in the '60s, you -- I think it was '68 -- you founded this magazine.

Stewart Brand: Bravo! It's the original one.

That's hard to find.

CA: Right. Issue One, right?

SB: Mm hmm.

CA: Why did that make so much impact?

SB: Counterculture was the main event that I was part of at the time,

and it was made up of hippies and New Left.

That was sort of my contemporaries,

the people I was just slightly older than.

And my mode is to look at where the interesting flow is

and then look in the other direction.

CA: (Laughs)

SB: Partly, I was trained to do that as an army officer,

but partly, it's just a cheap heuristic to find originalities:

don't look where everybody else is looking,

look the opposite way.

So the deal with counterculture is, the hippies were very romantic

and kind of against technology,

except very good LSD from Sandoz,

and the New Left was against technology

because they thought it was a power device.

Computers were: do not spindle, fold, or mutilate.

Fight that.

And so, the Whole Earth Catalog was kind of a counter-counterculture thing

in the sense that I bought Buckminster Fuller's idea

that tools of are of the essence.

Science and engineers basically define the world in interesting ways.

If all the politicians disappeared one week,

it would be ... a nuisance.

But if all the scientists and engineers disappeared one week,

it would be way more than a nuisance.

CA: We still believe that, I think.

SB: So focus on that.

And then the New Left was talking about power to the people.

And people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak

cut that and just said, power to people,

tools that actually work.

And so, where Fuller was saying don't try to change human nature,

people have been trying for a long time and it does not even bend,

but you can change tools very easily.

So the efficient thing to do if you want to make the world better

is not try to make people behave differently like the New Left was,

but just give them tools that go in the right direction.

That was the Whole Earth Catalog.

CA: And Stewart, the central image -- this is one of the first images,

the first time people had seen Earth from outer space.

That had an impact, too.

SB: It was kind of a chance that in the spring of '66,

thanks to an LSD experience on a rooftop in San Francisco,

I got thinking about, again, something that Fuller talked about,

that a lot of people assume that the Earth is flat

and kind of infinite in terms of its resources,

but once you really grasp that it's a sphere

and that there's only so much of it,

then you start husbanding your resources

and thinking about it as a finite system.

"Spaceship Earth" was his metaphor.

And I wanted that to be the case,

but on LSD I was getting higher and higher on my hundred micrograms

on the roof of San Francisco,

and noticed that the downtown buildings which were right in front of me

were not all parallel, they were sort of fanned out like this.

And that's because they are on a curved surface.

And if I were even higher, I would see that even more clearly,

higher than that, more clearly still,

higher enough, and it would close,

and you would get the circle of Earth from space.

And I thought, you know, we've been in space for 10 years --

at that time, this is '66 --

and the cameras had never looked back.

They'd always been looking out or looking at just parts of the Earth.

And so I said, why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?

And it went around and NASA got it and senators, secretaries got it,

and various people in the Politburo got it,

and it went around and around.

And within two and a half years,

about the time the Whole Earth Catalog came out,

these images started to appear,

and indeed, they did transform everything.

And my idea of hacking civilization

is that you try to do something lazy and ingenious

and just sort of trick the situation.

So all of these photographs that you see --

and then the march for science last week,

they were carrying these Whole Earth banners and so on --

I did that with no work.

I sold those buttons for 25 cents apiece.

So, you know, tweaking the system

is, I think, not only the most efficient way to make the system go

in interesting ways,

but in some ways, the safest way,

because when you try to horse the whole system around in a big way,

you can get into big horsing-around problems,

but if you tweak it, it will adjust to the tweak.

CA: So since then, among many other things,

you've been regarded as a leading voice in the environmental movement,

but you are also a counterculturalist,

and recently, you've been taking on a lot of,

well, you've been declaring

what a lot of environmentalists almost believe are heresies.

I kind of want to explore a couple of those.

I mean, tell me about this image here.

SB: Ha-ha!

That's a National Geographic image

of what is called the mammoth steppe,

what the far north, the sub-Arctic and Arctic region, used to look like.

In fact, the whole world used to look like that.

What we find in South Africa and the Serengeti now,

lots of big animals,

was the case in this part of Canada,

throughout the US, throughout Eurasia, throughout the world.

This was the norm

and can be again.

So in a sense,

my long-term goal at this point is to not only bring back those animals

and the grassland they made,

which could be a climate stabilization system over the long run,

but even the mammoths there in the background

that are part of the story.

And I think that's probably a 200-year goal.

Maybe in 100, by the end of this century,

we should be able to dial down the extinction rate

to sort of what it's been in the background.

Bringing back this amount of bio-abundance will take longer,

but it's worth doing.

CA: We'll come back to the mammoths,

but explain how we should think of extinctions.

Obviously, one of the huge concerns right now

is that extinction is happening at a faster rate than ever in history.

