Stewart Brand was the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. He’s been doing a lot of thinking over the years, and gave an update at TED.
He discussed the 1 Billion people living in squatter cities, soon to be 2 billion. There’s a lot of desperation and a lot of crime, but it’s not all bad news. There is a scale of efficiency about these cities. Talk about compactness! Go to the 6 minute mark of this video within a video and watch what happens immediately after the train goes by.
Brand suggests that coming to the city gives people hope that they will be better off financially, which inexorably brings down the birth rate.
He has nothing good to say about coal–it is the cause of the climate change we see. He has nothing bad to say about nuclear power; it is a “green” fuel. According to Brand, we can’t get rid of coal fast enough. We are going to be facing massive climate change, faster than we can imagine. This will cause many millions of “climate refugees” and ongoing “resource wars” such as the one in Darfur.
