Stewart Brand

“Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations, including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. Brand was born in Rockford, Illinois and attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He studied biology at Stanford University, graduating in 1960. As a soldier in the U.S. Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills; he later expressed the view that his experience in the military had fostered his competence in organizing. A civilian again in 1962, he studied design at San Francisco Art Institute, photography at San Francisco State College, and participated in a legitimate scientific study of then-legal LSD, in Menlo Park, California. In 1966, he married mathematician Lois Jennings, an Ottawa Native American. Brand has lived in California since the 1960s. He and his second wife live on Mirene, a 64-foot (20 m)-long working tugboat. Built in 1912, the boat is moored in a former shipyard in Sausalito, California. … By the mid-1960s, Brand became associated with New York multimedia group USCO and Bay Area author Ken Kesey and his ‘Merry Pranksters‘. Brand co-produced the Trips Festival, an early effort involving rock music and light shows, in San Francisco with Kesey and Ramón Sender Barayón. This was one of the first venues at which the Grateful Dead performed in San Francisco. About 10,000 hippies attended, and Haight-Ashbury soon emerged as a community. Tom Wolfe describes Brand in his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In 1966, while on an LSD trip on the roof of his house in North Beach, San Francisco, Brand became convinced that seeing an image of the whole Earth would change how we think about the planet and ourselves. … It adorned the first (Fall 1968) edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. … In 1985, Brand and Larry Brilliant founded The WELL (‘Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link’), a prototypical, wide-ranging online community for intelligent, informed participants the world over. … The Whole Earth Catalog implied an ideal of human progress that depended on decentralized, personal, and liberating technological development—so‑called ‘soft technology’. However, during 2005 he criticized aspects of the international environmental ideology he had helped to develop. He wrote an article called ‘Environmental Heresies’ in the May 2005 issue of the MIT Technology Review, in which he describes what he considers necessary changes to environmentalism. He suggested among other things that environmentalists embrace nuclear power and genetically modified organisms as technologies with more promise than risk. …”
Wikipedia, W – Whole Earth Discipline
Stewart Brand’s Strange Trip: Whole Earth to Nuclear Power (Dec. 2009)
TED – Stewart Brand (Video)
Stewart Brand (Video)
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