Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American project developer and writer, best known as the co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. Other organizations he has founded include 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 and Maintenance: Of Everything.

Life

Brand was born in Rockford, Illinois, and attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He studied biology at Stanford University under Paul R. Ehrlich, 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 moved back to California, where he has mostly lived since. He studied design at San Francisco Art Institute, photography at San Francisco State College, and participated in a scientific study of then-legal LSD with Myron Stolaroff's International Foundation for Advanced Study, in Menlo Park, California.

Brand became acquainted with Richard Raymond, a land-use and community-development expert turned entrepreneur, who had established a nonprofit society, the Portola Institute in Menlo Park. Raymond had become a consultant to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation and recommended Brand for a job there as a photographer.

In 1966, Brand married the mathematician Lois Jennings, Native American. The couple divorced in 1973.

Brand met Ryan Phelan when she applied for a job to work at Whole Earth Catalog, and the two married in 1983. The couple lives on Mirene, a -long working tugboat. Built in 1912, the boat is moored in a former shipyard in Sausalito, California. He works in Mary Heartline, a grounded fishing boat about 100 yards (90 metres) away. Tom Wolfe includes Brand in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

NASA images of Earth

thumb|Earth from space, by [[ATS-3 satellite, 1967]]

thumb|[[Earthrise, by William Anders, Apollo 8, 1968]]

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. He then campaigned to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He sold and distributed buttons for 25 cents each, asking, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" During this campaign, Brand met Richard Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help Brand with his projects.

In 1967, the ATS-3 satellite took the photo Brand had envisioned. He thought the image of our planet would be a powerful symbol and featured it on the first (fall 1968) edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. Later in 1968, NASA astronaut Bill Anders took an Earth photo,

Brand surmised that given the necessary consciousness, information, and tools, human beings could reshape the world they had made (and were making) for themselves into something environmentally and socially sustainable.

Whole Earth Catalog

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, about 10 million Americans were involved in living communally. In 1968, using the most basic approaches to typesetting and page layout, Brand and his colleagues created issue number one of the Whole Earth Catalog, with the subtitle "access to tools". Until 1980, editions of the Whole Earth Catalog were published by the Portola Institute.

Steve Jobs ended his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University by acknowledging both Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, quoting its farewell message: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish".

CoEvolution Quarterly

thumb|Brand with [[passenger pigeon study skins]]

To continue his work and also to publish full-length articles on specific topics in the natural sciences and invention, in numerous areas of the arts and the social sciences, and on the contemporary scene in general, Brand founded CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974, aimed primarily at educated laypeople. Brand never better revealed his opinions and reason for hope than when he ran, in CoEvolution Quarterly #4, a transcription of technology historian Lewis Mumford's talk "The Next Transformation of Man", in which he stated that "man has still within him sufficient resources to alter the direction of modern civilization, for we then need no longer regard man as the passive victim of his own irreversible technological development".

The content of CoEvolution Quarterly often included futurism or risqué topics. Besides giving space to unknown writers with something to say, Brand presented articles by many respected authors and thinkers, including Mumford, Howard T. Odum, Witold Rybczynski, Karl Hess, Orville Schell, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Bateson, Amory Lovins, Hazel Henderson, Gary Snyder, Lynn Margulis, Eric Drexler, Gerard K. O'Neill, Peter Calthorpe, Sim Van der Ryn, Paul Hawken, John Todd, Kevin Kelly, and Donella Meadows. In the ensuing years, Brand authored and edited a number of books on topics as diverse as computer-based media, the life history of buildings, and ideas about space colonies.

In 1984, Brand founded the Whole Earth Software Review, a supplement to the Whole Earth Software Catalog. It was merged with CoEvolution Quarterly to form the Whole Earth Review in 1985.

California government

From 1977 to 1979, Brand served as "special advisor" to the administration of California Governor Jerry Brown.<!-- Image with inadequate rationale removed: right --> The WELL won the 1990 Best Online Publication Award from the Computer Press Association.

