From West by Northwest.org Voices of Spencer Creek Life on the Forty-fifth Parallel: A Reply to Stewart Brand By Ryan Ramon Apr 22, 2005 Douglas fir trees under the stresses of drought and diseases produce many more seed cones than usual. Do human population trends follow a similar pattern? As the U.S. Senate debates changes to the cloture rules, the media have embraced the reckless insider's buzz phrase to describe this blasting away of opposition as "the nuclear option." Unfortunately, that term is careless and dangerous usage. Meaning becomes blurred, except if you are Stewart Brand. Meanwhile, my favorite online zine of which I am an occasional contributor published a link to Stewart Brands article, "Environmental Heresies." The headline writer at MIT Technology.com got that right. I am no media environ-star like Stewartt Brand, I am no expert, just your basic common-sense kind of guy. (I did find useful tidbits of ideas and information in the Whole Earth Catalog years ago. Thanks, Mr. Brand, it was a hopeful complilation of alternative business, tools, methods and scales of technologies, often on a do-it-your-self scale.) I have been living in blessed obscurity as I love and work with the land and observe nature's slowly unfolding stories in my corner of the Northwest, Spencer Creek Valley, Oregon. Meanwhile Mr. Brand allows himself to be a product (in all three senses of the word implied) of our shallow culture that wants instant solutions. As on his current lecture tour's platform, Mr. Brand asks us to grow up and get real. If we want less CO2 in the air, the trade-off is nuclear power. Okay, he is a bright man who understands the social roles of technology. He did understand the potential implications of the incipient Internet many years ago. And Brand is probably right to identify our romantic tendencies to see nature as all good and human constructs as all flawed. But he has got it wrong this time. To recklessly say the environmental movement must embrace and change its baseline positions on over-population, urbanization, GMOs and nuclear power is to trivialize the multitude of positions that have developed in response to a very real nexus of the misappropriations and applications of technology in the physical-political world. Stewart Brand risks being used by the very actors who claim there are no real environmental problems, no climate change, no danger in nuclear power and claim that people worried by nuclear accidents like Three Mile Island and Chernoble, "hot" nuclear wastes and radioactive contamination, inadvertently released GMOs that may affect or scramble the genetical code, third world grinding poverty exacerbated by unsupportable mega-cities, are just silly ninnies. Mr. Brand, where have you been? The new urbanization movement draws heavily upon the principles of sustainable systems, including transport, public services and spaces, water and power, recycling of wastes to good use, land use planning by re-inventing neighborhoods or "nodules" that cluster multi-purpose development rather than encouraging sprawling development. Stewart Brand is right to look to the idea of an important movement, such as the environmental one, changing and growing over time, even centuries, making sure that not all technolgy is "evil," learning how to influence the dialog and development of technology. But let's get real about the physical-political world as it is. The people in search of real alternatives are usually not the people in decision-making elites. Thanks to Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institute, the concepts of "shifting base lines" are useful in several ways; first as the idea of documenting what is known about the better or ideal state of health of an environment, then one can know how it changes over time and under what pressures. Different cultures and times may understand a baseline differently. Can there be a realtime baseline of environomental health of people or systems? Perhaps. Randy Olson of the Shiftingbaselines.org wrote in the LA Times: "If we know the baseline for a degraded ecosystem, we can work to restore it. But if the baseline shifted before we really had a chance to chart it, then we can end up accepting a degraded state as normal -- or even as an improvement... "The number of salmon in the Pacific Northwest's Columbia River today is twice what it was in the 1930s. (This was written before the weird no-show of the Spring Chinook of 2005.) That sounds great -- if the 1930s are your baseline. But salmon in the Columbia River in the 1930s were only 10% of what they were in the 1800s. The 1930s numbers reflect a baseline that had already shifted... "This is what most environmental groups are now struggling with. They are trying to decide: What do we want nature to look like in the future? And more important: What did nature look like in the past?" Although pre-industrial baselines may be elusive and not practical, maybe finding a stable point of ecological health is the best we can do. What is