The Visionary

Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand on the future, the environment, libertarianism, and the Merry Pranksters

Brian Doherty from the October 2010 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

reason: Your popularization of that picture of the whole Earth is credited with helping launch modern environmental consciousness and Earth Day. It was Earth Day just the other day. What do you think of it?

Brand: I was much instructed by this film on PBS the other night, Earth Days. Robert Stone put it together. I had not realized on the West Coast the extent to which that first Earth Day was an earthshaking, politics-shaking phenomenon that led directly to Nixon, of all people, encouraging and assigning a whole bunch of tremendously productive green legislation. That first Earth Day was a fabulous accomplishment, much more so than I realized at the time.

reason: You shifted in the 1970s from that earthy, crunchy, rural commune feel to promoting, among other things, space colonies. How did that play with your audience?

Brand: Some people felt we had really betrayed everything they thought we stood for. I felt ill-used by that.

My approach was: A good magazine’s role is to challenge its core readership from time to time. I wish reason did that more often! This was a case of that. I was an enthusiast. My mom passed onto me that space exploration was a fantastic thing, and I loved Gerry O’Neill’s idea of an inside-out planet that gets its gravity by rotation, replacing gravity with centrifugal force. But I also thought it played into some of the commune-starting idea that I had been involved with for a while. Instead of having it in a bus in New Mexico, have a commune in space. I thought that was consistent with what we were doing, but lots of readers thought: “high tech, large scale, therefore bad.”

I also predicted confidently we’d all be in space in a decade or two. That was just wrong. It didn’t happen because we’re at the bottom of a deep gravity well and the costs of getting out of it are horrendous. Whether it will happen remains to be seen.

reason: You worked for Jerry Brown when he was governor of California in the ’70s. What was that like, and are you still an admirer as he runs again?

Brand: I am still in touch with him, and he’s doing amazingly. We are almost exactly the same age, so I keep track of him fairly closely.

I think he’ll be an excellent second governor, and he was first-rate the first time. I was on his personal staff part time, and he hired a whole bunch of people from the Bay Area that he got to know through the San Francisco Zen Center. Through me he got Rusty Schweickart, the astronaut, and Art Rosenfeld, the physicist from Berkeley, who got Jerry and the state thinking seriously about energy conservation. As a direct result of work they did in government we are now in California emitting half the greenhouse gases of any other state per citizen.

Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly were solidly libertarian. I guess I was quasi-libertarian. I went and worked in government at the state level and came to realize all the libertarians I knew then or know now never actually worked in government or served their country in any manner. So lots of theories libertarians have about government are based on zero knowledge, or based on the kind of stuff that goes on in elections.

I discovered when I worked in Sacramento that elected officials are the least clueful, most distracted, and often most harmful people in government. But “faceless bureaucrats,” so called, are a fabulous cadre of public-spirited, hard-working, effective, apolitical players. Both the New Left people I knew and the libertarians were ignorant of practical politics. The only libertarian of prominence I know who worked in government was Robert Heinlein, who had been in the Navy. I got to know him when I worked for Brown. He came to an event Jerry did at the Maritime Training Academy in Vallejo.

reason: Do you still see yourself as having a libertarian streak?

Brand: I see things that take fire on their own, either in the face of government or irrelevant to government, like the Third World slums, and I’m interested and respectful. I also think in biological terms, which is devoid of government.

reason: Your view of the value of squatter slums is an interesting bit of optimism in Whole Earth Discipline. What’s good about them?

Brand: A classic libertarian argument is that people do pretty well when left alone. The slums are a tremendous grassroots release from poverty for millions of people, creating jobs and communities. They do the job incrementally and often with the opposition of city government, regional government, and national government, and nevertheless made a major advance for individuals in the slums themselves and for whole cities and the national economies that they are in.

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Paul|9.10.10 @ 12:40PM|#

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How do you hide a $100 bill from a hippie?

Put it under the soap.

|9.10.10 @ 4:25PM|#

Die, bohab!

SIV|9.10.10 @ 12:55PM|#

But “faceless bureaucrats,” so called, are a fabulous cadre of public-spirited, hard-working, effective, apolitical players.

What Barfman says...

cynical|9.10.10 @ 2:03PM|#

Relative to the political appointees, definitely. As someone married to a faceless bureaucrat (the no-face thing is creepy, but we do it with the lights out), a lot of bureaucrats take the job they're doing seriously -- like all government professions (e.g. cops, teachers) the problem is not so much an absence of good people, but difficulty getting rid of bad people.

Of course, one might argue that the job itself shouldn't be done, but that's a different question altogether. We probably shouldn't send soldiers into Iraq or Afghanistan, but that has no bearing on whether those soldiers are brave and patriotic.

SIV|9.10.10 @ 2:17PM|#

I know individual "dedicated hard-working" government employees. They all complain about the assholes they work with and how their particular bureaucracy is focused on increasing size, power, and funding rather than doing what they are primarily tasked to do.

Wegie|9.10.10 @ 3:37PM|#

If you know two, you probably know them all. Why would they work for the government?

|9.10.10 @ 5:23PM|#

They complain to you but they are apparently OK with being members of a union that enforces the rules that keep the lazy a-holes employed.

Jeff P|9.10.10 @ 1:03PM|#

You want to know how I know the revolution is over? Slayer is on NPR this weekend.
http://www.roadrunnerrecords.c.....mID=145841

Fire Tiger|9.10.10 @ 1:07PM|#

"The Man" is only bad when you aren't him.

The Man|9.10.10 @ 1:46PM|#

Yes of course that's true.

|9.10.10 @ 1:16PM|#

10,000-year thinking is a scoff-worthy notion. I think Taleb would agree. I've wondered, skeptically, about "scenario planning" since I first read that article in Wired - is there anything to it?

