Lunch with the FT: Stewart Brand
By David Honigmann
Published: January 8 2010 14:50 | Last updated: January 8 2010 14:50
During the week Stewart Brand and his wife, Ryan Phelan, live on a houseboat, a restored tug, moored in Sausalito harbour. At weekends, they take off to a restored Victorian farmhouse located by a samphire-filled saltmarsh near Petaluma, half an hour north of San Francisco. We are here to have a lunch of immense environmental friendliness.
When I arrive, it is raining steadily. The three of us pull lettuces from a neat raised bed in Phelan’s vegetable garden, admire the asparagus, and dither over some persimmons blighted by a recent frost. Brand, 71, points out a purple smoke tree that was a gift from the musician Brian Eno, a friend and intellectual sparring partner. A blue heron glides over the marsh. We walk back to the house to dry off in the glow of a catalytic wood-burning stove and look back over Brand’s career.
For more than 40 years, Brand has been at the nexus between California’s counterculture and its technological avant-garde. A quintessential 1960s figure – one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, he appears on the second page of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – who organised a “trips festival”, which brought together 10,000 people to listen to the Grateful Dead and drink acid-laced punch, he is also a Stanford-educated biologist and anthropologist interested in information systems and networks. In short, he has foreseen the future; sometimes blurrily but more often than not with immense prescience. For Brand is an intellectual entrepreneur; he makes ideas happen. His 1968 brainchild, the Whole Earth Catalog, an encyclopaedic review of all that a commune-dweller might need, has been described by Steve Jobs as “sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along”. His latest book, Whole Earth Discipline, throws down a gauntlet to the environmental movement he once helped to nurture.
As the vegetables cook, Phelan, 57, goes for a swim in a converted barn, and Brand tells me about his early years. Born in 1939, he was brought up in Rockford, Illinois, where his father was an advertising copywriter and his mother a Vassar-educated “space fanatic” – something that rubbed off on her son. He bounced to the east coast for prep school (Phillips Exeter Academy) and the west for college (Stanford).
In 1960, during the hiatus between Korea and Vietnam, he followed his elder brother into the army where he worked as a photographer. “I was never in combat. But I did jump out of planes.” He was a “weekend hippie and weekday soldier. A girlfriend had some friends in North Beach in San Francisco, which is where the Beats were. I saw the Bohemian lifestyle and couldn’t imagine living any other way.” I ask which aspects appealed to him. “Dancing that did not involve the foxtrot. Good conversation. Lots of creativity. Interesting women. The realisation that one could live very, very well on not much money.”
He left the army after two years but much of what he learnt is with him still. “I was trained that the worst officer is stupid and industrious. Stupidity makes them do ridiculous things and industry makes them do lots of ridiculous things. The very best officer is brilliant and lazy. Whenever possible, I try to have stuff done by other people.”
An alarm sounds on Phelan’s iPod, and Brand fishes giant artichokes out of the pan where they have been steaming. Sunlight briefly pours into the kitchen. We strip the leaves off the artichokes, dip them in melted butter, and eat sitting on stools at the kitchen table. Brand lines up his stripped leaves neatly on his plate, like the shed skin of a snake.
How did he meet Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and LSD evangelist? “Drugs. It must have been drugs.” There is a long pause. “And Indians.” Brand’s first wife, Lois Jennings, is an Ottawa, a native American. “I’d been photographing these Indians and thought Kesey would be interested ... I went to Perry Lane [Kesey’s home] and was met at the door by somebody with a joint. I just thought, ‘This is where the creativity is, and the juice, and the surprises and the interesting hazards.’ Kesey did drugs not for spiritual reasons but for overtly recreational and educational reasons.”
The idea for the Whole Earth Catalog came to Brand as he was “flying back from Illinois from my father’s funeral”. Initially he thought he would start up a business selling tools to friends living in communes who needed “buildings that would stand up”. The first incarnation of the project was a travelling shop: “Lois and I took a truck around various communes, loaded with books and tools. People came out and admired them and had no money to buy them. The business model was really wide. But I also had this idea to do a catalogue. I was thinking of LL Bean but also of Diderot and the Encylopedie. It was clear that the truck was not going to be the main event.”
