Brand time

 LISTEN. It's supposed to be a grab-bag, crowd-sourced day in Environmental Ethics. My contribution: Stewart Brand.

We've noted Brand's brand of Whole Earth EcoPragmatism (Whole Earth Discipline: An EcoPragmatist Manifesto...alternate subtitle: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary), and the general skepticism we've seen from Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben towards the prospects of "managing" and engineering our way around climate change. Brand thinks "environmentalists are going to have to reverse some longheld opinions and embrace tools that they have traditionally distrusted. Only a radical rethinking of traditional green pieties will allow us to forestall the cataclysmic deterioration of the earth's resources." 

“The scale of forces, this time, is planetary; the scope is centuries; the stakes are what we call civilization; and it is all taking place at the headlong speed of self-accelerating human technologies and climatic turbulence. Talk of “saving the planet” is overstated, however. Earth will be fine, no matter what; so will life. It is humans who are in trouble. But since we got ourselves into this fix, we should be able to get ourselves out of it.”

So will life. That's a bit glib, a bit broad. Whose life? Which species? Mass extinction events don't leave "life" intact. (But, "de-extinction"?!) But pragmatists do in fact tend to be speciesists, to the extent at least of prioritizing human trouble. I don't have a problem with that, except insofar as the Whole Earth idea of holistic ecological inter-relatedness (with which younger Stewart Brand is so closely identified) entails that the "fix" we're in isn't just ours. Any engineered solution that works for us must also work for life in general, must anticipate the long-term consequences for other species and eco-subsystems.

Brand knows that. That's why he started the Long Now Foundation, to foster long-term thinking and end our quick-fix mentality. So there's a conversation to be had between Brand the EcoPragmatist and Brand the Clock Maker. “The operative principle for all is what Danny Hillis calls the Golden Rule of Time: Do for the future what you’re grateful the past did for you. (Or what you wish the past had done for you.) That tells you the right thing to do.”

And,

“Climate is so full of surprises, it might even surprise us with a hidden stability. Counting on that, though, would be like playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded but one.” Well, exactly.

So it's a given that short-term thinking is untenable. But is really long-term thinking really helpful? Will thinking now about that 10,000 Year Clock translate into responsible Golden Rule behavior, and into the right choices about geoengineering, nuclear power, fossil fuel consumption, renewal energy transition, et al? Brand himself doesn't seem so sure.

“We’re engaging in a set of activities which go way beyond the individual life span, way beyond children, grandchildren, way beyond parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, to the whole frame of at least civilizational life. Once you get comfortable with that, then you start to go further out still, to three and a half billion years of life on Earth, and maybe we’ll do another three and a half billion years. That’s kind of interesting to try to hold in your mind. And once you’ve held it in your mind, what do you do on Monday?"

Good question, for a Wednesday. Sunday night may be too late, for "gods" like us.

 

"I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.

I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years." Danny Hillis