Whole Earth Discipline
Stewart Brand inspired Cool Tools. This blog is a continuation of the user-generated recommendation mechanism that Brand invented in the Whole Earth Catalog (which I worked on in its later years). Brand has spent his long career successfully changing people's minds by offering them tools. The tool he offers here is simply the tool of "changing your mind." How do you do it rationally, smartly, wisely? What kind of evidence do you need? What is more important, principles or pragmatism?
This book can be seen as a challenge to green theory and green dogma, but it directly challenges ideology itself. I think this is Brand's best book yet. As you follow his arguments, you get a great education in following science and data rather than righteous assumptions. Instead, says Brand, assume much of what we think is true isn't, and then go from there with a fresh look at the evidence. Being pragmatic about something as complex as a technological planet can lead you to unconventional ideas for dealing with planetary woes -- even if they seem contrary to cherished beliefs. Some of the solutions -- like nuclear power and genetically modified crops -- will be dismissed as outright heresies among greens. But you get to watch a great mind change his mind. As Brand's education continues he makes as good a case for these heresies as you'll hear anywhere.
This book may change your own mind about things you thought you believed. What more can you ask of a book?
Available from Amazon
When roles shift, ideologies have to shift, and ideologies hate to shift. The workaround is pragmatism -- a practical way of thinking concerned with results rather than with theories and principles. The shift is deeper than moving from one ideology to another; the shift is to discard ideology entirely.
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Forty years ago, I started the Whole Earth Catalog with the words, "We are as gods, and might as well get good at it." Those were innocent times. New situation, new motto: "We are as gods and have to get good at it." The Whole Earth Catalog encouraged individual power; Whole Earth Discipline is more about aggregate power.
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The three broad strategies for dealing with climate change are mitigation, adaptation, and amelioration. Mitigation, cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions, has been called avoiding the unmanageable. Adaptation, then, is managing the unavoidable -- moving coastal populations to higher ground, developing drought-tolerant agriculture, preparing for masses of climate refugees, and keeping resource warfare localized. And amelioration is adjusting the nature of the planet itself through large-scale geoengineering.
Civilization is at risk, but civilization is the problem. The key positive feedback in the current Earth system is us. Accelerating wealth (especially in developing countries these days), a still-growing human population, and accelerating industry are pouring overwhelming quantities of green-house gases into the atmosphere. As Australian biologist Tim Flannery puts it, "The metabolism of our economy is now on a collision course with the metabolism of our planet."
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Once upon a time, I dreamed that economics would eventually swell up and include ecology, and we would no more be misled by notions of "externalities." Now I'm not so sure. I recall a friend leaning on me to admit that ecology and economics are the same thing. "No, damn it," I said. "Ecology is devoid of intention, and economics is made of little else." (I suspect that my friend was on to something, though, because economics enthusiasts and ecology enthusiasts share an affliction. Conservative think that the self-organizing properties of a market economy are a miracle that must not be messed with. Greens think that the self-organizing properties of ecologies are a miracle that must not be messed with.)
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The emphasis of the vigilance principle is on liberty, the freedom to try things. The correction for emergent problems is in ceaseless, fine-grained monitoring, which largely can be automated these days via the Internet, by collecting data from distributed high-tech sensors and vigilant cellphone-armed volunteers. (Wikipedia, for example, is an orgy of vigilance: A cluster of diligent amateur watchers and correcters actively surveil each entry, with a response time of seconds.) Managing the precautionary process in this mode consists of identifying things to watch for as a new technology unfolds.
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A cool tool is anything useful that is superior to comparable items. If you think this tool is inferior suggest a better one. You are welcome to insult a tool, but comments containing insults to individual people will be deleted. Corrections of fact are always welcomed, if stated politely. Recommendations of better tools are dearly wanted and may be elevated to the front page.
quail333
First the intellectuals promote individualism and giving away money, now they promote collectivism and government theft. Gee thanks!
brad
I think one of the prerequesites for "mindchanging ---> worldchanging" to be successful is for more people to take a step back and accept that changing one's mind is not a sign of weakness. That in itself involves a mind change, because we've been trained (mainly by watching political campaigns) to view changing one's mind as something to avoid, something that opens us to ridicule by our opponents.
When I was in middle school, our social studies teacher tried to show us how debates work by splitting the class in half and giving each one of us a position to argue. I was elected the spokesman for my team. We debated the points, but the girl who spoke for the other side made her arguments so convincingly and cogently that I ended up agreeing with her. Everyone was furious at me; I was told that a successful debater never gives in and argues for his postion to the bitter end. I felt that was completely wrongheaded, and still do today.
