The founder of The Whole Earth Catalog swears he’s still green
Stewart Brand knew he’d startle his friends. The founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, an ecological bible in the Sixties and Seventies, was coming out for nuclear power. And that wasn’t all: he had changed his mind about genetically-engineered food, too.
Was this like Jerry Rubin’s transformation from a campus radical to a stockbroker?
No, Brand insists he’s still very much an environmentalist. His opinions have changed, he says, because the nuclear industry has. And the global warming crisis has made him what he calls “an eco-pragmatist.”
“I surprised myself,” he admitted recently from his home on a tugboat in Sausalito, California. “I used to be, you know, pretty much a knee-jerk on this particular subject. And then because of climate change, I reinvestigated the matter and discovered that I’d been misled in many of the details on how nuclear works. And I finally got to the point where I’m so pro-nuclear now that I would I would be in favor of it even if climate change and greenhouse gases were not an issue.”
This is the same man who dropped acid with Ken Kesey and produced a concert for the Grateful Dead. Tom Wolfe describes him in the beginning of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Otis Redding supposedly wrote “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” at a table on his tugboat.
Brand shrugs. Climate change remains a big issue for him. “Air pollution from coal burning is estimated to cause 30,000 deaths a year from lung disease in the United States, and 350,000 a year in China,” Brand writes in his new book, Whole Earth Discipline. “A one-gigawatt coal plant burns three million tons of fuel a year and produces seven million tons of CO2, all of which immediately goes into everyone’s atmosphere, where no one can control it, and no one knows what it’s really up to.”
Nuclear power, he observes, has enjoyed a spotless record since the accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986. “France is eighty percent nuclear,” he says. “If the U.S. were eighty percent nuclear, how many gigatons of carbon dioxide would not be in the atmosphere? We could have done that.”
The biggest development since that early generation of reactors is the movement toward micro-plants with a smaller footprint than wind farms or solar fields.
What about nuclear waste? “Either we will use it as fuel in the so-called fourth generation reactors that are being designed now or we could reprocess it the way the French do,” he says.
But nuclear plants consume huge amount of water. How does he get around that? He admits it’s a problem. “I don’t know anyone who has figured out how to turn heat into electricity without water.”
Brand, who took a degree in biology from Stanford, expected the biggest response to come from his changed mind on genetically-engineered food. Again, he is sanguine. “The second Green Revolution is the next set of good technology in agriculture. Not only green in the sense the first one was – higher yield, lower cost, cheaper food, better distribution and all that – but also green ecologically, environmentally green in terms of climate.”
Brand notes how opinions have come around. “The environmental movement used to hate cities and is now halfway toward loving cities,” he says. “The Sierra Club has been very active in supporting compactness in cities.”
The Whole Earth Catalog introduced a generation to alternative sources of energy – wind, solar, biodiesel, geothermal – and for its pathbreaking work it won a National Book Award. It famously began with the words, “We are as gods and we might as well get good at it.” “We have to get good at it,” he says now.
