Feature Articles Sorted by Title
Many feature articles from our past issues of Whole Earth are now available online! To read an article, simply click the title.
Comparison is Key
New learning is a victory for the human spirit. So is empathy.
Dancing with Systems
This excerpt from the last book written by Donella Meadows discusses what to do when systems resist change.
Merino Sheep
Domesticated for 12,000 years, sheep wools, depending on the breed, either become apparels or carpets.
A Bug Story
It began, as so many things begin these days, with an email message.
A Future-Proofed Power Meter
One unfortunate vision of our technological future is the "innovation imperative," which strongly implies that our things and appliances must always get "smarter."
A Goddess in the Making
A very hard-to-find town in India builds a shrine to a goddess for AIDS.
A Letter About "Aloha," the Internal Paradise
Defining the word Aloha.
A Treefree Botanical of Plant Fibers
Bamboo is a grass. It is the second most widely used non-wood fiber on the planet (six percent of global plant fiber production), whose bio-attributes just about equal those of pine.
A Whole Earth Forum of Compassionate Linguists
Concerned linguists take counsel: is ours a future of language fossils, or the preservation of many tongues?
All Species Inventory
A call for the discovery of all life-forms on Earth.
Art as Landscape/Landscape as Art
Art as Landscape/Landscape as Art
Attention! All Keepers of the Flame
The imagery stubbornly remains: flame is a hostile force or, at best, an unrelenting nuisance that the world would be wise to discard.
Banking on Natural Capital
Mapping paths to conservation-based banking
Beyond Left and Right
My modus operandi was fairly simple: I'd explore one group's convictions, granting them the benefit of the doubt, and see how it felt to see the world through . . .
Book Brawl
Independent bookstores, the Internet, chain stores and discount houses duke it out.
Bring Back the Elephants
Early hunters killed off the mammoths. Should we bring back proboscideans and restore America to its Pleistocene richness?
Burning Libraries
Burning libraries is a profound form of murder, or if self-inflicted, suicide.
Burning Mirrors
The ancient Chinese, Greeks, Incas, and Romans discovered that curved mirrors could concentrate the rays of the sun onto anything burnable with enough intensity to cause the object to burst into flames in seconds.
Crossed Signals
Synthetic chemicals and the coming health revolution.
From Tuva to Tupelo
An American bluesman takes throatsinging home to Central Asia.
Inventory of Synthetic Fibers
Inventory of Synthetic Fibers
Dalai Lama on: Earth - A Conservation District in the Universe
Meeting of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and David Brower, Founder and Chairman of Earth Island Institute
Healing Medicine
Any level of biological organization that we examine, from DNA up to the most complex body systems, shows the capacity for self-diagnosis, for removal of damaged structure, and for regeneration of new structure.
Places to Intervene in a System
Leverage Points are places withing a complex system where a small shift in one thing can produce large changes in everything.
The Microtonal Wave
Microtonal music results from a philosophical aesthetic of musical intervals.
The Multiverse
Not one but an inflating/deflating rhythmic diversity of many universes.
Dark Comix
The single largest impediment to the acceptance of comics as an artform has been the word itself.
Democratic Foundations
The future's best way to transfer wealth?
Local Currency: In Each Other We Trust
Creating community economics with local currency.
Organic Incorporated
Monocrops, labeling, biotechnology, and watershed activists challenge the pioneer farmer.
Can We Drink the Water We Live With?
New Yorkers struggle to let nature do the job.
Facades
When an organization commissions an architectural masterpiece for itself, it is almost always done at precisely the moment when that organization is on its last legs.
Gulf of Mexico Bioregion
Though often compared to the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Mexico is a unique semi-enclosed sea.
Sapsuckers at Work
By hewing nest holes in aspens and tapping sap from willows, a keystone bird restructures a mountain landscape, composes its species list, and connects its community members.
The Long Wave
Or why Asian economies are collapsing and the Democrats are cutting welfare.
The Renewal, Growth, Birth, and Death of Ecological Communities
A promising new model questions old ideologies, brittle beliefs, and ecological ideals. Is it a guide to more mindful actions?
Can a Nation Become a Commons of Nonviolence?
The Dalai Lama proposes that Tibet be transformed into a zone of Ahisma, a Hindu term used to mean a state of peace and nonviolence.
Defending the Global Commons
Having fun supporting the United Nations
Good-Guy Real Estate
Jean Hocker, Land Trust Alliance president, counsels Whole Earth on land trusts as conservation-based commons.
Neptune's Manifesto
How a few good pirates can save the oceans
Trust and Security
Can the commons exist without common decency and common sense?
Virtual Commons
The Internet is the only commons that now enjoys support from the whole political spectrum, including the farthest right.
Code of the Warrior
The code of the Warrior has the basic qualities of courage, loyalty and willingness to sacrifice for the larger group, to be connected to something larger than simply the individual.
