Overdoing the eco-pragmatism
Peter Madden, 19th January 2010, Climate change
I went with anticipation to a ‘Bristol Festival of Ideas’ talk earlier this week, where Stewart Brand, chaired by Brian Eno, was talking about his new book Whole Earth Discipline. I left feeling rather dispirited.
For those of you who don’t know Brand, he is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a grand old man of the US environmental movement.
His central message was that the problems facing the world are so great that we have to do “whatever works” in order to tackle them. That means concentrating people in cities, and embracing GM, nuclear power and geo-engineering. We are changing the earth so profoundly anyway, he argued, that we might as well do more of it.
I am a big technological optimist myself and am certainly on the eco-pragmatist side of the movement. But I found Brand’s recipe – at least as he dished it out in Bristol - unfulfilling.
His was a totally technocratic version of the world, encouraging us to “focus on the numbers” and “just do what works”. There was no room for vision or values, just a managerial approach to engineering the status quo.
Brand told us to “put aside ideology” and ridiculed most environmentalists as luddites who “would have opposed the wheel”.
While I liked Brand’s willingness to slaughter sacred cows, I was troubled by what he didn’t say. Surely we need both technological answers and changed values? Surely the environment movement shouldn’t be shorn of all sense of vision? Is more of the same, just better managed, really enough?
Read more about Whole Earth Discipline (publishers website)
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Its the numbers
Hi Peter,
I started a comment, but it grew into a blog post of its own.
Anyway, here it is....
I haven’t read the book yet, but I think Brand is probably on the right track. In the end it is not good intentions, visions or values that count, but whether we are going far enough and fast enough at transforming economies towards clean, green prosperity before we slam up against nature's buffers.
It’s the numbers.
Climate change is not the only issue, but it is an important and pressing one. To get anywhere near a sustainable emissions pathway and defend the ‘status quo’ (in terms of growing global prosperity) we have to be able to get ten times more value out of every tonne of carbon we emit by 2050. If not, we would have to accept a major drop in lifestyle in developed countries and stagnation everywhere else. Or as the Mckinsey Global Institute calculates we would have to make a daily choice on our carbon budget between a 40 kilometer car ride, a day of air conditioning, two T-shirts from a local store OR two meals.
So yes we have to focus on the numbers and do what works. Anything else is feel-good futility. As David Macay says in Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air ‘every BIG helps’.
I think we need to find ways to tell this story in ways that are not dispiriting, but doesn’t settle on a complacent message of ‘don’t worry, technology will sort it out’. We need to worry. We need to invent, and invest, and think differently, and do differently, and organise differently. And we need to do it in ways that add up.
As for vision, I don’t think we should ever forget that the ‘status quo’ is extraordinary. The freedoms and choices, comfort, security, abundant food, education and health we enjoy are an exception from the norm that has prevailed for most of human history (and still does for many). The ‘get out of jail free’ card from short, hard lives where you bury as many children as you raise, came at the cost of burning fossil fuels, and through generations of human ingenuity to harness that power.
Isn’t transforming the basis for prosperity vision enough?