Even when I agree with Stewart Brand (which seems to be more often than not), he kinda-sorta gets on my nerves. No idea why, but there was only so much reading about him (and his new book) that I could handle. Here's some of his TED.com bio (minus the key point bolding and links):
Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of the Well and the Long Now Foundation, writer, editor and game designer, Stewart Brand has helped to define the collaborative, data-sharing, forward-thinking world we live in now.
Since the 1960s, he has maintained that — given access to the information we need — humanity can make the world a better place. One of his early accomplishments: helping to persuade NASA to release the first photo of the Earth from space. The iconic Big Blue Marble became the cover for his Whole Earth Catalog, a massive compendium of resources and facts he thought people might like to know. And we did: the 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies. In 1987, he wrote The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT; in 1994, How Buildings Learn.
Currently Brand is working with computer scientist Danny Hillis to build the Clock of the Long Now, a 10,000-year timepiece; his Long Now Foundation also runs a number of spinoff projects, including the Rosetta Project, cataloguing the world's languages, and the Long Bets website. He's also busy with the Global Business Network (part of the Monitor Group), helping businesses plan for the near and way-far future...
The new book (released October 09) is Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. Publisher's Weekly (Amazon, B&N) has this:
Brand, co-author of the seminal 1969 Whole Earth Catalog, compiles reflections and lessons learned from more than 40 years as an environmentalist in this clumsy yet compelling attempt to inspire practicable solutions to climate change. Brand haphazardly organizes his manifesto into chapters that address environmental stewardship opportunities, exhorting environmentalists to become fearless about following science; his iconoclastic proposals include transitioning to nuclear energy and ecosystem engineering. Brand believes environmentalists must embrace nuclear energy expansion and other inevitable technological advances, and refreshingly suggests a shift in the environmentalists' dogmatic approach to combating climate change. Rejecting the inflexible message so common in the Green movement, he describes a process of reasonable debate and experimentation. Brand's fresh perspective, approachable writing style and manifest wisdom ultimately convince the reader that the future is not an abyss to be feared but an opportunity for innovative problem solvers to embrace enthusiastically.
His personal site has review clips and links to a page with (all) the complete reviews, which looks comprehensive to me. And he's had an assortment of media attention recently, I presume due to the media requirement to publish Earth-day (insert holiday/observance here) related things on or near Earth Day. Or maybe he's been doing the a publicity tour/talk thing.
No predictions about the interview. No, wait -- I suspect Brand will be one of those guests eager to prove that they, too, are it-getters who can take Colbert on his own turf. Hope I'm wrong.
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