The Environmentalists: The Whole Earth Catalog Gets Down to Business
You can find out how to build a geodesic dome, the cheapest way to travel overland from Luxembourg to Nepal, where to buy the best constructed tipis, books on foraging for food and Moog Synthesizers.
There are excerpts from the complete writings of R. Buckminster Fuller, the I Ching and the Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalog, tips on organic gardening and macrobiotic cooking and folksy reports from the “outlaw” designers and architects of the new longhair communities in Oregon, Colorado and New Mexico.
All this, and a hell of a lot more, makes up the contents of the twice-a-year Whole Earth Catalog and its four annual Difficult But Possible Supplements. Now completing its first year of publication, the Whole Earth Catalog is a unique compendium of the hip and the homespun, of far-out technology and down-home atavism, dedicated to the proposition that “we are as Gods——and might as well get good at it,” and to the assumption that anything practical, cheap, of high quality and easy availability can serve as a tool toward that end.
Visually, the Catalog is a richly textured, turn-of-the-Sixties funk collage of black-and-white photo-reproductions, line drawings, hand printed correspondence and Victorian type-faces, all jumbled together on cheap paper like an early century mail-order catalog.
Editorially, the easiest way to describe the Catalog is on its own terms. Thus, the spring, 1969, edition contained entries on Understanding Whole Systems——The Population Bomb, Tantra Art, Process and Pattern in Evolution——on adobe construction methods, the art of creative knotting, Dr. Hip Pocrates and Dr. Spock; there were photographs of the Earth taken from Apollo 8, and of the Plaster Casters’ alleged replica of Jimi Hendrix’ pecker taken from The Realist. The July supplement carried pieces on how to manage a rock group (from the Berkeley Barb), Experiments in Art and Technology, letters from Wes Wilson and Ken Kesey, and a frontpage feature on a road-race among buses on a commune meadow in New Mexico.
In general, the Catalog is a hefty 125-plus pages containing a more conventional listing of items and books, with reviews, excerpts and information on how to get them, while the scantier supplement is a kind of free-wheeling editor’s mail-bag. Both, however, rely heavily on suggestions and evaluations from readers (who get paid $10 per review), and the whole thing bears the unmistakable imprint of the Catalog’s founder and editor, Stewart Brand. Brand provides the individual bits and pieces with a loose editorial matrix of laconic style and wry humor, a mixture of biological, metaphysical and communications jargon written with an earthy, mid-Western twang.
Similarly, the apparent chaos of form and content eventually yields up a highly coherent method that is as American as New England town meetings, the Farmer’s Almanac or peyote rituals. For beneath a hip veneer of dymaxion design, exotic religious philosophy and faddish health theories, the Catalog celebrates an old-fashioned, fundamentalist individualism, the mystique of the self-taught, self-reliant do-it-yourselfer living in an organic relationship with his environment and on a level of collaborative equality with his fellows.
In contrast to the average mail order catalog’s emphasis on assembly-line consumables, Whole Earth is built around the idea that everything from kaibob boots to books on classic guitar construction and altered states of consciousness can qualify as “useful tools” contributing to “a realm of intimate personal power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment.” From one point of view, the Catalog represents a use of Marxist assumptions toward the ideals of anarchism, an attempt to spread control over the means of production——and education—so widely that anyone who wants to can be the locus of his own economic and political power. From another, the Catalog reflects an updating of the 19th century crafts movement to electronic age technology, and of New England transcendentalism to an earthy, peyote-vision mysticism in which the most visionary ideas are eminently practical and the most prosaic implements are sacred.