Stewart Brand

Built in 1912, the boat is moored in a former shipyard in Sausalito, California.

He works in Mary Heartline, a grounded fishing boat about 100 yards (90 metres) away.

One of his favorite items is a table on which Otis Redding is said to have written "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" (Brand acquired it from an antiques dealer in Sausalito).

Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American project developer and writer, best known as the co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog.

He has founded a number of organizations, including the WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation.

He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

Brand was born in Rockford, Illinois, and attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

He studied biology at Stanford University, graduating in 1960.

As a soldier in the U.S. Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills; he later expressed the view that his experience in the military had fostered his competence in organizing.

Brand has lived in California since the 1960s.

He and his second wife live on Mirene, a 64 ft-long working tugboat.

By the mid-1960s, Brand became associated with New York multimedia group USCO and Bay Area author Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, about 10 million Americans were involved in living communally.

A civilian again in 1962, he studied design at San Francisco Art Institute, photography at San Francisco State College, and participated in a legitimate scientific study of then-legal LSD with the International Foundation for Advanced Study, in Menlo Park, California.

Brand and his wife, Lois, traveled to communes in a 1963 Dodge truck known as the Whole Earth Truck Store, which moved to a storefront in Menlo Park, California.

In 1966, he married mathematician Lois Jennings, an Ottawa Native American.

Brand co-produced the 1966 Trips Festival, an early effort blending rock music and light shows, with Kesey and Ramón Sender Barayón.

The Trips Festival was among the first Grateful Dead performances in San Francisco.

In 1966, while on an LSD trip on the roof of his house in North Beach, San Francisco, Brand became convinced that seeing an image of the whole Earth would change how we think about the planet and ourselves.

He then campaigned to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space.

He sold and distributed buttons for 25 cents each, asking, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?"

During this campaign, Brand met Richard Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help Brand with his projects.

An estimated 10,000 hippies attended, and Haight-Ashbury soon emerged as the epicenter of an emerging counterculture, with the Summer of Love in 1967.

In 1967, a satellite, ATS-3, took the photo.

Tom Wolfe includes Brand in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Brand thought the image of our planet would be a powerful symbol; it adorned the first (Fall 1968) edition of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Later in 1968, NASA astronaut Bill Anders took an Earth photo, Earthrise, from Moon orbit, which became the front image of the spring 1969 edition of the Catalog.

In late 1968, Brand assisted electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart with the Mother of All Demos, a presentation of many revolutionary computer technologies (including hypertext, email, and the mouse) to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

Brand surmised that given the necessary consciousness, information, and tools, human beings could reshape the world they had made (and were making) for themselves into something environmentally and socially sustainable.

In 1968, using the most basic approaches to typesetting and page layout, Brand and his colleagues created issue number one of the Whole Earth Catalog, employing the subtitle "access to tools".

1970 saw the first celebration of Earth Day.

That first oversized Catalog, and its successors in the 1970s and later, reckoned a wide assortment of things could serve as useful "tools": books, maps, garden implements, specialized clothing, carpenters' and masons' tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers, and personal computers.

Brand invited "reviews" (written in the form of a letter to a friend) of the best of these items from experts in specific fields.

The information also described where these things could be located or purchased.

The Catalog's publication coincided with the great wave of social and cultural experimentation, convention-breaking, and "do it yourself" attitude associated with the "counterculture".

The Whole Earth Catalog had widespread influence within the rural back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, and the communities movement within many cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Australia.

The 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies, winning the first U.S. National Book Award in the Contemporary Affairs category.

To continue this work and also to publish full-length articles on specific topics in the natural sciences and invention, in numerous areas of the arts and the social sciences, and on the contemporary scene in general, Brand founded CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974, aimed primarily at educated laypeople.

During a 2003 interview, Brand explained that the image "gave the sense that Earth's an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And it's so graphic, this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum."

Steve Jobs ended his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University by acknowledging both Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, quoting its farewell message: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish".