Appropriating technology: The Whole Earth Catalog and counterculture environmental politics

Environmental History, Jul 2001 by Kirk, Andrew

A Counterculture Sears Catalog

No single institution or organization better represents the technological universe through which counterculture environmentalists defined themselves than the Whole Earth Catalog and its successor, CoEvolution Quarterly. This eclectic and iconoclastic publication became a nexus of radical environmentalism, appropriate technology research, alternative lifestyle information, and communitarian anarchism. First published in 1968, as the AT movement burst onto the world scene, wEc brought a wide range of divergent counterculture trends under one roof. Commune members, computer designers and hackers, psychedelic drug engineers, and environmentalists were but a few of those who could find something of interest in the pages of wEC. The publication's founder, Stewart Brand, set out to create a survival manual for "citizens of planet Earth" and "hippie environmentalist spacemen."39 According to Brand, WEC was a "movable education" for his counterculture friends "who were reconsidering the structure of modern life and building their own communes in the backwoods." Under his direction, Whole Earth and its successors extolled the virtues of steam-powered bicycles, windmills, solar collectors, and wood stoves, alongside new 11 personal computers," satellite telephones, and the latest telecommunications hardware. Brand and his followers were convinced that access to innovative and potentially subversive information and energy technologies was a vital part of changing the cultural perceptions that contributed to environmental decay.40

Brand's creation perfectly captured the post-Vietnam counterculture movement of the mid-1970s with its emphasis on lifestyle and pragmatic activism over utopian idealism and politics. WEC marketed real products, not just ideas, and the focus was always on theoretically feasible, if not always reasonable, solutions to real world problems. For Brand and his colleagues, Stop the S-Gallon Flush, a guide to stopping water waste with simple household technological fixes, was just as revolutionary a book as Das Kapital.41 Brand's practical revolution appealed to the growing numbers of disenchanted New Left radicals who tired of sitting in coffee houses endlessly debating politics but who still wanted to somehow subvert the system. The publishers of WEC inadvertently advanced the radical notion that by staying home from the protest demonstration and modifying your toilet, building a geodesic dome, or a solar collector you could make a more immediate and significant contribution to the effort to create an alternative future than through more conventional expressive politics.

In contrast to the downbeat rhetoric of the late i96os campus-based New Left, Brand and his enthusiastic collaborators remained optimistic about a coming revolution brought about by appropriate technology. Drawing on the optimism of utopian post-scarcity visions of the future, Brand and other alternative technology proponents were representative of a new direction within the counterculture characterized by intellectual curiosity and a love for creative technical innovation. Inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller, Brand expanded the "outlaw area" of counterculture innovation away from music production and psychedelic drug research toward areas such as alternative energy and information technology.42 Brand was hardly a pragmatist; he was a dreamer. WEC began with the working assumption that large numbers of Americans were willing to abandon their current lives and move into self-sustaining, ecologically friendly communities. The first issues of the catalog were aimed at those who were working to use the best of small-scale technology to literally disconnect themselves from the infrastructures of mainstream society and relocate to rural or wilderness areas. At first, WEC promoted radically detached self-sufficiency as the key to a viable revolutionary politics.