Destruction
Do you remember the way a bear goes through a cabin when nobody is home?
Energy Lessons Learned and To be Learned
Verities that will astonish some and delight the rest.
Internet: The Illusions of Empowerment
Computers, the global information networks, and the information society empower them, not us.
Is Nature Real?
Nature as seen from Kitkitdizze is no social construction.
KGB-ing America
Defending the independence of the judiciary.
Living Technologies for a Living Planet
The problem is simply how a species pleased to call itself Homo sapiens fits on a planet with a biosphere.
Natural Systems Agriculture
We now have a chance to seriously work toward solving the problem of agriculture.
Outside the Yuppie Zoo
Modern people do not know what wilderness is.
Plant Teachers and The Path of Eve
Plants were the first of Earth's creatures to establish extraterrestial contact.
SF Zendog@politics.heart
Asking 'What would make a differance?' is like taking an ethical snapshot of my life
Softening the Intractable: Tibet, China, and Ethical Pressure
The prospects for Tibet entirely depend on how things go in China.
The Computational Metaphor
The least-noticed trends are usually the most subversive ones.
The Garden Project
An introduction from the 1998 Bioneers Conference.
The Long Now
We're building a 10,000-year clock and a 10,000-year library.
The Ultimate Swiss Omni Knife
'We were put on this earth to make things.' --W.H. Auden
To Make Sure That Things Go On
The Red Queen told Alice that, in Wonderland, you had to run just in order to stay in the same place.
Visions for Rural Kentucky
In Kentucky we know that the important question is, 'Who has the vision?
Vital Cities: an interview with Jane Jacobs
An an interview with Jane Jacobs, whose The Death and Life of Great American Cities changed urban planning and policy by simply asking: what makes a vital city?
Whithering Politics?
I'd like to propose something radical: maybe, just maybe, most conservatives and liberals, leftists and rightists are...
Changing The Winds
A leader at the South African post-apartheid and Columbia, South America scenario workshops describes his journey from corporate 'reactive' to empowering facilitator.
Chicken Little, Cassandra, and the Real Wolf
So many ways to think about the future.
Declaration on Soil
The ecological discourse on planet Earth, global hunger and threats to life urges us to look down at the soil, humbly.
Doing Scenarios
Scenarios are imaginative pictures of futures, but the picture is just a means to an end.
Futurama Retro
An interview with John Clute, author of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
Greedy Frogs, Balanced Humans, and Improvisational Music
The planetary scenarios of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development
Soybean of Happiness
A 3,000 year history of our most modern oilseed.
Elegant Densities
Mayor Jerry Brown on a sustainable Oakland
Elegant, Empathetic Affordable Housing
An interview with Michael Pyatok, America's master craftsman of community partnerships and architectural design.
Global Aspirations, Local Gospels
Most of the human-rights standards which now exist in international law derive from the world's major religions and philosophies.
City Lights
An address by San Francisco's first Poet Laureate.
Poor Monsanto
Corporate demonizing will not transform industrial agriculture, but less hubris and more openness to organic agriculture might help.
The Viridian Manifesto of January 3,2000
Art movements have a problem, which is that moron critics name them. That's how you get stuck with a name like 'fauves.' We've already got a name. We're Viridian Greens.
Enough with the Nature Already, Do You Know a Good Dentist?
Let's pay 'nature writers' not to write any more books for at least ten years.
It's Time for Me to Die
A killer writes from death row. He wants to die, but psychiatrists say no.
Rock Not Always a Hard Place
Manufacturing minerals is a life process that has shaped the continents and our history.
Salman Rushdie on Bombay, Rock N' Roll, and The Satanic Verses
An Interview with Salman Rushdie from Bombay, India.
Virtual Community
Changing communications extend our minds, disrupt old forms of community, and create new ways to relate.
Virtual Reality
Sometimes, when you make up a metaphor, it goes out and has adventures. It mixes with the wrong crowd. It forgets where it came from and changes so you hardly recognize it. A metaphor can . . . .
2025, If...
Predicting the future, if we make it that far.
Plains of Science, Summits of Passion
I happen to live in a marginal ecosystem, where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains and cactus blooms under the ponderosa pine. I have also lived most of my life on the uneasy margin between science and religion.
What Happens When Technology Zooms Off the Chart?
Singularity and its meanings
Jump-Starting Renewables
What it takes to enter the Hydrogen Era.
The Table of Contents
In his vehicle--part VW Bug, part table--Reuben Margolin navigates a cross-country traveling commons.
The Unholy Triumvirate
Starting on the day we dreamed up money, flows of energy and water became inseparable from flows of cash.
Communication Prosthetics: Threat, or Menace?
"Neal," he finally said, "have you ever heard of this thing called . . . a PowerPoint Presentation?"
Foot-and-Mouth or Foot In Mouth?
