Stewart Brand quotes

Some interesting quotes from Steward Brand's Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto Brand has obviously shifted his beliefs since the 1960s; in fact, I was strongly reminded of Peter Huber's Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, A Conservative Manifesto. From Brand:

Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists helped stop carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe. (Except for France, which fortunately responded to the '73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear.) Greens caused gigatons of carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere from the coal and gas burning that went ahead instead of nuclear. I was part of that too, and I apologize.

And:

An enlightened environmental program on population should now focus, I suggest, on softening the impact of the depopulation implosion. . . . The most effective environmental population program in this century is gently pronatal.

And:

I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we've been wrong about. We've starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool. . . . It's worth knowing and remembering who was leading Greenpeace International . . .and Friends of the Earth International . . . when those two organizations went to great lengths to persuade Africans that, in the service of ideology, starvation was good for them.