WHAT IS
THE MATTER WITH STEWART BRAND?
From Radio
Ecoshock 101015
By Alex
Smith
There are
so many holes and howlers in former Whole Earther Stewart Brand's
green/anti-green position, it's hard to know where to start.
I am
still formulating my reply, based on the
online book (“Whole Earth Discipline, an Ecopragmatist Manifesto”, his
"conversation"
I recorded, and his speech the same night at the University of British Columbia
which is online
now.
The
Stewart Brand many knew and loved is dead, replaced by the new green
businessman, who tells us we are Gods.
We should push risky technology until we make it, or go extinct trying. Just wait until you hear what his billionaire
"friends" are up to....
===========
Here is
one exchange we had at the "conversation" I recorded in Vancouver on
October 5th, 2010. From my first
question, Brand interrupted with "funny" comments. He snorted at the idea of going "back
to the land" - when all the people of the world are fleeing the
countryside, to the city slums....
Alex Smith: "The argument could be made,
that you see the answer to the climate being rectified by technology, or one
might say human hubris. More technology
and more hubris. We can see how that
has fouled up so badly so far."
Stewart
Brand: "We
haven't fouled up so badly. C'mon. You don't like your cell phone?"
Alex: "Actually I don't and a
seldom use one. The thing is:
technology..."
Brand: "But you are using the tape
recorder..."
Alex: "We're in big, big
trouble. And it isn't because of the
people who were growing rice the way they grew it for a thousand years, over
parts of China and India...."
Brand: "Farmers of forty centuries.
I'd love the book."
Alex: (frustrated) "I won't go
further. I think you know what I am
talking about. I wonder how do you
respond?"
===========
How can
Stewart Brand say "We haven't fouled up so badly" - right after
warning us that climate change may drive us to extinction? Things aren't so bad?
Or this
exchange, where I ask Brand to explain his former self, as a
self-sufficiency communal sort-of-guy, versus his present big money boosterism.
He belittles the question...
Alex
Smith: "You
started out with the back to the land, putting out a book for people to be
self-supportive. In those days of the
Whole Earth Catalog - that's where I came to know you. But you've moved completely away from
that."
Brand: "I haven't at all."
Alex: "I haven't heard anything
about that. I haven't heard anything
about chickens. We haven't learned
about how to grow your own food...."
Brand: "Geo-engineered chickens,
with even more nutrition, and more melodious clucks. That is coming, not by any large corporation. But people are going to do that in their
back yard: chickens that sing like canaries."
In fact,
as we hear in the Radio Ecoshock
interview on Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations - chickens have been
mutilated by big business. They are
shut in cages with no movement, cannot walk, have their beak clipped off. Not much "singing like canaries"
in that corporate design.
And
everything in Stewart Brand's speech indicated he has moved very far from his
origins. He talks of the fabulously
wealth saving the world, with big tech adventures like nuclear power.
Later, evaluating
the back to the land movement which he championed, Brand found little of
value from that period, beyond sexual diseases.
"AIDS
might have been one outcome of the sexual promiscuousness."
Then
Brand adds: "'A case of crabs instead of revolution' was how one person described the
sixties."
Sexual
diseases were the only outcome of the sexual revolution, Stewart? Remember when you were supposed to marry a
Virgin, and THEN find out if the sexual chemistry worked? Should everyone have stayed in their closets?
People
don't need to bother going back to growing their own food. The country, Brand tells us, is a place to
be shunned, left to the wilds of nature (and, we presume, the factory farms
containing the heavenly genetic-made pigs and chickens in their tiny pens... to
feed the urban folk.) If the masses in
Asia are heading into the slums, you should stay in the city, too.
Really it
was a sad verdict on the old Stewart Brand, rather than a generation.
"Most
of the hippies I know who survived that period, became business people. Much to their own surprise.
