I did broadly change my mind as a result of reading this book about the potential advantages of progressive urbanisation - inevitable in any case - GM/GE organisms and nuclear power; the `main news' part of the book. Brand successfully includes these as possible solutions to the ecological crisis, part of the package needed. In this way his approach is refreshingly solution-orientated, identifying what is required as an engineering, problem-solving approach, in contrast to the tragic and pessimistic `decay narrative' of the romantic wing of environmentalism.
However there are serious lacks. Presumably because he is American, he does not imagine any alternative to corporate capitalism. He talks of `managing the commons' without recognising that one of the main thrusts of capitalism, for over four hundred years, is the privatisation of the commons for profit, more recently expropriating its intellectual property and patenting its DNA! He is clearly a technophile, but berates rather than understands the justified suspicion of science when it is in the service of this corporate capitalism. Western technological science co-arose with capitalism, is at best co-dependent with it, perhaps simply a product of it.
He fails to provide, therefore, any political economic context for his thesis or, for that matter, much cultural perspective. The future he imagines of successfully combating climate change could be either a utopia or a dystopia, depending whether the technical solutions are accompanied by a shift in values - or not....
Nevertheless he convincingly argues that the environmental movement will also have to shift its ground. The book's `eco-pragmatism' is therefore radical in suggesting some of the sacred cows it will have to abandon, and worth reading, even though the egocentric style is sometimes irritating, for Brand's encyclopaedic knowledge. It succeeds as a practical guide to changing one's mind and looking at difficult challenges in a new way.
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