The Last Whole Earth Catalog

by Portola Institute

Whole Earth Catalog is a glimpse back in time.

Genres: Nonfiction, Reference, Environment

448 pages, Paperback

First published October 26, 1972

Reviews

[Petra wants the cats to leave dead rats outside]

Fascinating. Hippies encapsulated.

[Steve]

The various Whole Earth Catalogs were the most important books of my young life. Steve Jobs once commented that they were "one of the bibles of my generation.... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions." The motto of the Catalogs was "Access to tools". I have no doubt that they provided the powerful springboard for a whole generation of autodidacts. That certainly was true of this small-town boy, who found a whole new world through the window of Whole Earth, a whole set of inspiring role models among the contributors to these books. I read the first Catalog in 1968, and I never missed an issue thereafter.

Stewart Brand and friends, I owe you, big time. You changed my life forever.

[Smith Nickerson]

Yes, I actually read it. Many times in fact and wore out several copies. Best to keep in the bathroom.

I highly advise everyone to keep a copy in case the Internet goes down and they have to restart civilization.

[Ian]

I first read this when it was just the Whole Earth Catalog, in the early 70's. It was inspiring, entertaining, 'life-affirming'- all of those good things. It never quite led me to join a commune but it did make me realize there were alternatives to the urban/traditional rural ways of living. It's now a window into and a landmark of what was the counter-culture. It's statement that there are different and interesting ways of doing things, and that you can do them, is as important now as it ever was. As it states on the back cover of one edition: " Stay hungry; Stay foolish."

[Ellen Snyder]

I still have this book in my storeroom. Kind of a guide to my former life. it was an eye-opener back in the 1970's.

[Keith]

Steve Jobs called it Google in paperback.

[Bill Daniels]

Oh those were days
My friends,
I thought they would never end . . .

Back when Whole Earth Catalogs celebrated what was more than two S. D.'s from the mean

[KennyO]

As a kid in the late fifties - early sixties I could while away the hours on a rainy day with my nose in a Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward catalog. In 1968 Stewart Brand compiled and published The Whole Earth Catalog which kicked off a sequence of editions into the seventies. I couldn't get enough of poring over the astonishing range of ideas for back-to-the-earth living. It was mesmerizing. I'm sure that now, nearly fifty years on in life, I could spend an hour here with great pleasure.

There were many editions of The Whole Earth Catalog and having to choose just one to include on my GR list meant being arbitrary about it. I'd say, if you're going to seek one out, try to find one published before 1973.

[Susana]

engagingly weird trip. what an interesting time slot in history.

[Harry Van Der Velde]

The first ever ultimate overview of possibilities present at that time. Incredibly inspiring for me.

[Leo Walsh]

I remember when I first stumbled upon this book. This version was a tad outdated, so I found it used (or maybe just marked down for clearance) at Ohio State's book store in 1986. And I remember pouring through it for hours while my chemistry and calculus homework sat on my desk, untouched. It made for several bleary nights, but it awoke me up to something grand.

And then, the next time my paycheck showed up, I grabbed the newer edition of the catalog -- "Essential Whole Earth Catalog." Which led to many more sleepless nights.

More than anything, the Whole Earth Catalogs I had made me think. And made me aware of systems theory. And made me aware that hippies weren't just people with long hair who smoked dope. Instead, they were people with a vision. It was a vision that the front covers, photos of the earth from spaced, captured. We are one planet, set in space. And we humans are all in this together.

Stewart Brand said it best in his famous introductory statement. "We are as the gods. So we may as well get good at it." And, while born way too late to be a hippy, I know one thing: These books altered the course of my life -- I was trending towards a career as a lawyer -- to a desire to write. Not for fame or fortune. but because it seemed more interesting to do than living in a cube, clawing my way to the corner office.

And that's something. Especially in Reagan's "Alex P. Keaton" campuses of the '80's.

[Charlie Kester]

A memento of a time that seems so long ago now.

Some of it has aged surprisingly well, some of it not so well. The lesson to find tools & solutions that last is one of the former.

But on the whole it's an uncomfortable reminder of how a movement toward down-to-earth simplicity and search for the best got lost in the game of one-ups-manship and cooler-than-thou hipsterism which eventually led to the consumerist excesses of yuppiedom.

[Norman Fellows]

Not my review but:

'Rejecting the professionalization of design, the Catalog took sustainability to be a concern for the citizenry at large, one best approached as a ''design Wiki,'' so to speak, refusing to cede to political and industrial hegemony, or to the supposition that nature is a limiting condition on society.'

Simon Sadler, "An Architecture of the Whole," Journal of Architectural Education 61, no. 4 (2008): 108.

[Kenneth]

The book that launched a thousand trips. So much information about so many fascinating subjects and so many remarkable objects and ideas and strategies for making a new world with a new philosophy, new economy, new politics of liberation, fulfillment, and enlightenment. A key document of its time.

When I was a teenage wannabe-hippie in the early Seventies, this book was my bible. I spent endless hours browsing thru it and letting it inspire my imagination.

[Steve]

so much information for weirdos..

[Ken Oatman]

Appropriate technology primer, now dated but fascinating still... inspirational and iconic to many cultural creatives to this day.