The singer Nanci Griffith once wrote in a song, "it's the boys who ask questions, but it's the man who knows." That kind of mentality is a big part of the problem. Overconfidence, closed-mindedness, and excessive emphasis on consistency and charisma are the root causes of many of the world's problems today. We definitely need some mind-changing in that area.
quailing and ignorant
And luckily the deliberately-ignorants who have always ignored the intellectuals' advice will continue to be a benchmark against the yardstick of civilization. God forbid someone change their mind in the face of conflicting evidence...
Ben-David
Mitigating Global Warming?
That's so... 2008.
Poor Stewart Brand - hope he doesn't have too many of these printed copies to unload.
Elgin
"We are as gods" ... already the text is unbearably laughable...
Cool Tool? — no... Fool Tool!
Robert
"When roles shift, ideologies have to shift, and ideologies hate to shift. The workaround is pragmatism -- a practical way of thinking concerned with results rather than with theories and principles."
Sound good... in theory
Alex Merz
#1, 4, and 5: You *do* realize that assertions without explanations are counterproductive, don't you? Or is it your intent that others should see you as walking bumper stickers?
PaulD
I don't know Stewart Brand personally, but I've followed his work since the '70's and he's never been someone that you could easily pigeon hole -- and that is probably true of most original thinkers. I guess you could say he is progressive / left-wing, but, for example, he always had a healthy dose of respect for the American military even when the left in general felt nothing but revulsion for it. As I see it, his current pragmatism is the natural outgrowth of where he's been in the past.
Amy Thomson
I remember spending a large swatch of the summer of '73 lying on the couch watching the Watergate hearings and reading the Whole Earth Catalog cover to cover. I was fourteen. Much of the content of the hearings and the catalog passed way over my head. But of the two, the Whole Earth Catalog was the more transformative. If my mother had any idea of the impact that book was to have on my life, she'd probably have burned it.
I read later editions of the Catalog nearly as thoroughly, and later subscribed to the Whole Earth Quarterly until it, sadly, died. Cool Tools is one way I've found to keep that Whole Earth energy going! I look forward to reading The Whole Earth Discipline.
Thanks Stewart Brand, and Kevin Kelly for all the ways you've made my life better and more sustainable.
CT Reader
"The Whole Earth Catalog encouraged individual power; Whole Earth Discipline is more about aggregate power."
Haven't read the book but have heard Brand talk about it on the radio, in part with Amory Lovins. I didn't hear him mention the primary issues with nuclear and GMOs from my perspective, the scale of the organizations needed to do them and the histories of those organizations in respect to how they have used the power they already have. Not good, either for nukes or for GMOs.
I have no fundamental problem with either technology. I do have serious problems with how they have been deployed. Monsanto seemingly wants to own all seed production and has gone a long way toward doing so. They have been ruthless in protecting their patents on their seed in such a way as to drive many people out of business. One example can be seen in the film "Food Inc" where Monsanto's nuisance lawsuits force a seed cleaner out of business even though he has never been proved to deal in Monsanto's seed illegally. That is not the contention of the suit. The contention of the suit is that by his business' existence he constitutes a threat to Monsanto.
The US nuclear industry also does not have a good reputation in how it has dealt with its critics. Their arrogance is legend. In the time we have left in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, nuclear power will play little or no part as there isn't the time nor the infrastructure to produce nuclear power plants in the quantity necessary. Efficiency, resource conservation, and renewables especially if deployed in an industrial ecosystem are the only real solutions available. Everything else is a distraction.
The aggregated power Brand is endorsing through his support for the present nuclear power and GMO industries is corporatism at best and neo-feudalism at worst. The problem is not the technologies themselves but the practices of the corporations which are building them.
no
It is not only civilization that has limit but life itself.
Just watch youtube video called Are Humans smarter than bacteria?
The answer is no.
Instead of convincing common man about sharing
may be you should try convincing rich man to give up
his/her power because in this case it is the top 1 billion
people using 80% of earth resources. This also called lifestyle.
Humans were starving and only accidently discovered farming
thus civilization...
in 1900, a US household used 50% of their income just for food
with women staying home, no electricity, etc.
Even with Peak Oil and War of resources, try convincing
any women to go back to 1900s. Not going to happen.
JS
By all means, trust individuals like Al Gore, Gordon Brown, George Soros, Obama, and the UN. Or the Hollywood elite who are more concerned about purchasing the latest $10,000 handbag, rent islands @ $50,000 / day, or living in castles on Lake Cumo. Maurice Strong - the right arm of Edmond Rothschild - and MSNBC-GE are your friend, too. I for one think that your heroes eugenicists have a point, because I already gave up on domesticated people long time ago. I hope John Holdren & Co. eliminate them all for "mother earth's" sake.
