Whole Earth Discipline

by Stewart Brand

  So here’s what I want. I want commercial wood grown directly. Let it be engineered as clean low-lignin pulpwood, or as timber so straight-grained and close-grained and beautiful and inexpensive that cutting a wild tree for lumber would seem ludicrous. Such trees are best concentrated in plantations, easily harvested, leaving more forests to be wild. Throughout the world, temperate and boreal forests have been coming back since 1950 thanks to the increase in tree plantations. In a Foreign Affairs article titled “Restoring the Forests,” David Victor and Jesse Ausubel wrote: “An industry that draws from planted forests rather than cutting from the wild will disturb only one-fifth or less of the area for the same volume of wood. Instead of logging half the world’s forests, humanity can leave almost 90 percent of them minimally disturbed.” The authors elaborated:According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), one-quarter of industrial wood already comes from such farms, and the share is poised to soar once recently planted forests mature. At likely planting rates, at least one billion cubic meters of wood—half the world’s supply—could come from plantations by the year 2050. Semi-natural forests—for example, those that regenerate naturally but are thinned for higher yield—could supply most of the rest. Small-scale traditional “community forestry” could also deliver a small fraction of industrial wood. Such arrangements, in which forest dwellers, often indigenous peoples, earn revenue from commercial timber, can provide essential protection to woodlands and their inhabitants.

  Environmentalists have done a great job establishing and promoting the leading sustainable forestry certification program, the Forest Stewardship Council. Look for the FSC logo when you buy lumber. Of the 140,000 square miles of sustainably logged forest currently approved by the FSC, about a quarter is in plantations. However, because plantations are where genetically engineered trees are being introduced, the FSC will unfortunately not be helpful in distinguishing the best sustainable practices in that part of the industry: FSC certification excludes “wood harvested from areas where genetically modified trees are planted.” Maybe some of the more adventurous FSC professionals could bud off a subsidiary called the FfSC—Frankenforest Stewardship Council—to oversee and evaluate the arrival of GE tree plantations to make sure they are maximally Green.

  • A major issue will be gene flow. The first tree being engineered by everybody—China, the United States, Britain, etc.—is the poplar, because it grows fast and grows big. Some want it for pulp, some for plywood, some for biofuel. Those growing poplars for pulp or biofuel are crafting low-lignin varieties for cheaper and cleaner processing, leading to less toxicity pouring out of the pulp mills. But it’s the pest-resistant Bt poplars in Chinese plantations that will tell the most about how much of a problem gene flow will be. Having proved highly successful against insects, two Bt varieties of the European black poplar were released in 2002 for use in China’s huge reforestation effort. Huoran Wang from the Chinese Academy of Forestry reported in 2004:The Chinese government has set a lofty target for forestry development: that forest coverage will reach 19 percent of the total land area by 2010 and 23 percent by 2020. . . . Forest genetics, genetic modification and domestication of forest trees will, beyond all doubt, be asked to make contributions to the goal. . . .

  It is estimated that one million GE Populus nigra [black poplar] trees have so far been propagated and used in the establishment of plantations. . . . However, the accurate area of GE plantations cannot be assessed because of the ease of propagation and marketing of GE trees and the difficulty of morphologically distinguishing GE from non-GE trees. A number of individual nursery-men at markets declare that their planting materials are GE trees produced through high-tech, for a higher price. Consequently, a lot of materials are moved from one nursery to another and it is difficult to trace them. . . .

  It is almost impossible to reduce the risk of gene flow from GE trees to non-GE trees through isolation distances because of the ease of natural hybridization between poplars of the same section, and poplar trees are so widely planted in northern China that pollen and seed dispersal cannot be prevented.

  There you have the very circumstance that environmentalists have most feared: transgenes loose in the world, and in a long-lived organism that outcrosses enthusiastically. It is a golden opportunity for definitive field research on gene flow—how much occurs and how much harm it does.

  If thorough field research is done on China’s poplars, I predict the following:• A fast, cheap method of detecting the transgenes in poplars will be devised.

  • Much less gene flow than expected will be found. (The impediment is what a paper by the Poplar Working Group in America calls “genetic inertia.” Among the elements of inertia listed in the paper are “delayed flowering, tree longevity, vegetative persistence, extensive wild stands, [and] dilution of plantation-derived propagules by those from wild stands.”)

  • The evolution of Bt-resistant pests will occur at a manageable pace, thanks to nonengineered poplar stands functioning as refugia for unspecialized bugs.

  • The harm to the ecology of nonengineered poplars from transgenes will be found to be minuscule, especially compared to the impact from climate change, habitat loss, and alien-invasive species.

  • Nevertheless, some varieties of sterile genetically engineered poplars will be developed just to allay ongoing fears of transgene “contamination.”

