Stewart Brand: Repairing Things, Contemporary Environmentalism, and the Nuclear Age

Stewart Brand has spent decades shaping how we imagine technology, the planet, and what comes next. He rose to prominence in the 1960s as the co-founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture touchstone that helped spark personal computing, the hacker ethic, and the modern environmental movement. Since then, he has launched the Long Now Foundation, advocated for nuclear energy and de-extinction, and urged us to consider time on the scale of ten millennia.

In his latest book, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, Brand contends that civilization’s true labor isn’t flashy invention but the patient, long-haul care of intricate systems. In March, he sat down with Nick Gillespie to discuss what that implies—and whether his concept of planetary stewardship clashes with libertarian ideals of personal sovereignty, disruptive innovation, and decentralized authority.

Reason: Your new volume proposes that maintenance forms the hidden backbone of everything. What is overlooked when we chase innovation, disruption, and creative destruction and neglect to ensure that the daily ties hold properly?

Brand: I don’t see them as enemies. A great deal of innovation emerges from maintenance. The people who figure out how to improve something are often the very ones who are stuck keeping it going and recognizing how hard that is. “Hmm, we could simplify it this way or that way. Or what if we just discard this clunky thing and replace it?” All of that belongs to the process of preserving something in operation.

We frequently conceive maintenance mainly as preventive upkeep. Repair feels like a chore when something breaks. It’s a trauma to both the operator and the system that this thing exists at all. We spend portions of our time doing the unglamorous tasks—changing the oil and brushing teeth—so that engines stay quiet and teeth stay intact. Yet, in truth, maintenance encompasses the entire sequence of keeping something alive. For example, I’m currently tracing the history of farming, because an animal has to be fed, just as we do; we humans are animals who must sustain ourselves. That feeding process has yielded one innovation after another.

You discuss how interchangeable components made it easier to repair things rather than discard them, and how necessity drove invention—isolated from neighbors, you learned to fix things on your own. Do you think, as a society, we still carry that ethos, or have the tools we rely on grown opaque to us?

The Model T was designed so it could be maintained and adapted in countless ways. Ford grew up amid Midwestern farming culture, where people were adept at fixing their own gear, and he anticipated that skill. The Model T remained recognizable as such for decades, gradually aged, ended in junkyards, and from there the parts were scavenged to keep other units running—two decades later, a component from a very old Model T would fit a newer one.

It’s worth noting the segment about interchangeable parts because it stands as perhaps the most anti-libertarian, anti–Reason portion of Brand’s book: it was government engineers—specifically the War Department’s Ordnance Office—for forty years that poured money into enabling U.S. manufacturers to produce interchangeable parts. It turns out you need tolerances down to about a fiftieth of a millimeter for it to function. The program succeeded, and that is why America led the way in the manufacturing facet of the Industrial Revolution.

We set the standard, what was called the “American system.” The secret to achieving truly interchangeable parts was essentially to automate the machinery that produced them.

Ford forbade anyone from filing a part on the assembly line, because a filed piece could derail the whole line. With firearms, if a weapon breaks on the battlefield, you must locate a gunsmith—often far from the front lines—to reshape a piece or manufacture a replacement. Once compatibility is achieved, like with the AK-47, any component can substitute for another, and those rifles are robustly engineered, albeit simply.

I view that 19th‑century evolution as a catalyst for institutions like ARPA, which today the researchers refer to as military entrepreneurship.

In your writing, you note the AK-47’s Soviet origin and its status as the weapon of choice for armies and insurgents because it is straightforward, easy to repair, and abundant in spare parts. You contrast that with the M16, developed in the United States and deployed en masse during Vietnam, which proved inferior in practice. It has twice as many components, is more prone to corrosion and dirt, and requires meticulous maintenance to function. Is there a sweet spot between these two extremes?

I don’t think there is one fixed sweet spot. The advantage is often found by pursuing both directions. AK-47s are cheap and resilient in mud, sand, and humidity, and you can pull one from the mud and fire it immediately as dust and mud are expelled. An M16, when it works, is superb—capable of delivering high-velocity rounds through a helmet at 500 meters—but it demands painstaking upkeep.

There’s always a niche for not only inexpensive, speedy solutions that barely hold together but also for finely tuned, perfect instruments when conditions are nearly ideal. Exploring both paths, as a way to map the entire design landscape, remains a worthwhile pursuit.

Your work has contributed to, among other things, the NASA effort to release a photograph of Earth that helped galvanize the first Earth Day. You helped cultivate the environmentalist mindset. When you suggest that some activism went too far, you carry significant weight.

Greenpeace, for instance, opposed technology. Romanticism generally recoils from technology. The fable of John Henry endures, while the steam drill does not. Yet the steam drill often proves to be a more effective method for certain tasks.

The French Revolution, which touched off the era of interchangeable gunparts, warned against it, fearing that skilled gunmakers would lose work. They halted the man known as [Honoré] Blanc, who specialized in making interchangeable musket parts. Within a generation, France shifted from possessing some of Europe’s best muskets to having some of the worst, precisely because the customers—soldiers—were left out of the calculation. And that pattern recurs.

The anti-technology romantic is, more often than not, wrong and misguided in argument. The proper way to critique any new development—AI included—is to embrace it, experiment with it, risk making mistakes, challenge its limits, and perform red-teaming to sharpen it. If, during that process, we decide that the path is a dead end, a well-informed critique from those who tested it remains legitimate.

People tend to conjure up more problems than there are ways to achieve success with new technologies.

What do you see as the most compelling critique of AI as it’s being integrated today? Which aspects should we test to determine whether it’s a path we truly want to follow?

