Stewart Brand and Ian McEwan in Dublin

Just got back from a short trip to Dublin to see controversial environmentalist Stewart Brand and Booker-prize winning British author Ian McEwan speak at the speak at the Dublin Writers Festival.

They were discussing their respective books “Whole Earth Discipline” and “Solar”.

Apparently the two writers have known each other for some time. Their recent books have a certain amount in common and are indeed quite complimentary, hence the double-bill for this event.

McEwan’s novel takes climate change as its theme. McKewan is obviously very interested in science and actually joined an scientific expedition to the Arctic before writing the book, and based scenes in the book on the trip.

McEwan said he felt we have been fortunate to have lived through a Golden Age of science writing since the 1970 that this body of work from the likes of Dawkins, E.O Wilson, should be considered as of great literary merit as well as scienctific.

Solar is hilarious, had me nearly rolling around laughing. One of the themes he deals with is the huge conceptual gap in academia between science and humanities subjects, something I relate to from experience of a sociology degree (graffiti above the toilet-roll holder in the university toilets: “Get your sociology degree here.”)

In the novel, McEwan has his lead character the brilliant but dysfunctional Michael Beard, a physicist, fall in love with his first wife, a literature undergraduate. It seems he is able, in just a couple of weekends reading, to gain enough superficial knowledge of the girl’s favorite classical authors to impress her enough to win her heart. Compared to the enormously hard-won truths of science, as far as literature goes, it seems easy to fake it.

He also takes a few well-aimed potshots at “cultural relativists” who seem to think everything is just a matter of opinion, also to hilarious effect.

This theme- the gulf between those who understand things like climate science and those who are deeply suspicious of science in general, is directly relevant to Brand’s book, which takes on the four Holy Cows of the environmental movement: urbanization, population, nuclear power and GM crops. “I had learned to distrust the opinions of my environmental colleagues” Brand ruefully comments. Environmentalists are more in the “romantic” (=humanities) camp than the scientific/engineering camp that Brand represents.

One of the omissions in his book however is the subject of Peak Oil. He only makes one reference to it I think, stating that he does not believe it willl have the significant impact the like of Kunstler, Heinberg and Campbell believe it will.

I had partly traveled to the talk to get in a question on this, which I did: why did he not deal with this issue, which could be nearly considered to have become the fifth Holy Cow: the impending peak and decline in the world’s life-blood of liquid fossil energy.

Brand answered that he feels it will not be the main event that others claim. He feels we are on a plateau and this will probably be a long, uneven one rather than a sudden abrupt drop; that other technologies may yet come on stream to make up the shortfall; that market controls have already shown themselves extremely successful in rapidly changing behavior, viz. the demand destruction in the US of a couple of years ago when prices spiked above $150 a barrel.

I was not entirely convinced, particularly when he included shale oil gas as amongst new technologies, a climate disaster I would have thought. However, it is true that while many leading pundits think we are now past peak, and the presumably related financial collapse is still getting worse, we may not be staring over the abyss of total collapse and reversion to warlord-ism just yet.

Another theme I would have liked to have discuss with Brand had there been more time (he declined an interview) would have been his view of the prevalence amongst romantic environmentalists of the tragedy of life, and how there is therefore a resistance to engineers coming along trying to fix things. So strongly embedded are we in the idea that humans have gone horribly wrong and we are doomed, we prefer to wallow in the tragedy. If it were possible to fix the world with geo-engineering for example- another of Brand’s themes- that would imply that our excesses, our consumerist habits and inability to stop, and most of all, our presumed separation from “nature” might not be such tragic flaws after all.

These are fascinating ideas, and the bringing together of these two writers, particularly the embracing of science- with all its warts as embodied in the horrible character of Michael Beard- perhaps suggests the great divide between the sciences and the humanities can after all be bridged.