And I'll
tell you why that happened. Because
business people were the first people to take us long hairs seriously. Everybody else thought that we were a danger
to society. But one of our
peculiarities was that we were honest.
And in business, nothing gains trust like being honest."
The latest
saga of business hardly suggests that money-makers love honesty. Such B.S.
Oh, and by the way, many of the "hippies" did not become
businessmen. Some went to academia to
teach, others to non-profits trying to better the world. I suppose some are just older hippies.
Then
Stewart Brand goes into an appreciation of the multi-billionaires, acting where
governments are grid-locked. Men such
as Andrew Carnegie, who founded so many libraries.
"The
Rockefeller Foundation, I know one of the Rockefellers, and they've been an
astounding dynasty, not only wonderful people, generation after generation. But really smart philanthropy, generation
after generation."
He missed
the source of that great Rockefeller wealth, monopolistic oil - the climate
toxin. Apparently he has not read
another appreciation of the Rockefellers "Thy Will Be Done - The Conquest
of the Amazon. Nelson Rockefeller and
Evangelism in the Age of Oil." A
good Baptist Christian tale of not so wonderful people taking over the lands of
other people.
And what
about the dark history of David Rockefeller's Citi Group? All those petro-dollars, and narco-dollars
recycled. The espionage and intrigue -
were they all wonderful people?
I do not
know if the Rockefeller fortunes have divested themselves of oil holdings. Do they still have major stock in Exxon,
that cash cow? The Rockefeller
Brothers philanthropy has indeed helped some environmental causes,
including donations to the Great Bear Rainforest campaign. But did you see their renunciation of fossil
fuels, and their giant campaign to save the climate of the Earth? Neither did I.
Brand
tries to appear like a person very plugged in.
He goes to important meetings - just back from one in Washington
D.C! Billionaires are his friends. He has become an apologist for this system
which is eating the earth, the sea, and the sky.
His idol Warren
Buffett, held out as an example of true capitalism in the recorded
conversation, could make a sincere change.
Namely: stop hauling endless trainloads of coal out of the West, to the
Mid-West power plants, using his train company. No sign of that. In an earlier Radio Ecoshock piece,
I have already covered Warren Buffet's non-statements about the coming climate
crisis.
Richard Branson could denounce senseless travel on super-polluting air planes on Virgin airlines, and his exotic travel destinations. He has not renounced his bread and butter - but dabbles in space tourism as well, as though that atmospheric damaging hobby is what the world needs now....
Bill Gates has been extremely slow to the
global climate change table, and has produced nothing there yet, except an idea
for a new type of traveling wave reactor, sometime in the long distant future.
None of
these charitable billionaires seems able to keep up with the darker side of
money: people like the notorious Koch Brothers who are sabotaging both
rational politics and climate change action.
We can
hardly talk about all the other multi-billionaires. The Russians, Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and so on. What are their beneficial intentions? Where are they on climate change, except
solidly on the wrong side, condemning our children to the heat, floods, and
rising seas? Most are holding on hard
to their fortunes, jewels, and power.
All the
solutions assume the capitalist financial system will survive, fortunes of the beneficent
wealthy will remain intact, and we'll fly higher, even higher, into becoming
the Gods of technology. I think the
system is bankrupt, and I am not alone.
"NASA
hasn't done anything useful for three decades." Brand proclaims.
(NASA was
a driving force, with the Germans, in launching the GRACE satellites that,
among many other things, show the massive ice loss in Greenland, by measuring
the change in gravity. Plus many other
ways of monitoring the Earth...)
This is
part of a continuing plea that governments are useless, so his
"friends" - the multi-millionaires and billionaires, should step in
and take private action. He almost
threatens that these individuals may step in with geoengineering. They have the money - it only takes $300
million a year, he says. And Stewart
Brand is meeting with other very rich people from the Silicon valley to independently
fund research into human cooling of the planet by injecting more pollution....
