108 Quotes by Stewart Brand

Everything looks like a failure in the middle.” Any.

Do what’s good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what’s convenient for computers.

Climate is so full of surprises, it might even surprise us with a hidden stability. Counting on that, though, would be like playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded but one.

In our researches on the likely economic apocalypse it’s become clear what is the prime survival tool for hard times: friends. Good friends. Lots of them.

What does it take to build something so that it’s really easy to make comfortable little modifications in a way that once you’ve made them, they feel integral with the nature and structure of what is already there? You want to be able to mess around with it and progressively change it to bring it into an adapted state with yourself, your family, the climate, whatever. This kind of adaptation is a continuous process of gradually taking care.

Humans perpetually fight, LeBlanc says, because they always outstrip the carrying capacity of their natural environment and then have to fight over resources.

The unwelcome four are urbanization, nuclear power, biotechnology, and geoengineering. The familiar one is natural-system restoration, which may be better framed as megagardening –.

Griffith calculates that, in order to keep the atmospheric concentration of CO 2 at no more than 450 ppm, humanity has to do something that is almost unimaginably difficult. We have to cut our fossil fuel use to around 3 terawatts, which means we have to produce all the rest of our power from non-fossil-fuel sources, and we have to do it in about twenty-five years or it will be too late to level off at 450 ppm.

When a fantasy turns you on, you're obligated to God and nature to start doing it - right away.