Breakdown of the British Social Infrastructure
Technology: The Bitch Goddess
Technological success is the bitch-goddess of the twenty-first century
The Paradox of Loss
If you have nothing, you'll have nothing to lose.
Viridians Invade Whole Earth, Seize Means of Information
The Viridian Design Movement
Donella Meadows tribute by Peter Warshall
Remembering Donella Meadows
Pete Seeger interviewed by David Kupfer
An interview with Pete Seeger.
Nice Boulders, but Where's the Fish?
Why twenty years of salmon restoration efforts haven't brought us back to the era of plenty, at least not yet.
Reintroducing the Lost
Once extinct, always extinct? Maybe not.
Solving for Pattern: The Straw Project
Fourth-graders' love of a shrimp has built a human web for changing education, ranching, government, philanthropy, and parenting.
The New New Economy
A new economy is emerging that is based on providing clean energy, clean transportation, clean water, and other goods and services that embody the principles of industrial ecology, resource productivity, and natural capitalism.
Wilderness and the Hyperreal
Are all our future landscapes headed for the hyperreal? Does faking nature matter?
Really Useful Websites
Websites that Kevin Kelly Finds to be Useful
Thinking With Her Hands
Maya Lin speaks of landscapes, history, and the practice of making mindful art.
Tools Are the Revolution
The problems created by technology create opportunities for new tool making.
Escaping the Matrix
What if consensus reality is a fabricated illusion? Are you ready for the red pill?
Storm Warning: Are Left and Right Obsolete?
Symposium introduction
Storm Warning: Are Left and Right Obsolete?
Progressives against progress!
Storm Warning: Are Left and Right Obsolete?
Left and right: an outworn framework.
Storm Warning: Are Left and Right Obsolete?
'Socialism is dead'...really?
Storm Warning: Are Left and Right Obsolete?
How about that green option?
Storm Warning: Are Left and Right Obsolete?
Hay foot, straw foot
To Save the Whooping Crane, You Need Two Wings
Down in the trenches of local politics, labels lose their meaning and odd bedfellows arise.
Disappearing Languages
Of the 6,000 languages still on Earth, 90 percent could be gone by 2100.
English: The Killer Language? Or a Passing Phase?
There are reasons to believe that the English language will eventually wane in influence.
Grassroots Radio
Noncommercial and nonprofessional, local and global, shortwave, Internet, and low-power FM radio.
Informed by Indifference
'In those moments above the cloudless sea, my body vibrating with the plane, I began to feel how remote Antarctica is....'
Just Speak Your Language
'It is the spiritual relevance deeply embedded in our own languages that makes them relevant to us as American Indians today....'
Left-Handed Bears and Androgynous Cassowaries
Homosexual/transgendered animals and indigenous knowledge.
Micro-Powered Radio
FM radio's Davids win a round against Goliath.
Migrant Mushroomers
Tales of adventure, nature love, and money on the globalocal mushroom trail.
WTO: Journal of the Uninvited
A streetwise report of happenings in Seattle on November 30,1999, when turtles, priests, farmers, scholars, diplomats, workers, scientists, fishermen, businesspeople, lawyers, and just plain citizens confronted the WTO.
Relinquishing the Mic
The only globalocal broadcast for women's rights has served the voiceless.
Salila-ti Mi-mu d-enn-i-gu: I Wish You Would Come Home
Without spiritual language, how are we to hear the Great Power's requests?
The Cryosphere
The Antarctic atmosphere consists of ice clouds and ice vapor; the hydrosphere is ice rivers and ice seas; the lithosphere, ice plateaus and ice mountains....
The Global Mushroom Trade
With the globalization of trade, mushrooms are being picked in more places than ever before.
The Living Water Garden
An American artist shepherds the first inner-city Chinese ecological park.
WTO Think-In
First steps toward reclaiming sovereignty and clear conscience.
WTO Think-In
Globalizing food standards: the role of the Codex Alimentarius Commission.
WTO Think-In
Will all boats, or just yachts, rise with globalization's tide?
WTO Think-In
Hold the champagne: globalization's not dead yet.
Yowlumni: The Path to Revitalization
Everytime we use our language I feel that all of creation understands us and is rejuvenated....
Cooking with Fire
A short history, with access to the best cookbooks.
Green Chemistry's Maven
An interview with EPA's Tracy Williamson.
Need-Fire
Kindling new fire; the basic rite of community renewal.
Restorative Fire Is Local Fire
Restoring fire's creativity in the San Joaquin grasslands.
The Long Burn
Seizing fire was our most daring, our most profound gamble. It made us the biospheric creature we are. It made the biosphere anew.
The Wild Rice Moon
Globalocal markets and preserving the taste of manoomin.
Uma and Shiva, or The Origin of a Young God
The Hindu story of fire, desire, and bringing order to the world.
