Back to the garden

Whole Earth Discipline 7-8

1. What's Stewart Brand's "gross oversimplification" about romantics, scientists, & engineers? How is it challenged by Paul Hawken? What's the difference between historical and cultural pessimism?

2. Does Brand agree that we have to clean up Earth before we can leave it? What does he think of consistency, ideology, and "solidarity"? Of optimism?

3. What is Biomimicry? What are its basic principles?

4. Was FDR a hedgehog or a fox?

5. What's "bogus" about The Education of Little Tree, The Teachings of Don Juan, etc.? What does Brand claim to have learned from native Americans? Gary Snyder? Kat Anderson? What "primer on how to harness an ecosystem" does Brand recommend?

6. What are the two harsh truths of human prehistory? What is its encouraging lesson?

7. What is the "growing realization" about how to think of protected areas? How does Brand differ with Lovelock over managing nature? Must we (on Brand's view) choose between either tending the wild or leaving it alone? What is a "working wilderness"?

8. What does ecology lack, as a predictive science? What still-hypothetical device might turn it into one?

9. What makes you a native? How well do you score on Brand's "reinhabitory quiz"?