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Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

by Stewart Brand

New York: Viking, 2009

According to Stewart Brand, a lifelong ecologist and futurist who sees everything in terms of solvable design problems, three profound transformations are under way on Earth right now. Climate change is real and is pushing us toward managing the planet as a whole. Urbanization — half the world’s population now lives in cities, and eighty percent will by midcentury — is altering humanity’s land impact and wealth. And biotechnology is becoming the world’s dominant engineering tool. In light of these changes, Brand suggests that environmentalists are going to have to reverse some longheld opinions and embrace tools that they have traditionally distrusted. Only a radical rethinking of traditional green pieties will allow us to forestall the cataclysmic deterioration of the earth’s resources.

Whole Earth Discipline shatters a number of myths. Cities are green — they are generators of income and concentrators of efficiency and innovation, and as the rural areas of the planet clear out, nature will come back. Nuclear power is green — it has proven its effectiveness and safety in other countries whose carbon footprint has substantially been reduced. Biotechnology and genetic engineering are green, and can be a tool for environmental protection. We can design crops to grow on less land with less pesticides, and create new microbes that can do everything from producing new fuels to protecting ecosystems against invasive species.

With a combination of scientific rigor, counterintuitive observations, and passionate advocacy, Brand shows us exactly where the sources of our dilemmas lie and offers a bold and inventive set of policies and design-based solutions for creating a more sustainable society. Whole Earth Discipline advocates not just a shift in habits, but a fundamental, philosophical change towards stewardship of the planet. In the end, says Brand, the environmental movement must follow science rather than just invoke it when convenient. We have to learn how to manage the planet’s global-scale natural infrastructure with as light a touch as possible and as much intervention as necessary.

Stewart Brand trained originally as an ecologist. His legendary Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1985) won the National Book Award in 1972. Brand, whose previous books include The Media Lab, How Buildings Learn, and The Clock of the Long Now, is president and cofounder of The Long Now Foundation and cofounder of Global Business Network. He lives with his wife, Ryan Phelan, on a tugboat in San Francisco Bay.