Too Much Controversy over Genetically Modified Foods? - Stewart Brand October 22, 2009

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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/10/09/Stewart_Brand_Rethinking_Green

Genetically engineered foods are "only unnatural if you don't know the biology," says author and futurist Stewart Brand. "There is no good reason for genetically engineered food crops to be controversial."

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Environmentalist pioneer Stewart Brand talks about his book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, in a discussion at the Long Now Foundation. This program was recorded in San Francisco, CA, on October 9, 2009.

Stewart Brand is a co-founder and managing director of Global Business Network, founded and runs the GBN Book Club, and is the president of The Long Now Foundation.

Brand is well known for founding, editing and publishing the Whole Earth Catalog (01968-85), which received a National Book Award for the 01972 issue. In 01984, he founded The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a computer teleconference system for the San Francisco Bay Area. It now has 11,000 active users worldwide and is considered a bellwether of the genre.

Brand has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary center studying the sciences of complexity, since 01989. He received the Golden Gadfly Lifetime Achievement Award from the Media Alliance, San Francisco in the same year.

He was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which supports civil rights and responsibilities in electronic media, and is an acting adviser to Ecotrust, Portland-based preservers of temperate rain forest from Alaska to San Francisco.

Brand is the author of many pioneering books including The Clock Of The Long Now in 01999, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built in 01994, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT in 01987, and Two Cybernetic Frontiers on Gregory Bateson and cutting-edge computer science in 01974. It had the first use of the term "personal computer" in print and was the first book to report on computer hackers.