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"Environmental Heresies; The founder of The Whole Earth Catalog believes the environmental movement will soon reverse its position on four core issues," by Stewart Brand

Great article from May 2005, by Stewart Brand, on scientific thinking v romanticist thinking, applied to environmentalism and predictions for the future. Great stuff. It starts like this (and doesn't slow down):
QUOTE
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.
UNQUOTE

Tags: mit_techreview, stewart_brand, environment, ecology, criticalthinking, futurismo on 2009-02-19 -All Annotations (6) -About

more fromwww.technologyreview.com

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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.

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In 2008, let us challenge the Politics of Apocalypse | spiked

The issues that Furedi raise have been bugging me for a couple of years now -- ever since running into James Kunstler and his ueber-successful economic project of making a living off scaring the pants off people. I find refreshing Furedi's spin on the matter -- that we seem to be losing "humanism" (in what I feel is a medievalist world view), and I appreciate his lament that "Public figures appear to have lost the capacity to reassure or lead people." Disaster sells, including at the polls/ in the voting booth.

Tags: apocalypse, criticalthinking, frank_furedi, opinion, political_correctness, public_opinion, spiked_online on 2008-01-10 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.spiked-online.com

In the past year, the threat of doom – from weather, terror or disease – became an everyday, even banal issue. It’s time to inject a dose of humanism into public debate.
any doubt expressed on the issue of climate change is looked upon as an act of bad faith or ‘denial’.
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- - which is scary in itself
  posted by lampertina on 2008-01-10
Public figures appear to have lost the capacity to reassure or lead people. Instead, they frequently opt for evoking frightening futuristic scenarios where the line between fiction and reality become unclear. In every respect, the sensibility that underpins public debate today can be described as a ‘crisis of nerve’. This crisis over the future coexists with a powerful sense of disorientation about the status and worth of the human species itself. Increasingly, humanity is represented as the biggest problem on the planet, rather than as the harbinger of a better future.
One consequence of Western societies’ obsessive preoccupation with the apocalypse-to-come is that less and less creative energy is devoted to confronting the all too important problems that exist in the here and now. Take the global credit crunch unleashed by the sub-prime home loan crisis this year for instance.
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- - exactly
  posted by lampertina on 2008-01-10
In terms of its material impact, this was arguably the most significant event of the year. After more than a decade of economic stability, the world economy faces the threat of a major recession with important implications for people’s lives. This threat may not make an exciting plot for a sci-fi movie, but it has a direct bearing on the quality of life of millions of people. It also raises important questions about an economic system that is so heavily reliant on using fictitious capital to reproduce itself. Unfortunately, however, today’s future-frightened public debate about economics seems more interested in finding ways to transform capitalism into a carbon-free, green-leaning system than in discussing the steps we need to take to minimise the destructive impact of a global recession on people’s lives and aspirations.
Worst-case thinking, the principal legacy of 2007, will most likely thrive in the years ahead. That is unless we can rediscover a sense of purpose in what it means to be human.

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