  Maybe I’m wrong. The proof is in the research—unless it isn’t done, and we are left with dueling assertions, which is no use at all. You’ve seen my assertions. Here’s one on the other side from the Global Justice Ecology Project: “The inevitable contamination of native forests by genetically engineered trees may cause destruction of wildlife, depletion of fresh water and soils, collapse of native forest ecosystems, cultural genocide of forest-based indigenous communities, and serious effects on human health.” I doubt that, but China will tell.

  One of the major drivers of GE agriculture is climate change. How we farm has to switch from being a climate problem to a climate solution. Some of that transformation will come from better practices that enrich soil and preserve wildland, some from engineered “ecology in the seed.”

  Consider nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas three hundred times worse than carbon dioxide that fumes up from soil drenched with chemical fertilizer. If the use of nitrogen fertilizer went down by a third, says a report in New Scientist, that “would reduce greenhouse emissions by more than grounding every single aircraft in the world.” More organic farming will help. So will new varieties of rice and other crops now being engineered for far more efficient uptake of nitrogen from fertilizer, so less is needed, saving the farmer money while reducing atmosphere and water pollution.

  Consider also the gases that come out of us and our livestock and pets exhaling, burping, and farting. Lovelock says that accounts for 23 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions. Australia is on the case. One project there is engineering lower-lignin grass that would reduce the methane emitted from cows by 20 percent. Another is trying to transfer the digestive bugs from methane-free kangaroo guts to cow guts for a hoped-for 15 percent methane reduction. (One anticipates a climate-friendly probiotic yogurt for humans called Roo.)

  As with energy efficiency, close attention turns up all sorts of possible gains. You notice things like plantstones, also called phytoliths. They are microscopic silica balls that lock up plant carbon in the soil for thousands of years. All crop plants have them and could be genetically encouraged to have more, earning farmers carbon credits for sequestering carbon.

  Every GE-capable foundation, corporation, and government is working on drought-tolerant and salt-tolerant crops, especially for climatically fragile Africa. Such crops are so crucial for adapting to climate change that they are sure to come, and the sooner the better. But ecologists are rightly worried about these crops going feral—weedy and invasive—in the dry or salty terrain they’re designed to thrive in, because there is less native plant competition in such harsh land. This is
a case where serious ecological research must be done during the field trials, to figure out how best to contain the newly talented crops.

  Biofuels were supposed to be a carbon-efficient reducer of greenhouse gases, but converting food crops to biofuels turned out to be an economic fiasco. Second-generation biofuels rely on biotech to make fuel out of non-food plants such as switchgrass, jatropha (for its oily seed), hemp, poplars, willows, and agricultural waste such as straw, corn stover, and forestry slash. Some engineering of the plants might help to turn all that tightly bound cellulose into fuel, but most of the work will be done by vast quantities of carefully tuned microbes turning cellulosic dross into gold. “If [the microbes] are unhappy with what they are doing, they are going to evolve away from what you want them to do,” warns Craig Venter. “A key part of the future is going to be designing a system where they are not grossly unhappy.” With his new company, Synthetic Genomics, Venter is one of countless entrepreneurs in the biofuels gold rush.

  “The fuel-and-oil industry is a multi-trillion-dollar industry,” he says.

  The same oil that gets burned as fuel is also the entire basis for the petrochemical industries, so our clothing, our plastics and our pharmaceuticals all come from oil and its derivatives. . . . Right now oil is being isolated around the globe, and there is a major effort in . . . transporting that oil around to a very finite number of refineries. Biology allows us to make these same fuels in a much more distributed fashion. I envision maybe a million micro-refineries. Companies, cities and potentially even individuals could have a small refinery to make their own fuel. This would eliminate a lot of the distribution problems and associated pollution.

  That’s one vision. Another may be seen in a letter to the editor in England’s Green paranoia magazine, The Ecologist: “The greatest nightmare we face involves the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) we are creating with an enhanced ability to liquefy cellulose, the basic building blocks of plants. . . . Some of these GMOs will escape, adapt and proliferate. They could become a green plague, causing a meltdown of the vegetable kingdom. This is not alarmist.” (James Watson’s 1977 comment about cellulase in the previous chapter should lay to rest the ever-recurrent “green goo” hypothesis. If green goo could thrive in the world, microbes would have invented it long ago. If we try to create green goo, microbes will defeat it.)

  Synthetic biologist George Church has yet another vision: “The most sustainable source of energy is sunlight and the most convenient products are pipeline-compatible petrochemicals. So I would aim for a perennial plant system that secreted pure chemicals—octane, diesel, monomer for plastics, etc.—into pipes without need for further purification.”

  In another distributed-energy solution, Venter wants to install his happy, skillful bacteria right at the site of maximum efficiency. “My new company,” he told the San Francisco audience, “has a deal with BP to try and use biology deep in the earth to stop mining coal by biologically converting that coal into methane. . . . This doesn’t stop taking carbon out of the ground, but it’s about a tenfold improvement over mining coal and burning it.”

