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Biotechnology’s role in agriculture to help feed the world and meet the challenges of climate change is the topic when Stewart Brand, a recognized voice in environmental issues since the 1960s, delivers the fourth Heuermann Lecture.

“In the face of climate change, everybody is an environmentalist,” Brand wrote in his 2009 book “Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.” Brand founded the “Whole Earth Catalog” in 1968.

He says three worldwide events – climate change, urbanization and biotechnology – are having lasting effects on the planet, and are requiring people to make hard ideological shifts. These shifts are hard, Brand says, because they mean reversing long-held opinions and supporting tools once distrusted.

Brand himself has gone from distrusting nuclear power and genetically modified organisms – he prefers the term genetically engineered – to embracing both in the race to save people from what he sees as catastrophic effects of climate change caused by human actions.

Brand is co-founder and president of The Long Now Foundation, which works to make long-term thinking more common as a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture. He also co-founded and works for Global Business Network, which helps clients address critical challenges and gain what they need to shape the future.

Brand has authored and edited a number of books since he began “The Whole Earth Catalog,” and is the subject of two books, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism,” and “Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism.”

A short reception in the Hardin Hall lobby will follow the lecture.