Friday, September 16, 2022

“Life Goes On” With Stewart Brand

About as un-Wendell as you can get…

Stewart Brand was born in 1938. In 1964, he was hanging out with Ken Kesey's "Merry Pranksters" at the center of the LSD counterculture described in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In 1966 he realized a satellite image of the Earth could be a powerful symbol for holistic environmental thinking, and launched a campaign to get such a photo released by NASA. In 1968, he succeeded, and the first satellite photo of the whole Earth, taken by the geostationary satellite ATS-3, appeared on the cover of Stewart's famous counterculture zine The Whole Earth Catalog. Later that year, he was the cameraman for Douglas Englebart's demonstration "Mother of All Demos," which laid the foundations of interactive graphical computing. 

As a lifelong visionary and an adventurer with a unique mix of scientific education, Army officer experience, and classy pedigree, Brand participated in many of the key scenes and events of late twentieth-century American culture.

More recently, he is known for cofounding the Long Now Foundation, which has built a clock inside a mountain designed to run for 10,000 years to promote long-term thinking, and the Revive & Restore project, which is applying genetic technology to wildlife conservation, ideally including the resurrection of the woolly mammoth.

Stewart often warns that "we are as gods and have to get good at it." Humanity has become a planetary force with an emerging planetary consciousness. What kind of civilizations emerge from taking that seriously? We called him up at his library north of San Francisco to discuss the future of man's dealings with nature…


https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/09/14/life-goes-on-with-stewart-brand/

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