EuroEnglish
The European Union comissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Norman Cousins
Norman Cousins is a lecturer on a wide variety of circuits. He has a reputation among the medical community for having cured his cancer with a program of laughing. He was the long time (1940 to 1971) editor of the Saturday Review, a charmingly highbrow magazine at that time.
Remembering Ivan Illich
Reflections on a seminal cultural critic/intellectual gadfly, by Carl Mitcham, Peter Warshall, Jerry Brown, Vijaya Nagarajan, Lee Swenson, David Cayley, and Lee Hoinacki
Remembering Ivan Illich
Carl Mitcham's memories of Ivan Illich.
Remembering Ivan Illich
Peter Warshall's memories of Ivan Illich.
Remembering Ivan Illich
Jerry Brown's memories of Ivan Illich.
Remembering Ivan Illich
Vijaya Nagarajan's memories of Ivan Illich.
Remembering Ivan Illich
Lee Swenson's memories of Ivan Illich.
Remembering Ivan Illich
David Cayley's memories of Ivan Illich.
Remembering Ivan Illich
Lee Hoinacki's memories of Ivan Illich.
We're in a 1920's Economy, an Interview with Paul Hawken
In 1980 and 1981, you seemed to be more pessimistic than optimistic about the economy. On the one hand you predicted that we were going through a healthy economic change, on the other you warned of some type of deflationary crisis or credit collapse. In 1980 and 1981, you seemed to be more pessimistic than optimistic about the economy. On the one hand you predicted that we were going through a healthy economic change, on the other you warned of some type of deflationary crisis or credit collapse. Since then, the economy has
We are as Gods
As unexpected and ungrammatical as a clap of thunder on a sunny day was the opening line of that first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it."
You are the Customer You are the Company
Two years ago, uncommon courtesy offered a two-day course called "Business as Service." Its premise was simple: All business is service regardless of whether it manufactures, produces, or distributes.
Thoughts of Buckminster Fuller
Standing by the lake on a jump-or-think basis, the very first spontaneous question coming to mind was, "If you put aside everything you've ever been asked to believe and have recourse only to your own experiences do you have any conviction arising from . . .
Nuclear Firewood
Important aspects of the energy shortage are being ignored in both science and government. We tend to forget that most of the energy used by man is solar energy that has been fixed recently through . . .
God is a verb
Here is God's purpose - for God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun . . .
God is a Verb
Here is God's purpose - for God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper; is the articulation not the art, objective or subjective; . . . .
WE ARE AS GODS
As unexpected and ungrammatical as a clap of thunder on a sunny day was the opening line of that first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968:
The Purpose of The Whole Earth Catalog
We are as gods and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory--as via government, big business, formal education, church--has succeeded to . . . .
The Function of The Whole Earth Catalog
The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and acess device. With it, the user should know . . .
Thoughts of Buckminster Fuller
Standing by the lake on a jump-or-think basis, the very first spontaneous question coming to mind was, "If you put aside everything you've ever been asked to believe and have recourse only to your own . . .
Anniversaries to come: Prolog
In this same year, Stewart Brand and a small group of cohorts published the first Whole Earth Catalog. In retrospect, Whole Earth was not the only . . . .
Juggling as Performing Mathematics
Instruction in juggling provides an interesting model for instruction in mathematics because there is a considerable similiarity between the processes involved in juggling and the abstract thought processes. In juggling, as in pure mathematics, no new facts are ever given to the student by the teacher.
New Age Doctrine is out to lunch on three issues.
It is easy to criticize excessive consumption, competitive marketplace values, and dollar-dominated political institutions and multinational corporations. We would like to suggest that a similar but more courageous critical eye be applied to peer views on three core issues affecting our planet villages, recycling and democracy.
Whole Earth Revived
Whole Earth points to bridges and barriers, driving forces and out-of-the-blue wildcards that will shape our lives, communities, bioregions, and planet . . . honors a quarter-century legacy and lineage . . . evaluates tools, ideas, practices; offers labor-saving access and nitty-gritty experiences that sow the seeds for a long-term, viable planet . . . stretches to encompass the whole Earth (and other universes) . . . nurtures adventurous intellect, lots of laughs, and independent thought; exp;ores connectivity and emerging patterns.
Endangered Night Skies
Initially I became interested in the appearance of the Earth from "outside" through my work related to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I worked out what the radio Earth looks like from interstellar distances . . .
Beginning Buddhism
Buddhism as a tool, maybe the sharpest and kindest tool held by us sentient beings, a tool for dismantling, cutting away and through, unmasking, demystifying.
Law of the minimun
Which is the special material without which industrial technology and its civilization cannot function? When does it run out?
Divine Right's Trip
This original folk-tale will be found proceeding episodically along the right-hand pages (lower-right corner) in this type face, making the CATALOG what if has longed to be, a work of drama.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. Any you will have a window in your head . . .
Jarfalla: City of the Future
STOCKHOLM-The first city of the futre will be built in Sweden. It will be called Jarflla. No gasoline powered vehicle will be allowed.
