The New York Times Sunday magazine “Green Mind” special featured interviews with two exceptional individuals who are leaders of the modern green movement.
Steven Chu is a Nobel-prize winning physicist. Stewart Brand founded one of the most beloved “catalogs” of all time, The Whole Earth Catalog.
Clearly, these accomplishments reflect their creativity, perseverance and love of the natural world. But what I find most inspirational about these two men is that they have been consistently proactive, not reactive, throughout their careers. They are not against things, they are for a green future.
Both Chu and Brand advocate practical solutions to particularly difficult-to-solve problems. “The most important thing is making sure that your home is properly insulated, that your leaky doors and windows are fixed” says Chu. They clearly enjoy implementing new ideas and technology that have environmental benefits. They do not ask if a technology is good or bad, cool or not but whether or not it is appropriate for the task at hand. “The romantic nature-is-perfect approach is just horse exhaust”, says Brand, choosing his words carefully.
These are thoughtful men that we are fortunate to have as leaders of a community-based, science-based movement. They are not reluctant to engage with established institutions (for example, the government of the United States of America) to move the world’s people forward. It is through their efforts and those like them that we finally will reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, make our cities more efficient and establish a more ecological way of farming.
(Full disclosure: I am associated with the Joint Bioenergy Institute, a DOE-funded Bioenergy Research Center that Secretary Chu supported when he was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I also have had the pleasure of meeting Stewart and reading a few advance chapters of his new book “Whole Earth Discipline”, which I highly recommend.)
Stewart was also kind enough to endorse my novel Rad Decision, an insider’s look at the world of nuclear power. He gets around.
Raoul and I also took a creative writing workshop before we wrote our book. It was quite helpful. I would love to take more classes and have more time to write creatively. For now it is all about grants, writing and rewriting scientific papers, and giving seminars…
I took quite a few creative writing workshops, and had a professional editor go over the manuscript as well (rather a painful process). It turns out though that fiction featuring a good deal of actual science and technology isn’t something the publishing industry is very keen on. I thank Stewart for seeing some value in a real voice from the technology trenches trying to pass on information in a more accessible format. There is a paperback at Amazon, etc. as well. Good luck with your own creative endeavors.
I met one person whose career steart helped launch by bringing the book to the attention of some magazine editors (some famous tech magazine, I forget which one). It has now been translated in 7 languages. quite a story. We cant all achieve such glory but it is still very worthwhile to do the writing and reach a few.