I just real­ized that it would be worth­while to save my reviews of the books I read here as well as on Goodreads. This was prompted by notic­ing the “Blog this Review” con­ve­nient lit­tle cut/paste fea­ture on Goodreads. I enjoy that site so much!

Whole Earth Dis­ci­pline: An Eco­prag­ma­tist Man­i­festo by Stew­art Brand

My rat­ing: 4 of 5 stars

This man­i­festo is a call for envi­ron­men­tal­ists to leave behind their roman­tic ideals and move into the 21st Cen­tury. Stew­art Brand’s zeal and enthu­si­asm make most of this book a joy to read, and he is the first to admit his past mis­takes in his efforts to serve the earth. In par­tic­u­lar, he urges rethink­ing oppo­si­tion to nuclear power, urban­iza­tion, and genetic engineering.

I haven’t thought much about urban­iza­tion as an envi­ron­men­tal boon before this book. I per­son­ally am not a fan of the city, despite liv­ing in the mid­dle of one, and would love to return to rural areas. Brand makes a very com­pelling argu­ment for the healthy urban envi­ron­ment and how it can help clean up a lot of the poverty, pol­lu­tion, and waste that we are now expe­ri­enc­ing. This was an eye-opening sec­tion for me, and I will likely do fur­ther read­ing on the topic.

Brand was preach­ing to the choir on the next sec­tion. I have been staunchly pro-nuclear for years. Espe­cially updat­ing and expand­ing with new, updated tech (using Cher­nobyl or Fukushima as a boogey­man is disin­gen­u­ous in my opin­ion, but that’s a topic for another day)can be a huge dif­fer­ence in our CO2 lev­els and pro­vide a low-risk, high-output, and largely clean alter­na­tive to fos­sil fuels and other alter­na­tives we have at the moment. I do think that Brand glossed over the human com­po­nent here, but I expect that if the book were writ­ten after Fukushima, instead of directly before, that com­po­nent would have been more extensive.

I was really groov­ing on this book, enjoy­ing every bit even when I dis­agreed with him, but then I got to the genetic mod­i­fi­ca­tion bits. And here I ran into trou­ble, and stalled read­ing it for quite some time. He does not give his oppo­nents a fair hear­ing in this sec­tion, prob­a­bly because he has done time as a nuclear detrac­tor and an oppo­nent of urban­iza­tion. He doesn’t seem to under­stand the valid con­cerns of those who urge cau­tion and oppose genetic mod­i­fi­ca­tion, and there­fore doesn’t ade­quately address those con­cerns. He con­de­scend­ingly sug­gests that these peo­ple are sim­ply fear­ful of sci­ence and inno­va­tion. He’s clearly daz­zled by genetic sci­ence, and thinks it is super cool, and any­one who doesn’t see it that way is just an old fogey.

The rest of the book, he goes back to being more fair minded and even handed. He sug­gests that polit­i­cal divi­sive­ness and single-minded all-or-nothing think­ing does more harm than good. While he clearly on the left side of the polit­i­cal spec­trum, and can’t resist quite a few digs at the Repub­li­can party along the way, he also takes a few jabs at Al Gore. It’s appar­ent that he thinks Jerry Brown is the cat’s meow, though.

He dis­cusses human inter­ven­tion on the planet, and how lit­tle we know and how much we’re learn­ing daily. He sug­gests that North Amer­ica was destroyed by the white man, not by rap­ing and pil­lag­ing the pris­tine wilder­ness, but by destroy­ing elab­o­rate ter­raform­ing projects by wip­ing out (mostly via germs) the gar­den­ers of two continents.

In the last chap­ter, he talks in great detail about geo­log­i­cal engi­neer­ing, and some pos­si­ble worst-case sce­nario solu­tions if global warm­ing keeps up to pre­dic­tions. They are all incred­i­bly inter­est­ing and I can’t even scratch the sur­face of all the amaz­ing ideas he brings to the table in the last few chap­ters. They all bear fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion. As this is a man­i­festo, his aim isn’t to delve deeply, but just sug­gest that there are solu­tions, if we are prag­matic and open to them, but bal­anc­ing that open­ness with being appro­pri­ately crit­i­cal and wary.

Brand’s writ­ing style is enthu­si­as­tic and clean. He is frank; even when he’s using a metaphor that he knows is imper­fect he admits it. He owns up to past mis­takes, and sug­gests that he could very well be wrong about many things he is writ­ing about now. He sug­gests his read­ers be open and rea­son­able, rather than intractable and stub­born, to go about tak­ing care of the planet we all call home. He appeals to all of us to be intel­lec­tu­ally hon­est and curi­ous and hope­ful, rather than despair­ing and quib­bling over details.

His love of sci­ence, human­ity, and the world are all appar­ent, and even though there is much in the book I dis­agree with, it opens up the ques­tion of a greater dia­log and research to such a degree that on the whole, I am thrilled that I read it. It has opened me up to many pos­si­bil­i­ties and ways of think­ing about the planet that I hadn’t con­sid­ered before, and I would sug­gest any­one inter­ested in these issues, no mat­ter what their stance, would get a great deal out of hear­ing Stew­art Brand out.

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