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THE WHOLE WORLD
The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
In 1966, Stewart Brand was an imprint of the Bay Area counterculture. As the host of a music and psychedelic simulation called the Festival of Travels, it was, according to him. by John Markoff In “Whole Earth”, “she is shirtless, has a large Indian necklace around her neck… and wears a black top hat capped with a distinctive feather.” Forty years later, Brand had become a business consultant. at a meeting with Nuclear Energy Institutepromoted the virtues and inevitability of nuclear power. He also wrote a book affirming genetically modified organisms, geoengineering, and urban density.
It’s Markoff’s challenge to monitor the relationship between these two Stewart Brands and what the distance they’ve come can say about the American environmental movement. A former New York Times tech writer whose previous work explored the intersection of counterculture and computing, Markoff now focuses on Brand’s unpredictable path as a “quixote-like intellectual poet”, a “provocateur” and, in Brand’s own words, an “echo”. -pragmatist.”
Now 83, Brand has an extraordinary ability to spark ideas, bring people together and put on memorable shows. The Festival of Travels was a three-day, drug-filled dance party that helped launch the Grateful Dead and spread the hippie movement to the wider world. In 1984, Brand chaired the first hackers conference. A year later, he founded an early Bay Area online internet community.
In 1968, Brand and his first wife, Lois Jennings, used family money for their signature project, Whole Earth Catalog. The eclectic release was a print festival. In oversized, illustrated pages, he combined instruction manuals for commune residents and “suburban guerrillas” with contact information for ordering early REI equipment and bulk natural foods. Alongside multimedia equipment promotions were summaries of environmental books and guides to natural childbirth, massage, and various New Age wonders. Did the catalog make sense? No, but that was his genius—he didn’t have to reconcile enthusiasm for technological innovation with a respect for a life back to earth. The 1971 edition won the National Book Award in contemporary affairs and has sold over a million copies.
Often historians or biographers lament a lack of access to the inner thoughts of their subjects or to detailed records of their activities. “Whole Earth” draws on Markoff’s extensive personal diaries and correspondence, along with more than 70 personal interviews with Brand. Markoff recalls Brand’s visit to a sex worker in Paris, his dreams with Tolkien, his skydiving and travel adventures. Sometimes, reading “All the World” feels like being sober at a psychedelic party. “It was a mountain for a while,” Markoff writes of an LSD trip Brand experienced while visiting Navajo Nation country in the mid-1960s. “Then he returned to the hogan and made coffee and walked around the stove naked, waving the cheese in his hand like an imaginary conductor.”
But the book offers a less critical perspective on Brand’s life and work. Markoff aims to illuminate tensions about how environmentalism relates to science and technology, but struggles to effectively place Brand’s contributions in the context of a more complex and broader movement. Perhaps this is because in the end Brand drove a series of waves, but did not create them.
Take a campaign that Brand launched in 1966 on a revelation he (inevitably) got after a trip to LSD. Brand decided that a photo of Earth from space could blow people’s minds. “Why haven’t we seen a photo of the whole Earth yet?” He pressed the buttons. Wearing a blue sandwich board asking the same question at Day-Glo red, Brand handed out buttons at universities in the Bay Area and the Northeast. Some fell into the hands of scientists at NASA. Eventually, of course, NASA released outstanding photos, including the famous image of Earth floating in space and colorful pictures. One of the photos gave the Whole Earth Catalog its name and cover art.
It’s a great story and captures Brand’s knack for performance art, but Markoff wants more and attributes to Brand a “seismic shift in our thinking.” He argues that the “single symbol of the whole Earth” stimulates the idea of a new “unified planetary culture”. However, global environmentalism, II. The horrors of World War II began much earlier, as a result of the growing awareness of the terrifying power of nuclear weapons and the interconnected nature of the planet’s resources. When distributing Brand buttons, the authors Kenneth Boulding and barbara ward As travelers in the “Spaceship World,” they were publishing influential works that expressed a holistic view of humankind. When Markoff writes about the American environmental movement, he doesn’t really connect the breakthroughs in Washington, D.C. represented by the Bay Area counterculture Brand, with the inventions of the 1970s that led to the passage of fundamental laws that protect clean air, clean water, and endangered species. .
In his late 60s and 70s, Brand reverted to his previous self. He decided that many cross-cultural objections to technology and science were blind to the need for economic growth. He has come to view the rejection of nuclear power as completely dangerous because of the impact of fossil fuels on climate change. In Brand magazine, he listed places he thought had failed, including “drugs, communes, spiritual practices, New Left politics, solar water heaters, domes, small farms, free schools, free sex, and more.” “My fault,” he concluded. Markoff may have forced Brand to learn more about his shift in values. In our hyper-online materialistic world, does the 70s really have nothing to teach us?
The brand’s passion for show has recently become a hour It is designed to keep time for 10,000 years. When ready, the clock will be set on a mountain in West Texas on land owned by Jeff Bezos. Brand and his collaborators hope the watch will encourage humanity to think long-term on the timescale of civilization. A visit will require a pilgrimage to the mountains, where visitors can help strengthen the mechanism.
The clock doesn’t solve anything by itself. But if it blows our minds for a moment or opens it up to the next millennium, it would be a fitting Brand legacy.
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