I’ve mentioned it before that one of the quirks of researching history is that you are usually only presented with information which draws you further into the past. Sometimes it is possible to be unaware of more recent events and discourse. This is how I belatedly encountered things such as the “Zig Zag Zen” book, a landmark retrospective survey of Psychedelics and Buddhism, and the phenomenon of Cuba’s organic agricultural revolution. And it’s always a surprise!
However, even as I went deep into the connection between the Whole Earth Catalog and radical agriculture, I was aware of the significance of Stewart Brand’s more recent ecological thinking, as well as his late sixties and early seventies activities which I chronicled. That’s because of Brand’s well-known support for nuclear power, and the influence his example of reframing ecological problems has lent to George Monbiot’s position on land sparing and lab meat. Furthermore, Brand’s example must have inspired Bill “Greenfinger” Gates’ own interventions.
Stewart Brand became famous in the sixties for his role at the Trips Festival (1966), and conceiving of the badge which asked, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” This prompted NASA to create just that. Brand was instrumental in setting up the Whole Earth Catalog to give his colleagues, who were heading back-to-the land, access to information.
Even before his more recent breaks with the traditional ecology movement, Brand had increasingly less sympathy with the back-to-the-land movement that he supported with the information in the Whole Earth Catalog. Although he frames this difference in absolute philosophical terms, I think it might be one more of temperament. I believe the urbane Brand simply felt more comfortable in the town, and doesn’t understand the perspective of people who profess to enjoy working the land. Rather than acknowledge the difference in that lifestyle choice, and come to terms with his own preferences, he may have sought to position himself as correct in his own choices. For all his apples, I suspect George Monbiot, who has been openly critical of what he has called “neo-peasant bullshit” might be another example of this. It seems it is harder to admit something is not your cup of tea than acknowledge that your chosen lifestyle is, on those terms, out of kilter.
OK, so this is a book review that’s 16 years late, but I think it’s important to circle back and examine the evolution of Brand’s thinking here, as one might comb one’s hair repeatedly, because I sense these locks are knotted, and the bearing on the evolution of our collective thought is evidently at stake.
Brand’s influential book “Whole Earth Discipline” (2009) introduced controversial ideas into the ecological debate. Rather than a Green manifesto, this was as he described it, a Turquoise one, responsible in no small respect for creating a turquoise sensibility. As much as I found myself disagreeing with it, it’s an interesting and thought-provoking read. There’s quite a lot of what Brand says that I don’t mind. Here are the big three topics in the book:
(1) That human society is much better and more efficiently served by living in cities.
I don’t particularly mind the idea that it is more ecological to live in cities. It is probably my own personal preference too. And I like the idea of greening-up cities also. It’s only one example but I remember as a child being driven endlessly around the countryside. Most people in the countryside drive everywhere, and all the time. However, that and other arguments against living in the country are largely to do with how it is currently arranged. People should be encouraged to go back to the land if they want to. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but if more people were prepared to do it, and set about it intelligently like in Wales’s stringent One Planet Development framework, the evidence shows that within the context of biological agriculture it could greatly enhance productivity.
Tied up with this is the idea of land sparing – over land sharing. Brand prefers the idea of spared land in the form of wilderness areas (he uses the examples of the area around the Soviet reactor which melted down in Chernobyl, and the corridor between North and South Korea), as opposed to shared land (which “sparers” generally envision only as land farmed with industrial agricultural techniques). This is even enshrined at policy level in the UK where subsidies don’t benefit ecological agriculture; only either leaving land alone or farming it chemically. However, in direct conflict with his position on sparing land, Brand celebrates native population’s careful management, cultivation, and shepherding of nature. Here he cites the Indians of California. So, which is it?
There’s no getting away from the fact that agriculture is extractive, but well-managed it can increase biodiversity and, it is coherently argued, can even sequester carbon.
(2) That Nuclear power ought to be embraced by the green movement.
I don’t mind this so much either. It makes sense in the developed world. But not so much in the developing one. One thing that I didn’t feel was emphasised enough in “Whole Earth Discipline” was the fact that energy use needs to be radically reduced. Brand takes the perspective that society’s energy needs to be generated without elevating carbon dioxide with little thought of behaviour change. What’s missing here is David Holmgren’s idea of “Descent”, the necessity of everyone using less energy, and the benefits of that initially painful adjustment.
(3) That genetic engineering ought to be welcomed by Greens.
This is where I really diverge with his thinking. Brand thinks that Genetic Engineering is the natural bedfellow of organic agriculture. He sets about describing how plants are all already, by processes not involving gene splicing and the like, genetically engineered. He describes maize being cultivated from a Teosinte grass as a miracle. OK, the argument runs – that process took thousands of years – but nevertheless it was a miracle of genetic engineering achieved without CRISPR. Methods of creating cultivars without recourse to these techniques are already so sophisticated (noting recent innovations like Corteva’s drought-resistant wheat) that it is arguable that these gene processes are risky and basically unnecessary.
I don’t believe it’s any coincidence at all that GE crops are, like they were in the Green Revolution, strictly the bedfellows of industrial agriculture with its chemical fertilisers, herbicides, and massive destructive irrigation schemes. The problem here is the celebration of reductionist science over the strawman of purism. What we need to be celebrating is science which is mature, and therefore by definition holistic. Again, it comes down to confusing not shiny progressive science with luddite rusticism, but bad management with good.
There’s a lot to love about Brand’s book though. Obviously not the dreaded chemtrails, but some of the geo-engineering ideas sound, well, fun! Like many of the counterculture, Brand who started on his odyssey in the sixties fascinated by the American Indians, loves the idea of the Inca’s Terra Preta, today’s Biochar. He also cites John Latham’s idea to brighten the albedo of the earth by adding more water droplets to the stratocumulus clouds that cover a third of the oceans, and John Martin’s plans to seed the oceans with iron filings to increase phytoplankton which would die off and sequester carbon. No doubt people will be horrified by these latter two, but they felt OK to me.
I also remember vividly that my hero Masanobu Fukuoka had no problem at all with plants being grown in zones they had previously not been – and was therefore totally enchanted by the idea of Josh Donlan’s, which Brand cites, of introducing surrogate replacements of big mammals to the North American ecosystem: cheetahs, lions, and elephants. Bring it on!
