Whole Earth’s Stewart Brand says consumer embrace of ‘healthier’ GM foods inevitable

Picture a parent roaming the supermarket aisles in 2050, scanning labels carefully for the all-important words “genetically modified ingredients”—to make sure everything that goes into the shopping cart is guaranteed to be GMO.

“They won’t accept any of that dangerous organic stuff because that was bred traditionally and no one knows what’s in there, and it probably wasn’t irradiated on the way to the market, so pathogens are still on there,” says futurist Stewart Brand, president of The Long Now Foundation and publisher of the 1970s counterculture bible for a self-sustainable lifestyle, the Whole Earth Catalog. “Flips like that do occur,” he says.

While Brand may offer up his futuristic scenario with tongue slightly in cheek, he is serious about his belief that technology is key to finding the solutions our hungry planet will need. He is a preacher of the power of biotech. It’s a perspective that’s a world away from his roots as a pioneer in the late 1960s and early 1970s environmentalist movement in California, when he fully supported the hippie philosophy of heading back to the land.

“The world has changed significantly since the early to mid-‘70s, but the environmental movement has not changed,” says Brand. “We were supposed to look down on tech solutions to environmental problems. We were supposed to solve all of our environmental problems through better behavior. And look down on corporations, and anything purporting to be good that came from a corporation should be regarded with suspicion, a viewpoint which stands to this day, and is based on nothing.”

Brand intentionally chooses strong words. He believes advances in agriculture will eventually result in healthier, more nutritious foods and more efficient food production on less farmland, which would lead to the return of great swaths of wildlife corridors—just some of the ideas he lays out in his 2010 book, “Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary.”

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Futurist Stewart Brand is betting on biotech

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