Whole Earth Catalog

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The Whole Earth Catalog was an American counterculture catalog that granted "Access to Tools" published by Stewart Brand between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. Apple Inc. founder and entrepreneur Steve Jobs has described the Catalog as the conceptual forerunner of the World Wide Web.^[1]

Overview

Fall 1969 cover

Andrew Kirk in Counterculture Green notes that the Whole Earth Catalog was preceded by the Whole Earth Truck Store. This store was conceived of as the "first phase" of his Whole Earth idea and was "an alternative library" ^[2] and an "abbreviated version of Brand's earlier hope to tour the country with educational fairs. The truck was a store but was also a lending library and mobile microeducation fair." ^[3] It was created in his "1963 Dodge Truck." In 1968, Brand and his wife Lois went "on a commune road trip" with the truck. ^[3] The Truck Store finally settled in its permanent location in Menlo Park, California. ^[4]

Brand's intent with the Catalog was to provide education and "access to tools" so a reader could "find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested."^{[citation needed]} The Catalog's development and marketing were driven by an energetic group of founders, primarily Stewart Brand, whose family was also involved with the project. Its outsize pages measured 11x14 inches (28x36 cm). Later editions were more than an inch thick. The early editions were published by the Portola Institute, headed by Richard Raymond. In 1972, the catalog won the National Book Award, the first time a catalog had ever won such an award.^{[citation needed]}

Brand's publishing efforts were suffused with an awareness of the importance of ecology, both as a field of study and as an influence upon the future of humankind and emerging human awareness.

The catalogs disseminated many ideas now associated with the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those of the counterculture and the environmental movements. Later editions and related publications edited by Brand popularized many innovative ideas during the 1970s-1990s.^[which?]

Concept

From the opening page of the 1969 Catalog:

Function

The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting. An item is listed in the CATALOG if it is deemed:

1. Useful as a tool,
2. Relevant to independent education,
3. High quality or low cost,
4. Easily available by mail.

CATALOG listings are continually revised according to the experience and suggestions of CATALOG users and staff.

Purpose

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory — as via government, big business, formal education, church — has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing — power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.

The title came from a previous project of Stewart Brand's. In 1966, he initiated a public campaign to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the sphere of Earth as seen from space. He thought the image of our planet might be a powerful symbol, evoking adaptive strategies from people.

Toward the end of the 1960s, the Stanford-educated Brand, a biologist with strong artistic and social interests, believed that there was a groundswell of commitment to thoroughly renovating American industrial society along ecologically and socially just lines, whatever they might prove to be. So using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, he and his colleagues created the first issue of The Whole Earth Catalog. In subsequent issues, its production values gradually improved.

J. Baldwin was a young designer and instructor of design at two colleges near San Francisco Bay. As he recalled in the film Ecological Design (1994), "Stewart Brand came to me because he heard that I read catalogs. He said, 'I want to make this thing called a "whole Earth" catalog so that anyone on Earth can pick up a telephone and find out the complete information on anything. ...That’s my goal.'" Baldwin served as the chief editor of subjects in the areas of technology and design, both in the catalog itself and in other publications which arose from it.

Steve Jobs compared The Whole Earth Catalog to Internet search engine Google in his June 2005 Stanford University commencement speech. "When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation.... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions." During the commencement speech, Jobs also quoted the farewell message placed on the back cover of the 1974 edition of the catalog: "Stay hungry, stay foolish." ^[1]

Kevin Kelly made a similar comparison in 2008:

For this new countercultural movement, information was a precious commodity. In the ’60s, there was no Internet; no 500 cable channels. [... The WEC] was a great example of user-generated content, without advertising, before the Internet. Basically, Brand invented the blogosphere long before there was any such thing as a blog. [...] No topic was too esoteric, no degree of enthusiasm too ardent, no amateur expertise too uncertified to be included. [...] This I am sure about: it is no coincidence that the Whole Earth Catalogs disappeared as soon as the web and blogs arrived. Everything the Whole Earth Catalogs did, the web does better.^[5]

Content

The 1968 catalog divided itself into seven broad sections:

• Understanding Whole Systems
• Shelter and Land Use
• Industry and Craft
• Communications
• Community
• Nomadics
• Learning

Within each section, the best tools and books the editors could find were collected and listed, along with images, reviews and uses, prices, and suppliers. The reader was also able to order some items directly through the catalog.

