Shamelessly yanked from Fark...

[bohannon]

Enviornmental Heresies. An interesting piece in MIT's Technology Review where Stewart Brand (i love his book How Buildings Learn) discusses the divide between "romantics" and "scientists" in environmentalism, and discusses how science is changing its opinion about 4 pivotal environmental issues. Very good essay...

Comments

[mvc]

It's an interesting essay. I'm sympathetic to the arguments he makes, but I think those arguments are weakened by a nasty tendency to dismiss his opponents as being hopelessly naïve. The way he describes the (real) division within the environmental movement sounds a little too much like "there are the scientists, who are good and sensible and agree with me, and the romantics, who are silly and disagree with me and, well, aren't they really kind of pathetic?" There's obviously a rhetorical advantage to presenting it his way, but it makes him gloss over some important nuances. In particular, there are good pragmatic reasons to be skeptical (not dismissive, but skeptical) of both nuclear power and GM food, and this sort of pragmatic skepticism about technology plays at least as big a part in the environmental movement as romanticism does.