That's the meme that's out there.

How should we think of it?

SB: The story that's out there

is that we're in the middle of the Sixth Extinction

or maybe in the beginning of the Sixth Extinction.

Because we're in the de-extinction business,

the preventing-extinction business with Revive & Restore,

we started looking at what's actually going on with extinction.

And it turns out, there's a very confused set of data out there

which gets oversimplified

into the narrative of we're becoming ...

Here are five mass extinctions that are indicated by the yellow triangles,

and we're now next.

The last one there on the far right

was the meteor that struck 66 million years ago

and did in the dinosaurs.

And the story is, we're the next meteor.

Well, here's the deal.

I wound up researching this for a paper I wrote,

that a mass extinction is when 75 percent of all the species

in the world go extinct.

Well, there's on the order of five-and-a-half-million species,

of which we've identified one and a half million.

Another 14,000 are being identified every year.

There's a lot of biology going on out there.

Since 1500,

about 500 species have gone extinct,

and you'll see the term "mass extinction" kind of used in strange ways.

So there was, about a year and a half ago,

a front-page story by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times,

"Mass Extinction in the Oceans, Broad Studies Show."

And then you read into the article, and it mentions that since 1500,

15 species -- one, five -- have gone extinct in the oceans,

and, oh, by the way, none in the last 50 years.

And you read further into the story, and it's saying,

the horrifying thing that's going on

is that the fisheries are so overfishing the wild fishes,

that it is taking down the fish populations in the oceans

by 38 percent.

That's the serious thing.

None of those species are probably going to go extinct.

So you've just put, that headline writer

put a panic button

on the top of the story.

It's clickbait kind of stuff,

but it's basically saying, "Oh my God, start panicking,

we're going to lose all the species in the oceans."

Nothing like that is in prospect.

And in fact, what I then started looking into in a little more detail,

the Red List shows about 23,000 species that are considered threatened

at one level or another,

coming from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the IUCN.

And Nature Magazine had a piece surveying the loss of wildlife,

and it said,

"If all of those 23,000 went extinct

in the next century or so,

and that rate of extinction carried on for more centuries and millennia,

then we might be at the beginning of a sixth extinction.

So the exaggeration is way out of hand.

But environmentalists always exaggerate.

That's a problem.

CA: I mean, they probably feel a moral responsibility to,

because they care so much about the thing that they are looking at,

and unless you bang the drum for it, maybe no one listens.

SB: Every time somebody says moral this or moral that --

"moral hazard," "precautionary principle" --

these are terms that are used to basically say no to things.

CA: So the problem isn't so much fish extinction, animal extinction,

it's fish flourishing, animal flourishing,

that we're crowding them to some extent?

SB: Yeah, and I think we are crowding, and there is losses going on.

The major losses are caused by agriculture,

and so anything that improves agriculture and basically makes it more condensed,

more highly productive,

including GMOs, please,

but even if you want to do vertical farms in town,

including inside farms,

all the things that have been learned about how to grow pot in basements,

is now being applied to growing vegetables inside containers --

that's great, that's all good stuff,

because land sparing is the main thing we can do for nature.

People moving to cities is good.

Making agriculture less of a destruction of the landscape is good.

CA: There people talking about bringing back species, rewilding ...

Well, first of all, rewilding species: What's the story with these guys?

SB: Ha-ha! Wolves.

Europe, connecting to the previous point,

we're now at probably peak farmland,

and, by the way, in terms of population,

we are already at peak children being alive.

Henceforth, there will be fewer and fewer children.

We are in the last doubling of human population,

and it will get to nine, maybe nine and a half billion,

and then start not just leveling off, but probably going down.

Likewise, farmland has now peaked,

and one of the ways that plays out in Europe

is there's a lot of abandoned farmland now,

which immediately reforests.

They don't do wildlife corridors in Europe.

They don't need to, because so many of these farms are connected

that they've made reforested wildlife corridors,

that the wolves are coming back, in this case, to Spain.

They've gotten all the way to the Netherlands.

There's bears coming back. There's lynx coming back.

There's the European jackal. I had no idea such a thing existed.

They're coming back from Italy to the rest of Europe.

And unlike here, these are all predators, which is kind of interesting.

They are being welcomed by Europeans. They've been missed.

CA: And counterintuitively, when you bring back the predators,

it actually increases rather than reduces

the diversity of the underlying ecosystem often.

SB: Yeah, generally predators and large animals --

large animals and large animals with sharp teeth and claws --

are turning out to be highly important for a really rich ecosystem.

CA: Which maybe brings us to this rather more dramatic rewilding project

that you've got yourself involved in.

Why would someone want to bring back these terrifying woolly mammoths?

SB: Hmm. Asian elephants are the closest relative

to the woolly mammoth,

and they're about the same size, genetically