Whole Earth Catalog
Encyclopedia
The Whole Earth Catalog was an American counterculture
catalog published by Stewart Brand
between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. Although the WECs listed all sorts of products for sale (clothing, books, tools, machines, seeds – things useful for a creative or self-sustainable lifestyle) the Whole Earth Catalogs themselves did not sell any of the products. Instead the vendors and their prices were listed right alongside with the items. This led to a need for the Catalogs to be frequently updated.
. In 1966, he initiated a public campaign to have NASA
release the then-rumored satellite photo of the sphere of Earth
as seen from space, the first image of the "Whole Earth." He thought the image might be a powerful symbol, evoking a sense of shared destiny and adaptive strategies from people. 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.
Andrew Kirk in Counterculture Green notes that the Whole Earth Catalog was preceded by the "Whole Earth Truck Store". The WETS was a 1963 Dodge
truck — in 1968 Brand and his wife Lois embarked "on a commune road trip" with the truck hoping to tour the country doing educational fairs. The truck was not only a store but also an alternative lending library and a mobile microeducation service. The "Truck Store" finally settled into its permanent location in Menlo Park
, California
. Instead of bringing the store to the people, Brand decided to create a catalog so the people could contact the vendors directly.
Using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, Brand and his colleagues created the first issue of The Whole Earth Catalog in 1968. In subsequent issues, its production values gradually improved. 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. 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."
J. Baldwin
was a young designer and instructor of design at colleges around the San Francisco Bay (San Francisco State University [then San Francisco State College], the San Francisco Art Institute, and the California College of the Arts [then California College of Arts and Crafts]). 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.
True to his 1966 vision, 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 1968 catalog divided itself into seven broad sections:
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 Catalogs 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.
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."
Kevin Kelly made a similar comparison in 2008:
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 grassroots
political (i.e., referred) power, Whole Earth eschewed politics and pushed grass-roots direct power—tools and skills.”
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 1986, The Essential Whole Earth Catalog (ISBN 0-385-23641-7) was published, and in 1988 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 reprinted the original WEC along with new material. An important aspect of this copy of the first WEC was a limitation placed on it by book publishers: because "Publishers begged [Whole Earth] not to reprint... their names anywhere near books they no longer carry", all such information was placed at the back of the catalog. This placement hampered a valuable function of the WEC: nudging publishers to keep featured seminal works in print.
. 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.
The Whole Earth website continues the WEC legacy of concepts in popular discourse, medical self-care, community building, bioregionalism, environmental restoration, nanotechnology, and cyberspace.
Recognizing the 'developed country' focus of the original WEC, groups in several developing countries have created 'catalogs' of their own to be more relevant to their countries. One such effort was an adaptation of the WEC (called the "Liklik Buk") written and published in the late 1970s in Papua New Guinea; by 1982 this had been enlarged, updated, and translated (as "Save Na Mekem") into the Pidgin
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
.
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." The editor of Worldchanging has since acknowledged the Catalog as a prime inspiration.
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.
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.
, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold
, and Fred Turner
..
Counterculture
Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...
catalog published by Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation...
between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. Although the WECs listed all sorts of products for sale (clothing, books, tools, machines, seeds – things useful for a creative or self-sustainable lifestyle) the Whole Earth Catalogs themselves did not sell any of the products. Instead the vendors and their prices were listed right alongside with the items. This led to a need for the Catalogs to be frequently updated.
Origin
The title Whole Earth Catalog came from a previous project of Stewart BrandStewart Brand
Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation...
. In 1966, he initiated a public campaign to have NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
release the then-rumored satellite photo of the sphere of Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...
as seen from space, the first image of the "Whole Earth." He thought the image might be a powerful symbol, evoking a sense of shared destiny and adaptive strategies from people. 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.
Andrew Kirk in Counterculture Green notes that the Whole Earth Catalog was preceded by the "Whole Earth Truck Store". The WETS was a 1963 Dodge
Dodge
Dodge is a United States-based brand of automobiles, minivans, and sport utility vehicles, manufactured and marketed by Chrysler Group LLC in more than 60 different countries and territories worldwide....
truck — in 1968 Brand and his wife Lois embarked "on a commune road trip" with the truck hoping to tour the country doing educational fairs. The truck was not only a store but also an alternative lending library and a mobile microeducation service. The "Truck Store" finally settled into its permanent location in Menlo Park
Menlo Park, California
Menlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...
, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
. Instead of bringing the store to the people, Brand decided to create a catalog so the people could contact the vendors directly.
Using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, Brand and his colleagues created the first issue of The Whole Earth Catalog in 1968. In subsequent issues, its production values gradually improved. 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
Portola Institute
The Portola Institute was a "nonprofit educational foundation" founded in Menlo Park, California in 1966 by Dick Raymond. The Portola institute helped to develop other organizations such as The Briarpatch Society. It was also the publisher of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog beginning with the...
, headed by Richard Raymond. In 1972, the catalog won the National Book Award
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...
, the first time a catalog had ever won such an award. Brand's intent with the catalog was to provide education
Education
Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...
and "access to tools" so a reader could "find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested."
J. Baldwin
J. Baldwin
James Tennant Baldwin is an American industrial designer and writer...
was a young designer and instructor of design at colleges around the San Francisco Bay (San Francisco State University [then San Francisco State College], the San Francisco Art Institute, and the California College of the Arts [then California College of Arts and Crafts]). 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.
True to his 1966 vision, Brand's publishing efforts were suffused with an awareness of the importance of ecology
Ecology
Ecology is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment. Variables of interest to ecologists include the composition, distribution, amount , number, and changing states of organisms within and among ecosystems...
, both as a field of study and as an influence upon the future of humankind and emerging human awareness.
Organization
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:
- Useful as a tool,
- Relevant to independent education,
- High quality or low cost,
- Not already common knowledge,
- 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 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 Catalogs 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
Drop City
Drop City was an artists' community that formed in southern Colorado in 1965. Abandoned by the early 1970s, it became known as the first rural "hippie commune".-Establishment:...
.
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
Joseph Needham
Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, CH, FRS, FBA , also known as Li Yuese , was a British scientist, historian and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941, and as a fellow of the British...
’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.
Impact
Steve JobsSteve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...
compared The Whole Earth Catalog to Internet search engine Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
in his June 2005 Stanford University commencement speech
Commencement speech
A commencement speech or commencement address is a speech given to graduating students, generally at a university, although the term is also used for secondary education institutions. The "commencement" is a ceremony in which degrees or diplomas are conferred upon graduating students...
. "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."
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 contentUser-generated contentUser generated content covers a range of media content available in a range of modern communications technologies. It entered mainstream usage during 2005 having arisen in web publishing and new media content production circles...
, without advertising, before the Internet. Basically, Brand invented the blogosphereBlogosphereThe blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community or as a social network in which everyday authors can publish their opinions...
long before there was any such thing as a blogBlogA blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
. [...] 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.
Looking back and discussing attitudes evident in the early editions of the catalog, Brand wrote, “At a time when the New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
was calling for grassroots
Grassroots
A grassroots movement is one driven by the politics of a community. The term implies that the creation of the movement and the group supporting it are natural and spontaneous, highlighting the differences between this and a movement that is orchestrated by traditional power structures...
political (i.e., referred) power, Whole Earth eschewed politics and pushed grass-roots direct power—tools and skills.”
The broad interpretation of "tool" coincided with that given by the designer, philosopher, and engineer Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller
Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society....
, though another thinker admired by Brand and some of his cohorts was Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford was an American historian, philosopher of technology, and influential literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer...
, who had written about words as tools. Early editions reflected the considerable influence of Fuller, particularly his teachings about "whole system
Systems theory
Systems theory is the transdisciplinary study of systems in general, with the goal of elucidating principles that can be applied to all types of systems at all nesting levels in all fields of research...
s," "synergetics
Synergetics (Fuller)
Synergetics is the empirical study of systems in transformation, with an emphasis on total system behavior unpredicted by the behavior of any isolated components, including humanity’s role as both participant and observer....
," 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.
By the mid-1970s, much of the Buddhist economics
Buddhist economics
Buddhist Economics is a spiritual approach to Economics. It examines the psychology of the human mind and the anxiety,aspirations and emotions that direct economic activity. Its understanding aims to clear the confusion between what is truly harmful and beneficial in Economics and ultimately tries...
viewpoint of E. F. Schumacher
E. F. Schumacher
Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher was an internationally influential economic thinker, statistician and economist in Britain, serving as Chief Economic Advisor to the UK National Coal Board for two decades. His ideas became popularized in much of the English-speaking world during the 1970s...
