Whole Earth Discipline

by Brand, Stewart

  After the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 focused the world’s attention on energy, efficiency and renewability became core doctrine for environmentalists. Solar was hip. Wind-generated electricity began developing toward the mega-infrastructure it is now. Insulated windows were invented and refined. A by-product of all that innovation, especially from the drive toward efficiency, was that gigatons of carbon dioxide stayed out of the air. I was part of that, and you’re welcome.

  Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists helped stop carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe. (Except for France, which fortunately responded to the ’73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear.) Greens caused gigatons of carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere from the coal and gas burning that went ahead instead of nuclear. I was part of that too, and I apologize.

  • One more climate book to invoke here is Plows, Plagues and Petroleum (2005), by paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman. He examines the last 2.75 million years, dominated by dozens of ice ages, their period and amplitude driven by three intersecting astronomical cycles affecting solar intensity. Ice-core data from Greenland matches the cyclic theory closely until about five thousand years ago, when, in the midst of our current routine interglacial, the standard steep drop in atmospheric methane suddenly reversed and headed up. It’s still going up. What the hell happened?

  We happened. Ruddiman surmises that the cause was the sudden adoption of irrigation in China and South Asia for an agricultural innovation, wet rice cultivation. Vegetation rotted in the new artificial wetlands and emitted methane. As rice farming expanded, so did methane emission. Add the ever-growing numbers of methane-burping livestock, plus increasing forest burning for agriculture, and the anomaly is explained. Ruddiman wondered if a similar mysterious reversal and climb in atmospheric CO2 eight thousand years ago might have a related explanation. It did. As human population took off with agriculture, forests were burned to make new fields and pasture. Whole societies grew and migrated, forests shrank, and the atmosphere became a greenhouse. On the old astronomical schedule, a new ice age should have begun a couple of thousand years ago. Ruddiman concludes, “A glaciation is now overdue, and we are the reason.”

  One further detail. What would explain the peculiar sudden dips in atmospheric CO2 between 200 and 600, 1300 and 1400, and 1500 and 1750? Those dates happen to match major human diebacks from pandemics—Roman-era epidemics, the Black Death in Europe, and the devastation of North American native populations by European diseases. Each time, forests grew back rapidly over empty agricultural land and drew down carbon dioxide.

  If Ruddiman is right, climate has been a human artifact, a highly sensitive one, for a long time. “The end of nature,” to use Bill McKibben’s famous book title, didn’t begin two hundred years ago with the Industrial Revolution but ten thousand years ago with the agricultural revolution. Farm and pasture land now takes up over a third of the world’s ice-free land surface. Ruddiman notes that “farming is not nature, but rather the largest alteration of Earth’s surface from its natural state that humans have yet achieved.” Furthermore, “A good case can be made that people in the Iron Age and even the late Stone Age had a much greater per-capita impact on the earth’s landscape than the average modern-day person.”

  • Never mind terraforming Mars; we already live on a terraformed Earth. We’ve been inadvertently adroit at it for ten millennia, even heading off an ice age. Unfortunately, we’re now excessively carbon-loading the atmosphere toward inferno, though fortunately some of the overheating has been masked by our other major air pollutant, particulate aerosols causing “global dimming.” How much longer can we count on such a string of dumb good luck?

  The terraforming thus far has been unintentional. Now that we have the curse and blessing of knowing what’s going on, unintentional is no longer an option. “Nature” can’t be counted on, having been compromised long ago. Gaia is no savior, since “she” likes ice ages and doesn’t mind hot ages either. We’re left with intention, with conscious design, with engineering. We finesse climate, or climate finesses us.

  Of the tools that come to hand, this book will examine four that environmentalists have distrusted and now need to embrace, plus one we love that has to be scaled up. The unwelcome four are urbanization, nuclear power, biotechnology, and geoengineering. The familiar one is natural-system restoration, which may be better framed as megagardening—restoring Gaia’s health at every scale from local soil to the whole atmosphere.

  One more positive feedback to take account of in the overall climate system is the autocatalytic—self-accelerating—technologies that can be deployed against the self-accelerating problems of world industrialization and against the positive feedbacks in climate itself. Our management of future technology acceleration has to reverse the effects of past technology acceleration. (Stopping present technology where it is would lead to Lovelock’s uninhabitable hot world.) The goal is for the climate-plus-humans system to settle down to a healthy, stable negative-feedback regime.

  Not all technologies are autocatalytic: New discoveries don’t make every technology advance faster. Progress in automobile technology and wind technology makes better cars and wind generators but not better tools for the engineering itself. The current autocatalytic technologies that goose themselves into exponential growth are infotech (including computers, communications, and artificial intelligence), biotech, and nanotech (which is blurring into biotech). What’s more, they stimulate each other in a mutual catalysis that at times results in hyperexponential growth of power.

