The Whole Earth Catalog and its spawn CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review were among my favorite reads and inspirations in the decades when they were in print.
Long gone from the dead tree publishing landscape, my fading collection of several Catalogs and an almost complete set of Co-Evolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review still graces my shelves.
The Whole Earth Catalog is now online.
Transformed from paper to electrons, this wonderous archive marks a period in our recent history when the contemporary environmental movement was beginning to take shape.
Carrying motto "Access to Tools," Whole Earth was handbook and manual for those seeking instructions and tools to create a better world and self-sufficient life with their own initative, passion, and energy.
Edited by Stewart Brand and a host of smart people like Kevin Kelly, Whole Earth is where I first saw the work of agrarian poet and essayist Wendell Berry and ecological agriculturalist Wes Jackson, who started The Land Institute in Kansas.
"Places" is mandatory guide to understanding any type of system: an organization, economy, living body, ecosystem, or a city, and explains why a small shift in one thing can create a big shift in most everything. She explains why most change is misguided, misapplied, and mistimed because of a failure to recognize "leverage points."
The Whole Earth family of publications was the internet before there was an internet, blogs before blogs. The arrival of a new edition or issue was an event, everything else was set aside until a full perusal of the copy that had just shown up in the mailbox.
--DD
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