Quote

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.

Stewart Brand

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Stewart Brand
Age: 85
Born: 1938
Born: December 14
Biologist
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Rockford
Illinois
Organic
Developed
Disaster
Subsistence
Environmental
Contemporaries
Poverty
Soulful
Many
Farming
World
Trap
Traps

More quotes by Stewart Brand

Image
We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
Stewart Brand
Image
When a generation talks just to itself, it becomes more filled with folly than it might have otherwise.
Stewart Brand
Image
All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.
Stewart Brand
Image
There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that.
Stewart Brand
Image
Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.
Stewart Brand
Image
This is pretty much the infrastructural stuff that comes along with large quantities of energy. Whichever technology we are looking at has serious hazardous issues.
Stewart Brand
Image
Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. [With de-extinction,] we have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.
Stewart Brand
Image
For artists diving into a new technology, it is a triple short-cut to mastery: you get a free ride on the novelty of the medium there are no previous masters to surpass and after a few weeks, you are the master. Try that with the violin.
Stewart Brand
Image
Redefine the possible.
Stewart Brand
Image
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.
Stewart Brand
Image
A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.
Stewart Brand
Image
One advantage of a solar collector in space: It would be some kind of origami thing that would unfold and be relatively light because it doesn't have gravity to deal with.
Stewart Brand
Image
When a fantasy turns you on, you're obligated to God and nature to start doing it right away.
Stewart Brand
Image
You own your own words, unless they contain information. In which case they belong to no one.
Stewart Brand
Image
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
Stewart Brand
Image
A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
Stewart Brand
Image
There should always be in sight the draw — a kind of a beacon that draws you on through the labyrinth.
Stewart Brand
Image
The technology of synthetic biology is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue.
Stewart Brand
Image
Want to know where the action in a culture is? Watch where new language is turning up and where the lawyers collect, usually in that sequence.
Stewart Brand
Image
Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s.
Stewart Brand