Stewart Brand
These days I work half time as president of The Long Now Foundation and half time for Global Business Network (GBN). Occasionally I give talks. Occasionally I write books or articles. It’s been going on for a while—see bio. And etc.
Page updated February, 02010
Stewart Brand
3E Gate 5 Road
Sausalito, CA 94965
email: sb (at) gbn (dot) org
Click for larger photo(s)
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.
The dominant event currently is a book I just finished—Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. It is available in the US from Viking-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.
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.)
