The Whole Earth Catalog(s) – Stewart Brand’s futuristic interpretation of the classic mail order catalog – was for many folk their introduction to composting toilets, Zen, straw bale buildings and everything counter-cultural. Since made obsolete by the same technology he helped pioneer and promote, they’re still a bit of a cultural milestone, and a trip down memory lane for (very) old hippies.
Camp Bibliophilia has a copy of ‘The Essential Whole Earth Catalog’ from 1986, and Stewart Brand’s ‘Space Colonies’ from 1978.
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A further appraisal of Stewart Brand’s legacy… https://californialocal.com/localnews/statewide/ca/article/show/135565-stewart–brand-whole-earth-catalog-coevolution-well/
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This is a review by Kev (from Amazon) of ‘Space Colonies’….
“This is perhaps the only balanced book on the topic of space colonies ever written. Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, was smitten with Gerard K. O’Neill’s 1974 proposal to build gigantic orbiting space habitats. But rather than write another sales piece as O’Neill and others had done, Brand solicited commentary in the pages of of The Whole Earth News. Sure, the book gives O’Neill plenty of space to make his case, including the text of his congressional testimony on the subject. But it also pulls together 3 years of responses, invited and not, from the likes of architects Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri; astronaut Russell Scweickart; astronomer Carl Sagan; biologists Lynn Margulis, John Todd, George Wald and Peter Walshall; poet Wendell Berry and many others. Over half of the invited authors were critical of O’Neill’s proposal. The debate between educator John Holt and T.A. Heppenheimer (author of Colonies in Space) runs nine 1200-word pages (out of 155 total) and is worth the purchase price in its own right. That Brand, an unabashed space colony fan, was able to bring so many high-caliber critics (and advocates) together in one volume is an amazing achievement. Read it for penetrating insight into one of the central divides in our culture.”
Not bad for a book written almost fifty years ago. Also fairly prescient, this image from the cover page echoes what a lot of us are feeling about Musk and Bezos at the moment –