"One
of my friends, two of my friends - Richard Branson, - three of my friends
actually - Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, all have their own space
programs. They can afford it - why not?
Elon Musk is going to be the go-to guy for rockets."
About
geoengineering. After saying no
government would fund it, Brand says, with a slide showing a futuristic
sail-powered ship with large stacks...
Stewart
Brand (conversation
101005 recorded by Alex Smith):
"This
one, is being funded by retired Silicon valley engineers. And this beautiful thing is a Stephen
Salter, a British engineer, design Catamaran with Flettner sails, sails cross
the wind, and the force of that drives these propeller turbines which then
atomize the sea water, send it out the top.
The atomized sea water immediately dries into little salt particles
which then become the nuclei of water droplets which then brighten the clouds,
which then brighten the Albedo of that part of the planet, cool that part of
the ocean. Keep it healthy and... do
enough of that, and they've figured out that a fleet of 300 of those might make
the difference to keep it cool, to keep the planet cool.
No
government is funding it. Not the
American government, not the British government, not the Canadian government. Private guys are, in Britain and the United
States. That will happen for a while,
until there's enough traction there, or enough worry, that some kind of
'GreenFinger' as he might be called, will save the world....
Then the
governments will step up.
So I see
personal philanthropy as a huge work-around to a lot of these issues."
In Brand's speech to the
UBC students the same night, he quickly mentioned ocean acidification
coming out of geoengineering, admitting it was a drawback. The plan isn't perfect, but still necessary,
he says.
Ocean
acidification is a land-mine waiting to blow up in the public consciousness.
The realization of the full meaning of turning the ocean more acid is
unknown to most. Brand does a
disservice by minimizing this risk - but then he minimizes all risks, even the
most hair-raising things, like nuclear waste, and dirty bombs, and wild genetic
engineering done by the general public, to create more pleasant chickens.....
I was
almost at a loss to explain my complex take on Stewart Brand, as a social phenomenon. He claims to be a green, but a new kind of
green, that denounces everything before him, especially Greenpeace. He laments regulation, even environmental
regulation, as an impediment to free invention and business. He likes everything that requires big
business to do. He's a kind of green
anti-environmentalist, who renounces even his former self, as an explorer
back-to-the-land, self-sufficiency, everything.
I turned
to my listeners email from last week's program. I couldn't do this show without such highly intelligent Ecoshock
listeners. I'm going to continue with
some of my emails to them.
Brand
still believes the market should solve most problems. But where it cannot work, private billionaires should step in,
until the solution can be re-launched into the private sphere. The billionaires will get into a league
to save us. That seems naive to me, to
say the least. And can we wait for
such saviors, doing little ourselves to change the culture of death?
"Ideology
will take you down blind alleys."
That, Brand says is the point of his book: it is time to put ideologies
on the shelf, and become very pragmatic.
Whatever works is good, he seems to say, especially in these times of crisis.
At the
end of his speech to University of British Columbia staff and students, Stewart
Brand said:
"This
is a whatever it takes deal, folks... We may not get out of this century
alive...." But, he says, it is all
a great adventure.
NEW NUCLEAR DEAD IN THE
U.S.
Meanwhile,
the nuclear power push is moot in the United States. See this. Brand didn't tell his students that the
fossil fuel industry has stalled any big nuclear until decades to late to help
us avert catastrophe. Even the huge
international plans will likely founder on the coming Depression's destruction
of capital. Most will never be built.
Exelon
Corp. Chief Executive Officer John Rowe told the press in New York that a new
Maryland nuclear plant would not be built, because it is not economic to build
nuclear with the price of natural gas so low.
He the nuclear renaissance has been stalled for a decade or two -
killed off by the fossil fuel industry.
The planned Maryland reactor will not be built - despite the $7.5
billion dollar government loan and other huge subsidies.
So why is Stewart Brand still flogging nuclear power as a solution in the United States?
