Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand is a pioneer of information technology and was once the editor of the counterculture manual The Whole Earth Catalog. According to an article for Southeast Farm Press in the US, he was "one of the poster children for the environmental movement".

Views

Brand is a champion of nuclear power and genetic engineering. He has argued for the acceptance of genetically engineered crops in organic food production. According to a New York Times article, he now "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."

Brand is well known for promoting technical solutions to environmental and other problems. "We are as gods", he wrote in the first Whole Earth Catalog, "and might as well get good at it." Brand has said that 30-40 years ago he was pushing space colonies, and he claims that if he'd known about GMOs then, he'd have been more than in favour: "30 to 40 years ago I think I would have said to all the genetic engineering stuff - hot dog!"

Brand claims the environmental movement has done more harm in its opposition to genetic engineering than in anything else: "We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool." In a review of Brand's book, Whole Earth Discipline, Clive Cookson, science editor of the Financial Times, comments, "the book gushes about [GM] technology in a way that might raise a blush even in a spokesman for Monsanto, the leading agricultural biotechnology company."

Brand has suggested that European opposition to GM foods stems from French protectionism.

Brand's wife, Ryan Phelan, is founder and CEO of DNA Direct, a company working in the controversial area of marketing DNA tests to consumers.

Brand's views on nuclear power, as detailed in his book, Whole Earth Discipline, have come under criticism from physicist Amory Lovins, Chairman and Chief Scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute and Chairman Emeritus of Fiberforge, Inc. Lovins says that on economic grounds, "His [Brand's] nuclear chapter's facts and logic do not hold up to scrutiny".

Lovins writes:

If nuclear power isn't needed, worsens climate change (vs. more effective solutions) and energy security, and can't compete in the marketplace despite uniquely big subsidies - all evidence-based findings unexamined in Stewart's chapter - then his nuclear imperative evaporates. Of course, a few countries with centrally planned energy systems, mostly with socialized costs, are building reactors: over two-thirds of all nuclear plants under construction are in China, Russia, India, or South Korea. But that's more because their nuclear bureaucracies dominate national energy policy and face little or no competition in technologies, business models, and ideas. Nuclear power requires such a system. The competitors beating nuclear power thrive in democracies and free markets.

Career

In 1977-79, Brand was a "special advisor" in the administration of California Governor Jerry Brown. In 1984, Brand and Larry Brilliant founded The WELL ("Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"), a "bulletin board which is something like an internet chatroom".

In 1986, Brand was a visiting scientist at the Media Laboratory at MIT. Soon after, he took up the role of private-conference organizer for such corporations as Royal Dutch Shell, Volvo, and AT&T. In 1988, he became a co-founder of the Global Business Network consultancy, which explores globalisation and business strategy. Brand has sat on the board of the Santa Fe Institute (founded 1984), an organization devoted to "fostering a multidisciplinary scientific research community pursuing frontier science."

What Stewart Brand got wrong

On November 4 2010 Channel 4 TV in the UK broadcast a polemic which attacked the green movement. Billed as a documentary and fronted by Mark Lynas and Stewart Brand, the programme, called What the Green Movement Got Wrong, blamed environmentalists for obstructing solutions to the energy crisis by opposing nuclear power, and for causing hunger and malnutrition in the third world by opposing genetically modified (GM) crops.

The programme presented Brand and Lynas as converts to GM crops and nuclear power - as greens who had now admitted that they had been mistaken. But Brand supporter Matt Ridley commented, "Stewart Brand, who I know and admire, played a prominent part in the Channel 4 film. He's not a 'convert' to these views. He has always been strongly pro-GM food and mildly pro-nuclear."

GM crops for the third world

What the Green Movement Got Wrong provoked fury among some of the leading voices in the African agricultural sector. "It was an insult to the very people it purports to care about," complained Zachary Makanya who heads an ecological land use group in Kenya. "The programme did not include Southern farmers' voices, and implied that Africans do not have the intelligence to think for themselves. The programme suggests that were it not for the external pressure of northern environmental organisations, Africans would be happily eating genetically modified foods by now, and hunger would be a distant memory," said a statement from the African Biodiversity Network. "We oppose these ridiculous and malicious claims."

