In a recent interview with Yale Environment 360, Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog explains how his positions on nuclear power and other topics have changed in the face of climate change and shifted his thinking about what it means to be green.

I cut my cultural teeth on the Whole Earth Catalog in the late 1960’s. Subtitled “Access to Tools”, the catalog was a compendium of everything I thought I could ever need to life an earth friendly, alternative lifestyle - as represented by the photo below:

“Blowing in the wind”: the author in 1972 - just a hippie in the weeds….

Everything was going natural - organic and natural foods, living in housing we built ourselves, moving back to the land, and embracing an earth centric ethic of living in harmony with nature and the planet. Nuclear power was the evil harbinger of war, radiation death, and annihilation.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to the New Age…

Besides marriages, kids, mortgages and the jobs to fund it all, climate change began to rear its polar ice cap melting head. Essentially caused by a human waste product - CO2 - along with other greenhouse gasses, the weather started getting warmer. I say waste product, because while CO2 is completely natural and normal at certain concentrations in nature, our industrial metabolism was creating so much of it as to upset the balance in the atmosphere. And much of the waste we produce - in manufacturing, packaging, burning petroleum and coal for fuel - creates more CO2. It’s essentially a Waste 2 Resources (not a new rap band) problem.

Stewart Brand was a thought leader of the 1960’s-70’s environmental movement via the Whole Earth Catalog. Every socially conscious home had one, and waited eagerly for the next supplement. A wide ranging collection of information and tools for simpler ecoinnovative lifestyles filled it’s newsprint pages. This was life before - and a precursor to - the internet. There was no - gasp! - Google or Twitter. We had to talk to each other and pass books and stuff around hand to hand. But we were all for clean air, ands water, healthy land, natural food, and opposed to nuclear energy. The “no nukes” movement was an article of faith.

But Brand, now in his 70”s (Whatever happened to “don’t trust anyone over 30?) has rethought his earlier opposition to nuclear power in the face of climate change. He lays out this and other departures from environmental orthodoxy in his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

Now he’s calling for the rapid deployment of a new generation nuclear power plants to fight global warming, citing improvements in safety, and that the damage every year from burning coal is greater than all the nuclear mishaps in history.

He writes: “The 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.” He goes on: “A 1-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.”

He points out that countries like France, with no domestic coal industry - have made huge moves to nuclear - with a near perfect safety record. He asks if the US had 80% nuclear (which could eliminate coal use) how many gigatons of carbon dioxide waste would not be in the atmosphere.

France has an energy export industry selling to everybody in Europe, including all the green countries. He notes that China is going full bore on nuclear, and that while there will be problems, climate change represents the bigger threat.



He also notes the reemergence of cities and environmentally friendly places to live - less energy and materials per person - versus the “boring stupid” suburbs. “It’s not a question of whether you save energy by walking to the market, you sort of save your mind by walking to the market, by being able to bicycle the kids to school. The idea of parents, smart busy adults, having to be chauffeurs for their children has nothing to do with environmental issues at all - it’s just a weird way to live.”

“The order is rapidly changing,” as Bob Dylan wrote, and Brand’s new book looks out 30 to 100-years. He states that we’ll be sorting out - one way or another - most of the issues like climate change.” It’s going to be a thrilling century because so much is in play and so many balls are in the air.” Let’s just hope one ball that is not too much in play is this nice blue/green one we’re currently living on.