1 Video to Watch This Week: Stewart Brand's 4 environmental heresies

by Emily Gertz · 2009-07-21 20:14:00 UTC
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One of the founders of the modern environmental movement, Stewart Brand, has been reconsidering his positions on a few mundane matters related to preserving the environment, feeding the exploding human population, and stabilizing the climate.

Brand has been incalculably influential in American environmental and internet cultures. In just a few examples: Brand helped catalyze the early years of the sustainable communities and DIY movements in the late Sixties and early Seventies with the Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of tools, reviews, and information. Brand uttered his famous aphorism, "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive," at the inaugural Hackers Conference in 1984, an event he co-founded to gather together the early pioneers of the computer revolution. And he co-founded one of the earliest of influential online communities, The WELL, way back in 1985.

So if he now thinks slums will be drivers of green innovation, and micronuclear reactors and geo-engineering are crucial to stopping global warming, it's worth paying attention.

Emily Gertz
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