The Whole Earth Discipline: Ecopragmatist Manifesto (Brand, 2009)

Brand, co-author of the seminal 1969 Whole Earth Catalog, compiles reflections and lessons learned from more than 40 years as an environmentalist in this clumsy yet compelling attempt to inspire practicable solutions to climate change. Brand haphazardly organizes his manifesto into chapters that address environmental stewardship opportunities, exhorting environmentalists to become fearless about following science; his iconoclastic proposals include transitioning to nuclear energy and ecosystem engineering. Brand believes environmentalists must embrace nuclear energy expansion and other inevitable technological advances, and refreshingly suggests a shift in the environmentalists' dogmatic approach to combating climate change. Rejecting the inflexible message so common in the Green movement, he describes a process of reasonable debate and experimentation. Brand's fresh perspective, approachable writing style and manifest wisdom ultimately convince the reader that the future is not an abyss to be feared but an opportunity for innovative problem solvers to embrace enthusiastically.

[JLJ - Stewart Brand - the hip environmentalist on a mission to save planet Earth, can teach you a thing or two if you are willing to listen. Brand embraces the full spectrum of environmentalism and offers advice and direction for those like him that want to know what they can do to save their planet.]

p.1-2 We are still realizing how much radical rethinking we will need to comprehend the forces now loose in the world and to figure out how to deal with them.

p.69 Evolving conceptual frameworks for urban ecology view cities as heterogeneous, dynamic landscapes and as complex, adaptive, socioecological systems, in which the delivery of ecosystem services links society and ecosystems at multiple scales

p.78 We realized that Yucca Mountain [JLJ - the proposed location for expensive long-term storage of nuclear waste] is a classic example of the folly of long-term planning - the illusion that we know now how to do the right thing for the next ten millennia. What Long Now pushes is almost the opposite: long-term thinking - where you set in motion a framing of events so that a process is made intensely adaptive, preserving and indeed increasing options as time goes by. [JLJ - long-term planning in a game is similar folly. What we need is long-term thinking, where we create adaptive capacity which is used to handle the unknown positions which emerge in the future.]

p.300 Naturalist Peter Warshall: "Take any position and ask: What do we want and love? Dream the dream of the perfect (not practical) results so you can see the vision clearly and with full passion. Then ask, What do we know? Put together the knowledge about the situation... and power relationships involved. Finally, What will we accept? ... it should be thought through."

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