  • I’ve learned something about the environmentalist mindset from having worked with the U.S. intelligence community in recent years. The national-security perspective on any new technology is a set of anxious questions. How can this new thing hurt us? Who is creating it, promoting it, or grabbing it, and what is their agenda? How might that agenda shape the technology in harmful ways?

  Such technoparanoia has a way of being self-fulfilling. It institutionalizes distrust, establishing an interpretive apparatus that sees only threat and only enemies, and thereby helps to create both. Whether you’re defending a nation or the natural world, a more useful assumption with any new technology is that it is neutral, and so are the people creating it and using it. Your job is to help maximize its advantages and minimize its harm. That can’t be done from a distance. Particularly for environmentalists, the best way for doubters to control a questionable new technology is to embrace it, lest it remain wholly in the hands of enthusiasts who think there is nothing questionable about it.

  I would love to see what a cadre of dedicated environmental scientists could do with genetic engineering. Besides assuring the kind of transparency needed for intelligent regulation, they could direct a powerful new tool at some of the most vexing problems in our field, such as heading off alien-invasive species like kudzu and mitten crabs or detecting toxins in water with a cheap bacterial sensor. (The last one has already been done by three students from Brown University; it won Best Environmental Project at the 2008 iGEM Jamboree.)

  In the 1970s I saw hackers transform computers from organizational-control machines into individual-freedom machines. Where are the Green biotech hackers? The appropriate attitude was expressed by a participant in one of the new grassroots Maker Faires: “We are grabbing technology, ripping the back off of it and reaching our hands in where we are not supposed to be.” Whether it’s slum dwellers in India reverse-engineering cellphones to write their own repair manuals, or Drew Endy distributing BioBrick parts to amateur bioengineers, or contract farmers in West Africa reinventing traditional African polyculture around new GE crops and livestock, the attraction is grassroots empowerment.

  I think every environmental organization would be well served by working closely with such people. The true nature of any new technology can be learned best from what enthusiasts do with it. Critiques based on the experience of practitioners, rather than on ideology or theory, have real bite, and corrections for problems can be tried and proved at street level before they’re broadly recommended.

  If environmentalists and others dubious about genetic engineering had taken this approach from the start in the 1980s, cleaving close to researchers out in the fields, they would have quickly discovered that GE foods are safe to eat, GE crops can be ecologically beneficial, and corporations are significant but not necessarily controlling players in the technology. Environmentalists would have helped lead the doubly Green agricultural revolution in the developing world instead of delaying it. Two decades of time, money, people, and credibility wasted on anti-GE activism would have been saved for solving real rather than imaginary environmental problems, and genetic technology would have arrived in the world Green from the ground up.

  With that, the main news items of this book are now done. Cities are Green. Nuclear energy is Green. Genetic engineering is Green. The rest of the book addresses how not to repeat the mistakes we made on those three, how deep inhabitants take care of the nature around them, and how to manage the planet’s global-scale natural infrastructure with as light a touch as possible, considering.

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

  • 7 •

  Romantics, Scientists, Engineers

  I saw myself

  a ring of bone

  in the clear stream

  of all of it

  and vowed,

  always to be open to it

  that all of it

  might flow through

  and then heard

  “ring of bone” where

  ring is what a

  bell does

  —Lew Welch, Ring of Bone

  Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about.

  —Jim Harrison, True North

  Environmentalists own the color green. That’s extraordinary, an astonishing accomplishment. No movement has owned a color globally since the Communists took over red. Red means nothing now. How long will Green mean something?

  “What is the environmental movement?” It was the editor of a Green magazine asking. I heard myself say, “The environmental movement is a body of science, technology, and emotion engaged in directing public discourse, public policy, and private behavior toward ensuring the health of natural systems.”

  My theory is that the success of the environmental movement is driven by two pow
erful forces—romanticism and science—that are often in opposition, with a third force emerging. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and dismissive of any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethical rather than moralistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against one another. For them, identifying mistakes is what science is, and direction change is the goal.

  It’s fortunate that there are so many romantics in the movement, because they are the ones who inspire the majority in most developed societies to see themselves as environmentalists. But that also means that scientists and their perceptions are always in the minority; they are easily ignored, suppressed, or demonized when their views don’t fit the consensus story line.

  A new set of environmental players is shifting the balance. Engineers are arriving who see any environmental problem neither as a romantic tragedy nor as a scientific puzzle but simply as something to fix. They look to the scientists for data to fix the problem with, and the scientists appreciate the engineers because new technology is what makes science go forward. The romantics distrust engineers—sometimes correctly—for their hubris and are uncomfortable with the prospect of fixing things because the essence of tragedy is that it can’t be fixed.