  Forty years ago, I started the Whole Earth Catalog with the words, “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” Those were innocent times. New situation, new motto: “We are as gods and have to get good at it.” The Whole Earth Catalog encouraged individual power; Whole Earth Discipline is more about aggregate power.

  The scale of the climate challenge is so vast that it cannot be met solely by grassroots groups and corporations, no matter how Green. The situation requires government fiat to set rules and enforce them. Specifically, the four major energy-using governments—the European Union, the United States, China, and India—have to get tough. If all four do the right thing, there’s hope. So far the European governments have led the way.

  Our civilization caused climate change, and now it is undertaking to cause climate nonchange. At the end of the exercise (if it’s successful), climate will be the same but civilization probably won’t. We will be more transformed by our efforts to stabilize climate than by anything else we do in this century. If we fail to stabilize climate, our civilization will either be gone or unrecognizable.

  Who wrote this book?

  I turned seventy during the writing in 2008 and 2009. In seven decades, I’ve enjoyed the instruction of living downstream from a good many of my own and other people’s mistakes. As the old joke goes: How do you build good judgment? (Experience!) How do you build experience? (Bad judgment!) Because I’m an ecologist by training, a futurist by profession, and a hacker (lazy engineer) at heart, my bent is scientific rigor, geoeconomic perspective, and an engineer’s bias, which sees everything in terms of solvable design problems.

  In keeping with professional forecaster practice, my opinions are strongly stated and loosely held—strongly stated so that clients can get at them to conjure with, loosely held so that facts and the persuasive arguments of others can get at them to change them. My opinion is not important; it’s just a tool. The client’s evolving opinion is what’s important. Your evolving opinion is what’s important. If you’re reading this book just to reinforce your present opinions, you’ve hired the wrong consultant.

  I’m a lifelong environmentalist. My voice piped at age ten: “I give my pledge as an American to save and faithfully to defend from waste the natural resources of my country—its air, soil, and minerals, its forests, waters, and wildlife.” I got infected by that Conservation Pledge through th
e magazine Outdoor Life and proceeded to paste it on everything and everyone around me. Since the concept of pledge has long been rendered meaningless by the surreal Pledge of Allegiance that American schoolchildren have to recite, what I meant in 1948—and mean now—is: “I declare my intent to save and defend from waste the world’s natural resources—its air, soil, and minerals, its forests, waters, and wildlife.”

  I graduated with a degree in biology from Stanford in 1960, having focused mainly on evolution and what was then the very low-status field of ecology. One of my teachers, the later-renowned Paul Ehrlich, encouraged me to publish the results from my only fieldwork, concerning two species of tarantulas out back of Stanford that appeared to be permanently mingled, in violation of Gause’s principle, which states that no two species can long occupy the same niche together. Instead of publishing, I went off to the army to be an officer.

  Some of the Green adventures I had after that will turn up later in these pages. My previous books (on new media and adaptive buildings) have been journalistic essays—reports by an outsider. This one is journalistic too, but it’s written from inside its subject. Some of the issues I’m writing about I have a stake in; some of the people I’m writing about are friends. Where I think my personal experience has some relevance, I’ll throw it in.

  There are two things I won’t attempt in this book. The goal of the environmental movement is to manage the commons well—meaning for everyone and for the long term. A great service would be to inventory and praise the countless environmental organizations and success stories that have kept the commons—air, forests, soil, oceans, animal life—as healthy as they are. I’m not doing that here. Another important service would be to inventory and condemn the innumerable cases in which governments, companies, and property owners have done their best to mismanage the commons for private and short-term gain, meanwhile disparaging and thwarting environmentalists. It would be fun and useful to compile a bestiary of such behaviors and examine their constituent pathologies, but I have other fish to fry.

  Whole Earth Discipline carries on something that began in 1968, when I founded the Whole Earth Catalog. I stayed with the Catalog as editor and publisher until 1984, adding a magazine called CoEvolution Quarterly along the way. The Whole Earth publications were compendia of environmentalist tools and skills (along with much else) and explicitly purveyed a biological way of understanding. Peter Warshall wrote and reviewed about watersheds, soil, and ecology. Richard Nilsen and Rosemary Menninger covered organic farming and community gardens. J. Baldwin was an impeccable source on “appropriate technology”—solar, wind, insulation, bicycles. Lloyd Kahn wrote about handmade houses. We promoted bioregionalism, restoration, and “reinhabitation” of one’s natural environment. There’s now an insightful book about all that by Andrew Kirk—Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (2007).

  These days I divide my time between Global Business Network and an idiosyncratic foundation. In the 1990s, when inventor Danny Hillis came up with an idea to help people think long-term by building a monumental ten-thousand-year clock, I responded by cofounding The Long Now Foundation with him in 1996. “Fostering long-term responsibility” is its mission. The “long now” is defined as the last ten thousand years and the next ten thousand years. That is the reach of humanity’s current decisions.