useful for finding real time baselines in nature can be applied our human constructs as well: movements, cities, agriculture. Like the physician's ancient motto, the environmental movement's first principle or baseline toward technology may be technology must "do no harm." Maybe someday there may be a safe and controlled use for some GMOs. But we are not there. Considering the recent news story of the pandemic influenza virus from the 1950s accidentally sent out to over 5,000 labs, there is pathetically little quality control in our labs. This is a security question as well as an environmental one. Brand wants us to trust to the current system of GMO labs and trial plots and their careful releases of genetically modified organisms. This "trust the experts" attitude is, in part, why we have such dangerous technology. The lack of controls is disheartening as well as criminal. Brand refers to the GMO pollination exposure and decline of the of the Mid-western Monarch butterflies as an urban tale. He cites the European Union ban on GMOs as simply fearful and fadish ignorance. Brand says the environmental movement may have to embrace nuclear energy as a way out of the global climate shift. Many promoters tout nuclear power as "renewable," and as the best, most reasonable tool to wean the developed and developing countries away from dependence on fossil fuels. As long as nuclear power uses plutonium it is a dangerous and false alternative to coal and petroleum, as well as giving us radioactive headaches for 200,000 to 500,000 years or more. (Hard to imagine how future generations will judge us and the horrors we leave behind.) Yes, we must get away from the carbon-based fuels for transport and power generation. And quickly. Our air quality, or lack of it, and the CO2s byproducts that contribute to the accumulative greenhouse effect that drives world wide climate change are real effects that must be addressed before it is moot. But to ask environmentalists to help usher in a plutonium-based, "new" nuclear age in the guise of reducing greenouse gases and as a solution to the energy crisis is a specious sideshow distracting us from the real tasks, that is how to remake technologies that are non-toxic, truly renewable and non-radioactive. Maybe someday there will be a kind of nuclear power that is relatively safe. But we are not there. Brand suggests the world birth rate is actually declining, not only in the "first" world countries but in the "third" and developing world. He cites replacement rates. Here is a use of the shifting baseline that is detrimental to an understanding of the problem. Maybe the replacement rate is not the same and declining slightly but why use that baseline of ballooning population growth in the third world as the point to show a world wide trend? That is a disingenuous use of statistical baselines. As long as millions (millions!) of children die from malnutrition and disease (and war) every year, to speak of a trend of lower (and therefore supposedly more economically and politically "manageable") populations is morally bankrupt. His reasoning ignores the reality of a world that accepts these conditions as normal. This kind of cruel attrition must be addressed when speaking of over-population equations. If people are so expendable that millions are sacrificed each year, what kind of stable population trend do we have? Zilch. Brand is correct that as more education and health care become available, including reproductive health, mothers and children will have a chance for a better quality of life. How any society or economy, now becoming more globally integrated, uses it physical resources (land, water, air, agriculture, solar access, mining and oil) partly determines the environment for the short and long term. Now local environments are not a question of only the regional quality of life but the whole world catalog of environmental health. There is a logical connection between Stewart Brand's environmental heresies that he is so brave to expound and the journal that published it. The MIT Technology.com journal is an organ of an wonderful, powerful and market oriented research institution. Many patents of GMOs, nuclear research and its devices, etc. have their origins at places like MIT. Until public research can be divorced from private gain we will have to live with the inherent conflicts of interests that derives from such development of technologies. Yes, Mr. Brand, the environmental movement needs to grow and encourage deep research that provides life-enhancing technologies, but we need to keep our baseline from shifting in the sands of politics. Much hard, political and economic work must be done to shift our environmental movement's baseline from reactive mediation to active planning of a non-toxic, non-radioactive, non-polluting integrated systems of technology. And the non-shifting baseline? "Technology: Do no harm." Copyright 2005 by Ryan Ramon Visit Ryan Ramon's Strange Spring © Copyright 2000-2004 by West by Northwest.org