
Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, is 83 years old today.
Brand founded a number of organizations, including 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.
Brand attended Phillips Exeter Academy, before studying biology at Stanford University, from which he graduated in 1960. As a soldier in the U.S. Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills. He was later to express the view that his experience in the military had fostered his competence in organizing.
A civilian again in 1962, he studied design at San Francisco Art Institute, photography at San Francisco State College and participated in a legitimate scientific study of then-legal LSD in Menlo Park, California.
Brand has lived in California ever since. He and his wife live on Mirene, a 64-foot-long working tugboat. Built in 1912, the boat is moored in a former shipyard in Sausalito.
Brand works in Mary Heartline, a grounded fishing boat about 100 yards away. A favorite item of his is a table on which Otis Redding is said to have written “(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay.” Brand acquired it from an antiques dealer in Sausalito.
Through scholarship and by visiting numerous Indian reservations, he familiarized himself with the Native Americans of the West. Native Americans have continued to be an important cultural interest, an interest which has re-emerged in Brand's work in various ways through the years.
By the mid-1960s, he was associated with author Ken Kesey and the "Merry Pranksters." In San Francisco, with his partner, Zach Stewart, Brand produced the Trips Festival, an early effort involving rock music and light shows.
This was one of the first venues at which the Grateful Dead performed in San Francisco. About 10,000 attended and Haight-Ashbury emerged as a community.
Tom Wolfe describes Brand in the beginning of his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
In 1966, Brand campaigned to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He distributed buttons for 25 cents each asking, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" He thought the image of our planet might be a powerful symbol.
In 1967, a satellite took the photo. It adorned the first (Fall, 1968) edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. Later in 1968, a NASA astronaut took an Earth photo from Moon orbit, which became the Catalog's next front image in spring, 1969.
In 1970, Earth Day began to be celebrated. During a 2003 interview, Brand explained that the image "gave the sense that Earth’s an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And it’s so graphic, this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum."
In late 1968, Brand assisted electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart with The Mother of All Demos, a famous presentation of many revolutionary computer technologies (including hypertext, email and the mouse) to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.
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.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, about 10 million Americans were involved in living communally. In 1968, using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, Brand and his colleagues created issue #1 of The Whole Earth Catalog, a book with the significant subtitle, "access to tools.”
Brand and his wife Lois travelled to communes in a 1963 Dodge truck known as the Whole Earth Truck Store, which moved to a storefront in Menlo Park, California.
That first oversize Catalog, and its successors in the 1970s and later, reckoned that many sorts of things were useful "tools": books, maps, garden tools, specialized clothing, carpenters' and masons' tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers and personal computers.
The influence of these Whole Earth Catalogs on the rural back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, and the communities movement within many cities, was widespread throughout the United States, Canada and Australia. A 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies, and it won the first U.S. National Book Award in category Contemporary Affairs.
To continue this work and also to publish full-length articles on specific topics in the natural sciences and invention, Brand founded the CoEvolution Quarterly (CQ) during 1974. It was aimed primarily at educated laypersons.
In 1985, Brand and Larry Brilliant founded The WELL ("Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"), a prototypical, wide-ranging online community for intelligent, informed participants the world over. The WELL won the 1990 Best Online Publication Award from the Computer Press Association.
Almost certainly the ideas behind the WELL were greatly inspired by Douglas Engelbart's work at SRI International. Brand was acknowledged by Engelbart in "The Mother of All Demos" in 1968 when the computer mouse and video conferencing were introduced.
A few of Brand's aphorisms (on which he has elaborated) are that civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.
These include "Environmental health requires peace, prosperity and continuity,” "Technology can be good for the environment" and (perhaps most famously) "Information wants to be free."