THE GREAT BUS RACE
Everybody's pretty innoculated already; it's the spaciest part of the afternoon. The race was going to be one bus at a time against the clock, but Ken Kesey and others are maintaining that's a chicken shit race. It's got to be all at once.
Take what you want. Take what you need There is plenty to go around Everything is free.
Nothing in this manual is copyrighted. Anyone may reprint this information without permission. If you paid money for this manual you got screwed. It's absolutely free because it's yours. Think about it.
Other People's Mail
Correspondence between Steward Brand and Dr. Carl Djerassi, President Syntex Research Center
Whole Earth Catalog Costs
Publishing is a numbers game. Volume. With more subscribers and buyers we're increasingly able to lower the price on the CATALOG and deepen and widen its research and its usefulness. More ain't necessarily merrier, but it permits you to keep playing.
More on Getting by Without Money
You don't have to be rich to drop outbut it helps.
Volkswagen Technical Manual
There's unusual agreement among all the mechanics we've talked to that this is the best book on VW's, It's good prevention against getting burned when a dismaying noise starts following you down the road and your trip shifts from 400 miles a day to nothing a week.
Ed Rosenfield Suggests
The early Whole Earth Catalog featured a section titled "New Suggestions" here are Ed's.
The Far-Out Park Party
.... And the whole thing came out the top of itself. "We're not going to use the Earth as a weapon. We're going to use it as a tool." No stones or bullets were thrown while 30,000 fans of fluidity strolled through Berkeley. War had turned into party. Something squirted loose and commenced to flow.
Up Against the Wall Mothers
Here's the valedictory address of Stephanie Mills at Mills College on June 1st in full.
Portola Institute, Inc.
Taken from the last page of The Difficult But Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog
The Unanimous Declaration of Interdependence
On the Planet, Earth, August, 1969 The Declaration of Interdependence, written by Thomas Jefferson and Cliff Humphrey and many delegates is available in poster form (17"x22") for$1 from: Ecology Action P.O. Box 9334 Berkeley, Calif. 94709 The poster has lots of space at the bottom for signatures, paw prints, fly specks, snake slithers, clam spit, pollen.,,
Other People's Mail - No. 1
Community is a matter of making, not finding. Start your own.
Open letter to Hon. John Brademas, Chairman, Committee of Education and Labor, U.S. House of Representatives
Thank you for the opportunity to testify before your committee. John Holt has suggested that if we tried to teach infants to talk, they would never learn. I suspect it is the same with ecology. It must be learned. It is being learned. If you try to reach it to people, you will only teach them to hate it.
Other People's Mail - No. 2
Communes aren't too interested in being studied, unless you feel like paying them.
CATALOG Procedure
Most Whole Earth Catalogs presented "Procedure" for readers. Here is an example from July 1970.
Always Whole Thing Catalog
Knowing you place helps you get there. There are many ways of doing things . . . . besides our own.
Appalachia and On Heroes
The Whole Earth Catalog often provided context to it's reviews. These comments by Gurney Norman surround reviews of Stinking Creek, Night Comes To The Cumberlands , Seedtime On The Cumberland, and Cabins In The Land. All four reviews are posted on this site.
The Great Mail Hassle
The Whole Earth Catalog had an ongoing problem with the US Post Office. Their description of such problems follows:
Dedication to Lenny Bruce
"Cause everytime we get a suicide, it's the weirdest thing but they always got this grin on their faces. No matter how they go: hanging, gas or whatever, they always got this certain grin"
Liferaft Earth
The scene Wednesday at the Truck Strore was harrowing.
In Celebration of Worms
Earthworms ordinarily come to the surface only at night in order to forage for food and to throw off their soil-enriching castings. They forage for organic litter. Earthworms never eat anything that is living.
Shit
tommy laing said you can shit in your nest just so long, then you're nesting in your shit.
Model Rockets
Model rockets, you say, what are they ... idealizations of instruments of war? Not at all. They are idealizations of one of man's primal urges, mastery of the skies.
Forward: The Fringes of Reason
Oh God, how did I get into this room with all these weird people!
This magazine is a book-in-progress.
The purpose of this magazine, as with our previous Whole Earth Catalogs, is to aid the empowerment of individuals. And to aid the balance of that empowering.
The Humanoids
DO "HUMAMOIDS" PILOT UFOS? Have human beings seen them?
Reincarnation: Pro and Con
Ted Schultz discusses three books on the subject of reincarnation.
Censoring the Paranormal
Writer Charles Fort called them "the damned." De-bunkers call them superstitious nonsense that threatens to undermine the fabric of science. Christian fundamentalists call them satanic manifestations that undermine faith in God. Other people simply call them anomalies.
