Stewart Brand
I work half time as president of The Long Now Foundation, mostly these days on a project called “Revive & Restore.” Occasionally I give talks. Occasionally I write books or articles. It’s been going on for a while—see bio. And etc.
Page updated May, 02013
Stewart Brand
3E Gate 5 Road
Sausalito, CA 94965
email: sb@longnow.org
[My old email address of
sb @ gbn.org IS NO LONGER FUNCTIONING]
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Past books: Two Cybernetic Frontiers (1974), The Media Lab (1987), How Buildings Learn (1994), The Clock of the Long Now (2000).
What do I usually do? I find things and I found things. Things I find include tools, ideas, books, and people, which I blend and purvey. Things I’ve founded and co-founded include the Trips Festival (1966), Whole Earth Catalog (1968), Hackers Conference (1984), The WELL (1984), Global Business Network (1988), and The Long Now Foundation (1996).
Less well known things I’ve started and co-started... New Games (1973), CoEvolution Quarterly (1974), Uncommon Courtesy (1982), GBN Book Club (1988), All Species Inventory (2001), and Long Bets (2001) and Seminars About Long-term Thinking (2003)—both within Long Now.
My slightly previous books is out in paperback with a wordy new subtitle—Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary. (The British edition adds “Radical Science” to the list.) It is available in the US from Penguin and in the UK from Atlantic.
Blurb excerpts (full blurbs here): “Likely one of the most original and important books of the century.… a mindbending exploration of what humankind can and must do to retain the mantle of civilization.”—PAUL HAWKEN.
“This book is truly important and a joy to read.”—JAMES LOVELOCK “Ominous and exhilarating.” —EDWARD O. WILSON “Read this deeply engaging book and be prepared to do some serious re-thinking.”—IAN McEWAN “Read it from cover to cover and get ready to join the fierce debate it will spark.”—PAUL ROMER
“Smart, practical, wise and full of goodwill.”—RICHARD RHODES “This is a short course on how to change your mind intelligently.”—KEVIN KELLY “…charts a way forward that shatters conventional thinking, and yet leaves one brimming with hope. It has been years since I have read a book that in so many ways changed the way I think about so many fundamental issues.”—WADE DAVIS “I adored this book. Even the few parts I disagreed with.”—MATT RIDLEY “It could be one of the most important books of the decade.”—LARRY BRILLIANT “Perhaps its greatest achievement will be to reframe this global crisis as an opportunity for civilisational regeneration.”—BRIAN ENO
Review excerpts (full reviews here): “Breathtaking in scope and implication—a must-read.”—KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review) “Environmentalism’s pithiest polemicist has outdone himself, giving us one of the most important green tracts since Silent Spring.”—FORTUNE “A lucid big picture put together with experience, wisdom and optimism.”—NATURE “Essential reading for all.”—LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review) “Starkly candid and highly entertaining.”—WASHINGTON TIMES “Grow up, Greens!”—LITERARY REVIEW “A tour-de-force of persuasion.”—Tim O’Reilly, GOOD READS “Fresh. Important. Wise. Readable and information-dense.” —Eric Drexler, METAMODERN. “The book as a whole is this year’s must-read for anyone who considers himself an open-minded green.” —Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees, in NEW STATESMAN. “It’s one of those books that you want to press on people and insist they read.”—THE INDEPENDENT. No reader will agree with everything Brand recommends, but we ought to carefully consider everything he discusses in this beautifully written and closely reasoned fact-based analysis. —Mark Tercek, CEO of The Nature Conservancy, in SCIENCE CHRONICLES.
In June 2009 I gave a talk for TED at the U.S. State Department flying low and fast over some of what is in the book—17 minutes total. You can see the video here.
Anything written by me here is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. (Please don’t ask permission to borrow my stuff: just do it.)
A one-hour version of my book tour talk was aired on C-Span Book TV. That one is here.
Just like that I have a new book out:
On Kindle for $2.99. It’s the most condensed writing I’ve ever done, summarizing in a few paragraphs the ideas about long-term thinking of Jared Diamond, Craig Venter, Bruce Sterling, Jill Tarter, Martin Rees, Clay Shirky, Niall Ferguson, Jimmy Wales, Mary Catherine Bateson, Paul Hawken, Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil, Sam Harris, Will Wright, Orville Schell, Nassim Taleb, Michael Pollan, Wade Davis, Lera Boroditsky, David Eagleman, Richard Rhodes, Paul Romer, Matt Ridley, and more... Brian Eno wrote the Foreword.
SALT stands for Seminars About Long-term Thinking, the monthly talks I’ve been curating for The Long Now Foundation in San Francisco since 02003. After each talk I email out my summary of its most essential news. There have been 100 such talks and summaries now (some of them written by Kevin Kelly or Paul Saffo when I was out of town). These have been brilliant speakers, adroitly wrangled by Long Now staffers Danielle Engelman, Laura Welcher, and Alexander Rose—who are also responsible, along with Ben Keating, for this instant book. Great videos of the talks are here.