, as well as the activist interests of the biological species preservationist
Preservationist
Preservationist is generally understood to mean historic preservationist: one who advocates to preserve architecturally or historically significant buildings, structures, objects or sites from demolition or degradation...
s, had tempered the overall enthusiasm for Fuller's ideas in the catalog. Still later, the amiable-architecture ideas of people like Christopher Alexander
Christopher Alexander
Christopher Wolfgang Alexander is a registered architect noted for his theories about design, and for more than 200 building projects in California, Japan, Mexico and around the world...
and similar community-planning ideas of people like Peter Calthorpe
Peter Calthorpe
Peter Calthorpe is a San Francisco-based architect, urban designer and urban planner. He is a founding member of the Congress for New Urbanism, a Chicago-based advocacy group formed in 1992 that promotes sustainable building practices.-Biography:...
further tempered the engineering-efficiency tone of Fuller's ideas.
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.
As an early indicator of the general zeitgeist of the times, the catalog's first edition preceded the original Earth Day
Earth Day
Earth Day is a day that is intended to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's natural environment. The name and concept of Earth Day was allegedly pioneered by John McConnell in 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco. The first Proclamation of Earth Day was by San Francisco, the...
by nearly two years. The idea of Earth Day occurred to Senator Gaylord Nelson
Gaylord Nelson
Gaylord Anton Nelson was an American politician from Wisconsin who served as a United States Senator and governor. A Democrat, he was the principal founder of Earth Day.-Public service and leadership:...
, its instigator, "in the summer of 1969 while on a conservation speaking tour out west," where the Sierra Club
Sierra Club
The Sierra Club is the oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. It was founded on May 28, 1892, in San Francisco, California, by the conservationist and preservationist John Muir, who became its first president...
was active, and where young minds had been broadened and stimulated by such influences as the catalog.
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 had bid $1.4 million for the trade paperback rights.
In 1986, The Essential Whole Earth Catalog (ISBN 0-385-23641-7) was published, and in 1988 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 reprinted the original WEC along with new material. An important aspect of this copy of the first WEC was a limitation placed on it by book publishers: because "Publishers begged [Whole Earth] not to reprint... their names anywhere near books they no longer carry", all such information was placed at the back of the catalog. This placement hampered a valuable function of the WEC: nudging publishers to keep featured seminal works in print.
Publication history
| No. | Date | Title | Editor | Pages | Price | Notable Contents | ISBN |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1010 | Fall 1968 | Whole Earth Catalog | Stewart Brand | 64 | $5 | First WEC; cover photo: Earth from space | |
| #1020 | January 1969 | The Difficult But Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog | Stewart Brand | 32 | $1.65 | Additions and price corrections | |
| #1030 | March 1969 | The Difficult But Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog | Stewart Brand | 30 | $1.65 | Calls for subscribers to write to President Nixon Richard Nixon Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under... urging establishment of the entire Earth as a National Park; establishes early support for computers with a photo of a Computer Club showing "two Commodore calculators" |
|
| #1040 | Spring 1969 | Whole Earth Catalog | Stewart Brand (with Lloyd Kahn Lloyd Kahn Lloyd Kahn is the founding editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, Inc., and is the former Shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He is also an author, photographer, and pioneer of the green building and green architecture movements.... ) |
132 | $4 | Cover photo: Earth from the far side of the moon; lists a $4,900 Hewlett Packard programmable calculator | |