  • Lovelock said, “The planet really is on the move.” So is civilization, now completing a process it began ten millennia ago—moving to town. Ecopragmatism in this century has to begin with understanding what humanity’s momentous transition from rural to urban is made of, and what it portends. The subject has so much news, I’ll give it two chapters.

  A “city planet” needs city power—grid electricity. At present, the best low-carbon source is nuclear. I’ll explore a chapter’s worth of how that fits into a climate-driven Green agenda and then do the same for genetic engineering for two chapters, because I believe biotech offers a major tool for reducing the overwhelming impact of agriculture on natural infrastructure, and new discoveries about genes and microbes are transforming the science of ecology.

  Science has long informed the environmental movement. Now it must take the lead, because we are forced to enter an era of large-scale ecosystem engineering, and we have to know what the hell we’re doing. That sermon gets a chapter. Beavers are benevolent ecosystem engineers; so are soil-enriching earthworms; so were American Indians, who terraformed a continent; so are all of us who work on restoring natural infrastructure. A chapter on that subject leads straight to the book’s conclusion: our obligation to learn planet craft, to be as life-enhancing as any earthworm, in the big yard.

  Live-linked footnotes for this chapter, along with updates, additions, and illustrations, may be found online at www.sbnotes.com.

  • 2 •

  City Planet

  Against the dark screen of night, Vimes had a vision of Ankh- Morpork. It wasn’t a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who’d never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent that life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed . . .

  . . . and gave back the dung from its pens, and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions, and ideas, and interesting vices, songs, and knowledge, and something which, if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That was what civilization meant. It meant the city.

  —Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

  Cities are wealth creators; they always have been. They are population sinks, and always have been. Just as agriculture raised the world’s carrying capacity for humans, so did cities. The death rate from “constant battles” declined with urbanization, LeBlanc says, because “as the city folk make tools and improve the technologies that make the farming more efficient, more people can live in the city instead of farming, and the cities grow. To some degree, this process solves the resource/population pressure found among farmers.”

  The ten-thousand-year flow of people to cities has become a torrent. In 1800 the world was 3 percent urban; in 1900, 14 percent urban; in 2007, 50 percent urban. The world’s population crossed that threshold—from a rural majority to an urban majority—at a sprint. We are now a city planet, and the Greener for it, as I’ll show. But environmental projects in this century can prosper only if we understand what is really going on in cities and figure out how to work with it.

  At the current rate, humanity may well be 80 percent urban by midcentury. Every week there are 1.3 million new people in cities. That’s 70 million a year, decade after decade. It is the largest movement of people in history.

  What is really going on?

  “In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and relatives, pound millet, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children.” That remark at a conference in 2001 exploded my Gandhiesque romanticism about villages. The speaker was Kavita Ramdas, head of the Global Fund for Women. Ever since she spun my head, I’ve been asking travelers back from remote places what they noticed out in the countryside. Their universal report: The villages of the world are emptying out, everywhere.

  Demographers talk about “push” and “pull” motivations driving the migration to cities. Push feels like this: Life in your village is dull, backbreaking, impoverished, restricted, exposed, dangerous, and static. Brigands get you, an accident gets you, disease gets you, and there’s no help nearby. You work like hell; then the weather changes, and you don’t have crops to eat or sell. Visit your relative in town and you see what “pull” means. In the city, life is exciting; work is less grueling; you’re far better paid; you’re free to move around and change jobs; you have some privacy; you’re less vulnerable; and you have upward mobility. Will you put up with slum conditions for all that? In a heartbeat. �
��City air makes you free,” said the Renaissance Germans. History may view the urban release of the European Renaissance as mild compared to what’s going on now.

  The move to town is a liberation. A New York Times story in 2005 related thatGandhi idealized villages as the way to return Indians to their precolonial state. B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit, or untouchable, leader who helped write India’s Constitution, saw it differently: he called villages a cesspool, “a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism,” and urged untouchables to flee them for urban anonymity.

  The same article gave an example of the strongest reason to migrate from India’s 600,000 villages to cities such as Surat, with a population of 3.5 million:Rajesh Kumar Raghavji Santoki, 28, had tried farming for a year at home, and given up in the face of a water shortage. After just three years in Surat, he was earning in a month more than the $500 his farmer father earned in a year. He owned a house, a motorcycle and a van.

  Multiply his motivation by 900 million—the 70 percent of India’s 1.3 billion still living in rural areas. Multiply it by 2.8 billion, the number of people still rural throughout the developing world. At the same time that opportunity in the cities is becoming more attractive, in many places the countryside keeps getting rougher. The land is depleted by overuse, land-holdings shrink as they are divided among successive generations, and civil strife is a frequent threat. Many of my contemporaries in the developed world regard subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster. When subsistence farms are abandoned, the trees and shrubs, no longer gathered for firewood, quickly return, and so do the wild animals no longer hunted and trapped for bush meat.