Later editions changed a few of the headings, but generally kept the same overall framework.

The Catalog used a broad definition of "tools." There were informative tools, such as books, maps, professional journals, courses, and classes. There were well-designed special-purpose utensils, including garden tools, carpenters' and masons' tools, welding equipment, chainsaws, fiberglass materials, tents, hiking shoes, and potters' wheels. There were even early synthesizers and personal computers.

The Catalog's publication coincided with a great wave of convention-challenging experimentalism and a do-it-yourself attitude associated with "the counterculture," and tended to appeal not only to the intelligentsia of the movement, but to creative, hands-on, and outdoorsy people of many stripes. Some of the ideas in the Catalog were developed during Brand's visits to Drop City.

With the Catalog opened flat, the reader might find the large page on the left full of text and intriguing illustrations from a volume of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China, showing and explaining an astronomical clock tower or a chain-pump windmill, while on the right-hand page are an excellent review of a beginners' guide to modern technology (The Way Things Work) and a review of The Engineers’ Illustrated Thesaurus. On another spread, the verso reviews books on accounting and moonlighting jobs, while the recto bears an article in which people tell the story of a community credit union they founded. Another pair of pages depict and discuss different kayaks, inflatable dinghies, and houseboats.

The broad interpretation of "tool" coincided with that given by the designer, philosopher, and engineer Buckminster Fuller, though another thinker admired by Brand and some of his cohorts was Lewis Mumford, who had written about words as tools. Early editions reflected the considerable influence of Fuller, particularly his teachings about "whole systems," "synergetics," and efficiency or reducing waste. By 1971, Brand and his co-workers were already questioning whether Fuller’s sense of direction might be too anthropocentric. New information arising in fields like ecology and biospherics was persuasive.

Looking back and discussing attitudes evident in the early editions of the catalog, Brand wrote, “At a time when the New Left was calling for grass-roots political (i.e., referred) power, Whole Earth eschewed politics and pushed grass-roots direct power—tools and skills.”^[6]

By the mid-1970s, much of the Buddhist economics viewpoint of E. F. Schumacher, as well as the activist interests of the biological species preservationists, had tempered the overall enthusiasm for Fuller's ideas in the catalog.^{[citation needed]} Still later, the amiable-architecture ideas of people like Christopher Alexander and similar community-planning ideas of people like Peter Calthorpe further tempered the engineering-efficiency tone of Fuller's ideas.^{[citation needed]}

As an early indicator of the general zeitgeist of the times, the catalog's first edition preceded the original Earth Day by nearly two years. The idea of Earth Day occurred to Senator Gaylord Nelson, its instigator, "in the summer of 1969 while on a conservation speaking tour out west," where the Sierra Club was active, and where young minds had been broadened and stimulated by such influences as the catalog.

Gurney Norman's Appalachian epic "Divine Right's Trip" first appeared in The Last Whole Earth Catalog in 1971. The complete novel was printed in its margins.

Despite this popular and critical success, particularly among a generation of young hippies and survivalists, the catalog was not intended to continue in publication for long, just long enough for the editors to complete a good overview of the available tools and resources, and for the word, and copies, to get out to everyone who needed them.^{[citation needed]}

Publication history

Publication after 1972

After 1972 the catalog was published sporadically. Updated editions of The Last Whole Earth Catalog appeared periodically from 1971 to 1975, but only a few fully new catalogs appeared. In 1974 the Whole Earth Epilog was published, which was intended as a 'volume 2' to the Last Whole Earth Catalog. In 1980, The Next Whole Earth Catalog (ISBN 0-394-70776-1) was published; it was so well received that an updated second edition was published in 1981.

There were two editions in the 1980s of the Whole Earth Software Catalog, a compendium for which Doubleday had bid $1.4 million for the trade paperback rights.^[7]

In 1986, The Essential Whole Earth Catalog (ISBN 0-385-23641-7) was published, and in 1989 the WEC was published on CD-ROM using an early version of hypertext. In 1988, there was a WEC dedicated to Communications Tools. A Whole Earth Ecolog was published in 1990, devoted exclusively to environmental topics. Around this time there were special WECs on other topics (e.g., The Fringes of Reason in 1989).

