Stewart Brand Quotes

“At present, the best low-carbon source is nuclear.”

“California was a great place to get over mysticism in the 1960s and 1970s. Such an endless parade of gurus and mystics came through, peddling their wares, that they canceled each other out. They couldn't compete with the drugs, and the drugs canceled each other out as well. Fervent visions, shared to excess, became clanking clichés. All that was left was daily reality, with its endless negotiation, devoid of absolutes, but alive with surprises.”

“Certain knowledge of what to fight for, and what to fight against, gives meaning to life and provides its own version of discipline: never give up. That kind of meaning is illusory, I now believe, and blinkered. Fealty to a mystical absolute is a formula for disaster, especially in transformative times.”

“Climate is so full of surprises, it might even surprise us with a hidden stability. Counting on that, though, would be like playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded but one.”

“Every interview with a public figure should include the question 'What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?' The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility.”

“Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value - the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests. The standard to insist on is live value. What is something worth when it's working?”

“If you don't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet.”

“Many of my contemporaries in the developed world see subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.”

“Science has long informed the environmental movement. Now it must take the lead, because we are forced to enter an era of large-scale ecosystem engineering, and we have to know what the hell we’re doing.”

“Seize the century. We’re facing multidecade, multigeneration problems and solutions. Accomplishing what is needed will take diligence and patience—a sustained bearing down, over human lifetimes, to bridge the long lag times and lead times in climatic, biological, and social dynamics, and to work through the long series of iterations necessary for any apparent solution to become practical. At the same time, we need a professional caregiver’s sense of urgency. Here’s how that works.”

“Talk of 'saving the planet' is overstated. Earth will be fine, no matter what; so will life. It is humans who are in trouble. But since we got ourselves into this fix, we should be able to get ourselves out of it.”

“We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

“We finesse climate, or climate finesses us.”

“When environmentalists are wrong, it is frequently technology that they are wrong about, and they wind up supporting parochial Green goals at the cost of comprehensive ones. That happened with space technology, nuclear technology, and genetic engineering. If your default position on a new technology is suspicion, you forfeit the ability to deploy it for your own purposes. "The environmental movement has so far concentrated its attention upon the evils that technology has done rather than upon the good that technology has failed to do," says Freeman Dyson. But focusing on Green technological opportunity requires a shift in attitude toward novelty.”