“Cities Are Probably the Greenest Thing That Humans Do.”

A few years ago, environmental guru, Merry Prankster, and Whole Earth Catalog author Stewart Brand caused a minor stir with an article he wrote in the MIT publication, Technology Review.  Brand, who was an early advocate of the “back to the land” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, had done some re-thinking, and he concluded that environmentalist opposition to things like urbanization, population growth, biotechnology, and nuclear power generation, was wrong and needed to change.

Now, Brand has written a new book, called Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, in which he takes on these environmental shibboleths in a more concerted fashion.  On American Public Radio’s Marketplace program yesterday, host Kai Ryssdal discussed the new book with Brand.  Asked what prompted him to write the book, Brand said that,

“My fellow environmentalists have been wrong about a couple of issues and were getting in the way of important things we should be doing, both with biotechnology and with nuclear technology, and in terms of how we think about cities, and in terms of how I know we’re going to think about geoengineering–that is, direct intervention in the climate.”

 

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Tags: Big Green, biotechnology, environmentalism, frankenfoods, Kai Ryssdal
Posted Oct 27th 2009 at 12:30 pm in Culture, Environment | 2143420 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/gconko/2009/10/27/cities-are-probably-the-greenest-thing-that-humans-do/%22Cities+Are+Probably+the+Greenest+Thing+That+Humans+Do.%222009-10-27+19%3A30%3A32Gregory++Conko