I deeply appreciate the second proposition- too often you find people in the environmental movement that don't look at people as a blessing, but as a burden. It has always been the biggest turn off about the Greens, for me.

This book is worth reading to help all people who care about the environment take a step back and re-evaluate our positions. As Brand states at the close of his book, the last thing environmentalism should ever become is anti-science. And being pro-science means that you need to sometimes take a step back and give a good hard look at your assumptions and paradigms.

Just like the title of the book says, this book is full of thought-provoking ideas from an ecopragmatist. Stewart Brand shares his ideas on how to help the planet and the people, in his refreshing style that is mostly devoid of stubborn ideology. For example, although he has been against nuclear power most of his adult life, he has recently changed his way of thinking and embraced expanding nuclear power as an alternative to greenhouse gas spewing fossil fuel power plants.

Brand also makes a good case that genetically modified foods are probably, on the whole, better for the poor people of the world than banning genetically modified foods (because the modified plants tend to have higher yields and nutrition).

The author also makes a good case that cities are "greener" than lots of people living in the country. I don't really buy into Brand's arguments that living in slum cities are better than living in the country-side, but I guess it's possible in some third-world countries that slums offer more of chance to find a menial job that pays for enough food to eat.

All in all, a very lively, thought-provoking book written for environmentalists who are open to new ideas.

This was a tough one to get through...
But Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, is pretty close to what I had anticipated after watching seminar videos sponsored by the author covering like material. I expected something from him of an even-handed scientific point-of-view on the state of our planet, plus sober, intelligent suggestions on what can be done about the hard problems--and feel I got just that.

As an educated member of our planet with limited energy and resources (...that's me I'm talking about), there is little I can do in response but to take note and perform whatever small steps I can to help out, such as informing the people in the small community where I live--since there's nothing like knowing about another set of possible dreadfulness coming our way to keep us focused on what is important. And now, hopefully, our scientific knowledge of the world around us can help serve as a moderating force for the difficult choices all of us will have to make.

Just like fear serves athletes involved with extreme skiing or base jumping down mountainsides, perhaps our non-athletic thinking types can use this fear-factor to gain access to places in themselves capable of solving seemingly impossible tasks and making effective choices amidst a chaos of dueling ideas and current insufficient data. This is part of what is needed, and part of what Whole Earth Discipline is attempting to prime I think.

So my advice with this book, as a non-scientist but interested onlooker, and one of 6.8 billion+ decision makers, is to read it, weep, and then carry on...as we all must...as all of our heroic traditions insist...with the necessary details of our own daily lives, and now, with something we never dreamed of signing-up for as children--the necessary awareness of having to save our global home as well. That Stewart and friends through this book are performing a needed public service in this regard, is a monumental understatement.

Truly one of the most eye-opening things I've read in a while. He gleefully points out that our partisan loyalties of various kinds make us quite blind to what's really going on around us. The earth and society continue to evolve at a breath taking pace, and our conceptualizations don't quite keep up. Fascinating is his analysis of how the movement of the poor from the countryside to the city is actually an amazing piece of economic and environmental progress, freeing people to new levels of prosperity and freedom, while simultaneously removing much of the load on the countryside. A number of yesterday's problems are becoming non-problems, with the earth's population growth stalling and getting to a point of falling vastly sooner than anyone had expected, and the forrest growing back much faster than it's being cut down. Meanwhile technology keeps shifting, with immense progress and promise in harnessing the ability of life to swap genes back and forth, creating new opportunities to feed the poor. While we face giant problems in the decades to come, there are also amazing opportunities out there, for anyone willing to seize them. The key challenge is to see beyond our nose - go beyond our prejudices of what a conservative, a liberal, an American city dweller, or whatever, should see and think, to see what's really out there. Being honest and open, and thinking globally is critical right now. Even while our own society seems mired in doldrums, the planet keeps changing. Tapping into that change is what will get us out of this calm spot. Read this book and think!

Five stars are not enough for this book.

Reading this book I constantly asked myself how one human could find, organize and so simply present so much information. Stewart Brand has quite a track record in life, but nothing he has done preceding this book measures to the same standard.

I won't reiterate what has been said in previous reviews about the detailed content of the book. The central theme of the book, as Brand details a multitude of environmental problems facing humanity and potential solutions, is that we should face environmental problems scientifically and without a religiously dogmatic refusal to ignore facts. We must not fail to test currently accepted beliefs, which we assume to be true and self evident, without rigorous scientific testing. We must solve the most serious problems with --- 'whatever it takes'. Our preferred, but unworkable, solutions are not good enough.

Other reviewers have said this book may be the best environmental book of the decade. That may be an understatement considering the breadth and scope of Brand's work. This is the "Whole Earth Catalog" of environmental problems and solutions. The optimistic focus on scientific solutions sets this book apart.