Orland Evangelical Free Church | New York Times Readers and a Heretic

He lives on a tugboat in Sausalito. He is building the world's slowest computer, "a giant clock designed to run for 10,000 years inside a mountain in the Nevada desert, powered by changes in temperature." He's been at least a decade ahead of major technological and cultural changes for forty years. He is the subject of two new academic studies.

And a profile of him spent more than a day on the Times most e-mailed list this week.

"An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies'" by John Tierney surveys the eccentric career and opinions of Stewart Brand.

To anticipate cultural changes, its best to watch individuals who live where subcultures intersect. These individuals see more of what's happening than the narrow majority.

For instance, I know a church consultant who works with every sort of Christian group from Episcopalians to the Church of God. He gets to see what lots of groups are doing. I know musicians who play both classical and jazz. They see what's happening among musicians of many styles.

Individuals with a broad view can see things change before anyone else. And Stewart Brand is a Grand Central Station of subcultures.

Begin with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters in the 1960s. Brand was on the LSD bus, directing multimedia shows at the Pranksters' acid trips. But he was more than the typical enthusiast for psychedelia: he designed the shows "drawing on the cybernetic theories of Norbert Wiener, the M.I.T. mathematician who applied principles of machines and electrical networks to social institutions." Not many people can put acid and cybernetic theories together.

That's just the beginning.

He started the Whole Earth Catalogue, devoted to organic farming and computers. He "helped found The WELL, the early electronic community that was a sort of prototype of the Web." His digerati connections ran "from the Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s to Wired magazine in the 1990s."

And he was an environmentalist. "In 1969, he was so worried by population growth that he organized the Hunger Show, a weeklong fast in a parking lot to dramatize the coming global famine predicted by Paul Ehrlich, one of his mentors at Stanford."

His current environmental views are the prod for this profile.

Tierney's lead: "Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn't plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They'll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They'll stop worrying about ‘frankenfoods' and embrace genetic engineering."

How long will this take? Brand thinks ten years.

Some of us wonder how much acid he took.

Yet, when his reasoning emerges, his appraisal acquires a certain inevitability. Nuclear power is cleaner than other electricity-generating options - and its output is enormous. The flight of third-world poor to megacities allows farms to revert to forests. The lower birth-rate is not healthy because it will result in too few young people. And genetically engineered crops can "grow on less land with less pesticide."

Brand's brain is a forecast of what may happen as political coalitions on the left and right continue to splinter. The next decade will indeed see an ideological realignment in America, with groups becoming allies in combinations that today would seem very strange indeed.

Evangelicals persistently try to understand social changes from within the narrow subculture of the white middle class. They monitor the mainstream. But they'd understand better if they went to the intersections of cultures and monitored the people who don't fit in neat boxes.

You should watch the weirdos. If you can manage it without acid, you should become one.