| #1050 | July 1969 | Difficult But Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog | Stewart Brand | 32 | $1 | Cover recounts a bus race between Ken Kesey Ken Kesey Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a... 's Further and three buses from Wavy Gravy Wavy Gravy Wavy Gravy is an American entertainer and activist for peace, best known for his hippie appearance, personality and beliefs. His moniker... 's Hog Farm Hog Farm The Hog Farm is an organization considered to be America's longest running hippie commune. With beginnings as an actual collective hog farm in Tujunga, California, the group, founded in the 1960s by peace activist and clown Wavy Gravy, evolved into a "mobile, hallucination-extended family", active... |
|
| #1060 | September 1969 | Difficult But Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog | Stewart Brand | 34 | $1 | Unanimous Declaration of Interdependence | |
| #1070 | Fall 1969 | Whole Earth Catalog | Stewart Brand (with Lloyd Kahn) | 132 | $4 | Cover photo: Earth from deep space | ASIN B000KVJ3ZC |
| #1080 | January 1970 | Whole Earth Catalog: The Outlaw Area | Stewart Brand | 56 | $1 | Cover photo: Arthur Godfrey; reprints long articles on The Outlaw Area, Liferaft Earth, Earth Peoples Park; dropped word "Supplement" to qualify for 2nd class postage | |
| March 1970 | Whole Earth Catalog: The World Game | Gurney Norman Gurney Norman Gurney Norman is an American novelist, documentarian, and professor.-Biography:Gurney Norman was born in Grundy, Virginia in 1937... (with Diana Shugart) |
56 | $1 | "Buckminster Fuller Buckminster Fuller Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society.... 's World Game" by Gene Youngblood Gene Youngblood Gene Youngblood is a theorist of media arts and politics, and a respected scholar in the history and theory of alternative cinemas. His Expanded Cinema , the first book to consider video as an art form, was influential in establishing the field of media arts as a recognized artistic and scholarly... |
||
| #1090 | Spring 1970 | Whole Earth Catalog | Stewart Brand (with Lloyd Kahn) | 148 | $3 | Cover photo: M-31 Andromeda Galaxy Andromeda Galaxy The Andromeda Galaxy is a spiral galaxy approximately 2.5 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Andromeda. It is also known as Messier 31, M31, or NGC 224, and is often referred to as the Great Andromeda Nebula in older texts. Andromeda is the nearest spiral galaxy to the... , taken by the Lick Observatory Lick Observatory The Lick Observatory is an astronomical observatory, owned and operated by the University of California. It is situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, in the Diablo Range just east of San Jose, California, USA... |
ASIN B001B6L98O |
| #1110 | July 1970 | Whole Earth Catalog | Gordon Ashby (with Doyle Phillips) | 56 | $1 | "Find Your Place In Space" (a series of mandala Mandala Maṇḍala is a Sanskrit word that means "circle". In the Buddhist and Hindu religious traditions their sacred art often takes a mandala form. The basic form of most Hindu and Buddhist mandalas is a square with four gates containing a circle with a center point... s) |
ASIN B00139YNAA |
| #1120 | September 1970 | Whole Earth Catalog | Gurney Norman Gurney Norman Gurney Norman is an American novelist, documentarian, and professor.-Biography:Gurney Norman was born in Grundy, Virginia in 1937... (with Diana Schugart) |
56 | $1 | "Think Little" by Wendell Berry Wendell Berry Wendell Berry is an American man of letters, academic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer. He is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays... ; "Introducing Divine Right's Bus, Urge" by Gurney Norman Gurney Norman Gurney Norman is an American novelist, documentarian, and professor.-Biography:Gurney Norman was born in Grundy, Virginia in 1937... |
|
| #1130 | Fall 1970 | Whole Earth Catalog | J.D. Smith (with Hal Hershey) | $3 | ASIN B001B6GKWO | ||
| #1140 | January 1971 | Whole Earth Catalog | Stewart Brand | 48 | $1 | Cover: Truth, Consequences | |
| #1150 | March 1971 | The Last Supplement to The Whole Earth Catalog | Paul Krassner Paul Krassner Paul Krassner is an author, journalist, stand-up comedian, and the founder, editor and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958... and Ken Kesey Ken Kesey Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a... |
132 | $1 | R. Crumb cover; "The Dream is Over" by J. Marks, "The Bible" by Ken Kesey (and no catalog items!) | ASIN B000GTN5BG |
| #1160 | June 1971 | The Last Whole Earth Catalog | Stewart Brand | 452 | $5 | Divine Right's Trip Divine Right's Trip Divine Right's Trip is a 1972 novel by Gurney Norman set in the 1960s which chronicles the awakening of the hippie stoner Divine Right as he travels with his patient and introspective VW Bus, Urge... by Gurney Norman Gurney Norman Gurney Norman is an American novelist, documentarian, and professor.-Biography:Gurney Norman was born in Grundy, Virginia in 1937... serialized; winner of the National Book Award, 1972; cover photo: Earth from space, taken by Apollo 4 Apollo 4 Apollo 4, , was the first unmanned test flight of the Saturn V launch vehicle, which was ultimately used by the Apollo program to send the first men to the Moon... |
ISBN 0-394-70459-2 |
| #1170 | May 1971 | Whole Earth Catalog | |||||
| May 1974 | The (Updated) Last Whole Earth Catalog | Stewart Brand | 452 | $5 | 16th Edition | ISBN 0-14-003544-3 | |
| #1180 | October 1974 | Whole Earth Epilog | 320 | $4 | Cover photo: earthrise over the moon by Apollo 12; "Tongue Fu" by Paul Krassner serialized | ISBN 0-14-003950-3 | |
| December 1977 | Space Colonies: Whole Earth Catalog | Stewart Brand | 160 | $5 | ISBN 0-14-004805-7 | ||
| #1220 | September 1980 | The Next Whole Earth Catalog | Stewart Brand | 614 | $12.50 | Cover photo: Madagascar & Southern Africa from orbit by Apollo 17; more emphasis on space travel | ISBN 0-394-73951-5 |
| #1280 | Spring 1980 | The Essential Whole Earth Catalog | J. Baldwin | 416 | $24.99 | Published by Doubleday | ISBN 0-385-23641-7 |
| March 1981 | The Next Whole Earth Catalog, revised | Stewart Brand | 608 | $16 | Excerpts from The Rising Sun Neighborhood Newsletter by Anne Herbert serialized. Ron Jones' account of the Third Wave The Third Wave The Third Wave was an experiment to demonstrate that even democratic societies are not immune to the appeal of fascism. It was undertaken by history teacher Ron Jones with sophomore high school students attending his "Contemporary World" history class as part of a study of Nazi Germany... experiment. |
ISBN 0-394-70776-1 | |
| Spring 1984 | Whole Earth Software Review, No.1 Whole Earth Software Catalog and Review The Whole Earth Software Catalog and The Whole Earth Software Review were two publications produced by Stewart Brand's Point Foundation as an extension of The Whole Earth Catalog.-Overview:... |
Stewart Brand | |||||
| Summer 1984 | Whole Earth Software Review, No.2 | Stewart Brand | |||||
| June 1984 | Whole Earth Software Catalog 1.0 | Stewart Brand | 208 | $17.50 | Groundbreaking software reviews | ISBN 0-385-19166-9 | |
| Fall 1984 | Whole Earth Software Review No.3 | Stewart Brand | |||||
| Fall 1985 | Whole Earth Software Catalog 2.0 1986 | Stewart Brand | 224 | $17.50 | ISBN 0-385-23301-9 | ||
| 1988 | Whole Earth Catalog: Signal Communication Tools for the Information Age | Kevin Kelly | ISBN 0517570831 | ||||
| 1989 | The Fringes of Reason: Whole Earth Catalog | Ted Schultz with Stewart Brand | 223 | $14.95 | ISBN 0-517-57165-X | ||
| 1989 | The Electronic Whole Earth Catalog | Stewart Brand | n.a. | Early version of hypertext, on CD-ROM | |||
| 1990 | Whole Earth Ecolog | James Baldwin | 128 | $15.95 | Deals with ecology exclusively | ISBN 0-517-57658-9 | |
| #1330 | December 1994 | The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog | Howard Rheingold Howard Rheingold -See also:* Collective intelligence* Information society* The WELL* Virtual community-External links:***** at TED conference** a 48MB Quicktime movie, hosted by the Internet Archive... |
410 | $30 | White cover with Earth as "o" in "Whole"; Frank's Real Pa by Jim Woodring Jim Woodring Jim Woodring is a Seattle-based cartoonist, comic book author, artist and toy designer. He also produces fine art works in a variety of other media, including painting and charcoal.... serialized |
ISBN 0-062-51059-2 |
| #1340 | December 1998 | Whole Earth Catalog: 30th Anniversary Celebration | Peter Warshall with Stewart Brand | 108 | $14.95 | The complete first WEC + new comments | ISBN 1-892-90705-4 |
WEC spin-offs and inspirations
From 1974 to 2003, the Whole Earth principals published a magazine, known originally as CoEvolution QuarterlyCoEvolution Quarterly
CoEvolution Quarterly is a descendant of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. It eventually became the Whole Earth Review.-History:...
. When the short-lived Whole Earth Software Review
Whole Earth Software Catalog and Review
The Whole Earth Software Catalog and The Whole Earth Software Review were two publications produced by Stewart Brand's Point Foundation as an extension of The Whole Earth Catalog.-Overview:...
(a supplement to The Whole Earth Software Catalog
Whole Earth Software Catalog and Review
The Whole Earth Software Catalog and The Whole Earth Software Review were two publications produced by Stewart Brand's Point Foundation as an extension of The Whole Earth Catalog.-Overview:...