I’m not focused on one critique, but I do know many of those who will think through it will examine potential misuses and unintended consequences. They could potentially foreclose some risks, though not all. Some outcomes may be catastrophic, and in that case we would negotiate responses. The deployment of AI in weapons is likely to advance rapidly, because militaries tend to adopt every new capability as soon as it appears, and—viewed from a strategic angle—there’s a logic to that. It could resemble the use of gases that eventually become taboo. Nuclear weapons, even tactical ones, have also faced long-standing taboo.

Everything is tied to threat perception. The extensive testing conducted during the 1950s and 1960s was about negotiating risk. But once mutual assured destruction and second-strike capability emerged, the overall drive toward escalation lessened. Some problems prove non-existent; others are easy to spot and fix, while still others remain stubbornly resistant. We’ll experience the same arc with AIs.

In the late 1960s, political violence surged and drew strength from a belief that it was the answer. The nation seemed to unravel at times, with no shared ground. Today we observe a similar climate of polarization, demonization, and violence. Is our political system resilient enough to keep things in check, or has it ceased functioning? How can we cultivate a consensual government that yields broad benefits with lower costs?

This moment is interesting precisely because all of that is being tested, contested, and weighed. The system was designed to resist grasping it, yet it has been grabbed. How far will that trend go before it becomes permanent? That is what we are discovering now.

There are many reasons to believe a balance can be found, albeit a new one. It will look different from the past. The institutions may wear different party labels, but the basic machinery at the local and state levels remains largely intact. A path to a renewed equilibrium will emerge.

The Whole Earth Catalog mission statement, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” first appeared in 1968. With almost six decades behind us, do you think we’ve become adept at wielding that power?

Climate remains the real test. We have indeed gained access to many godlike capabilities—though with a small “g”—powerful in scope but not omnipotent. We have yet to undertake planetary-scale maintenance in any comprehensive sense. Climate change confronts us with a deep, slow-moving process. There are no instant remedies, though some are more effective than others. Geoengineering is likely to become part of the debate as the ongoing escalation of temperature and sea level prompts a cheaper means to give us time to transition energy systems away from combustion. That shift would reshape the planet, its society, and its civilization because it isn’t a purely economic matter. A planetary economy does not exist in the same way the global economy does; the matters that affect the planet operate beyond dollars and cents.

The most important advancement in science is our ability to sense when something is going wrong and to identify the precise source of the problem. In terms of maintenance, that form of sensing—predictive maintenance—is essential. Before a failure occurs, there are signals that suggest trouble, and that is when you try to intervene. Often intervention is insufficient. Thus far, we have not fully succeeded in applying this to climate. We have advanced solar energy far beyond expectations; our circle of supporters in the Whole Earth Catalog era believed it obvious, yet it took time for solar to become affordable and straightforward.

If you manage 100 acres of farmland, you can expect a particular yield. Even with precision farming, there’s a fixed ceiling. If you allow a company to install a large solar array on your land and you lease it out, you might earn ten to a hundred times more, without the same level of hassle. The sun is an ever-cheaper, abundant energy source, and there is a lot of sunlight. In time, there will be even more as space-based data centers emerge.

Do you sense that attitudes toward nuclear energy are maturing globally? You ruffled some feathers in environmental circles by arguing that nuclear power is a clear path to lower emissions and reduced planetary impact. Do you think that view is gaining broader acceptance?

The opposition to nuclear energy has largely faded. Younger generations were not convinced by the fear they inherited, and now prosperous young people are pursuing AI, crypto, and other ventures that demand energy—yet they also recognize the appeal of nuclear power’s potential. They see its safety improvements and scalability. So it appears that both nuclear expansion and solar growth are on track to continue.

How are you tending to your own legacy while you’re still actively contributing?

I once attempted to write a memoir, but I found the process tedious and tedious for myself. Yet a film about my life, We Are As Gods, was produced and turned out well. A biography by John Markoff followed and it too is well done. All of the Whole Earthwork material—over thirty years—now lives online at wholeearth.info. I feel fortunate that my legacy has taken on a life of its own without my constant involvement.

After Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb, passed away, you observed that you’d stand up for Paul. You noted that, while he was wrong about discounting the demographic transition, he co-authored (with Peter Raven) one of the most cited papers in biology on coevolution. How do you assess his overall influence on science and society?

Remember that it was Dave Brower of the Sierra Club who urged Ehrlich to write not as a scientist but as a polemic on overpopulation. Overpopulation was a preexisting environmental obsession before Ehrlich ignited it with his book. (Those same self-styled ecologists often couldn’t distinguish a trophic level from a Tyrannosaurus.)

Peter Raven is a botanist—his Wikipedia entry notes that he coauthored Butterflies and Plants: A Study in Coevolution, published in Evolution in 1964 with Ehrlich. Ehrlich was a zoologist and a lepidopterist focused on checkerspot butterfly populations. He observed that identical-looking butterflies could feed on entirely different plants in different regions. Over coffee, he and Raven argued that zoologists treated plants as mere edible plastic, while plants actively respond to animals as much as animals respond to plants. Naming that reciprocal relationship “coevolution” jolted evolutionary theory by highlighting how much evolution involves reciprocal adaptations among living beings. In short, it reframed understanding by showing adaptation is largely coadaptation among species.

That’s a profound reframing, which is why I named a magazine after it—CoEvolution Quarterly. For me, it far outweighs Ehrlich’s numerical exaggerations about population numbers.

In a sense, I’m attempting something similar with the idea of “maintenance.” It’s not merely a nuisance; it’s so fundamental that most living things devote their time and energy to tending it.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity, as well as augmented by questions answered over email.