Big Think Interview With Stewart Brand | Big Think

Big Think Interview With Stewart Brand

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Stewart Brand:

Stewart Brand is an author, pioneering environmentalist, and former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, which he published from 1968 through 1998. In the early 1960s he served as an infrantryman in the U.S. Army and was subsequently associated with Ken Kesey's "Merry Pranksters" movement. He is president of The Long Now Foundation and co-founder of the Global Business Network (GBN), a consulting firm that helps businesses, NGOs, and governments plan for multiple possible futures. His most recent book, "The Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto," was published by Viking-Penguin in 2009.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What visionaries excited you growing up?

Stewart Brand: Growing up. Well, my mother I guess was a thinker and a visionary because she was, among other things, focused on space exploration. This was in the 1950's. One result of that was when the Apollo Space Program came along in the ‘60’s; a lot of my fellow environmentalists were against it for various weirdly technical reasons. And all I saw was pure adventure and let's get on with it. And so, as a result of that, I was onboard with space and pushed, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" in 1966. And then we got the photograph and that created the environmental movement out of almost nothing.

I was sort of acting as if I was lobbying NASA to get images of the earth from space, but I was really lobbying the populace of the world to pay attention to the image and to think about the image a little bit in advance so that when we got it, there would be that shock of recognition; we have this big new mirror to think about ourselves in regard to, and also to think about it as a finite, fragile-looking place that we live.

I was pretty sure that that set of things would occur when we had the photograph. Amazingly enough, they did occur, and that photograph became so iconic that it replaced the previous iconic image of the earth, which was the mushroom cloud of the Cold War, so you got rid of a bad image and got a very positive image that is still with us. And that’s why I wanted it for the cover of my new book.

Question: Which shaped you more, the military or the Merry Pranksters?

Stewart Brand: Which was more important between Merry Prankster-dom and U.S. Infantry? They're about equal and matched and are sort of bookends in a way because I was at Fort Dix and my weekends I was running basic training as a Second Lieutenant there. And then my weekends were in the Lower East Side in New York hanging out with artists, with a group that would later be called **** and messing with psychedelic drugs and the weekend to week contrast was just the sort of life you want to have as a young man.

Question: How did your two separate lives affect one another?

Stewart Brand: Well, military training is fantastic, especially for an officer, I think especially for an infantry officer because you learn how to lead, you learn how to manage, you learn how to handle, at least small units. And as a very young person, you learn how to take charge. So, typically a 20 or 21-year-old isn't in charge of much in civilian life, but I was in charge of a platoon of 50 people including some very experienced Sergeants. You find that you step up to the responsibilities you are handed and so, when I came out of that and went off into a kind of freelance civilian world, I expected to be in charge of things and I knew how to be. So, one of the things I found with the Merry Pranksters and the Ken Kesey group is there were a number of ex-military people in that group. Kesey was not, but his number two, Ken Babbs had been a helicopter pilot with the Marines in Vietnam, there were two other guys in the group who had been in the military, and that gave us a common language and a set of understandings and approach to field expedience that you can just accomplish your mission with whatever is at hand. That's what you do in the military. You never have enough stuff, you never have the right gear, you never have enough people, and so you figure out some way to make the right thing happen with what you've got. And that's good training.

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