Why the IBM PC is a Lousy Standard for the Induistry
The IBM PC isn't a standard for the industry at all it's a standard for IBM, and a shifty target at that. IBM never set out to create a standard. They birthed a well-conceived market-grabber that bridged the gap between the adaptable but non-business Apple II and the workaday, dull world of CP/M computers. Well then, fine. . . . What's the big deal about standards anyway?
Playing Hardball
Have you ever seen an article entitled "Why I hate the Cleveland Indians"? Of course not. Who would care? Someone did take the time, however, to write an entire book about why he hates the New York Yankees not George Steinbrenner, or even a particular Yankee team, but the very idea of the Yankees. The Yankees, like IBM, are important enough to hate.
Bringing the IBM PC Up to Snuff
The IBM PC is sold "bare bones" to make the initial purchase price seem low. Some personal computers are complete packages including a display, disk storage units and built-in connectors for a printer and communications that make the system ready to go to work as soon as you get it.
Not a Toy but the Real Thing
Apple Computer's new Macintosh is a professional computer you can own, an affordable (but not inexpensive) version of the kind of machine computer scientists and engineers have been using for several years. What do the pros have that the rest of us don't know about?
Breaking the Chains that Bind
I am not artistically inclined. My elementary school art teacher often suggested that I use the little cut-outs of birds and flowers she had available for tracing rather than try any creative drawing. Even now I only doodle in straight lines, but MacPaint stirs some latent artistic urge in me.
Organizing Programs as Mind Extension Tools
There may be no more valuable tool in your life than a good database system keeping an ever expanding, never-forgetting, totally cross-indexed catalog of your mind.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Gurney Norman
Gurney Norman created Divine Right's Trip, that strange story threading its unlikely way through the pages of the Last Whole Earth Catalog. Gurney lives in Appalachia where, he says, ten million people and a thousand artists and writers are happily fulfilled by work without reference to the national culture.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand compiled the first Whole Earth Catalog twenty years ago. His current experiment is the Global Business Network, a mechanism for generating scenarios of the future.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Ram Dass
Ram Dass made waves two decades ago because of his spiritual conversions brought about by LSD and a guru in India, epiphanies conveyed in the book that became a motto: Be Here Now. His self-described role is "social philosopher." In his heart he is a committed servant in SEVA, an organization dedicated to eradicating preventable blindness in the third world.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Marilyn Ferguson
Marilyn Ferguson set the tone for the late New Age with the 1981 publication of her book The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s. Her remarks here will appear in her new book, The New Common Sense.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Dave Foreman
Dave Foreman practices monkeywrenching (sabotaging offending equipment) as founder of Earth First!, an organization whose motto in short is "No compromise." In my informal survey, Earth First! and Dave Foreman were the most often cited examples, both pro and con, of where activism may be headed,
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich lives in Mexico, and is a radical scholar/historian in the business of overturning perceptions on such topics as education, gender, medicine, energy, economics, and information. In his book, Toward a History of Needs, he developed the "economics of scarcity." His recent investigations concern the history of the body
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Lorenzo Milam
Lorenzo Milam is publisher of the "noisiest book review in the world," the idiosyncratic Fessenden Review
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Stephanie Mills
Stephanie Mills is a bioregionalist working in Michigan, She was formerly assistant editor of CQ, and co-editor of the special bioregional issue (Winter 1981).
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Robert Rodale
Robert Rodale manages the Rodale network of publications (Organic Gardening, Prevention, New Farm, many books) and research centers in -eastern Pennsylvania. For a generation, these publications have been preaching that no, or at hast fewer, chemicals for soil, plants, or humans is the best for all. There would be no better example of how formerly fringe ideas of the '60s have moved to the mainstream.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Anne Waldman
Anne Waldman is a performance poet and a Fast Speaking Woman (that's the name of her first collection of poems): As director of Writing & Poetry at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics held at the Naropa Institute, Colorado, Anne is an inspiration and teacher to many young poets.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Jerry Brown
Jerry Brown was governor of California from 1974 to 1982, and ran for president in 1980. He has appeared in this magazine primarily as an interviewer of others, such as Herman Kahn. I interviewed him in Los Angeles by phone.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Peter Warshall
Peter Warshall is a biologist, eco-man, watershed guru, poet, professional naturalist, and Land Use editor of Whole Earth publications. His thinking is entirely nonlinear, so I've excerpted our phone conversation whenever it intersected ground zero.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Tim Leary
Tim Leary defined a youth rebellion in the late '60s with the words, "turn on, tune in, drop out." His adventures with hallucinogenics earned him notoriety, jail, and an appreciation for artificial intelligence:
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Huey Johnson
Huey Johnson is a pioneer land guardian. His crusades have been instrumental in preserving key wilderness on the west coast, and his methods of doing it influential on similar projects. He serves on Point Foundation's board of directors.
