Stewart Brand

Author, Futurist, Activist and Visionary

BIG IDEAS

• City Planet
  A billion people now live in squatter cities, with two billion more coming. The world’s rampant urbanization and squatter cities are major news, and surprisingly good news at that, both economically and environmentally.
• The Greening of Nuclear Power
  Climate change is so catastrophic environmentally that everything must be done to head off its worst effects, including expanding nuclear power.
• The Long Now
  Taking the long view on the impact of humans on the planet. Once you have the perspective of decades and centuries, problems that seemed unsolvable become solvable, and pressing urgencies fade away to expose what is crucial.
• The Future of the Environmental Movement
  Science-attentive Greens will reverse direction on urbanization, population, genetic modification, and nuclear power.
• How Buildings Learn
  Buildings never stop changing. Some do it well and become loved. Some do it badly and get worse over time. The difference is intelligent design and intelligent use.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Since he emerged in the counter-culture sixties, Stewart Brand has been a force in the world for giving access to the information needed to make the planet a better place.

He is a co-founder and managing director of Global Business Network, a scenario strategy consulting business and part of the Monitor Group, where he works with leading companies and public institutions on their futures.

Mr. Brand is the president of The Long Now Foundation. Brand is well known for founding, editing and publishing the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-85), which received a National Book Award for the 1972 issue. In 1984, he founded The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a computer teleconference system for the San Francisco Bay Area. It now has 11,000 active users worldwide and is considered a bellwether of the genre.

Brand has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary center studying the sciences of complexity, since 1989. He received the Golden Gadfly Lifetime Achievement Award from the Media Alliance, San Francisco in the same year. He was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which supports civil rights and responsibilities in electronic media, and is an acting advisor to Ecotrust, the Portland-based preservers of temperate rain forests from Alaska to San Francisco.

Recently, he has advocated nuclear power as a responsible strategy to address power demand in the face of the stark reality of global warming. His seminal essay on this topic, entitled Environmental Heresies, appeared in the MIT Technology Review in May 2005.

Brand is the author of many pioneering books including The Clock Of The Long Now in 1999, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built in 1994, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT in 1987, and Two Cybernetic Frontiers on Gregory Bateson and cutting-edge computer science in 1974. It had the first use of the term "personal computer" in print and was the first book to report on computer hackers.