NYT article about Stewart Brand

[bananas]

Former doomer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/science/earth/27tier.html

An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies’
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: February 27, 2007

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Mr. Brand is the first to admit his own futurism isn’t always prescient. In 1969, he was so worried by population growth that he organized the Hunger Show, a weeklong fast in a parking lot to dramatize the coming global famine predicted by Paul Ehrlich, one of his mentors at Stanford.

<snip>

Professor Ehrlich dismissed Professor Simon’s victory as a fluke, but Mr. Brand saw something his mentor didn’t. He considered the bet a useful lesson about the adaptability of humans — and the dangers of apocalyptic thinking.

<snip>

“It is one of the great revelatory bets,” he now says. “Any time that people are forced to acknowledge publicly that they’re wrong, it’s really good for the commonweal. I love to be busted for apocalyptic proclamations that turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. In 1973 I thought the energy crisis was so intolerable that we’d have police on the streets by Christmas. The times I’ve been wrong is when I assume there’s a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought.”

He now looks at the rapidly growing megacities of the third world not as a crisis but as good news: as villagers move to town, they find new opportunities and leave behind farms that can revert to forests and nature preserves. Instead of worrying about population growth, he’s afraid birth rates are declining too quickly, leaving future societies with a shortage of young people.

<snip>

[Porcupine]

1. He's gone batshit crazy.

Every day as Stewart Brand sits and looks out over the bay an environmental disaster happens over his shoulder. Highway 101 turns into a high speed tangle of flying metal heading in and our of San Francisco. Sometimes it comes to a complete halt. It all depends upon fuel arriving under that bridge they cross on a daily basis from foriegn lands.

Somewhat north of his house in Sonoma county friends of mine who followed his original advice are living quite nicely. They have paid off homes in the hills with wood heat and solar power. They have hot tubs that they entertain their friends in and gardens that produce the best salads on earth. They practice Tai Chi and Yoga and Pilates and make guitars. Rich people from Sausolito pay them to teach them how to relax.

Complex systems work well except when they don't. They only have to not work for a short time to result in a disaster; ask anybody who's survived an airliner crash. That's why nuclear power is a problem. That's why mega-cities are a problem. Baghdad was a mega-city once lauded as one of the worlds urban sucess stories.

Unless Stewarts brands gene hackers invent a completely new physics humankinds run on the earth is going to hit a big bump. We have been mining energy supplies from the ground and resources from everywhere else in non-renewable ways and the jig is up. The easy pickings are gone.