Whole Earth Catalog Quotes

Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first. I say that information doesn't deserve to be free. Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not? ... Information is alienated experience.

The roots of the personal computer can be found in the Free Speech Movement that arose at Berkeley in 1964 and in the Whole Earth Catalog, which did the marketing for the do-it-yourself ideals behind the personal computer movement.

When we depend less on industrially produced food and live in the world’s quiet spaces,” she says, quoting something she read in the Whole Earth Catalog, her mouth still turbo-charged by the pills, “our bodies become vigorous. We discover the serenity of living in sync with the rhythms of the Earth. We cease oppressing one another.

This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of starting his own business. “There was just something going on here,” he said, looking back at the time and place. “The best music came from here—the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin—and so did the integrated circuit, and things like the Whole Earth Catalog.

On its first over was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was "Access to Tools." The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, "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.

Heaven and Earth are large, yet in the whole of space they are but as a small grain of rice. . . . How unreasonable it would be to suppose that, besides the heaven and Earth which we can see, there are no other heavens and no other Earths.” TENG MU, CHINESE PHILOSOPHER OF THE 1200S

Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which began as a roving truck that sold useful tools and educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to extend its reach with the Whole Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was “Access to Tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “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.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began: “I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.

Whole Earth Discipline carries on something that began in 1968, when I founded the Whole Earth Catalog. I stayed with the Catalog as editor and publisher until 1984, adding a magazine called CoEvolution Quarterly along the way. The Whole Earth publications were compendia of environmentalist tools and skills (along with much else) and explicitly purveyed a biological way of understanding. Peter Warshall wrote and reviewed about watersheds, soil, and ecology. Richard Nilsen and Rosemary Menninger covered organic farming and community gardens. J. Baldwin was an impeccable source on “appropriate technology”—solar, wind, insulation, bicycles. Lloyd Kahn wrote about handmade houses. We promoted bioregionalism, restoration, and “reinhabitation” of one’s natural environment. There’s now an insightful book about all that by Andrew Kirk—Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (2007).

Did dinosaurs sing? Was there a teeming, singing wilderness with all the species thumping around, tuning up for the next millennia? Of course, dinosaurs sang, I thought. They are the ancestors of the singing birds and cousins to the roaring crocodiles…turns out, no. Turns out the syrinx, the organ that produces birdsong and the larynx, the organ that produces operatic arias, didn’t evolve until after the dinosaur extinction event…Some dinosaurs blew air into their closed mouths and through nasal cavities into resonance chambers, which we see in fossils as bony crests. They made the forest echo with clear, ominous tones, eerily like a cello. I have heard it in recordings scientists made of the sound they produced when they blew air through crests constructed to mimic lambeosaurus’s. Some dinosaurs cooed to their mates like doves…turns out that even if dinosaurs didn’t sing, they danced. There is evidence in vigorous scrape marks found in 100-million year old Colorado sandstone. From the courting behavior of ostriches and grouse, scientists envision the dinosaur males coming together on courting grounds, bobbing and scratching, flaring their brilliant feathers and cooing. Imagine: huge animals, each weighing more than a dozen football teams, shaking the Earth for a chance at love. What the story of the dinosaurs tells me is that if the earth didn’t have music, it would waste no time inventing it. In birds, tantalizing evidence of birdsong is found in 67-million-year old fossils, marking the first know appearance of the syrinx. Now the whole Earth can chime, from deep in the sea to high in the atmosphere with the sounds of snapping shrimp, singing mice, roaring whales, moaning bears, clattering dragonflies, and a fish calling like a foghorn. Who could catalog the astonishing oeuvre of the Earth? And more songs are being created every year.

She was not alone. “There’s a definite panic on the hip scene in Cambridge,” wrote student radical Raymond Mungo that year, “people going to uncommonly arduous lengths (debt, sacrifice, the prospect of cold toes and brown rice forever) to get away while there’s still time.” And it wasn’t just Cambridge. All over the nation at the dawn of the 1970s, young people were suddenly feeling an urge to get away, to leave the city behind for a new way of life in the country. Some, like Mungo, filled an elderly New England farmhouse with a tangle of comrades. Others sought out mountain-side hermitages in New Mexico or remote single-family Edens in Tennessee. Hilltop Maoists traversed their fields with horse-drawn plows. Graduate students who had never before held a hammer overhauled tobacco barns and flipped through the Whole Earth Catalog by the light of kerosene lamps. Vietnam vets hand-mixed adobe bricks. Born-and-bred Brooklynites felled cedar in Oregon. Former debutants milked goats in Humboldt County and weeded strawberry beds with their babies strapped to their backs. Famous musicians forked organic compost into upstate gardens. College professors committed themselves to winter commutes that required swapping high heels for cross-country skis. Computer programmers turned the last page of Scott and Helen Nearing’s Living the Good Life and packed their families into the car the next day. Most had no farming or carpentry experience, but no matter. To go back to the land, it seemed, all that was necessary was an ardent belief that life in Middle America was corrupt and hollow, that consumer goods were burdensome and unnecessary, that protest was better lived than shouted, and that the best response to a broken culture was to simply reinvent it from scratch.

