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.”