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Heresy

Stewart Brand was a big influence on my thinking (and doing), so I

was interested in Jamais Cascio's response to a Sunday NY Times piece about Brand, "An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New Heresies." The article says Brand "has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found," but Jamais notes that the environmentalism of the article no longer exists; it's been replaced by the "bright green" movement a bunch of us have been pushing, more or less beginning with the Viridian Design Movement. We wouldn't necessarily find Brand's thoughts heretical, at least not for the reasons he thinks. [Link] My own thought about Brand is that he's never been a great thinker, but he's drawn out some great thinking from others... kind of a catalyst.

Jamais really is smart, and he reads other smart people, such as David Roberts. Jamais paraphrases a Roberts argument re. nuclear:

the Bright Green reluctance about nuclear power has far more to do with it being centralized infrastructure and dated technology than with any fear or loathing of atoms. The environmental situation in which we find ourselves demands a fast-learning, fast-iterating, distributed and collaborative technological capacity, not a system that bleeds out investment dollars and leaves us stuck with technologies already on the verge of obsolescence....If we're looking for resilience, flexibility and innovation, the nuclear industry is not a good place to start.

Jamais' conclusion about Brand:The conventional meaning of "heretic" is one who goes against dogma, and the positions that Stewart takes here just don't meet that requirement. There's no doubt that it would be possible to find self-described environmentalists who fit the stereotype that Stewart is responding to, but one of the hallmarks of the modern environmental movement -- and the reason why the "heresy" model is arguably obsolete -- is that, when it comes to solutions, nothing is a priori off the table. All solution options can be considered, but they must be able to stand up to competing ideas. Even if some of us believe that some of the solutions he advocates don't stand up to the competition, we aren't going to try to claim that Stewart Brand somehow isn't an environmentalist. As long as he recognizes that the Earth's geophysical systems are under extraordinary duress, and that business-as-usual is driving us headlong into disaster, he's one of us -- even if the ways we want to avoid that disaster vary.

jon posted this at 12:31 AM
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