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Tips to run a successful small business Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Also in Business: TIME WILL TELL Stewart Brand with a chime prototype for his 10,000-year clock. Getting paid, one way or another How to promote your business with a company blog By JOHN TIERNEY Find new ways of custom-blending careers Published: February 27, 2007 SIGN IN TO E-MAIL OR SAVE THIS Correction Appended PRINT MOST POPULAR Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he SINGLE PAGE E-MAILED BLOGGED SEARCHED helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that REPRINTS environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose 1. Op-Ed Contributor: Women Are Never Front-Runners SHARE 2. The Falling-Down Professions their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. 3. Skin Deep: Short, Stout, Has a Handle on Colds They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering. 4. David Brooks: McCain and Obama He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which 5. Second Opinion: For Cancer Patients, Empathy Goes a Long Way TierneyLab sounds rather improbable — or at least it would if anyone else 6. Can Burt’s Bees Turn Clorox Green? Stewart Brand on had made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the 7. Is Prefab Fab? MoMA Plans a Show the safety of zeitgeist, never underestimate Stewart Brand. 8. What Is It About Mormonism? genetic 9. Stanley Fish - Think Again: Will the Humanities Save engineering. He divides environmentalists into romantics and scientists, the Us? 10. A Safety-Net Hospital Falls Into Financial Crisis Join the two cultures he’s been straddling and blending since the 1960s. discussion. He was with the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead at their Go to Complete List » Go to TierneyLab » famous Trips Festival in San Francisco, directing a multimedia show called “America Needs Indians.” That’s somewhere in the Further Reading neighborhood of romantic. "Environmental Heresies." Stewart Brand. Technology Review, May nytimes.com/politics 2005. But he created the shows drawing on the cybernetic theories of Norbert Wiener, the M.I.T. mathematician who applied Stewart Brand Web Page. principles of machines and electrical networks to social "An Interview With Stewart Brand." Conservation, May-June 2006. institutions. Mr. Brand imagined replacing the old technocratic The Long Now Foundation. hierarchies with horizontal information networks — a scientific Global Business Network vision that seemed quaintly abstract until the Internet came along. "Betting on the Planet." John Mr. Brand, who is now 68 and lives on a tugboat in Sausalito, Complete coverage from New Hampshire Tierney. The New York Times Calif., has stayed ahead of the curve for so long — as a Also in Politics: Magazine, Dec. 2. 1990. (Times All about the primaries publisher, writer, techno-guru, enviro-philosopher, supreme Photograph your polling place Select Content) Watch the debates and analyze the transcripts networker — that he’s become a cottage industry in academia. "The Clock of the Long Now." Stewart Brand. Basic Books, 1999. Last year, Fred Turner of Stanford published “From "From Counterculture to Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the ADVERTISEMENTS Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.” This fall Andy Digital Utopianism." Fred Turner. Kirk of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is putting out All the news that's fit to personalize. University of Chicago Press, 2006. “Counterculture Green: The Environmentalism of Stewart Brand "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." Tom Wolfe. Farrar, Strauss and and the Whole Earth Catalog.” By next year we should be due Giroux, 1968. for a revisionist historian’s discovery of a modern social movement that Mr. Brand did not orchestrate.

Enlarge This Image In addition to publishing the Whole Earth Catalog, he organized the first Hackers Conference, in 1984, and helped found The Wind Power Turbine - 2006 Buy Now WELL, the early electronic community that was a sort of prototype of the Web. In Professor Turner’s history, he was the impresario who knew everyone and brought the counterculture and the cyberculture together, from the Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s to Wired magazine in the 1990s.

He is now promoting environmental heresies, as he called them in Technology Review. He sees genetic engineering as a tool for environmental protection: crops designed to grow on less land with less pesticide; new microbes that protect ecosystems against invasive species, produce new fuels and maybe sequester carbon. Ted Streshinsky/Corbis AHEAD OF THE CURVE Stewart Brand, who helped found the environmentalist He thinks the fears of genetically engineered bugs causing movement, balancing atop an Earth ball at disaster are as overstated as the counterculture’s fears of the New Games in 1973 in Marin County, Calif. computers turning into Big Brother. “Starting in the 1960s, hackers turned computers from organizational control machines into individual freedom machines,” he told Conservation magazine last year. “Where are the green biotech hackers?”

He’s also looking for green nuclear engineers, and says he feels guilty that he and his fellow environmentalists created so much fear of nuclear power. Alternative energy and conservation are fine steps to reduce carbon emissions, he says, but now nuclear power is a proven technology working on a scale to make a serious difference.

“There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective,” he says. “Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don’t know where it is and you don’t know what it’s doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody’s atmosphere.”

Mr. Brand predicts that his heresies will become accepted in the next decade as the scientific minority in the environmental movement persuades the romantic majority. He still considers himself a member of both factions, just as in the days of the Merry Pranksters, but he’s been shifting toward the minority.

“My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by,” he says. “I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind.”

Mr. Brand got his first look at the big picture one afternoon in 1966 while sitting on a roof in San Francisco at what he calls an “altitude of three stories and 100 mikes,” meaning micrograms of LSD. He contemplated the skyline and decided the buildings weren’t parallel because he was seeing the curvature of the Earth. This reminded him of Buckminster Fuller’s theory that people abused the environment because they thought of the Earth as flat and infinite, not as a finite globe. The next day the Earth looked flat again, but the 28-year-old Mr. Brand had a new cause. He printed up buttons asking, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”

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Correction: February 28, 2007

The Findings column in Science Times yesterday, about the environmentalist Stewart Brand, gave the incorrect surname in some references for an economist who made a bet about the prices of natural resources in the 1980s. He is Julian Simon, not Sinon.

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