Stewart Brand has always lived slightly ahead of the curve, asking what comes next and helping bring it into being. His work connects the experiments of the counterculture with the rise of personal computing and the effort to think responsibly across millennia. Few people have moved so freely among those worlds, or done so much to bring them together.
I first met Stewart when he visited me at Military.com, more than twenty years before I began this book. Since then, I have photographed him aboard boats in Sausalito, at his river home in Petaluma, and deep inside the mountain in Texas that houses the 10,000-Year Clock. I have come to know the restless curiosity behind his public achievements, and the pleasure of following a conversation wherever his mind takes it.
That curiosity gave us the Whole Earth Catalog. Launched in 1968 under the words “Access to Tools,” it gathered equipment, books, and practical knowledge for people who wanted to shape their own lives. Building and farming shared its pages with science and new approaches to learning. Stewart made useful discoveries available to others, trusting them to find possibilities of their own.
The Catalog could have occupied the rest of his life. Instead, it became one chapter.
In 1996, he helped establish the Long Now Foundation to encourage responsibility across generations. Its best-known undertaking is the 10,000-Year Clock, conceived by Danny Hillis. Designing a clock to run for ten millennia changes the questions an engineer must ask. How will someone understand its mechanism centuries from now? What will wear out, and how can it be repaired? Its future caretakers will inhabit a world its builders cannot foresee.
I have been inside the Texas mountain with Stewart. There, an idea about time becomes a physical undertaking, with chambers cut into rock and machinery intended to outlast everyone working on it. The scale is extraordinary. So is the decision to begin something whose future belongs largely to strangers.
With his partner, Ryan Phelan, Stewart also co-founded Revive & Restore, which brings biotechnology into conservation. Its work includes increasing genetic diversity in endangered species and investigating de-extinction. Stewart has helped bring scientists together to explore what might be possible and what would be worth attempting.
His book Maintenance: Of Everything takes up the work that continues after something has been built. I think of the immaculate tugboat Mirene, where he and Ryan have welcomed me, and his cluttered boat office near Gate 5 in Sausalito. Boats make maintenance personal. Neglect has consequences. Keeping something useful and alive requires returning to it.
Each year, I join Stewart and Ryan and a gathering of friends to pick olives in their grove. The work is meditative, and conversation carries us through the harvest. These afternoons have become part of the rhythm of our friendship.
I admire the reach of Stewart’s thinking. I also know him through these repeated acts of care, for a boat, a grove, a gathering of people. Inside the mountain, we contemplated ten thousand years. Among the olive trees, we do the work of another season. I have come to understand his long now through both.
