Students never stop reading; I think it’s in the job description.
During the school year, as most of us know all too well, reading is likely to be assigned and topical. While not uninteresting, as a graduate student in engineering, that means my reading tends toward the academic—papers and texts full of math and nuanced details that can take hours, if not years to fully understand. So, I don’t usually mind when course work and the semester buzz wanes during the summer months, leaving a little more time to sift through the stack of books collecting on my nightstand.
I know it’s probably hard to imagine a grad student having time to pick up a book, but I do (sort of). While I have been known to take such light reading as “Aeroelasticity”—affectionately called “B. A. H.” in my research group after its authors’ last initials—on airplane trips (and not just to impress the passengers next to me), my latest companion was a beast of a different nature, better suited to the backpack of a Nicholas School student.
“Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto,” by Stewart Brand, certainly came from the “green devil” pile.
Where do I find such books? Like any 20-something—on late night comedy talk shows. This one in particular came from “The Colbert Report,” naturally. In my own defense, I definitely don’t have a staff to read books for me, or compile talking points—my list has to be filtered by something. That list is infrequently augmented by suggestions from Amazon.com or friends, and often supplied by the Duke Library (well, only when people return the books that I’ve requested!). Regardless, the list stays pretty short, but far too long for the hours I have to devote to it.
Back to that trip…with Brand’s book perched between me and the tray table, I was able to divert my attention from the summer’s other must-read—coverage of the BP oil spill—if only for a few hours.
Here’s the crux of why I think Brand’s “Whole Earth Discipline” is worth reviewing here: it presents facts and ideas that put what I thought I understood on its head, but the evidence for which is easy to identify.
For starters, Brand claims that cities are the greenest place to live. This seemingly runs counter to the connection with the land a rural upbringing instilled in me. My experience last summer breathing the sooty, smog choked air of several Peruvian cities also had me raising at least one eyebrow at the assertion. But, sitting on a brand new airplane, taxiing backward down the runway as we left Cuzco, the ancient Peruvian city, I watched out the window as newly constructed houses rolled by on the other side of the fence, few of which probably had a reliable supply of running water. This was exactly the juxtaposition Brand had in mind; his point being that cities are creators of wealth and progress. They demand this progress from growing populations, in food production, energy distribution and water, as well as waste and space management.
The very same regeneration and progress that Brand talks about occurring in illegal slums can also be seen around Duke and Durham, just with far more bureaucratic oversight. Over the past decade, campus construction projects have been filling in campus with buildings, and closing roadways like science drive to create walking corridors and quadrangles. The utilities that serve this growing infrastructure, like chilled water, have also gotten more efficient and centralized.
Durham is likewise being transformed. You don’t have to walk farther than the end of Research Drive to see the tall cranes working along Erwin Road to complete a new apartment complex that replaces a parking lot and will join several other housing complexes constructed in the same vicinity over the last several years. This growth close to campus is a good thing on several fronts. It continues a trend of concentrating development density close to campus which has implications for improved transportation including more efficient busing, biking and walking, as well as improved service distribution. Of course landlords can also charge a premium for these conveniences.
Brand follows the population density assertion with ideas about nuclear power and genetically engineered crop production. I’ll leave a discussion of nuclear power to another column, but note that Brand’s ideas on this topic did more to tickle my curiosities to find out more on the subject than settle my mind definitively. Chalk it up to overeducated skepticism. Regardless, I owe you some thoughts on that.
As for genetically engineered crops, I didn’t know there was a real problem with the concept.
After the first half of the book, Brand devolves a little into some of the finer details of the plan and that’s where we get some mixed messages, hardly surprising considering the complexity, scope and scale of the problem he’s set out to tackle.
Is there a definitive list of green books? Would this be on it? I can hardly pretend to be qualified in answering those questions. In the mean time, “Whole Earth Discipline” lived up to the task of expanding my worldview, making me a little skeptical and a lot more curious.
There is always more to learn, my friends, so keep reading!
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