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Environmental Heresies
By Stewart Brand May 2005
Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental
movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas:
population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and
nuclear power.
Reversals of this sort have occurred before. Wildfire went from universal
menace in mid-20th century to honored natural force and forestry tool now,
from "Only you can prevent forest fires!" to let-burn policies and
prescribed fires for understory management. The structure of such reversals
reveals a hidden strength in the environmental movement and explains why it
is likely to keep on growing in influence from decade to decade and perhaps
century to century.
The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful
forces-romanticism and science-that are often in opposition. The romantics
identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The
romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power,
and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate
to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic,
rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against
each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is.
There are a great many more environmental romantics than there are
scientists. That's fortunate, since their inspiration means that most
people in developed societies see themselves as environmentalists. But it
also means that scientific perceptions are always a minority view, easily
ignored, suppressed, or demonized if they don't fit the consensus story
line.
Take population growth. For 50 years, the demographers in charge of human
population projections for the United Nations released hard numbers that
substantiated environmentalists' greatest fears about indefinite
exponential population increase. For a while, those projections proved
fairly accurate. However, in the 1990s, the U.N. started taking a closer
look at fertility patterns, and in 2002, it adopted a new theory that
shocked many demographers: human population is leveling off rapidly, even
precipitously, in developed countries, with the rest of the world soon to
follow. Most environmentalists still haven't got the word. Worldwide,
birthrates are in free fall. Around one-third of countries now have
birthrates below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) and sinking.
Nowhere does the downward trend show signs of leveling off. Nations already
in a birth dearth crisis include Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, and
Russia-whose population is now in absolute decline and is expected to be 30
percent lower by 2050. On every part of every continent and in every
culture (even Mormon), birthrates are headed down. They reach replacement
level and keep on dropping. It turns out that population decrease
accelerates downward just as fiercely as population increase accelerated
upward, for the same reason. Any variation from the 2.1 rate compounds over
time.
That's great news for environmentalists (or it will be when finally
noticed), but they need to recognize what caused the turnaround. The world
population growth rate actually peaked at 2 percent way back in 1968, the
very year my old teacher Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The
world's women didn't suddenly have fewer kids because of his book, though.
They had fewer kids because they moved to town.
Cities are population sinks-always have been. Although more children are an
asset in the countryside, they're a liability in the city. A global tipping
point in urbanization is what stopped the population explosion. As of this
year, 50 percent of the world's population lives in cities, with 61 percent
expected by 2030. In 1800 it was 3 percent; in 1900 it was 14 percent.
The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities. My
mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance
who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and
family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained,
when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses,
and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as
they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is
the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history.
Environmentalists will be rewarded if they welcome it and get out in front
of it. In every single region in the world, including the U.S., small towns
and rural areas are emptying out. The trees and wildlife are returning. Now
is the time to put in place permanent protection for those rural
environments. Meanwhile, the global population of illegal urban
squatters-which Robert Neuwirth's book Shadow Cities already estimates at a
billion-is growing fast. Environmentalists could help ensure that the new
dominant human habitat is humane and has a reduced footprint of overall
environmental impact.
Along with rethinking cities, environmentalists will need to rethink
biotechnology. One area of biotech with huge promise and some drawbacks is
genetic engineering, so far violently rejected by the environmental
movement. That rejection is, I think, a mistake. Why was water
fluoridization rejected by the political right and "frankenfood" by the
political left? The answer, I suspect, is that fluoridization came from
government and genetically modified (GM) crops from corporations. If the
origins had been reversed-as they could have been-the positions would be
reversed, too.
Embracing GMOs
Ignore the origin and look at the technology on its own terms. (This will
be easier with the emergence of "open source" genetic engineering, which
could work around restrictive corporate patents.) What is its net effect on
the environment? GM crops are more efficient, giving higher yield on less
land with less use of pesticides and herbicides. That's why the Amish, the
most technology-suspicious group in America (and the best farmers), have
enthusiastically adopted GM crops.
There has yet to be a public debate among environmentalists about genetic
engineering. Most of the scare stories that go around (Monarch caterpillars
harmed by GM pollen!) have as much substance as urban legends about toxic
rat urine on Coke can lids. Solid research is seldom reported widely,
partly because no news is not news. A number of leading biologists in the
U.S. are also leading environmentalists. I've asked them how worried they
are about genetically engineered organisms. Their answer is "Not much,"
because they know from their own work how robust wild ecologies are in
defending against new genes, no matter how exotic. They don't say so in
public because they feel that entering the GM debate would strain relations
with allies and would distract from their main focus, which is to research
and defend biodiversity.
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
hard-over 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 vexed
problems in the field.
