Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938 in Rockford, Illinois) is an author, editor, and creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly. Brand is best known for the Whole Earth Catalog (a compendium of tools, texts and information). The Catalog sought to "catalyze the emergence of a realm of personal power" by making soft technology available to people eager to create sustainable communities.

Brand went on to found a number of organizations, including the WELL or Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (an early online community); the Global Business Network (a futurist consulting firm); and the Long Now Foundation (dedicated to encouraging long-term thinking). He is the author of several books and many articles, ranging in focus from the psychedelic rituals of Native Americans to a systems analysis of "buildings in time." Today, he and his wife live on a tugboat in Sausalito, California. During Brand's childhood, his father worried that school was not stimulating Stewart to independent, creative thinking.

His parents' response was to send him to Phillips Exeter Academy. From there, he went on to study biology at Stanford University, graduating in 1960. In the U.S. Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills; he was later to express that his experience in the military fostered his competence in organizing.

A civilian again, in the year 1962 he studied design at San Francisco Art Institute, photography at San Francisco State College, and was a participant in a legitimate scientific study of the then-legal drug LSD, in Menlo Park, California.

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