Access to Tools
Composer Roger E. Hyde has been an occasional Whole Earth contributor for twenty-two years. His consistent foci have been the philosophy of art and communications theory. He is looking for a publisher for his novel The Weighing of Secret Burdens, and his theoretical tome A General Poetics is nearing completion, but he says not to hold your breath in anticipation of either. However, you may expect to find a fairly amazing Hyde essay, on music as an evolutionary system of knowledge, in these pages in the near future. James Donnelly
Ten Commandments for Planners
This talk might as easily have been titled "Ten Commandments for Environmentalists," because it grew out of the author's conversion from a knee-jerk environmentalist into a reluctant admirer of the pragmatism of America's new "edge cities" out on the heltways. He chronicled that phenomenon in his 1991 Edge City: Life on the New Frontier fWER 73:52), a book that taught me more about contemporary America than any I've read in years. (That's because I hadn't read Joel's earlier book. The Nine Nations of North America.) A Washington Post journalist for twenty years now, Joel lives with his family on a Virginia homestead straight out of the early Whole Earth Catalogs. Stewart Brand
A Hard Look at Softwoods
THE WHOLE EARTH is in transition from old-growth forests to either managed forests or tree plantations.
Space Colonies - A CoEvolution Book
Most of this book is Used Information. It is reprinted from various issues of The CoEvolution Quarterly, a California-based peculiar magazine. You can look at that news two ways. If you operate by the Bread Model of Information, it's terrible news. You've been gypped stale information.
Who's Earth
Like a long, pauseless prayer, astronaut Russell Schweickart spoke these words in the summer of '74 before a brainy group meeting on "Planetary Culture" at the spiritual community of Lindisfarne, Long Island. Schweickart himself seemed amazed at what he was saying, amazed at the gathering he was attending, amazed still at the events which led him to drift bodily free between Earth and Universe. Remember the starchild at the end of "2001"? Like that.
The Long View
The shocks of this Age are the shocks of pace. Change accelerates around us so rapidly that we are strangers to our own pasts and even more to our futures.
Beauty & The Junkyard
MEXICO CITY PRESENTS THE WORLD with a new, modern plague.
Poets on the Bum
THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT at the University of Washington was, in 1956, housed in Parrington Hall, a Victorian monster of damp stone and warped wainscoting.
Do-It-Yourself Eclipse Prediction
IF YOU ARE IN a tight spot, you may find yourself wishing for a solar eclipse to turn day into night, as in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. If you knew the eclipse was going to happen (but others didn't), you could pretend to "command the heavens." While Mark Twain's solar eclipse was an invention, his inspiration was probably a real-life incident involving Christopher Columbus in 1504, where the explorer "stole the moon" to get himself out of a sticky situation in Jamaica.
Priests of Another Knowledge
But I do go back always to the base questions: What is music? Where does it come from? Where does it go? Can we see the whole perimeter of its range, its spectrum?
The Reintroduction of Kate Wolf
If, on the other hand, the Kate Wolf who sings is getting these kinds of letters, I intend to learn how to play the guitar. Yours Truly, Kate Wolf
Priests of Another Knowledge - An Afterword of Sorts
A follow- up to Priests of Another Knowledge
20th Anniversary Gossip
The format of this forum was stolen from the 1978 Whole Earth 10th anniversary Jamboree. Stewart Brand engineered that two-day gathering so that 60 people spoke for a maximum of five minutes each.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Tom Mandel
Making hard predictions about the future is a guaranteed way to make mistakes. But I believe the above developments are among the important factors shaping our lives and lifestyles over the next 20 years.
20th Anniversaru Rendezvous - Wavy Gravy
Wavy Gravy is just about the only name Wavy Gravy has by now. A charter member of the prospering Hog Farm (you might know them as the commune providing first aid at a lot of famous concerts), Wavy Gravy is the patron saint and holy jester of all former hippies, tripsters, and backsliding yuppies.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Sparrow
All day I'm walking around stunned. "I'm a voice of The New Age!" I'm thinking.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Murry Bookchin
Murray Bookchin is one of the granddaddies of American anarchism. He is currently in the center of a raging ideological debate among socialists and environmentalists.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Anne Herbert
Anne Herbert was the first editor Steward Brand hired to assist in producing this magazine. Her prose has animated many issues of CoEvolution and WER. She now freelances in Mill Valley, California.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Rusty Schweichart
Rusty Schweickart is the astronaut (Apollo 9, 1969) who first floated in space without umbilical connections. Like other astronauts, his space perspective pushed him directly into ocean, atmospheric, and international perspectives.
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader invented the modern consumer-rights movement. His work in Washington, DC, now extends beyond safer automobiles to such issues as voter registration
20th Anniversary Rendezvous - Bob Fuller
Bob Fuller roams the Earth as an international troubleshooter. He seeks hot-spots of conflict and areas of fierce misunderstanding at national, racial, or ethnic levels. There he begins his work as a citizen diplomat to reconcile the many sides (there's almost always more than two). Bob also serves as a Point board member.