Brand did
not talk about the global dimming problem, arising from geoengineering
schemes that he promotes. Dimming is
already extreme, with about 10% less sunlight reaching Chinese fields. Think about that! What a huge change, just since 1950 (figures from Scripps
Institute). How dare we darken the sky,
blot out the Sun!
Some
techies' say they want to put ships pumping sulfur into the Southern
Hemisphere, in the "empty" Pacific where the automatons won't run
into shipping traffic. Never mind the
impact on algae in the Pacific that provide much or our oxygen.
The
potential for acid rain, and greater cloudiness, falls on Australia, South
America, South Africa.... as the particles stay generally in the hemisphere where
they are created, due to wind patterns (just as most industrial pollution stays
with us in the North). But how
convenient for the powerful North to decide the South should get the added
pollution!
It goes
on. I interviewed Tim
Garrett, a cloud expert from the University of Utah. He had doubts "cloud whitening"
would work anyway. He suspects that
other clouds will just get darker. He's
working on that theory.
Meanwhile,
the only real way we can know such large-scale climate tinkering can work - is
if we try it out! There is no research
model that can really determine workability, other than releasing the hounds,
and see what happens to the sky....
Still,
humanity may become so desperate one extra hot year, that we try it. Meanwhile, the dream of a technical fix
allows us to go ahead and pollute some more.
We'll make it all better some time in the future, somehow, because we
are Gods.....Stewart Brand said so.
============
Brand is
certainly now representing himself a "friend" and apologist for
some American and British billionaires, and other movers-and-shakers.
He became a pollinator, from the counter-culture to the business world, and in my opinion, became a kind of character to inspire one's dinner table, or corporate meeting. a little too harsh, perhaps, since Brand is also an organizer, but that is my take.
As such,
Stewart Brand serves a purpose in his public talks: to elucidate what the
response, or non-response, of some English-speaking wealthy men is. Listen to him, because you will hear the
progressive capitalist buzz. Surprise,
surprise - all it takes is more technology and big business, and it will be run
by the very rich. Brand said he didn't
see much difference between governments and corporations - they are just
different ways of organizing people. I
see a big difference, don't you?
There are gigantic holes in Brand's simplifications. Some of his statements in the afternoon were preposterous. I could create a short list of laughable/awful Brandisms from just one afternoon.
Nature is
what we make of it. We are Gods. We just need to improve. There is nothing wrong with technology, we
just need a lot more of it. We can fix
every mistake.
Everyone
will be performing genetic experiments in their garden sheds, Brand says. If some horrible life form results, we'll
find it and exterminate it with some other life form. As if one can take such mistakes back..... He sees the genetic "game" to be
like computer hacking. Mistakes just
make the system stronger. Try taking
back life forms like rabbits in Australia, zebra mussels in the Great Lakes,
and all the invasive species we already introduce. Now try to correct the super bug created in a University lab contest...
I could go on.
I
don't classify Brand as a climate denier. He is a true
believer, the most desperate, and still manages to profit from both the
corporate world, and the crisis, in his own way. He is a businessman.
As an
idea pollinator, moving between some powerful money, and some bright minds,
Stewart Brand does bring us some fresh perspectives. He can roll out the California hype like few others. I recommend listening to him to see what one
big money line is, these days.
I
disagree with Brand's hubris, and his ideas.
In fact, now that I have met him, I don't like Stewart Brand. I felt he didn't like me.
To be
fair - Stewart immediately allowed me to record his conversation - he believes
in open media, open source. And it was
an off-the-cuff conversation, rather than a prepared speech (taking the risk of
thinking out loud). And Brand had a
slight cold.
Still, I
felt Stewart Brand made it apparent that we, as a small audience, had failed
him that afternoon. I asked him if he
would like an mp3 of the recording.
"No, there is nothing there I have not heard before, many
times...."
He is so
great, and we so small. Likely, we
don't know any billionaires at all.
Alex
Smith
Radio
Ecoshock