The last 'full' WEC, entitled The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog (ISBN 0-06-251059-2), was published in 1994. A slender, but still 'A3'-sized, 30th Anniversary Celebration WEC was published in 1998 as part of Issue 95 of the Whole Earth magazine (ISSN 0749-5056); it was comprised half of old material and half of brand-new material. An important aspect of this final WEC was the limitations placed on it by book publishers: Because "Publishers begged [Whole Earth] not to reprint ... their names anywhere near books they no longer carry", all access information was placed at the back of the WEC. This placement hampered a valuable function of the WEC: calling for readers to urge publishers to get seminal works back into print.

An important shift in philosophy in the Catalogs occurred in the early 1970s, when Brand decided that the early stance of emphasizing individualism should be replaced with one favoring community. He had originally written that "a realm of intimate, personal power is developing"; regarding this as important in some respects (to wit, the soon-emerging potentials of personal computing), Brand felt that the over-arching project of humankind had more to do with living within natural systems, and this is something we do in common, interactively.^{[citation needed]}

From 1974 to 2003, the Whole Earth principals published a magazine, known originally as CoEvolution Quarterly. When the short-lived Whole Earth Software Review (a supplement to The Whole Earth Software Catalog) failed, it was merged in 1985 with CoEvolution Quarterly to form the Whole Earth Review (edited at different points by Jay Kinney, Kevin Kelly, and Howard Rheingold), later called Whole Earth Magazine and finally just Whole Earth. The last issue, number 111 (edited by Alex Steffen), was meant to be published in Spring 2003, but funds ran out. The Point Foundation, which owned Whole Earth, closed its doors later that year.^{[citation needed]}

The Whole Earth website continues the WEC legacy of concepts in popular discourse, medical self-care, community building, bioregionalism, environmental restoration, nanotechnology, and cyberspace.

WEC spin-offs and inspirations

Recognizing the value of the WEC, and also recognizing the limits of its 'developed country' focus, groups in several countries developed 'catalogs' of development tools that were based on their perceptions of topics relevant in their countries. One such effort was an developing country adaptation of the WEC: In the late 1970s a version of the WEC (called the "Liklik Buk") was developed and published in Papua New Guinea; by 1982 this had been enlarged, updated, and translated (as "Save Na Mekem") into the Pijin language used throughout Melanesia, and updates of the English "Liklik Buk" were published in 1986 and 2003.

In the United States, the book Domebook One was a direct spin-off of the WEC. Lloyd Kahn, Shelter editor of the WEC, borrowed WEC production equipment for a week in 1970 and produced the first book on building geodesic domes. A year later, in 1971, Kahn again borrowed WEC equipment (an IBM Selectric Composer typesetting machine and a Polaroid MP-5 camera on an easel), and spent a month in the Santa Barbara Mountains producing Domebook 2, which went on to sell 165,000 copies. With production of DB 2, Kahn and his company Shelter Publications followed Stewart Brand's move to nation-wide distribution by Random House.^[8]

In late 2006, Worldchanging released their 600-page compendium of solutions, Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century, which Bill McKibben, in an article in the New York Review of Books called "The Whole Earth Catalog retooled for the iPod generation."^[9] The editor of Worldchanging has since acknowledged the Catalog as a prime inspiration.^[10][11]

In 1969, a store which was inspired by (but not financially connected with) The Whole Earth Catalog, called the Whole Earth Access opened in Berkeley, California. It closed in 1998.

Scholarship

Stewart Brand and The Whole Earth Catalog are both subjects of interest to scholars. Notable examples include works by Theodore Roszak, Howard Rheingold, Fred Turner, John Markoff, Andrew Kirk, and Sam Binkley. The Stanford University Library System has a Whole Earth archive in their Department of Special Collections.^[12]

References

Further reading

• Binkley, Sam. Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
• ---. "The Seers of Menlo Park: The Discourse of Heroic Consumption in the ‘Whole Earth Catalog.'" Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 3, No. 3, 283-313 (2003).
• Kirk, Andrew G. Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 2007.
• Markoff, John. What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. New York: Penguin, 2005.
• Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community. Cambridge: MIT press, 1993/2000.
• Roszak, Theodore. The Cult of Information. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986/1994.
• --.From Satori to Silicon Valley. San Francisco: Don't Call It Frisco Press, 1986.
• Turner, Fred (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-81741-5. 

External links

• Official website
• From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog - Stanford University, featuring Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, and Fred Turner
• "Taking the Whole Earth Digital" - an excerpt from Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture.
• The Whole Earth Effect — Plenty Magazine