I'm intrigued to pick up his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmitist Manifesto. In this video, Brand says squatter and shanty towns in developing nations are good things for saving the planet. Poor farmers leave the country, the country recovers. These farmers in the city create jobs and have fewer kids, since kids in the city (vs. the country) or not as beneficial, so world population will climax at 8 billion in 2050 then drop sharply. Maybe this is true--it's an inteesting take on something I think we most think of as a bad phenomenon. I'll have to read more so I can speak better on it, though. He also is a proponent of geneticlly modified plants that can produce more food per acre, thus taking up less room and allowing for more nature (ha), and plants that are no longer annuals but perennials, thus being no till (which means less carbon released into the air, and less topsoil blown away).
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Good heavens, Stewart Brand! I had no idea he was still extant. (In fact, I just discovered that John Shuttleworth, founder of The Mother Earth News, had returned to ashes and dust. I'd always wondered what had become of him.) I don't know what to even begin to think of Brand's stands (so to speak), but will ponder them...
Benjamin -Thank you for posting this video on your site. It is very scary to see the "Corporate Think" that is pervading most scholarly study, and the governments, too. Solutions for our problems will come from individuals working with the resources that they have, and taking responsibility for fixing problems, not from "geoengineering". As Ben says, there is a lot to ponder here!
Hope your book is going well.
Yes, thanks for posting this; it's the most interesting piece of news I've seen in eons. Possibly longer. Hope we can continue the conversation after reading the book....
Very intersting...and just last week I was in a meeting and we were also discussing this, grasping how this move to cities is actually good (akin to what the urban design folks have been preaching for years - small, dense populations areas are better for about a gazillion reasons). I have a friend here who is a landscape architect - but the head of the urban landscape group for his company - and he preaches this all of the time and I've been resistant too. I like my little piece of land, need it even, and don't want to have a neighbor all around me with no windows between us. I also laugh with this friend, justify it by saying 'I compost and mulch all of my leaves...and haven't procreated', in essence, that I'll leave the land better off than when I arrived. But is this really true?
The GMO strategy sounds logical to me.
Well, I want 160 acres to myself, otherwise I will literally go insane. I am serious. I'm a writer. I don't like tight spaces or loud noises.
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