Wegie|9.10.10 @ 5:04PM|#

"I've wondered, skeptically, about "scenario planning" since I first read that article in Wired - is there anything to it?"
Yes, here is a simple example....not 10,000 years out, but gets the point across. Those living in the northern areas of North America, Europe and Asia should get out their warmer clothes as it will be getting colder in the next few months.

|9.10.10 @ 8:04PM|#

"10,000-year thinking is a scoff-worthy notion. I think Taleb would agree. I've wondered, skeptically, about "scenario planning" since I first read that article in Wired - is there anything to it?"

No there is nothing to scenario planning. It never works because there is no good way to assign probabilities, often the whole framework is posed wrong (e.g. you are considering climate change scenarios when it turns out you should really be considering depopulation scenarios), the future is never the same as the past etc. I do risk management in finance and it doesn't even work there.

Wegie|9.10.10 @ 9:20PM|#

Come on! My scenario is almost 100% certain.

|9.10.10 @ 1:26PM|#

"My approach was: A good magazine’s role is to challenge its core readership from time to time. I wish reason did that more often!"

Ouch! Burn!

Anyways, why has reason changed their font and layout? The new version sucks

Robert|9.10.10 @ 4:20PM|#

It's as if they wanted to get rid of those readers who are at bifocals age.

Ron L|9.10.10 @ 2:14PM|#

Re: Ehrlich
"And he’s a good guy."
That's nice, but he's been peddling dangerous pap for years.
I guess being nice to dogs counts for more than promoting a particularly pernicious religion.

Wegie|9.10.10 @ 3:39PM|#

Or being intelligent.

LoveItORLeaveIt|9.10.10 @ 2:27PM|#

Don't throw Houston under the bus just because a Walmart opens every now and then.

|9.10.10 @ 3:14PM|#

That comment reaches the the Heights of hilarity.

LoveItORLeaveIt|9.10.10 @ 6:57PM|#

Well done.

Mike Laursen|9.10.10 @ 3:32PM|#

First published in 1968, it spun off one of the most interesting small magazines of the 1970s, CoEvolution Quarterly.

Shit, the most interesting magazine ever.

(Except Playboy, of course. No homo.)

Wegie|9.10.10 @ 3:34PM|#

Why would a magizine called Reason interview someone that believes in AGW??? What kind of insight would you hope to get?

Mike Laursen|9.10.10 @ 3:50PM|#

Drink!

Wegie|9.10.10 @ 4:58PM|#

A Visionary is just a fucking idiot that thinks he can tell the future.

Wegie|9.10.10 @ 5:06PM|#

"My company commander was a black guy in 1961." WOW...really???What color was he in 1962????

|9.10.10 @ 5:26PM|#

Sounds like Spaulding in Caddy Shack - it's good sh*t, I got it from a negro.

Wegie|9.10.10 @ 5:09PM|#

“If you don’t boil rocks and drink the water, how do you know it won’t make you drunk?” Aahhh, my favorite science....Alchemy.

Ronnie|9.10.10 @ 5:47PM|#

and helped inspire Earth Day as an early environmental activist.

Is this the prick that picked Vlad Lenin's birthday?

Mike Laursen|9.10.10 @ 5:57PM|#

I'd be surprised. Not Brand's style to wax romantic about Communists.

Wegie|9.10.10 @ 6:08PM|#

None the less he is a prick!

Wegie|9.10.10 @ 6:09PM|#

Wegie|9.10.10 @ 6:10PM|#

Just to make sure you got the point!

BOB|9.10.10 @ 7:35PM|#

I really liked this interview, really like Brand, and think that, ironically, his very statements showed that Reason is not shy about challenging their readers. Congrats.

Wegie|9.10.10 @ 9:24PM|#

Is that you Brian?

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Ron L|9.11.10 @ 10:09AM|#

^ Uh, this is Stuart Brand; you need to pitch Birkenstocks or Roots...

d|9.11.10 @ 12:39PM|#

Yeah. Dense cities. Big fat targets for unions/terrorists/demagogues/tax collectors. How are you supposed to shoot trespassers if there ain't a property line.

|9.13.10 @ 1:44PM|#

There's always the basement of your parents' house in Hooterville if you don't have the balls to be an urbanite. Hey, wait; you *do* live in the basement of your parents' house in Hooterville.

question ?|9.12.10 @ 12:43PM|#

"...explicitly nonpolitical stance... We’d feature something like Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals...how-to book on how to be politically effective. I understand people are still using it now."

yeah, the same pricks that have used it (Rules) for forty years, you know, the explicitly political jerkoffs that are in power now, the ones that are in control of the big-government institutions, the schools and the military. How can this guy wax romantically about these assholes now?

|9.13.10 @ 3:17AM|#

Hey, I hear the Anti-War Protesters are back in D.C? I wonder if they are going to be called racists!! hahaha.

|9.13.10 @ 7:53AM|#

Why isn't Mr. Brand apologizing for all of the fads that he supported over the years that made life for all of us more difficult and aggravating? I guess he just figures that that stuff is passe, and it is now time to move on to something else a bit more edgy.

Why do we even continue to listen to people like him and Paul Erlich? And why does a magazine called "Reason" waste its time on these people?

MysteryFish|9.13.10 @ 12:22PM|#

It's after noon, I can start drinking now, right?

|9.13.10 @ 12:43PM|#

I expect better from Reason interviews. Jerry Brown was a great governor? Bullcrap. California emits less 1/2 the GH gas per person as the US average? Does that include the electricity they inport from other states because, you know, you can't get a permit to build a plant in good ole CA?

If you toss softballs and never challenge an answer, then why bother with an interview? Just ask him to send you a press release next time.

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