I just read an incredibly interesting article about the revolutionary thinker Stewart Brand in the NY Times. It talks about his new ideas on the environmental movement, a group he divides in two: the romantics and the scientists.

Mr. Brand predicts that his heresies will become accepted in the next decade as the scientific minority in the environmental movement persuades the romantic majority. He still considers himself a member of both factions, just as in the days of the Merry Pranksters, but he’s been shifting toward the minority.

“My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by,” he says. “I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind.”

I find the idea really interesting. It’s been a nagging sensation in me for a while now, this idea that eating organic and drinking filtered water won’t save the planet. I mean, it’s obvious, but we do it anyway. But I love what he says, too, about energy, for example. I find myself on the brink of this very same thinking…

“It is one of the great revelatory bets,” he now says. “Any time that people are forced to acknowledge publicly that they’re wrong, it’s really good for the commonwealth. I love to be busted for apocalyptic proclamations that turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. In 1973 I thought the energy crisis was so intolerable that we’d have police on the streets by Christmas. The times I’ve been wrong is when I assume there’s a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought.”

I guess we’ll just have to do our best. Wait and see. And try not to be overly romantic about organic mineral water from Fiji.

I’m still dreaming of building an off-the-grid cob house on a mesa in the desert, though. No one can convince me that I can’t ward off the apocalypse on my own!

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