The Whole Earth Catalog was a project dreamed up by Stanford-educated Stewart Brand. The concept of the Catalog arose out of Brand’s desire to celebrate humankind’s essential tool-making brilliance as a means to live life fully and consciously. The Catalog was chock-a-block full of tools of all kinds. The very concept of tool was being defined while the catalog was produced from 1968-1971.
The Purpose of the Whole Earth Catalog
The purpose of the Whole Earth Catalog was to explore "the 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." And that was seen to be accomplished by way of tools. The Whole Earth Catalog promoted and celebrated tools of all kinds that were considered to enhance life.
The Whole Earth Catalogue and the Philosophy of Responsibility
In a way, the Whole Earth Catalog was a precursor to the World Wide Web. The fundamental difference between The Whole Earth Catalog and the World Wide Web is the reader/user’s experience of connectedness. The Whole Earth Catalog was a movement. It was born from the philosophy of responsibility – that the planet earth was a precious space filled with finite entities that must be valued.
How Tools Define Humanness
Tools were defined in the broadest of terms. And the catalog invited its contributors to respond to the challenges of being human on this planet in innovative and convention-breaking ways. Humans were celebrated as being tool makers, and the concept of tool was anything that enhances life on planet Earth.
The Mission of the Whole Earth Catalog
One of the goals of the Whole Earth Catalog was to remind its readers that the planet earth was a self-sustaining system. Buckminster Fuller, designer, engineer and philosopher, coined the phrase “spaceship earth”. Fuller was deeply concerned with the wastefulness of humanity. He envisioned a world where there was no poverty, where fuel was conserved, heat pumps replaced furnaces, and solar energy was commonplace. The key was humanity’s attitude to its home – planet earth.
Spaceship Earth
Fuller wanted people to understand that the planet was a fragile closed system, with everything interconnected. Wastefulness was the Earth’s worst enemy. His vision was that humans would learn to do more with less through the innate human ability to innovate. His greatest concern was that unconscious use of Earth’s resources would end in the planet being exhausted of its resources. And that, he felt, could lead to the ultimate end of humanity.
Community and Responsibility
The Whole Earth Catalog created a forum for consciousness. Every article featured in the catalogue in some way contributed to the betterment of the planet, and the community of humans that live on it. It’s time to get back to thinking of planet Earth as a whole, everything connected to everything else.
The Whole Earth Approach
The Whole Earth Catalog took the approach expressed in its back cover: "We can’t put it together.It is together." The caption sat above the first photograph of the whole earth shot at noon from an ATS satellite in November 1967, the year that man walked on the moon for the first time. The question is have humans done a good job in looking after Spaceship Earth?
Lesley Strutt - Lesley Strutt lives with her dog in the Gatineau Hills near Ottawa, Canada. She loves being surrounded by nature: it brings her joy and ...
