Whole Earth Catalog

The Whole Earth Catalog is a catalog which was published twice a year from 1968 to 1972 (and occasionally thereafter, until 1998) for the purposes of providing education and access to tools for one to "find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested." Its outsize pages measured 11x14 inches (28x36 cm). Later editions were more than an inch thick.

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). It was published by the Portola Institute, headed by Richard Raymond. In 1972, the catalog won the National Book Award.

Brand's efforts publishing efforts were suffused with an awareness of the importance of ecology (as a field of study and an influence) to the emerging human awareness and to the future of humankind.

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:

1. Useful as a tool,
2. Relevant to independent education,
3. high quality or low cost,
4. easily available by mail.

CATALOG listings are continully 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 repsonse to this dilemme 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 catalog divided itself into seven broad sections:

• Understanding Whole Systems,
• Shelter and Land Use,
• Industry and Craft,
• Communications,
• Community,
• Nomadics, and
• 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 in some cases also able to order directly through the Catalog.

The title derived from a previous project of Stewart Brand's: In 1966, Brand had initiated a public campaign to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the sphere of the 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, 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 these might prove to be). So, using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, he and cohorts created issue number one of The Whole Earth Catalog. Production values gradually improved with successive editions.

The first Catalog and its successors used a broad definition of the term "tools." There were informational tools, such as books, maps, professional journals, courses, classes, and the like. And there were specialized, designed items, such as garden tools, carpenter's and mason's tools, welding equipment, chainsaws, fiberglass materials, tents, hiking shoes, potter's wheels, etc. - even early synthesizers and personal computers.

The Catalog's publication coincided with the great wave of experimentalism, convention-breaking, and "do it yourself" attitude associated with the "counterculture," and tended to appeal not only to the intelligentsia of that social movement, but to "hands-on," creative, and outdoorsy people of many stripes. The publication of the first edition preceded the first Earth Day by nearly two years.

Despite this popular and critical success, particularly among a young generation of hippies and survivalists, the Catalog was not intended to continue publication for long; just long enough for the editors to complete a good overview of the available tools and resources, and for word (and copies of catalogs) to get out to everyone who might need the same.

After 1972 it was published more sporadically; only a few more full versions of the Whole Earth Catalog have been published since then: a 1986 edition entitled The Essential Whole Earth Catalog, and an oversized 1994 edition entitled The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog. A thirty-year commemorative edition (half original material, half brand-new) was published in 1998.

In the 1970s, in his later publications (e.g., the CoEvolution Quarterly, Stewart Brand was to recant somewhat in terms of the philosophy of individualism, favoring community instead. He disavowed the individual's right or need to "shape his own environment," since living with Earth's natural systems is something we do in common, interactively.