The Non-Radical Environmentalist

Yesterday at Techonomy--before the fun started--we heard from Stewart Brand, famed founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and author most recently of Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. With his latest book, Brand is pioneering a new brand of environmentalism that discards some of the movement’s anti-technology habits, and reacquaints the green impulse with an openness to innovations that may be the key to solving our biggest problem—climate change. According to Brand, environmentalism has a “legacy resistance” to nuclear power, and to transgenic crops or GMOs. In other words, the resistance isn’t really based on strong evidence of dangers, so much as an instinctive distrust of certain types of meddling with “nature.”...READ ON.