Born in 1938 to a conventional Midwest family, Brand studied biology at Stanford before embarking on a stint in the army as parachutist and photographer. A “cosmic cowboy” who was fascinated by Native American culture, he was soon drawn into the nascent counterculture of the mid-1960s, where older beatniks rubbed shoulders and shared hot tubs with a younger cohort of hippies. A psychedelic drug experience in 1966 prompted him to successfully lobby NASA to make public photographs of the entire planet from space, a feat that brought him considerable renown. Brand claims these pictures helped dissipate the pessimism that permeated 1960s popular culture. Later, they graced the covers of the Whole Earth Catalog. As he famously stated on the catalog’s opening page, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
The book’s runaway success — a later edition won a National Book Award — enabled Brand to assume a decades-long role as a provocateur and influencer. Starting in the 1970s, he catalyzed public debates about personal computers, nanotechnology, the internet, and nuclear power. More recently, he has promoted the possibility of using biotechnology to reverse the extinction of certain creatures like the Xerces, a brilliantly iridescent blue butterfly that disappeared from the San Francisco area in the 1940s.
Brand’s activities leading up to the publication and reception of the Whole Earth Catalog are generally well known and, understandably, receive a good deal of Markoff’s attention. Less familiar to readers will be those episodes that exemplify Brand’s repeated willingness to challenge traditional viewpoints — for instance, his mid-1970s promotion of the space settlements that had captured my imagination as a boy. In 1969, a Princeton physicist named Gerard O’Neill used mathematical calculations and extrapolations drawn from existing technological trends to develop detailed designs for such settlements. O’Neill envisioned them as self-contained worlds, microcosms of larger Earth-bound systems. The Bay Area–based Point Foundation, a nonprofit started by Brand, provided seed funding for a modest-sized conference organized by O’Neill in the spring of 1974. When The New York Times featured the meeting on its front page, media coverage of O’Neill’s idea blossomed internationally, launching the physicist to minor celebrity status.
Brand contributed to the enthusiasm through his new magazine CoEvolution Quarterly, its coverage becoming a flashpoint for the conflict between technological enthusiasts like Brand and traditional environmentalists like Wendell Berry who opposed the concept of humans in space. To some CoEvolution readers, the idea of living in space seemed a logical extension of the “back to Earth” lifestyle that eschewed crowded urban environments for rural communes. Others were attracted to the escapism and possibility for social experimentation sans authoritarian oversight. But, for those who favored E. F. Schumacher’s “small is beautiful” philosophy and ideals of “appropriate technology,” space colonies provoked outrage. Brand himself tried to remain neutral but his diary reveals where his loyalty lay. After seeing a space shuttle at Rockwell International’s factory in Palmdale, California, he wrote: “Technology, kiddo. This is to today what the great sailing ships were to their day. Get with the program or stick to your spinning wheel.” Critics directed equally pointed barbs. Perhaps most cutting was this verse from one CoEvolution reader, which I found in Brand’s personal papers:
It seems to be no secret Where all the flowers have went Yesterday’s counterculture Is today’s establishment.