Stewart Brand

Here is a link to a an interesting new book by Julia Gordon. She just graduated from Washington University in St Louis as a graphic design major, and for her senior thesis she designed an informational book, using the chapter "Green Genes" from Stewart Brand's book "Whole Earth Discipline". For this project she used his text as the body for the book, and created additional images, graphics, maps, captions and footnotes to accompany the text. When given the assignment to design an informational book for her thesis, she was excited to base it on Green Genes because she found it "eye opening,…

In the mid-1970s, the U.S. State Department prohibited the internal use of the term "space colony," due to the global bad reputation of colonialism. Instead, the government opted for "space settlement." Of course, as Stewart Brand pointed out at the time, the last thing you do in space is settle. Quite the opposite! Making the decision to explore space -- and live there -- is just about the most unsettled act a human can commit. There have always been two camps on this issue. First, the unsettled, like Brand: the science-fiction aficionados, capitalists, rocketry geeks, macrocosmic thinkers,…

Following in the footsteps of The Great Global Warming Swindle Channel 4 has produced a new documentary that also appears to favour being controversial over being accurate or fair: What the Green Movement Got Wrong. Adam Werbach who was in the documentary protested that his views were misrepresented and tried to have his contribution removed. He writes: In one scene they interspersed heart-wrenching photos of starving children in Zambia, their emaciated mouths crying out for help, with a story of how the environmental movement blocked the delivery of food aid to Zambia from the United States…

The word is spreading- we can feed the world without damaging it, if we can entertain some new ideas. Check out Paul Voosen's article in the NYT and let me know what you think.

One of the pleasures of reading Stewart Brand's new book, "Whole Earth Discipline", is that when it comes to managing the Earth's ecosystem, he is unconstrained by conventional wisdom. In a break with many old-school environmentalists, Brand argues that the established Green agenda is outdated, too negative, too tradition bound, too specialized, too politically one-sided to address the scale of environmental problems that we face today. Who better to challenge the rigidity of the long-respected environmental movement than the distinguished writer, lecturer and author of the classic Whole…