Introduction to The Essential Whole Earth Catalog
"Live and learn" is a redundancy. Live is learn.
Preface to The Essential Whole Earth Catalog
Reviewers of our Catalogs have often missed the point by calling us a "wishbook." Not at all. You can grab ahold of nearly anything in here and make it a part of your life.
One Highly Evolved Toolbox
That's the whole idea: making it easy to work makes it easy to try new concepts, to prove them in an irrefutable way. You can actually change things out there! Maybe not in a big way, but at a scale you can comprehend. Instead of technology taking over, you are in control at least locally, and perhaps universally if the idea works well for lots of people. That's subversive tech. It can be fun. It's always satisfying. Work up your toolbox and give it a try.
Someday Everyone will communicate this way!
Whole Earth editors became so enamored of computer networks that we started our own the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link). Like all such networks, you pay by the minute in our case, $3/hour plus $8/month.
Some rules and hints for teachers and students.
RULE TEN: "We're breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities." (John Cage)
Introduction to Whole Earth Software Catalog
Introduction in which the book asserts its Agenda, Method, & Credibility
Telecommunicating
But don't be daunted; it's becoming easier. Programs are finally emerging that treat telecommunicating as a human activity instead of a technical obstacle course. Modems are getting cheaper and more reliable.
Hardware: Hard Choices
This is June 1984 speaking. By the time you read this, there will have been changes in personal computing equipment. We've focused on general advice and direction, which shouldn't be seriously affected by the announcement of a new computer or even another "generation" of computer systems.
Writing
Said to account for more than 60% of personal computer use, word processing programs are doing to writing what pocket calculators did to figuring. Cue the testimonials:
Farm Stories
The holy-man scene was a big part of the action in the late sixties, and in San Francisco the guy who worked the local beat was Steve Gaskin.
Water Supply for Mountain Camp
For another simple example, let us estimate how we would bring water from a running stream into a tank (let's say a 50-gallon gravity tank) to supply water for a vacation cabin in the woods. A natural supply point is 100 ft away upstream, guaranteeing among other things a clean, continuous water supply. Our problem is transport.
Pollution by Fertilizer
injection of excess nitrogen into the biosphere not only is seriously polluting rivers and lakes but also has greatly increased the frequency of a rare form of poisoning among both humans and domestic animals.
How to do a Whole Earth Catalgo
From page 435 of The Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog
Defending the Earth and Burying the Hatchet
I have been a social activist for over 55 years. I was on the ecological frontlines as far back as 1952.
The Gift Economy
ONE AREA IN WHICH American companies are always at a disadvantage when operating in Japan is that of personnel.
None of the Above
I WOULD FEEL better about voting if it felt true if it felt like I was able to state what I think about our shared life by voting. Sometimes what I think is that none of the candidates offered on the ballot is worthy of office.
Cold Turkey on the Farm
CALIFORNIA'S FARMERS HAVE STARTED checking their fields into the agricultural equivalent of the Betty Ford Clinic. Any honest accounting of our nation's chemical dependency should include most of American agriculture, but this fifty-year era is beginning to wind down.
Number is Different from Quantity.
You can have exactly 3 tomatoes. You can never have exactly 3 gallons of water.
What happens with presuppositions such as "Number is Different From Qunanity"?
Both groups are difficult to teach because they attach such great importance to "right" premises and presuppositions that heresy becomes for them a threat - of excommunication.
Allegory
Reader asks impossible question: "Who's the "Next" Gregory Bateson, por favor? Jim Cleaver, Bolder, Colorado.
Gregory Bateson: Old Men Ought to be Explorers
Anthropologist, psychologist, biologist, epistemologist, writer of Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, Gregory Bateson was (is) godfather to most of what I've been up to with CoEvolution Quarterly. -SB
The Political Economy of Deforestation
AS A MANIACAL TREE LOVER, my first act when I moved to California was to sleep in a virgin forest of each major Sierran and coastal species.
Five Minute Speeches - Stewart Brand
Ten years ago we reached for something with the Whole Earth Catalog. A lot of us reached for various things some to stop the war in Vietnam, some to save various species, some to find a way to stay high. And we have spent ten years refining our activities so that our grasp could catch up with that reach.
A New Look at Botanical Medicine
BOTANY and medicine have been the closest of friends and the most distant of strangers.
Five Minute Speeches - Wavy Gravy
"If you had the whole Earth, what would you do with it?" And I started to think about that God, well, we need to clean it up.
Five Minute Speeches - J. Baldwin
... We're not really credible when we talk about appropriate technology. What a lot of people around here mean by appropriate technology is they drive a diesel Mercedes to work. That won't do.
Five Minute Speeches - Russell Schweikart
The difference between universe and environment is me, the thinker, feeler, doer, lover.
Five Minute Speeches - Meca Wawona
SB: We happen to have a crazy lady here, just in time. She can't stay til tomorrow, so she's goi