Meet the Creator of Environmental Heresies, The Whole Earth Catalog, PC.word processing and primative blogs.

"Environmental Heresies," (directlink not operational) a 2005 article by Whole Earth Catalogue-founder Stewart Brand illustrates an ogoing reformation that's occuring in the mainstream environmental movement

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

Brand goes on:

One area of biotech with huge promise and some drawbacks is genetic engineering, so far violently rejected by the environmental movement. That rejection is, I think, a mistake. Why was water fluoridization rejected by the political right and "frankenfood" by the political left? The answer, I suspect, is that fluoridization came from government and genetically modified (GM) crops from corporations. If the origins had been reversed -- as they could have been -- the positions would be reversed, too.

It's these resurgent heresies that interest GMO Pundit, as well as an intriguing, extensive, psychedelic biography of Brand, now available, via ALR, that shows that Brand was, ahem, always ahead of his time.

The Edge- The Third Culture.

Brand worked off and on with USCO as a photographer and a technician between 1963 and 1966, living at the Garnerville church for short periods between his travels. Within USCO, he encountered the first stirrings of the New Communalist movement. Like Cage and Rauschenberg, the members of USCO created art intended to transform the audience's consciousness. They also drew on many diverse electronic technologies to achieve their effects. Strobe lights, light projectors, tape decks, stereo speakers, slide sorters—for USCO, the products of the technocratic industry served as handy tools for transforming their viewers' collective mind-set. So did psychedelic drugs. Marijuana and peyote and, later, LSD offered members of USCO, including Brand, a chance to engage in a mystical experience of togetherness. And USCO's work did not stop at the end of each performance. Gathering at their church in Garnerville, and then again at performance sites around the country, the members of USCO lived and worked together steadily for a period of years. Like a cross between a touring rock entourage and a commune, USCO was more than a performance team. It was a social system unto itself. Through it, Brand encountered the works of Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller—all of whom would become key influences on the Whole Earth community—and began to imagine a new synthesis of cybernetic theory and countercultural politics.

STEWART BRAND MEETS THE CYBERNETIC COUNTERCULTURE [10.3.06]
By Fred Turner

Introduction

When I first met Stewart Brand in 1965, he was sporting a button on which was printed: "America Needs Indians." We were at the headquarters of USCO ("US" company), an anonymous group of artists whose installations and events combined multiple audio and visual inputs, including film, slides, video, lighting, music, and random sounds. We were both wearing remnants of our US Army uniforms. We hit it off immediately and have been in touch consistently for the past forty-one years...read on at link.