Democrats -> Global warming bogeyman
Republicans -> Terrorist bogeyman
You -> Domesticated intellectual hipster
mark
"Solutions without ideology"?? Kevin, you're kidding, right? In the annotated Chapter 1 (thanks for putting it online!) Brand writes:
"With climate change under way, we have to make a choice. If we do nothing or not enough, we face a carrying-capacity crisis leading to war of all against all..".
No ideology? Catastrophic climate change is "settled science", right?
Brand also quotes from the IPCC (and we now know where they get their "data"), Marxist scholar Mike Davis, and that bastion of freedom and academic integrity, the UN.
No ideology?
Brand also writes:
"For the definitive word on how much to worry about climate change, environmentalists in America have taken to relying on James Hansen, NASA’s authoritative and outspoken climatologist. "
No ideology? Hansen would put global warming "deniers" on trial for their heresy.
People, there is an ideology at work here. It started with another "Manifesto" written by a bearded psychopath in the British Museum in 1848.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't make the planet better, or look for solutions to global problems, and Brand does have a lot of good ideas. I'm just saying that let's not fool ourselves that there's not an agenda here.
Finally, just to be clear, we are not as gods, despite all the technological wonders we've created. People are sinners, not gods. We hate, we love, we lie, we tell the truth, and we are just as selfish, vain, and arrogant as any who have gone before. A government of elites can attempt to control those who do not adhere to the "common good' (as defined by the elites) but don't expect the result to be any different from the same attempts at social control in the past.
This message was not peer-reviewed. Thank you for your time.
derrick
Yeah, I'm not going to buy this one. Kevin, stick with crowbars, screwdrivers, and shoes. Something as nebulous as "global solutions without ideology" is wholly useless to CT's readers. I'm not even addressing the AGW hypothesis itself - other posters have already pointed out the data-scrubbing and infighting going on at the IPCC - but a book telling people how to "think better" strikes me as something more suited to a puff piece on Oprah than a site that caters to people wanting to buy a better staple gun.
christopher
It is the height of irony to read so many negative perceptions of the book by people who haven't read it yet, but are intensely interested in a *by-product* of the book, this list as developed by Mr. Kelly. A little meta-discussion about the list might be in order to get some perspective.
It's a mailing list you subscribed to, voluntarily. It doesn't purport to cater to your whims or desires, it publishes what the editor(s) consider "Cool Tools". If, in their wisdom, they offer a book for you to read, read it. Or don't. But don't pretend to be the kind of person who's so insanely busy building hospitals and solving energy problems that they lack the time to read it. You like this list. You trust the opinions of the list creator. Read the book. Then, and only then, do you have an opinion worth sharing.
Charlie
Bravo, christopher!
elon
Thank you, Christopher.
Derrick: To me Cool Tools has always been more about possibilities than the merits of any individual tool. For more on that, I recommend this:
http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/2103/article/126/tools.are.the.revolution
or a tour through the CT archives.
As with other books that have been recommended and then discussed in the comments here, it seems dismissing ideas before openly exploring them doesn't really allow for one to ever come upon new ideas, or evolve old ones. Dialogue and disagreement are both valuable, but book critiques based on book recommendations and short excerpts don't productively further the discussion.--es
Jeff
With life so busy and chaotic, i find i must really be intrigued to read something. My mindset is I believe solving social problems, economic problems, disease, poverty, war, suicide, etc. come before "environmental" issues, so I would stereotype this book as something much less important and never attempt it. Am I foolish?
Robert
Christopher:
You can have an opinion on say... abortion, without having an abortion!
That said, this book looks trite. People have been trying to "change their thinking" for EXACTLY 3,841 years
Andrew
Jeff: Poverty is largely an environmental issue. The basis of war is frequently freshwater rights. The environment is the top contributor to our economy--why do you think all successful cities are located where they are?
kreg
#5: Clarkes Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The semi literate nomadic sheep herders who wrote the book you likely use to orient your moral compass would have seen something as ordinary as arguing through an electronic medium with someone hundreds or thousands of miles away as pretty near god like. And you are wasting this miracle by taking it for granted.
We have powers on an aggregate level that in prehistory would have be ascribed to the gods themselves, if you can't reconcile a tongue in cheek reference to that fact within your worldview you likely wouldn't gain much from reading this book anyway.