{"id":3012,"date":"2007-09-14T19:01:03","date_gmt":"2007-09-14T19:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=3012"},"modified":"2007-09-14T19:01:03","modified_gmt":"2007-09-14T19:01:03","slug":"jolly_green_her","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=3012","title":{"rendered":"Jolly green heretic"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Economist<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Stewart Brand, a pioneer of both environmentalism and online communities, has not lost his willingness to rock the boat.
\nIN SOME respects Stewart Brand’s green credentials are impeccable. His mentor was Paul Ehrlich, an environmental thinker at Stanford university and author of \u201cThe Population Bomb\u201d, published in 1968. That book, and the related Club of Rome movement of the 1970s, famously predicted that overpopulation would soon result in the world running out of food, oil and other resources. Though it proved spectacularly wrong, its warning served as a clarion call for the modern environmental movement.
\nMr Brand made his name with a publication of his own, which also appeared in 1968, called \u201cThe Whole Earth Catalogue\u201d. It was a path-breaking manual crammed with examples of small-scale technologies to enable individuals to reduce their environmental impact, and is best known for its cover, which featured a picture of the Earth from space (which Mr Brand helped to persuade America’s space agency, NASA, to release). The book became a bestseller in anti-corporate and environmental circles. In 1985 Mr Brand co-founded the WELL, a pioneering online community that was a precursor of today’s social-networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook.
\nMr Brand still has a following among the Birkenstock set, and even lives on a tugboat near San Francisco. But meet him in person and it becomes clear he is not exactly your typical crunchy-granola green. Sitting down to lunch at a posh beach resort on Coronado Island, off San Diego, he does not order a vegan special but a hearty Angus burger with bacon, cheese and French fries, and a side-order of lobster bisque. \u201cI’m genetically a contrarian,\u201d he says with a broad smile.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Economist: Stewart Brand, a pioneer of both environmentalism and online communities, has not lost his willingness to rock the boat. IN SOME respects Stewart Brand’s green credentials are impeccable. His mentor was Paul Ehrlich, an environmental thinker at Stanford university and author of \u201cThe Population Bomb\u201d, published in 1968. That book, and the related […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,32],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3012"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}