Following the line taken by Brand in his book, Whole Earth Discipline, What the Green Movement Got Wrong claimed that hundreds or thousands of people died in the Zambian famine of 2002 because Northern NGOs like Greenpeace persuaded the Zambian government not to accept US food aid because it was GM. In fact, Zambia made its own decision about the GM food aid, based on its own scientific investigation. And Greenpeace, contrary to the libellous claim of the programme, advised Zambia to accept the US's GM food aid if there was no alternative. Happily, there was. Alternative non-GM food aid was provided. And no Zambians died from the famine, let alone from lack of GM food. "We didn't record a single death arising out of hunger," said Charles Mushitu of the Zambian Red Cross.

DDT

What the Green Movement Got Wrong wrongly claimed that the environmental movement got the insecticide DDT banned internationally, leading to millions of third world deaths from malaria. Again, it uncritically adopted this claim from Brand's book, Whole Earth Discipline. In fact, there has never been a global ban on DDT for disease control purposes. But some governments did stop using DDT because mosquitoes became resistant. The programme makers claimed to have meticulously researched the programme for over six months. But science blogger Tim Lambert pointed out that it doesn't take six months of research to find that this is wrong but more like six seconds.

In the programme, Brand challenged the environmental movement as follows: "I would like to see an environmental movement that's comfortable noticing when it's wrong and announcing when it's wrong."

The journalist George Monbiot challenged Brand to notice and announce that he's wrong about DDT, adding, "So far it hasn't happened."

Mistaking corporate consultancy for a new form of environmentalism

After What the Green Movement Got Wrong was broadcast, Greenpeace published the following biography of Brand, making clear his links with the nuclear and biotech industry that were not mentioned in the Channel 4 programme:

Stewart Brand has links to both the nuclear and biotech industry through the Global Business Network. Brand is a co-founder of Global Business Network. Among the 192 clients named on its website (www.gbn.com), more than a dozen corporations and governmental agencies are involved in the production or promotion of nuclear energy: General Electric, Bechtel, Duke Power, Siemens-Westinghouse, Fluor, Electric Power Research Institute, Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, Électricité de France, Iberdrola, Vattenfall, Sydkraft (now E.ON Sweden) and Sandia National Labratories. Some of these, including GE, Bechtel, Duke Power and Westinghouse, are receiving government subsidies to develop the next generation of nuclear power plants. DuPont - a company that sells genetically engineered seed and chemicals - is also listed as a client.

Monbiot commented on the Channel 4 programme, "Brand's approach, which the [Channel 4] film is based on, is not so much a new form of environmentalism as a new form of corporate consultancy: he appears to be seeking to shape the environmental debate to suit the businesses he works for."

Biography

• Born: December 14 1938, Rockford, Illinois.
• Education: 1954-56, Phillips Exeter Academy; Stanford University.
• Married: 1966 Lois Jennings (marr. diss '72). Ryan Phelan 1983- . One son, Noah Johnson.
• Career: 1960-62, US Army officer; '62-68 Created multi-media performances; '77-79; adviser to Jerry Brown; '88- co-founder and board member Global Business Network; '89 - Member board of trustees, Santa Fe Institute; '95 - co-founder, then president, The Long Now Foundation; 2000 co-Founder, All Species project. Publications: 1968-72, Founded, edited, and published Whole Earth Catalogue; '74 Two Cybernetic Frontiers; '87 The Media Lab; '94 How Buildings Learn; '99 The Clock Of The Long Now.

According to John Stauber, Brand and his Long Now Foundation brought John Rendon, the elusive head of the Rendon Group, one of the CIA's favorite PR firms, to San Francisco for a rare public address on July 14, 2006, promoting him and his CIA- and Pentagon-funded work in the war on terror.

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