- Whole Earth Catalog
Infobox Company
name = Whole Earth Access Catalog
type = Private subsidiary
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foundation =Menlo Park, California (1968)
founder =Stewart Brand
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location = 558 Santa Cruz Ave,Menlo Park, California 94025 U.S.
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key_people =Stewart Brand
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intl ="The Whole Earth Catalog" was an American
counterculture catalog that granted "Access to Tools" published byStewart Brand between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998.Apple Inc. founder and entrepreneurSteve Jobs has described the "Catalog" as the conceptual forerunner of theWorld Wide Web .Commencement address by Steve Jobs, delivered on June 12, 2005. [http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html] ]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" [Andrew Kirk. "Counterculture Green." (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas, 2007):47] 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." Andrew Kirk. "Counterculture Green." (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas, 2007):48. ] It was created in his "1963Dodge Truck." In 1968, Brand and his wife Lois went "on a commune road trip" with the truck. The "Truck Store" finally settled in its permanent location inMenlo Park ,California . [John Markoff. "What the Doormouse Said," (New York, Penugin):154.]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."Fact|date=July 2008 The "Catalog's" development and marketing were driven by an energetic group of founders, primarilyStewart 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 thePortola Institute , headed by Richard Raymond. In 1972, the catalog won theNational Book Award , the first time a catalog had ever won such an award.Fact|date=April 2007Brand'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 theenvironmental movement s. Later editions and related publications edited by Brand popularized many innovative ideas during the 1970s-1990s.whichConcept
From the opening page of the 1969 "Catalog":
;FunctionThe 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.
;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 haveNASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the sphere ofEarth 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 engineGoogle in his June 2005 Stanford Universitycommencement 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:
"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 theblogosphere long before there was any such thing as ablog . [...] 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." [Kevin Kelly: [http://kk.org/ct2/2008/09/the-whole-earth-blogalog.php The Whole Earth Blogalog] September 17, 2008]Content
The 1968 catalog divided itself into seven broad sections:
* Understanding Whole Systems
* Shelter and Land Use
* Industry and Craft
* Communications
* Community
* Nomadics
* LearningWithin 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 wasLewis 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 ofE. F. Schumacher , as well as the activist interests of the biological speciespreservationist s, had tempered the overall enthusiasm for Fuller's ideas in the catalog.Fact|date=September 2008 Still later, the amiable-architecture ideas of people likeChristopher Alexander and similar community-planning ideas of people likePeter Calthorpe further tempered the engineering-efficiency tone of Fuller's ideas.Fact|date=September 2008As 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 SenatorGaylord Nelson , its instigator, "in the summer of 1969 while on a conservation speaking tour out west," where theSierra 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.Fact|date=September 2008
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. [ [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B06EFDA1738F931A15757C0A965948260 Publishing: The Computer Software Race Is On - New York Times ] ]
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.Fact|date=September 2008
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 byJay Kinney , Kevin Kelly, andHoward Rheingold ), later called "Whole Earth Magazine" and finally just "Whole Earth". The last issue, number 111 (edited byAlex 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. Fact|date=July 2008The 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 buildinggeodesic 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 companyShelter Publications followed Stewart Brand's move to nation-wide distribution byRandom House . [Kahn, Lloyd: "The Birth of West Coast Publishing", "Whole Earth Review" Winter,1988:15]In late 2006,
Worldchanging released their 600-page compendium of solutions, , whichBill McKibben , in an article in theNew York Review of Books called "The Whole Earth Catalog retooled for the iPod generation." [ [http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/10/22/145810/84 Bill McKibben: How close to catastrophe?] ] The editor of Worldchanging has since acknowledged the Catalog as a prime inspiration. [ [http://www.plentymag.com/features/2006/11/a_world_of_good.php A World of Good] ] [ [http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/223/WorldChanging-com-Another-World-page01.html#post4 The Well: WorldChanging.com: Another World is Here] ]In 1969, a store which was inspired by (but not financially connected with) "The Whole Earth Catalog," called the "
Whole Earth Access " opened inBerkeley, California . It closed in 1998.cholarship
Stewart Brand and "The Whole Earth Catalog" are both subjects of interest to scholars. Notable examples include works byTheodore 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. [ [http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf7n39n9ms Guide to the Whole Earth Catalog Records, 1969-1986 (bulk 1974-1980)] ]References
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.
*Markoff, John. "". 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 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 0-226-81741-5External 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 , featuringStewart Brand ,Kevin Kelly ,Howard Rheingold , andFred 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."
* [http://www.plentymag.com/magazine/the_whole_earth_effect.php The Whole Earth Effect — Plenty Magazine]
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