Whole Earth Catalog

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Fall 1969 cover
Fall 1969 cover

The Whole Earth Catalog was a sizable catalog published twice a year from 1968 to 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. Its purpose 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." Apple Inc. founder and entrepreneur Steve Jobs has described the Catalog as a conceptual forerunner of Web search engines.[1]

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.

Contents

[edit] Introduction

From the opening page of the 1969 Catalog:

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.'" In this sense, the Catalog’s initial concept can be viewed as a forerunner of the Internet, as an information sourcing tool. 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 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]

[edit] Content

The 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.

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.” (Winter 1998 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, p. 3)

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. 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.

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.

[edit] 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.[2]

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.

From 1974 to 2003, the Whole Earth principals published a magazine, known originally as CoEvolution Quarterly. When the short-lived Whole Earth Software Review 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. As of 2007, the Whole Earth magazine website still exists, but it does not appear to have been updated since 2003.

The Whole Earth website is currently under development, and will relaunch in January of 2008.

[edit] WEC Spin-offs

Recognising the value of the WEC, and also recognising 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. Many of these fine efforts were weakened because political correctness made it difficult to use the 'free thinking' approach that created the WEC.[citation needed] However, one such effort was an excellent 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.[3]

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."[4] The editor of Worldchanging has since acknowledged the Catalog as a prime inspiration.[5][6]

[edit] Retail Spinoffs

In the early 1970's, a small shop, called the Whole Earth Truck Store, was opened in Menlo Park, California. This store sold a variety of books described in the Whole Earth Catalog, as well as hard-to-find household goods, tools, and other items.

In 1978, a store called Whole Earth Access opened in Berkeley, California, which sold a variety of things: tools, furniture, cameras, electronic devices, clothing. Branch stores in San Mateo, San Jose, and San Rafael soon followed. This business thrived into the 1990's but eventually succumbed to competition from more specialized retailers, established department stores, and national chains of discount stores. There is still a Website for Whole Earth Access, which offers a few items for sale directly over the Internet and refers to stores that no longer exist; it is apparently unmaintained. (The Website has a disclaimer stating that none of the featured items are actually for sale, but if you want a Website designed, you can contact the designer.)

In the 1970, a store named Whole Earth Provision Co. opened in Austin, Texas to offer books reviewed in the Whole Earth Catalog. It added some camping gear which grew to a full line of equipment needed for back-country adventure and worldwide trekking, now similar to what you'd find at REI. Outerwear and other clothing became departments of their own and evolved to "lifestyle" clothing that appeals to value conscious young people and upscale buyers. Boots grew into a shoe department that may be the store's largest at this point, and departments were added along the way for clothing accessories, books with particular appeal to the store's customers, and a unique group of toys, games, and fun things mostly for children but also of interest to adults. The chain of six stores is thriving with 3 locations in Austin and one each in Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas. The web site at http://www.wholeearthprovision.com is out of date and does not offer merchandise, but it has a little bit of information, a way to find the stores, and a way to sign up for a mailing list to get postcards by snail mail. Most products are national brands and prices are retail, but when you go to the stores you still feel the influence of genuine "green" and holistic concerns and a bit of counter-culture flavor. The roots in the Catalog are still apparent.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Commencement address by Steve Jobs, delivered on June 12, 2005.[1]
  2. ^ Publishing: The Computer Software Race Is On - New York Times
  3. ^ Kahn, Lloyd: "The Birth of West Coast Publishing", "Whole Earth Review" Winter,1988:15
  4. ^ Bill McKibben: How close to catastrophe?
  5. ^ A World of Good
  6. ^ The Well: WorldChanging.com: Another World is Here

[edit] External links

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