Fox or Hedgehog - Stewart Brand And Ecopragmatism.
Stewart Brand is one of the founders and intellectual leading lights of modern environmentalism. In October 2009, he published a book titled Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. To the shock and dismay of some long-time allies, it turns out that forty years in the environmental policy business have led Brand to favor nuclear power and oppose using the Precautionary Principle to make government policy. As Peter Huber puts it in a thoughtful City Journal review:
The man who founded and then edited the Whole Earth Catalog for 16 years—a magazine guided by “biological understanding” and enamored with the planet-saving power of organic farming, solar, wind, insulation, bicycles, and handmade houses—now concludes: “Cities are Green. Nuclear energy is Green. Genetic engineering is Green.”
Huber's essay begins with Brand's admission that anti-nuclear greens are responsible for massive CO2 emission increases over the past forty years.
“One of the greatest dangers the world faces is the possibility that a vocal minority of antinuclear activists could prevent phase-out of coal emissions,” Brand writes, quoting Hansen. It’s an indubitable historical fact that the developed world was poised to break free from a carbon-centered energy economy 30 years ago. Greens locked us back into it. By demonizing nukes so effectively, they boosted U.S. coal consumption by about 400 million tons per year. We would instantly cut our coal consumption in half if we could simply conjure back into existence the 100-plus nuclear plants that were in the pipeline three decades ago. If global warming is a problem, Brand and his ex-friends own it [and] Brand admits it.
Huber then highlights Brand's assault on the Precautionary Principle, described by Huber as a "sliver of vacuous pedantry." Huber writes:
[According to Brand], “evidence of harm disappeared as a precautionary principle trigger, and science was explicitly devalued.” The Old Greens followed the science only when its predictions fit with a narrative of “decay,” “decline,” and “disaster.” This was a “formula for paralysis.” The New Brand supports the “freedom to try things,” subject to “ceaseless, fine-grained monitoring.”
Brand's deep commitment to environmental protection has not waivered, but it seems he is, when all is said and done, an empiricist. Thus:
It all comes down to how people think. Adopting Isaiah Berlin’s familiar taxonomy, Brand explains that Old Greens are intellectual “hedgehogs”—they start with a grand theory and then shore it up with mounds of factoids dredged up to reinforce what they already believe. “Foxes, on the other hand, are skeptical about grand theories, diffident in their forecasts, and ready to adjust their ideas based on actual events. Hedgehogs don’t notice or care when they’re wrong. Foxes learn. Hedgehogs are great proponents, but foxes are invariably better forecasters and policy makers.”
One can only hope, as Congress and EPA take up climate change/energy policy and TSCA reform, and issue an unprecedented raft of environmental regulations, that Brand's foxes prevail over the hedgehogs.
