Whole Earth Catalog
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226144803
2008-07-17T00:49:22Z
Classicfilms
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[[Image:Wh-earth-69-cover.jpg|right|thumb|250px|Fall 1969 cover]]
'''''The Whole Earth Catalog''''' was [[counterculture]] catalog by [[Stewart Brand]] published twice a year from 1968 to 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. [[Apple Inc.]] founder and entrepreneur [[Steve Jobs]] has described the ''Catalog'' as a conceptual forerunner of [[World Wide Web|Web]] [[search engine]]s.<ref name="Jobs">Commencement address by Steve Jobs, delivered on June 12, 2005.[http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html]</ref>
==Overview==
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" <ref>Andrew Kirk. ''Counterculture Green.'' (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas, 2007):47</ref> 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." <ref name=kirk48> Andrew Kirk. ''Counterculture Green.'' (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas, 2007):48. </ref> It was created in his "1963 [[Dodge]] Truck." In 1968, Brand and his wife Lois went "on a commune road trip" with the truck. <ref name=kirk48/> The ''Truck Store'' finally settled in its permanent location in [[Menlo Park]], [[California]]. <ref>John Markoff. ''What the Doormouse Said," (New York, Penugin):154.</ref>
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 [[The environment|environment]], and share his adventure with whoever is interested."
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 (publisher)|Richard Raymond]]. In 1972, the catalog won the [[National Book Award]], the first time a catalog had ever won such an award.{{Fact|date=April 2007}}
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 movement]]s. Later editions and related publications edited by Brand popularized many innovative ideas during the 1970s-1990s.
==Introduction==
From the opening page of the 1969 ''Catalog'':
<blockquote>
===Function===
<i>
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:
# Useful as a tool,
# Relevant to independent education,
# High quality or low cost,
# Easily available by mail.
CATALOG listings are continually revised according to the experience and suggestions of CATALOG users and staff.
</i>
===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.''
</blockquote>
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." <ref name="Jobs" />
== 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 "[[systems theory|whole system]]s," "[[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 [[preservationist]]s, 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.
== 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 (publisher)|Doubleday]] had bid $1.4 million for the trade paperback rights.<ref>[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B06EFDA1738F931A15757C0A965948260 Publishing: The Computer Software Race Is On - New York Times<!-- Bot generated title -->]</ref>
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 (editor)|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.
==WEC Spin-offs and inspirations==
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. {{Fact|date=March 2007}} 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 typewriter#The Selectric as computer terminal|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]].<ref>Kahn, Lloyd: "The Birth of West Coast Publishing", "Whole Earth Review" Winter,1988:15</ref>
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."<ref>[http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/10/22/145810/84 Bill McKibben: How close to catastrophe?]</ref> The editor of Worldchanging has since acknowledged the Catalog as a prime inspiration.<ref>[http://www.plentymag.com/features/2006/11/a_world_of_good.php A World of Good]</ref><ref>[http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/223/WorldChanging-com-Another-World-page01.html#post4 The Well: WorldChanging.com: Another World is Here]</ref>
In 1978, a store which was inspired by (but not financially connected with)<ref name=fastestgrowing>Victor F. Zonana. "One of the Fastest-Growing Chains in U.S.: Whole Earth Access Stores are Bargain Basement for Yuppies." ''[[Los Angeles Times]]'', May 19, 1986: E2</ref> called the ''[[Whole Earth Access]]'' opened in [[Berkeley, California]]. [http://www.webhelper.com/wholeearth/aboutstores.html] It closed in 1998. [http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/1998/11/09/daily7.html]
== Further reading ==
*Binkley, Sam. ''Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s.'' Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
*---. "[http://joc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/3/3/283 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.
*[[John Markoff|Markoff, John]]. ''[[What the Dormouse Said|What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry]]''. New York: Penguin, 2005.
* [[Fred Turner (academic)|Turner, Fred]] {{cite book
| year = 2006
| title = From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
| publisher = University of Chicago Press
| id = ISBN 0-226-81741-5
}}
==References==
{{Reflist}}
==External links==
*[http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php Official website]
* [http://www.stanford.edu/~shyeo/wholeearth.htm From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog] - [[Stanford University]], featuring [[Stewart Brand]], [[Kevin Kelly]], [[Howard Rheingold]], and [[Fred Turner]]
*[http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/817415_chap4.html "Taking the Whole Earth Digital]" - an excerpt from Fred Turner's ''From Counterculture to Cyberculture.''
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[[Category:1960s books]]
[[Category:1970s books]]
[[Category:1980s books]]
[[Category:Whole Earth]]
[[Category:Bibliographies]]
[[Category:Environmental non-fiction books]]
[[Category:Appropriate technology]]
[[Category:Hippie movement]]
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