For instance, invasive species. Most of the current mass extinctions of
native species is caused by habitat loss, a problem whose cure is well
known-identify the crucial habitats and preserve, protect, and restore
them. The second greatest cause of extinctions is coming from invasive
species, where no solution is in sight. Kudzu takes over the American
South, brown tree snakes take over Guam (up to 5,000 a square kilometer),
zebra mussels and mitten crabs take over the U.S. waterways, fire ants and
fiendishly collaborative Argentine ants take over the ground, and not a
thing can be done. Volunteers like me get off on yanking up invasive French
broom and Cape ivy, but it's just sand castles against a rising tide. I
can't wait for some engineered organism, probably microbial, that will
target bad actors like zebra mussels and eat them, or interrupt their
reproductive pathway, and then die out.
Now we come to the most profound environmental problem of all, the one that
trumps everything: global climate change. Its effect on natural systems and
on civilization will be a universal permanent disaster. It may be slow and
relentless-higher temperature, rising oceans, more extreme weather getting
progressively worse over a century. Or it may be "abrupt climate change":
an increase of fresh water in the north Atlantic shuts down the Gulf Stream
within a decade, and Europe freezes while the rest of the world gets drier
and windier. (I was involved in the 2003 Pentagon study on this matter,
which spelled out how a climate change like the one 8,200 years ago could
occur suddenly.)
Let's Go Nuclear
Can climate change be slowed and catastrophe avoided? They can to the
degree that humanity influences climate dynamics. The primary cause of
global climate change is our burning of fossil fuels for energy.
So everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize
energy production. Kyoto accords, radical conservation in energy
transmission and use, wind energy, solar energy, passive solar,
hydroelectric energy, biomass, the whole gamut. But add them all up and
it's still only a fraction of enough. Massive carbon "sequestration"
(extraction) from the atmosphere, perhaps via biotech, is a widely held
hope, but it's just a hope. The only technology ready to fill the gap and
stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power.
Nuclear certainly has problems-accidents, waste storage, high construction
costs, and the possible use of its fuel in weapons. It also has advantages
besides the overwhelming one of being atmospherically clean. The industry
is mature, with a half-century of experience and ever improved engineering
behind it. Problematic early reactors like the ones at Three Mile Island
and Chernobyl can be supplanted by new, smaller-scale, meltdown-proof
reactors like the ones that use the pebble-bed design. Nuclear power plants
are very high yield, with low-cost fuel. Finally, they offer the best
avenue to a "hydrogen economy," combining high energy and high heat in one
place for optimal hydrogen generation.
The storage of radioactive waste is a surmountable problem (see "A New
Vision for Nuclear Waste," December 2004). Many reactors now have fields of
dry-storage casks nearby. Those casks are transportable. It would be
prudent to move them into well-guarded centralized locations. Many nations
address the waste storage problem by reprocessing their spent fuel, but
that has the side effect of producing material that can be used in weapons.
One solution would be a global supplier of reactor fuel, which takes back
spent fuel from customers around the world for reprocessing. That's the
kind of idea that can go from "Impractical!" to "Necessary!" in a season,
depending on world events.
The environmental movement has a quasi-religious aversion to nuclear
energy. The few prominent environmentalists who have spoken out in its
favor-Gaia theorist James Lovelock, Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore,
Friend of the Earth Hugh Montefiore-have been privately anathematized by
other environmentalists. Public excoriation, however, would invite public
debate, which so far has not been welcome.
Nuclear could go either way. It would take only one more Chernobyl-type
event in Russia's older reactors (all too possible, given the poor state of
oversight there) to make the nuclear taboo permanent, to the great
detriment of the world's atmospheric health. Everything depends on getting
new and better nuclear technology designed and built.
Years ago, environmentalists hated cars and wanted to ban them. Then
physicist Amory Lovins came along, saw that the automobile was the perfect
leverage point for large-scale energy conservation, and set about designing
and promoting drastically more efficient cars. Gas-electric hybrid vehicles
are now on the road, performing public good. The United States, Lovins
says, can be the Saudi Arabia of nega-watts: Americans are so wasteful of
energy that their conservation efforts can have an enormous effect.
Single-handedly, Lovins converted the environmental movement from loathing
of the auto industry to fruitful engagement with it.
Someone could do the same with nuclear power plants. Lovins refuses to. The
field is open, and the need is great.
Within the environmental movement, scientists are the radical minority
leading the way. They are already transforming the perspective on
urbanization and population growth. But their radicalism and leadership
will have to increase if humanity is to harness green biotech and step up
to its responsibilities for the global climate. The romantics are right,
after all: we are indi visible from the earth's natural systems.
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"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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