Your eulogy of Stewart Brand is a stirring read (“Jolly Green Heretic,” September 8, 2007). A self-confessed contrarian by nature, the man of The Whole Earth Catalogue (1968) fame still challenges the world around him. With consummate gusto, too. That is admirable, especially among the holier-than-though greens, his one-time admirers. His three environmental heresies—genetic engineering, urbanization, and nuclear power—surely deserve careful scrutiny. To say the least, they cannot be dismissed out of hand in view of climate change, which Brand acknowledges as the greatest environmental challenge facing mankind. But I cringe at your closing sentence, taken from his forty-year-old masterpiece: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” The ghost of 1968 can be jarring at times, indeed. As gods we are not, nor shall we ever be, and it is high time such heresies are given up for good. For they can only get us into even greater trouble than we already face.