About Whole Earth

Whole Earth is committed to a vision of what's needed to challenge ingrained patterns and stale assumptions. Curiosity. Exploration. Independence. Community. Living fearlessly. Principles. Tools and ideas. Whole Earth shows you ways to take back your power and put it to use. Here you'll find information about restoring your local ecosystem, citizen advocacy, and socially responsible investing. Here are the tools for producing knowledge, and creating communities according to your own values and ideals.

Since its founding in 1974, Whole Earth has evolved into a worldwide network of information hunters and gatherers. Throughout its pages, this community has broken ground-thinking long and hard about the design of market systems and ecosystems, spirituality, scientific and poetic discovery, social change, and upending technologies.

Whole Earth is the successor of the Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968 by Stewart Brand. The Catalog found immediate success with the youth movement, selling millions of copies and quickly becoming the unofficial handbook of the counter-culture. It won the National Book Award, cited by jurors as a "Space Age Walden", hitting national bestseller lists in the process. Point Foundation went on to publish several updated editions, and other titles on appropriate technology, environmental restoration, and communication technologies.

Originally titled Co-Evolution Quarterly, the magazine was first published in 1974. For its time, it was very pragmatic and principled. It furthered social change and new movements by introducing ideas such as the gaia hypothesis, watershed consciousness, whole system thinking, and voluntary simplicity to readers. It featured many of the catalog's facets: access to information, book and tool reviews, essays, interviews with, and articles by seminal thinkers of the day. An early issue was edited by the Black Panther Party, another by beat poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure.

In 1985 the magazine changed its name to Whole Earth Review. Since then, it has carried dozens of essential concepts into popular discourse-medical self-care, community building, bioregionalism, environmental restoration, nanotechnology, and cyberspace.