Legendary environmental activist and progenitor of the Whole Earth Catalog talks about climate change, global energy challenges, nuclear energy and some out-of-this-world resource prospects.
Couldn't figure out the embed code, but the video is HERE.
Below the video is Brand's essay on climate change which begins:
WE ARE AS GODS AND HAVE TO GET GOOD AT IT
About 40 years ago I wore a button that said, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" Then we finally saw the pictures. What did it do for us?
The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as gods, we might as well get good at it". Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective.
What I'm saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it. Necessity comes from climate change, potentially disastrous for civilization. The planet will be okay, life will be okay. We will lose vast quantities of species, probably lose the rain forests if the climate keeps heating up. So it's a global issue, a global phenomenon. It doesn't happen in just one area. The planetary perspective now is not just aesthetic. It's not just perspective. It's actually a world-sized problem that will take world sized solutions that involves forms of governance we don't have yet. It involves technologies we are just glimpsing. It involves what ecologists call ecosystem engineering. Beavers do it, earthworms do it. They don't usually do it at a planetary scale. We have to do it at a planetary scale. A lot of sentiments and aesthetics of the environmental movement stand in the way of that.
By all means, read the rest... I trust you'll find his take on nuclear energy as surprising as I did. For a more complete profile, visit this link at Edge.org.
For a brief bio of Stewart Brand, visit this page at The Third Culture.