y personal, el poder de una persona para dirigir su propia educación, encontrar su propia inspiración, moldear su propio entorno y compartir su aventura con quien esté interesado. Las herramientas que ayudan a este proceso están seleccionadas y promocionadas por The Whole Earth Catalog». Buckminster Fuller continuaba con un poema que empezaba: «Veo a Dios en los instrumentos y mecanismos que funcionan con precisión»[13]. El Homebrew Computer Club, donde Jobs y Wozniak concibieron el primer ordenador Apple, se fundó sobre aquellos tres principios. Actualmente, acoge a centenares de espacios Maker que utilizan herramientas del siglo XXI tratando de llevar a cabo la misma clase de revolucionario cambio social y económico.

Fuller had put out this idea that there’s no use trying to change human nature. It’s been the same for a very long time. Instead, go after the tools. New tools make new practices. Better tools make better practices.” Out of all of this was born the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC).

The strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: what's the alternative? Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn't going to bring nature back. The choice is not between what was and what is, but between what is and what will be, which often enough is nothing. This is the situation of the Devil's Hole pupfish, the Shoshone pupfish, and the Pahrump poolfish, of the northern quoll, the Campbell Island teal, and the Tristan albatross. Stick to a strict interpretation of the natural and these--along with thousands of other species--are goners. The issue at this point, is not whether we're going to alter nature, but to what end? "We are as gods and might as well get good at it," Stewart Brand, editor of the Who Earth Catalog, famously wrote in its first issue, published in 1968. Recently, in response to the whole-earth transformation that's under way, Brand has sharpened his statement: "We are as gods and we have to get good at it.

As I described in the “Uncorked!” chapter, the economic background in 1970 was turning grim, and sales were weakening. I was concerned. And then, once again, Scientific American came to the rescue. Each September that wonderful magazine devotes its entire issue to a single subject. In September 1970, it was the biosphere, a term I’d never seen before. It was the first time that a major scientific journal had addressed the problem of the environment. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, of course, had been serialized in the New Yorker in the late sixties, so the danger to the biosphere wasn’t exactly news, but it could be considered alarmist news. The prestige of Scientific American, however, carried weight. In fact, it knocked me out. I Suffered a Conversion on the Road to Damascus Within weeks, I subscribed to The Whole Earth Catalog, all the Rodale publications like Organic Gardening and Farming, Mother Earth, and a bunch I no longer remember. I was especially impressed by Francis Moore Lappé’s book Diet for a Small Planet. I joined the board of Pasadena Planned Parenthood, where I served for six years. Paul Ehrlich surfaced with his dismal, and proved utterly wrong, predictions. But hey! This guy was from Stanford! You had to believe him! And in 1972 all this was given statistical veracity by Jay Forrester of MIT, in the Club of Rome forecasts, which proved to be even further off the mark. But I bought them at the time. Bob Hanson, the manager of the new Trader Joe’s in Santa Ana, which was off to a slow start, was a health food nut. He kept bugging me to try “health foods.” After I’d read Scientific American, I was on board! Just how eating health foods would save the biosphere was never clear in my mind, or, in my opinion, in the mind of anyone else, except the 100 percent Luddites who wanted to return to some lifestyle approximating the Stone Age. After all, the motto of the Whole Earth Catalog was “access to tools,” hardly Luddite.

To keep sales increasing during the mid-1970s, we relied on new ideas implemented in existing stores. This was my favorite form of growth. I don’t think that any given store ever fully realizes its potential. During those four years of no expansion in terms of number of stores, our dollar sales kept right on growing while the CEO of Trader Joe’s struggled with trying to reconcile good business practice with the Whole Earth Catalog. Whole Earth Harry indeed! In my private life, I had become an organic gardener. Few things have so enriched my life so much as my own personal conversion to organic gardening, something that I still practice except when the ants start raising colonies of aphids in my blood orange trees, and it’s Grant’s Ant Control to the rescue. In any event, the schizoid marriage of the party store with the health food store was a great success for Trader Joe’s, if not for the biosphere.

Although he was largely an observer of the technical community that created Silicon Valley, his various ideas and crusades around the Whole Earth Catalog, which he created in the fall of 1968, foreshadow and resonate with the techno-utopian culture that the Valley spawned. He went on to rethink modern architecture from a biological perspective and later publicly broke with the environmental movement over nuclear power and GMO food.

National recognition, however, meant more pressure and more work, and it quickly began to take a toll. In September, after just eleven months, Brand announced, “The CATALOG has but 20 months to live.” Then he added: “The function of the skyrocket is to get as high as possible before it blows.

Soon the decision was made not to carry advertisements. The philosophy was simple as was spelled out in the Catalog: “We don’t carry ads anymore, if you have a product, let us see it, if we like it, you don’t owe us anything.

