Ya hace casi dos años hablábamos de las herejías ecologistas de Stewart Brand. Hace unos días el artículo de The New York Times An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies ha llegado en el momento oportuno (al calor del debate actual alrededor del cambio global) y ha generado muchos comentarios en la red sobre las ideas de Brand.
Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering.
Sobre las “herejías de Brand” trataba ya su artículo publicado en Mayo de 2005 en Technology Review(Environmental Heresies), que dió pie a una entrevista del mismo título en Conservation in Practice. De hecho, Brand lleva ya un tiempo renovando drásticamente su discurso, desde las posiciones que defendía hace décadas que le han llevado a ser considerado como una leyenda de la cibercultura y de contracultura (su papel se analiza en el libro From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism de Fred Turner) y del ecologismo (como fundador del World Earth Catalog y nuevo protagonista del libro que aparecerá este año, Counterculture Green: The Environmentalism of Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog de Andrew Kirk).
Pero, a pesar del eco generado por el artículo de NYT, pocos han analaizado críticamente los planteamientos de Brand. Por eso tiene especial interés el post de Jamais Cascio, Obsolescent Heresies. Las críticas de Cascio no se dirigen tanto a las ideas heréticas en si mismas como al hecho de considerarlas heréticas, o sea enfrentadas al movimiento ecologista contemporáneo. Parece que Brand se está enfrentando realmente a los fantasmas de los años 1970:
Brand seems to retain an image of environmentalism that may have been appropriate in the 1970s, but has diminishing credibility today: the anti-technology, back-to-nature hippie. Today's environmental movement is urban, techie, and far less likely to refer to any assertion as "heresy" (although, in the case of the handful of people who still try to deny the existence of global warming, we're happy to use the term "stupidity"). Stewart Brand is nailing his environmental heresies on the door of a church that was long ago abandoned... or, at the very least, taken over by Unitarians.
This isn't to say that the Bright Green types have fully embraced Stewart's views. There's little support for aggressive nuclear power production among the new environmentalists, and the various positions concerning biotech are complex, to say the least. There's little disagreement with his love of cities, but in this case, Brand is almost a latecomer. Ultimately, the positions that Stewart stakes out appear more to be arguments against his own past beliefs than against the claims of modern eco-advocates.
Cascio proporciona una visión alternativa del ecologismo contemporáneo sobre todas y cada una de las “herejías” de Brand, mostrando que las diferencias, caso de haberlas, son de matiz más que de fondo. Respecto a la energía nuclear las críticas se centran ahora más en su escasa flexibilidad que en sus riesgos:
The short version, in my phrasing: the Bright Green reluctance about nuclear power has far more to do with it being centralized infrastructure and dated technology than with any fear or loathing of atoms. The environmental situation in which we find ourselves demands a fast-learning, fast-iterating, distributed and collaborative technological capacity, not a system that bleeds out investment dollars and leaves us stuck with technologies already on the verge of obsolescence.
Respecto a la biotecnología:
There's no consensus Bright Green position on environmental biotech, but there are plenty of voices calling for the responsible use of biotech (and nanotech) as a way of combatting climate and ecosystem disruption; moreover, most people arguing for holding off on bioengineering do so out of concern that we still have more to learn before we can undertake such solutions responsibly, not out of a flat opposition to the technology.
Brand se pregunta donde están los "green biotech hackers", y Cascio enlaza con la contestación que le da un especialista en biología sintética como Rob Carlson, que explica en su blog que:
We're coming, Stewart. It's just that we're still on the slow part of the curves. [...] At the moment, synthesis of a long gene takes about four weeks at a commercial DNA foundry, with a bacterial genome still requiring many months at best, though the longest reported contiguous synthesis job to date is still less than 50 kilobases. And at a buck a base, hacking any kind of interesting new circuit is still expensive. [...] So, Mr. Brand, it will be a few years before green hackers, at least those who aren't support by Vinod Khosla or Kleiner Perkins, really start to have an impact.
Y respecto a la urbanización y el crecimiento poblacional no parecen existir discrepancias:
As for cities, I'm not sure I could find many modern enviros still clinging to the notion that, on the whole, rural life is intrinsically better than urban life. There are plenty of individual examples of terrific rural homes and awful urban homes, of course, but in the aggregate, there's no question that communities in dense, urban settings have a smaller footprint than communities of the same size in suburban and rural settings. And the notion that population size is still at the top of the environmental hit list is seriously out of date; all signs point to a global population peak of below 10 billion, and possibly no more than 8 billion -- of concern to the extent that more people means more consumption, but by no means a panic-inducing Malthusian threat.
Cascio critica el estereotipo de ecologista que dibuja Brand. Posiblemente esa visión sea adecuada en el ámbito anglosajón (como comentaba en Ecocapitalismo y ciberverdes: ¿an inconvenient future?), pero muy probablemente Stewart Brand seguiría siendo considerado un hereje absoluto en el ámbito europeo y, especialmente, en España.
