Quotes from Stewart Brand

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.

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.

There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that.

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

When a generation talks just to itself, it becomes more filled with folly than it might have otherwise.

In terms of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy. We have been taking down the Russian warheads, turning it into electricity. 10 percent of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads.

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.

How can I throw my life away in the least unhappy way?

Information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.

Style is time's fool. Form is time's student

The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time.

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.

The product of careful continuity is love....Trust, intimacy, intense use, and time are what made these buildings work so well.

The operative principle for all is what Danny Hillis calls the Golden Rule of Time: Do for the future what you're grateful the past did for you. (Or what you wish the past had done for you.) That tells you the right thing to do.

It seems there is an ideal degree of aging which is admired. Things should not be new, but neither should they be rotten with age (except in New Orleans, which fosters a cult of decay).

Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative. Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail. Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a failed experiment? Art flouts convention. Convention became conventional because it works. Aspiring to art means aspiring to a building that almost certainly cannot work, because the old good solutions are thrown away. The roof has a dramatic new look, and it leaks dramatically.

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.

Reinventing beats inventing nearly every time.

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.

The scale of the climate challenge is so vast that it cannot be met solely by grassroots groups and corporations, no matter how Green. The situation requires government fiat to set rules and enforce them. Specifically, the four major energy-using governments—the European Union, the United States, China, and India—have to get tough. If all four do the right thing, there's hope. So far the European governments have led the way.

How did we start worrying about climate? In 1948 a conservationist named Fairfield Osborn wrote a book titled Our Plundered Planet (the first jeremiad of its kind) and, with Laurance Rockefeller, founded the Conservation Foundation in New York. In 1958 Charles Keeling began his epic project measuring the atmospheric concentration of CO 2.

Osborn's Conservation Foundation assembled the first climate change conference in 1963; this resulted in a paper, "Implications of Rising Carbon Dioxide Content of the Atmosphere." According to Spencer Weart's Discovery of Global Warming (2004), "Their report warned that the doubling of CO 2 projected

At present, the best low-carbon source is nuclear.

Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists helped stop carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe. (Except for France, which fortunately responded to the '73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear.)