Romantic Liberal?

[Procrustes Stretched]

The Whole Earth Catalog guy backs nuke energy and belittles romanticism?

I probably got rid of what was left of my romanticism by the time I was 40, 45, because I'd seen a lot of people become -- what? Victims of a notion? A notion that civilization is going downhill, that bad people and bad institutions and bad ideas are shaking all that is right and good out of the world and this must be resisted even though it's a losing battle. It's a wonderfully coherent way to think and live. It just happens to be wrong. But that's part of the fun of being a romantic: You get to defy reality.

hmmm, so much for stereotypes.

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In those days, how did you balance between the philosophically romantic and the pragmatic, maybe the technical?

I probably got rid of what was left of my romanticism by the time I was 40, 45, because I'd seen a lot of people become -- what? Victims of a notion? A notion that civilization is going downhill, that bad people and bad institutions and bad ideas are shaking all that is right and good out of the world and this must be resisted even though it's a losing battle. It's a wonderfully coherent way to think and live. It just happens to be wrong. But that's part of the fun of being a romantic: You get to defy reality.

I'm neither interested in the impossible nor in the probable. I am interested in the difficult but possible. You get to do striving, but you get to also be successful. I suppose that's kind of a mix of ambition and pragmatism.

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How did you come to be open to things the liberal canon has rejected, like nuclear power and genetically modified foods?

Some of it may be genetic. The story in Rockford, Ill., was, if you throw a Brand in the river, they'll float upstream. There was a certain inborn contrariness.

[On nuclear energy], I figure I was wrong all along. I bought, without thinking about it or doing my own research, into the mistaken over-connection between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. Teasing those apart and saying, "Weapons bad, energy good," is not something I took the trouble to do. Because I was and am an environmentalist. The thought that nuclear waste was going to be this terrible obligation we'd put on dozens or hundreds of future generations -- I didn't actually look at how nuclear waste works, and so it was a knee-jerk response.

Are you fairly pessimistic about us getting a grip on global warming quickly enough?

Yes, I am pessimistic. One good outcome -- a quiet one -- in Copenhagen [at the global climate summit] was you started to get a serious conversation between the U.S., China and India. But the rate of greenhouse gas emissions is not slackening, it's not leveling, it's increasing. My guess is that something equivalent to the melting of the Arctic ice, in a place where people live, is what it's going to take to shake people up.

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Stewart Brand: Earth man - latimes.com