All Species Foundation

In 2000, Brand helped launch the All Species Foundation, which aimed to catalog all species of life on Earth. The project ceased functioning in 2007, transferring its mission to the Encyclopedia of Life. in the May 2005 issue of the MIT Technology Review, in which he described what he considered 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.

Brand later developed these ideas into a book and published Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto in 2009. The book examines how urbanization, nuclear power, genetic engineering, geoengineering, and wildlife restoration can be used as powerful tools in humanity's ongoing fight against global warming.

In a 2019 interview, Brand described his perspective as "post-libertarian", indicating that at the time when the Whole Earth Catalog was being written, he did not fully understand the significance of the role of government in the development of technology and engineering.

Long Now Foundation

Brand is co‑chair and president of the board of directors of the Long Now Foundation and chairs the foundation's Seminars About Long-term Thinking. This series on long-term thinking has presented a range of speakers, including Brian Eno, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, Philip Rosedale, Jimmy Wales, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling, and Cory Doctorow. The Long Now Foundation has worked with Jeff Bezos to build the 10,000 Year Clock.

Brand is the subject of the 2021 documentary film We Are As Gods.

Works

Stewart Brand is the initiator or was involved with the development of the following:

  • Whole Earth Catalog in 1968
  • CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974
  • Whole Earth Software Catalog and Review in 1984
  • Whole Earth Review in 1985
  • Point Foundation
  • Global Business Network (co-founder) The other authors included: Barry Brook, Ruth DeFries, Erle Ellis, David Keith, Mark Lynas, Ted Nordhaus, Roger A. Pielke Jr., Michael Shellenberger, and Robert Stone.

Publications

Books

  • II Cybernetic Frontiers, 1974, (hardcover), (paperback)
  • The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, 1987, (hardcover); 1988, (paperback)
  • How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built, 1994.
  • The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, 1999.
  • Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Viking Adult, 2009.
  • The Salt Summaries: Seminars About Long-term Thinking, Long Now Press, 2011. (paperback)
  • Maintenance: Of Everything, Stripe Press, 2025.

Editor or co-editor

  • Whole Earth Catalog, original editor, 1968–1972 – winner of the National Book Award, 1972
  • Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 1971
  • Whole Earth Epilog: Access to Tools, 1974,
  • The (Updated) Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 16th edition, 1975,
  • Space Colonies, Whole Earth Catalog, 1977,
  • Soft-Tech, co-editor with J. Baldwin, 1978,
  • The Next Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 1980,
  • The Next Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, revised 2nd edition, 1981,
  • Whole Earth Software Catalog, editor-in-chief, 1984,
  • Whole Earth Software Catalog for 1986, editor-in-chief, 1985, – "2.0 edition" of above title
  • News That Stayed News, 1974–1984: Ten Years of CoEvolution Quarterly, co-editor with Art Kleiner, 1986, (hardcover), (paperback)

Contributor

  • The Essential Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas, 1986, – introduction
  • Signal: Communication Tools for the Information Age, edited by Kevin Kelly, 1988, – foreword
  • The Fringes of Reason: A Whole Earth Catalog, edited by Ted Schultz, 1989, – foreword
  • Whole Earth Ecolog: The Best of Environmental Tools & Ideas, edited by J. Baldwin, 1990, – foreword

See also

  • Bright green environmentalism

References

Further reading

  • Binkley, Sam. Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
  • Brokaw, Tom. "Stewart Brand". BOOM! Voices of the Sixties. New York: Random House, 2007.
  • Phil Garlington, "Stewart Brand", Outside, December 1977.
  • Kirk, Andrew G. Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007.
  • Markoff, John. Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. New York: Penguin, 2022.
  • Markoff, John. What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. New York: Penguin, 2005.
  • Sam Martin and Matt Scanlon, "The Long Now: An Interview with Stewart Brand", Mother Earth News, January 2001
  • Whole Earth Catalog, various issues, 1968–1998.
  • CoEvolution Quarterly (in the 1980s, renamed Whole Earth Review, later just Whole Earth), various issues, 1974–2002.
  • Stewart Brand Papers housed at Stanford University Libraries