Catalog To Shape Your Environment Whole Earth Catalog’s 6th Edition Is Packed With Information
“The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas for the Twenty-First Century,” (Harper and Point Foundation, 384 pages, $30).
What happened to the counterculture? Twenty-five years after Woodstock, where are the proponents of alternative energies, communal hot tubs and creative anachronism? Did all the yippies become yuppies?
Apparently not. There seems to be a healthy colony of counterculturalists centered in Sausalito, Calif., and they have just published the sixth major edition of The Whole Earth Catalog.
“The Millenium Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas for the 21st Century” is, like its predecessors, jammed with information for those who hear a different drummer or drummers. Founding editor Steward Brand has transferred the editorial reins to Howard Rheingold, and Rheingold has sensibly followed a format that has worked for 25 years, even though the contents are markedly new.
The catalog’s 373 pages of entries are classified into the familiar categories: Whole Systems, Nomadics, Learning and so on. As in previous editions, the catalog is crammed with essays, equipment reviews and book excerpts, thousands of nuggets of information.
Throughout its pages, there are arresting images: a map showing the interstate routes of garbage in America (page 113); how to remove a fishhook from your skin (page 180); a somewhat graphic graphic on the estimated risks of HIV transmission associated with different sexual activities (page 195).
By turns startling, provocative and amusing, “The Millenium Whole Earth Catalog” maintains the heady juxtaposition of image and text of earlier editions.
But for all the comforts of continuity, it is equally fascinating as a record of change, how we have changed. And those changes boil down to this: Now we have kids and computers.
Perhaps there is no single title that more clearly mirrors these changes than Victor Strasberger’s “Getting Your Kids to Say ‘No’ in the ‘90s When You Said ‘Yes’ in the ‘60s” (Fireside Books). The entire section on family is filled with useful references to books and journals spanning topics from sex to spirituality, from safeguarding your house to stretching your children’s minds.
The catalog remains committed to the bracing philosophy outlined by founder Steward Brand in 1968 regarding “the power of individuals to conduct their own education, find their own inspirations, shape their own environments, and share the adventure with whoever is interested.”
Knowledge, personal power and freedom - “The Millenium Whole Earth Catalog” articulates a classic statement of American individualism.