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TODAY Wednesday 28 January 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Things To Come

After the banality and underwhelmingness of last night's State of the Union Address, it is soothing to lose oneself in speculations about the future from a plain-spoken big thinker.

And so we turn to an interview published in the most recent edition of Wired. Stewart Brand talks with Freeman Dyson about almost everything. Of particular interest this morning are the ideas of the 74-year-old wise-man physicist on solar energy and the resuscitation of rural villages.

In the rich countries, Dyson points out, a village revival is already underway, and it's born of the decline of the countryside in industrial economies. National and then global economies stack their incentives against small production units off in the hills; village weavers give way to textile mills and New England sheepherders give way to New Mexicans and New Zealanders. Little farm towns lose population and political heft; megacities arise. This process is occurring today in Asia, Latin America, and east-of-NATO Europe. In Western Europe and North America, Dyson says, the decline has been arrested by rich emigres to the villages from new post-industrial sectors. Drawn by the tranquillity and beauty of nature and the relatively low costs of living, enabled by the decentralist capabilities of the information business, millions of "symbol manipulators" (Robert Reich's happy phrase) are re-populating the villages and caring for the natural and cultural inheritances. Of course there are downsides for the natives, he says, but on balance the emigration is a positive development.

This option is not available to most places in the world, says Dyson, because there aren't enough rich people to go around. For there to be a village revival in poor societies, there has to be development of domestic resources and value-added domestic products. And for that Dyson names three key developments: 1) equalization of access to information, regardless of the user's locale; 2) narrowing of the cost differences between solar energy and oil; and 3) use of biotechnology, "which is essential for using solar energy in crop plants designed to do all the industrial processes."

Brand: "So you're not talking about solar electricity."

Dyson: "That's also part of the deal, but the more important thing is that you'll be able to make your gasoline locally. People will live in the villages and commute to work in the towns, and they'll produce gasoline on the local farms."

Brand: "This is from biomass that you refine right there?"

Dyson: "You don't even have to refine it. The plants produce it."

Brand: "Isn't this a more complicated process?"

Dyson: "True, we don't have the biotech yet. For that I'm talking maybe 50 years -- when we really understand how DNA functions. However, there's no reason plants should be limited to 1 percent efficiency. We know photovoltaics can reach 10 percent quite easily. Plants are stuck at 1 percent because they use a particularly elegant process involving chlorophyll. But it's wasteful; it involves a long chain of chemical reactions. It's a historical relic that plants got stuck with. If you could design a plant from scratch, you'd probably use silicon films instead of chlorophyll to collect sunlight..."

Yikes! We're talking big interventions here, proposed in the name of preserving peace, nature, and culture. Is the Dyson future an affront to Deep Ecology or the precondition for living it?

Indulge me a little on this futurist business. Tomorrow I want to pass along news of another energy strategy -- producing hydrogen fuels from coal and then sequestering carbon dioxide beneath the earth -- and ask how it might relate to the village a la Freeman Dyson and the village of our own short-term dreams.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

For a rundown of Websites on renewable energy, don't fail to look into Jeff Birkby's excellent High Five on the subject. Jeff is one of the Butte Birkbys, on the staff of the National Center for Appropriate Technology.

 

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1/22: No More Roads
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1/20: Electromagnetic Sleuthing
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1/12: Superbowl, Scientific Uncertainty, and the Future of Al Gore
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To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.