An extraordinary compendium of “tools for self-reliance”, divided into sections such as “craft”, “nomadics”, “whole systems”, “shelter” and “land use”, the first Catalog was 64 pages long and published in 1968. Its very taxonomy was an assertion of a new type of knowledge. Within its pages were articles on almost everything: articles on windmills, composting toilets, books on eastern philosophy and, in later editions, personal computers (a phrase Brand was the first to use in print).
“We are as gods”, Brand wrote in its introduction, “and might as well get good at it.” Promoting “tools for self-reliance”, the orginal Catalog had rudimentary production values and a conversational tone. Later editions were amplified and extended by readers, making it something like a prototypical blog . Published sporadically until 1981 (a premature “Millennium” edition appeared in 1994), the catalogue in its various incarnations – many of them hundreds of pages long – sold a couple of million copies.
It also evolved into a magazine where he met Phelan. “Ryan was an employee who I did not chase when she was an employee, but, when it looked like she was going to stop being an employee, then she was fair game.” Phelan, who runs a genomics advisory service, has returned from her swim. “He was my first and only boss,” she says. Brand chortles. “What does that say? Boy, I’m never going to do that again? Or, being a boss is such fun that I’m going to do that now.”
The magazine also spawned, in the early 1980s, a pioneering online community, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or WELL, an electronic bulletin board with a founding principle the blogosphere would do well to remember: “No anonymity: respectable, responsible adult people behave like true brats as soon as they lose accountability.” Using his personal and professional networks, Brand has been involved in a number of related projects: in 1984, for instance, he was convenor for the first Hackers Conference where he insisted, “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.” Three years later he was one of the five founders of Global Business Network, a futurist consultancy sold in 2000 to the Monitor Group.
His latest project is Whole Earth Discipline, a book that attacks what he sees as the romantic, anti-science strain of environmentalism. Its four themes might have been chosen as deliberate provocations to back-to-the-land hippiedom. If the Earth is to be saved, Brand argues, it will require mass urbanisation, a shift to nuclear power, genetically modified or “genetically engineered” foods (all foodstuffs, he says, are genetically modified), and geo-engineering: directly modifying the planet’s climate. “We are as gods”, he writes again, this time followed by the exhortation “and have to get good at it.”
Of these themes, the one that smacks most of apostasy is Brand’s enthusiasm for nuclear power. “That’s the one that makes everybody jump. Britain is ahead on this one. One [reason] is being an island. You’re buying two gigawatts of power from France all the time, and that’s got to sting. You’re taking climate change seriously.”
Brand is sure the US will come round. “The Obama administration is pro-nuclear. The Democratic party is becoming pro-nuclear. The Republican party has been pro-nuclear for some time. So we will get nukes.” But his attention is further east: “What the US does or does not do is not that huge an event. What India and China are going to do is the huge event. China, fortunately run by engineers, is going full-bore toward a lot of these things.”
We shred a roast chicken and eat it with the salad pulled from the garden earlier. Even though we are eating organic food, opposition to genetically engineered food bewilders Brand. He likes organic foods because they are free of pesticides and chemicals. He likes “GE” foods for the same reason – because they are engineered to be pest-resistant, they do not need pesticides. For Europeans, I say, GMOs are the very devil. “I know”, says Brand in a pantomime whisper. “How did that happen? Do you have a theory?” I suggest suspicion of Monsanto. “Has that sort of allergy to a corporation happened before?” McDonald’s springs to mind. “That’s right. We burn down a McDonald’s from time to time when we’re unhappy with Americans.”
I argue that one of the worries about GE foods is intellectual property. Farmers dislike the notion that they are licensing what they are growing rather than owning it. But Brand has a counter-theory. “How much of it do you think is French protectionism? Because there they are, more pro-nuclear than anybody in the world, and their president is saying there are all these issues with genetically engineered foods.”
Food, I say, is central to French culture. He scoffs. “Socialised agriculture is OK?” He takes some fig jam with his cheese. France, I say, is full of small farmers, not dominated by agrochemical combines. “That’s fair.” None the less, he insists that “it will all go better with genetically engineered plants. And animals. And farmers.
“We’ve had 12 or 13 years of genetically engineered food in this country and it’s been great. My prediction is that in a couple of years we’ll see a soyabean oil that has Omega 3 fatty acids to cut down heart disease. Who would refuse that, any more than people refuse to take medicine?”
