'The Intellectual Johnny Appleseed Of The Counterculture'

A conversation with Whole Earth Catalog founder, Merry Prankster, and woolly mammoth de-extinctionist Stewart Brand

- By Nick Gillespie. Photos by Mark Mahaney

Has anyone lived a more interesting, influential, and inspiring life than Stewart Brand?

Born in 1938 and educated at Stanford, Brand was a Merry Prankster who helped conduct Ken Kesey’s legendary acid tests in the 1960s. His guerilla campaign of selling buttons that asked “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” pushed NASA to release the first image of the planet from space and helped inspire the original Earth Day celebrations. From 1968 to 1971, he published the Whole Earth Catalog, which quickly became a bible to hippies on communes and techno-geeks such as Steve Jobs, who famously quoted its parting message: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

Brand helped shape early techno-culture and cyberspace by reporting on the personal computer revolution and interacting with many of the key figures responsible for what became known as cyberculture. His ideas were instrumental in the creation of one of the earliest online communities, The WELL. He also co-founded The Long Now Foundation, which seeks to deepen the way people think about the past and the future.

In a series of books on such topics as the MIT Media Lab and the rise of “eco-modernism,” Brand has delineated a unique strain of ecological thought that embraces technology as a means of salvation and liberation rather than a destructive force that must be stopped. His current passion is Revive & Restore, a leading organization in the “de-extinction movement” that is using biotechnology to bring back plants and animals including the American Chestnut tree, the passenger pigeon, and the woolly mammoth.