Stewart Brand is best known as the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog (1968–85). His book Whole Earth Discipline makes a strong case for keeping some of our technological civilization alive while reducing our net carbon emissions to a minimum. The methods he touts include urban density, vertical farms, nuclear power plants, and biotechnology. Referring to scientist James Lovelock’s statements that climate change cannot be halted now and will turn many habitable regions into parched wasteland, Brand outlines visionary and risky geoengineering projects that may be deployed to mitigate global warming. 

A lifelong environmentalist who sees everything in terms of solvable design problems, Brand describes three profound transformations underway on Earth right now. Climate change is real and is pushing us toward managing the planet as a whole. Urbanization—half the world’s population now lives in cities, and eighty percent will by mid-century—is altering humanity’s land impact and wealth. And biotechnology is becoming the world’s dominant engineering tool, the key to crop and land management. In light of these changes, Brand suggests that environmentalists are going to have to reverse some long held opinions and embrace tools that they have traditionally distrusted. Only a radical rethinking of traditional green pieties will allow us to forestall the cataclysmic deterioration of the earth’s resources.

With scientific rigor and passionate advocacy, Brand offers a bold and inventive set of policies and solutions for creating a more sustainable society. In the end, he says, we have to learn how to manage the planet’s global-scale natural infrastructure with as light a touch as possible and as much intervention as necessary.

“One of the most original and important books of the century. As the title connotes, the writing is about disciplined thinking. Shibboleths, ideological cant, and green fetishes are put to the side with the clarity and expertise gained by years of research and forethought, a mindbending exploration of what humankind can and must do to retain the mantle of civilization. The highest compliment one can give a book is ‘it changed my mind.’ It changed mine and I am grateful.” —Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest