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 -- anything for a self-sustainable ""hippie" 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.
Apple Inc. founder and entrepreneur Steve Jobs has described the Catalog as the conceptual forerunner of the World Wide Web.
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" 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." It was created in his 1963 Dodge 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 in Menlo Park, California.
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." 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.
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.
Concept
From the opening page of the 1969 Catalog :
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:CATALOG listings are continually revised according to the experience and suggestions of CATALOG users and staff.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.
- Useful as a tool,
- Relevant to independent education,
- High quality or low cost,
- Not already common knowledge,
- Easily available by mail.
The title came from a previous project of Stewart Brand. In 1966, he initiated a public campaign to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the sphere of Earth as seen from space. He thought the image of our planet might be a powerful symbol, evoking adaptive strategies from people.
Toward the end of the 1960s, the Stanford-educated Brand, a biologist with strong artistic and social interests, believed that there was a groundswell of commitment to thoroughly renovating American industrial society along ecologically and socially just lines, whatever they might prove to be. So using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, he and his colleagues created the first issue of The Whole Earth Catalog . In subsequent issues, its production values gradually improved.
J. Baldwin was a young designer and instructor of design at two colleges near San Francisco Bay. As he recalled in the film Ecological Design (1994), "Stewart Brand came to me because he heard that I read catalogs. He said, 'I want to make this thing called a "whole Earth" catalog so that anyone on Earth can pick up a telephone and find out the complete information on anything. ...That’s my goal.'" Baldwin served as the chief editor of subjects in the areas of technology and design, both in the catalog itself and in other publications which arose from it.
Steve Jobs compared The Whole Earth Catalog to Internet search engine Google in his June 2005 Stanford University commencement speech. "When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog , which was one of the bibles of my generation.... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions." During the commencement speech, Jobs also quoted the farewell message placed on the back cover of the 1974 edition of the catalog: "Stay hungry, stay foolish."
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. was a great example of user-generated content, without advertising, before the Internet. Basically, Brand invented the blogosphere long before there was any such thing as a blog. No topic was too esoteric, no degree of enthusiasm too ardent, no amateur expertise too uncertified to be included. This I am sure about: it is no coincidence that the Whole Earth Catalogs disappeared as soon as the web and blogs arrived. Everything the Whole Earth Catalogs did, the web does better.
Content
The 1968 catalog divided itself into seven broad sections:
- Understanding Whole Systems
- Shelter and Land Use
- Industry and Craft
- Communications
- Community
- Nomadics
- Learning
Within each section, the best tools and books the editors could find were collected and listed, along with images, reviews and uses, prices, and suppliers. The reader was also able to order some items directly through the catalog.
Later editions changed a few of the headings, but generally kept the same overall framework.
The Catalog used a broad definition of "tools." There were informative tools, such as books, maps, professional journals, courses, and classes. There were well-designed special-purpose utensils, including garden tools, carpenters' and masons' tools, welding equipment, chainsaws, fiberglass materials, tents, hiking shoes, and potters' wheels. There were even early synthesizers and personal computers.
The Catalog' s publication coincided with a great wave of convention-challenging experimentalism and a do-it-yourself attitude associated with "the counterculture," and tended to appeal not only to the intelligentsia of the movement, but to creative, hands-on, and outdoorsy people of many stripes. Some of the ideas in the Catalog were developed during Brand's visits to Drop City.
With the Catalog opened flat, the reader might find the large page on the left full of text and intriguing illustrations from a volume of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China , showing and explaining an astronomical clock tower or a chain-pump windmill, while on the right-hand page are an excellent review of a beginners' guide to modern technology ( The Way Things Work ) and a review of The Engineers’ Illustrated Thesaurus . On another spread, the verso reviews books on accounting and moonlighting jobs, while the recto bears an article in which people tell the story of a community credit union they founded. Another pair of pages depict and discuss different kayaks, inflatable dinghies, and houseboats.
The broad interpretation of "tool" coincided with that given by the designer, philosopher, and engineer Buckminster Fuller, though another thinker admired by Brand and some of his cohorts was Lewis Mumford, who had written about words as tools. Early editions reflected the considerable influence of Fuller, particularly his teachings about "whole systems," "synergetics," and efficiency or reducing waste. By 1971, Brand and his co-workers were already questioning whether Fuller’s sense of direction might be too anthropocentric. New information arising in fields like ecology and biospherics was persuasive.
Looking back and discussing attitudes evident in the early editions of the catalog, Brand wrote, “At a time when the New Left was calling for grass-roots political (i.e., referred) power, Whole Earth eschewed politics and pushed grass-roots direct power—tools and skills.”
By the mid-1970s, much of the Buddhist economics viewpoint of E. F. Schumacher, as well as the activist interests of the bi
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