In the long run, he insists, opposition will die out. “IVF is the big example. I remember when that was an abomination in the face of God’s will. As soon as people met a few of the children, they realised that they were just as good as the ‘regular’ ones. My hope is that, unlike nuclear, which involves almost a theological shift, getting gradually used to genetic foods will be a non-issue.”
I wonder aloud whether he might secretly enjoy disagreeing with people? He looks hurt. “Ryan, am I routinely obstreperous?” No, says Phelan loyally. “I want my enemies”, says Brand, “to listen to me because I know something they don’t.” But he also owns up to his own mistakes. “The hippies were wrong about a lot of stuff. My fellow environmentalists were wrong about a lot of stuff. I’m wrong about a lot of stuff. I like the idea of changing my mind. And I don’t see those as contradictory.” What in particular has he been wrong about? “Communes are the path to the future. Buckminster Fuller domes are a nice place to live. Cocaine is harmless – that was before crack. I was wrong about population. I bought Paul Ehrlich’s line [about a crisis of overpopulation] hook line and sinker. I was wrong about nuclear.”
Again, he reaches for his military experience. “The military concept of lessons learned is based on acknowledging that something has not gone as planned. That’s also part of what an officer’s trained to do.”
Has that worked well recently? “No. We had a stupid and industrious commander-in-chief. Nobody knew he was industrious, but his administration was, God knows, industrious, and got us in all sorts of pickles. In lots of organisations one pretends that things have gone as planned and nothing is learned. But it’s better to do the right thing badly than the wrong thing well. The officer’s job is to figure out the difference.”
David Honigmann reviews music for the FT
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Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan’s house
Petaluma, near San Francisco
Castro Valley artichokes
Roast chicken
Lettuces, beet greens and spinach salad from Brand and Phelan’s garden
Bread
Local cheeses
Olive oil, from olive trees in the garden
Fig jam
Apple juice $3.99
(the FT’s token contribution)
CocaCola
Total (including service) $3.99
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Key moments of Brand recognition
‘Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?’ (1966)
A drug trip on the roof of his house in North Beach set Brand lobbying for an unlikely spin-off from the US space programme. “I had 100 micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide folding through me and infusing my observation that the buildings were not exactly parallel because of the curve of the Earth’s surface. I was convinced that seeing an image of the whole Earth would be transformative.”
When he came down (in both senses of the expression), Brand put his plan into action. He distributed badges asking “Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?” A couple of years later, when Nasa did release a picture of the Earth, it had the effect Brand wanted: the planet’s evident fragility and unity were a spur to the whole environmental movement. For the first time, as Brand noted with approval, humanity saw itself from the outside.
New Games (1973)
Brand devised and ran the New Games tournament, held near San Francisco, which attracted 6,000 players. The ethos was co-operative rather than competitive; Brand had initially conceived the games as a counterpoint to Vietnam, a way of channelling physical aggression into play. The highlight of the event was the “Earthball”, a 6ft diameter canvas and rubber ball painted as a globe, used for free-flowing forms of football and volleyball. The tournament’s motto was “Play Hard. Play Fair. Nobody Hurt.”
Two subsequent books edited by Andrew Fluegelman (The New Games Book and More New Games!) give the rules for “Butt Off”, “Clench A Wench”, “Boffing” and countless other games. The photographs capture the fashions of 1970s California with alarming precision.
How Buildings Learn (1994)
In his book How Buildings Learn, Brand looked at how buildings, once they have been built, adapt to their users. He contrasted cheap “low road” buildings – which are capable of endless remodelling – with the inflexible “high road” buildings designed for a specific purpose beloved by celebrity architects. “I was sued in a big way by Richard Rogers. Lord Asshole.” Brand had been sceptical about the amount of maintenance required by Rogers’ designs. Rogers took legal action to have these passages removed from the British edition of the book.
The Clock of the Long Now (1995)
The Long Now Foundation is building a clock that will keep time for 10,000 years, ticking once a year and chiming to mark each millennium. “I had been perturbed for a long time”, Brand says, “about how short-term thinking is rewarded a lot and institutionalised a lot. Quarterly reports. Elections every two years for congressmen.”
A prototype of the clock is now in the Science Museum in London. “The first thing I almost always hear from somebody who I encounter is, ‘How’s the clock coming?’ The clock doesn’t even exist yet, and it’s already working.”
DH
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