A decade later Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog would begin with the premise “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.

As the Vietnam War raged on and protests tore the country apart, Brand did his best to stay above the fray. When he set out to become a publisher in the fall of 1968, just months after Chicago police beat and tear-gassed protesters, he decreed the new publication would have nothing to say about the Vietnam War, and he stuck to what he believed was a no-politics editorial policy for the first three years he published the Catalog.

His romance with tools—the Catalog would be subtitled Access to Tools—came in part from his 1966 encounter with Fuller, who was legendary for claiming: “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.

Both the Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Club, which gave rise to several dozen companies that forged the personal computer industry—including Apple—emerged from the fertile ground that Raymond created.

Whether it was “consciousness expansion” or “intelligence amplification,” something was afoot in Northern California at the beginning of the 1960s that would be instrumental in both the creation of the sixties counterculture and, in the 1970s, the formation of Silicon Valley. The spectrum extended from the spiritual, mystical, and chemical—“instant mystic”—paths to mind expansion, to the pragmatic access-to-tools philosophy that Brand pioneered in the Whole Earth Catalog and that would be best expressed by Steve Jobs in the 1980s when he described the personal computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” Brand’s Big Sur weekend would point him in a radical new direction, a path that ultimately contributed not only to the emergence of the counterculture in Northern California but also to the birth of a new environmental movement.

The staff would grow to almost thirty by the time of the release of The Last Whole Earth Catalog in 1971.

Clearly, he had gone over some physiological edge with nitrous oxide, so he abruptly stopped using it. Before he stopped, however, nitrous oxide—or perhaps the combination of the explosive growth of the Catalog, nitrous oxide, LSD, and a crumbling marriage—would push him into a deepening depression. It would be a significant factor in his decision to place an end date on the Catalog: 1971—in the fall of 1969, only a year after its first publication, just as it began its exponential growth.

It was soon even clearer that they were riding a rocket ship. Brand had advanced the project about $25,000 from his family inheritance to produce the first Catalog. After selling out the first two thousand, they did ten thousand more in the spring, followed by a second run of twenty thousand. In July of 1969, the Catalog operation had its first profitable month, taking in almost $16,000 in income against $8,000 in expenses. For the Fall 1969 issue, they printed sixty thousand copies and had four thousand subscribers.

The new desktop publishing tools meshed perfectly with Brand’s editorial design for the Catalog. By purchasing an $850 halftone camera, he freed the Catalog from the world of print shops and graphic design houses completely. It made self-publishing not only possible but easy and adaptive in real time.

The Catalog itself was first announced to the world in May 1968 in a Portola Institute marketing brochure, offering $8 annual subscriptions covering two issues and two supplements, and setting the single-issue price at $5.

Tcherepnin had a crucial qualification—she was a good typist. After a brief conversation, Brand told her the job was hers and invited her over to the Portola Institute for a celebratory round of nitrous oxide. She became the Whole Earth Catalog’s first employee.

When they began, desktop publishing did not exist, but for $150 a month, Brand leased an IBM Selectric Composer, an advanced version of the company’s workhorse electric typewriter that had been introduced in 1966. The composer was capable of producing camera-ready justified copy with proportional fonts and it opened the door to low-cost publishing. (The Fall 1969 Catalog cost only $33,000 to produce.)

Under “PURPOSE” the Catalog noted that government, big business, formal education, and the church had gone about as far as possible. Now a “realm of personal power” was ready to “find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.

Although it was still more than seven years before the first hobbyist personal computer would appear, the Catalog was sprinkled with hints that the power of computing might be seized from corporations and the military.

The Last Whole Earth Catalog, published in 1971, would offer a vast menu of items sprawling over almost 500 pages.

The Catalog and the Truck Store became a vehicle for Brand to follow his whims and chase after any kind of new idea. He reviewed a build-your-own-airplane kit and found it interesting enough that he decided to order one. Ultimately, the plane, unfinished and unflown, ended up in the barn on Bill English’s property. Brand purchased a BMW motorcycle and discovered that as great an adventure tool as his new motorbike was, it was also probably more risk than it was worth. Thinking about the hazard of zipping along the freeway at seventy miles per hour, he decided to sell the bike after several misadventures.

His marriage to Jennings was disintegrating. It seemed that the world was starting to close in, and he had become agoraphobic. In the end, he kept up appearances, putting out the last Catalog, but he had begun to contemplate suicide.

Forty years ago, I started the Whole Earth Catalog with the words, “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” Those were innocent times. New situation, new motto: “We are as gods and have to get good at it.

I think that hackers—dedicated, innovative, irreverent computer programmers—are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S. Constitution . . . No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technology and succeeded. They not only did so against the active disinterest of corporate America, their success forced corporate America to adopt their style in the end. In reorganizing the Information Age around the individual, via personal computers, the hackers may well have saved the American economy . . . The quietest of all the ’60s sub-subcultures has emerged as the most innovative and powerful. —Stewart Brand Founder, Whole Earth Catalog