) failed, it was merged in 1985 with CoEvolution Quarterly
CoEvolution Quarterly
CoEvolution Quarterly is a descendant of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. It eventually became the Whole Earth Review.-History:...
to form the Whole Earth Review
Whole Earth Review
Whole Earth was a magazine which was founded in January 1985 after the merger of the Whole Earth Software Review and the CoEvolution Quarterly. All of these periodicals are descendants of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog...
(edited at different points by Jay Kinney
Jay Kinney
Jay Kinney is an American author, editor, and former underground cartoonist. A member, along with Skip Williamson, Jay Lynch and R. Crumb, of the original Bijou Funnies crew, Kinney also edited Young Lust, a satire of romance comics, in the early 1970s with Bill Griffith...
,
Kevin Kelly, and Howard Rheingold
Howard Rheingold
-See also:* Collective intelligence* Information society* The WELL* Virtual community-External links:***** at TED conference** a 48MB Quicktime movie, hosted by the Internet Archive...
), later called Whole Earth Magazine and finally just Whole Earth. The last issue, number 111 (edited by Alex Steffen
Alex Steffen
Alex Steffen is an American writer, editor, public speaker and futurist most noted for his bright green ideas.Steffen co-founded and ran the online magazine Worldchanging from its start in 2003 until its closure in 2010...
), was meant to be published in Spring 2003, but funds ran out. The Point Foundation
Point Foundation (environment)
The Point Foundation was a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco and founded by Stewart Brand and Dick Raymond. It published works related to the Whole Earth Catalog. It was also a co-owner of The WELL.-References:...
, which owned Whole Earth, closed its doors later that year.
The Whole Earth website continues the WEC legacy of concepts in popular discourse, medical self-care, community building, bioregionalism, environmental restoration, nanotechnology, and cyberspace.
Recognizing the 'developed country' focus of the original WEC, groups in several developing countries have created 'catalogs' of their own to be more relevant to their countries. One such effort was an adaptation of the WEC (called the "Liklik Buk") written and published in the late 1970s in Papua New Guinea; by 1982 this had been enlarged, updated, and translated (as "Save Na Mekem") into the Pidgin
Pidgin
A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...
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
Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn is the founding editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, Inc., and is the former Shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He is also an author, photographer, and pioneer of the green building and green architecture movements....
, 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
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
.
In late 2006, Worldchanging
Worldchanging
Worldchanging is an American non-profit online magazine and blog about sustainability and social innovation. At 19/09/2011, it was taken over by Architecture for Humanity....
released their 600-page compendium of solutions, Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century, which Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben
William Ernest "Bill" McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College...
, in an article in the New York Review of Books called "The Whole Earth Catalog retooled for the iPod generation." The editor of Worldchanging has since acknowledged the Catalog as a prime inspiration.
In 1969, a store which was inspired by (but not financially connected with) The Whole Earth Catalog, called the Whole Earth Access
Whole Earth Access
The Whole Earth Access was a countercultural retail store in Berkeley, California. Two more shops were later opened San Rafael and San Francisco . By 1993 it also had stores in Concord, San Mateo and Sacramento...
opened in Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
. It closed in 1998.
Scholarship
Stewart BrandStewart Brand
Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation...
and The Whole Earth Catalog are both subjects of interest to scholars. Notable examples include works by Theodore Roszak
Theodore Roszak (scholar)
Theodore Roszak was professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay. He is best known for his 1969 text, The Making of a Counter Culture.-Background:...
, Howard Rheingold
Howard Rheingold
-See also:* Collective intelligence* Information society* The WELL* Virtual community-External links:***** at TED conference** a 48MB Quicktime movie, hosted by the Internet Archive...
, Fred Turner
Fred Turner (academic)
Fred Turner is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Communication and the acclaimed author of two books:* From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism...
, John Markoff
John Markoff
John Markoff is a journalist best known for his work at The New York Times, and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick.- Biography :...
, Andrew Kirk, and Sam Binkley. The Stanford University Library System has a Whole Earth archive in their Department of Special Collections.
External links
. Official website, includes scans of many magazine issues.. Featuring Stewart BrandStewart Brand
Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation...
, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold
Howard Rheingold
-See also:* Collective intelligence* Information society* The WELL* Virtual community-External links:***** at TED conference** a 48MB Quicktime movie, hosted by the Internet Archive...
, and Fred Turner
Fred Turner (academic)
Fred Turner is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Communication and the acclaimed author of two books:* From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism...
..