A ‘Whole Earth Catalog’ for Techies

Its pages were printed on recycled newspaper. Its topical approach arose from the alternative lifestyles of the late 1960s. Readers learned about living in communes, the Dairy Goat Journal and hydroponic farming.

Now, eight years after its last update, “The Whole Earth Catalog” is leaving its hippie image behind in a remake for the ‘90s and beyond. Instead of studying macrobiotic rice and living in tepees, readers of “The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog,” to be published in October by HarperCollins San Francisco, will tune into contemporary trips.

The compendium will still contain handy information on raising livestock, but the emphasis will be on the high-tech tools of Generation X and the concerns of late-century dwellers--biodiversity, surfing the Internet and relating via e-mail.

“The frontier has shifted,” says Contributing Editor Patrizia DiLucchio, whose specialties are the sections on sex, birth and death. “It used to be back to the earth and raising your food and goats. But the lands have been mostly filled. Now, the new frontier is the intellectual frontier.”

The 400-page soft-cover book will cost $30 and have a first printing of 3 million copies--about as many as all the previous editions sold over more than two decades.

“It’s amazing it’s still around after all these years,” says Stewart Brand, 55, who was a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters 26 years ago when he figured out the world needed “The Whole Earth Catalog.” He’s since called the idea a mistake that worked; he won a National Book Award for the second edition in 1971.

Brand works out of an old land-bound fishing boat across the courtyard from the catalogue editors’ headquarters. He is editor emeritus of the new edition and is putting the finishing touches on an architectural book, “How Buildings Learn.”

The original “was really a counter-counterculture catalogue,” Brand says. “By late 1968, a lot of people were leaving college to start their own way, create communes. There was a lot of romantic ideology that didn’t work.

“It was meant to bring back the kind of material practicality and respect for new ideas,” Brand says. “The catalogue was patterned on L.L. Bean’s catalogue of outdoor goods and the Diodorus encyclopedia of telling all of civilization’s secrets.”

The book became part of an emerging culture. “It was perfect and whole,” recalls Jim Fisher, professor of magazine journalism at the University of Missouri, Columbia. “We loved it and we lived with it.

“You didn’t buy anything out of it,” he says. “You just read it. You learned how to grow giant vegetables. If you lived in a serious commune, you had to pay attention to ‘The Whole Earth Catalog.’ ”

Since the first edition in 1968, there have been periodic updates: “The Last Whole Earth Catalog” in 1971, an updated “The Last Whole Earth Catalog” in 1975, “The Next Whole Earth Catalog” in 1980 and “The Essential Whole Earth Catalog” in 1986. The contents changed, but each cover was adorned with a picture of Earth.

“When we first started out, we told people how to grow wheat in a flower pot,” James Baldwin recalls. The 60-year-old contributing editor is an expert in alternative energy and calls himself the “seniorist” editor. “We started out a pretty funky operation. Now, we’re tightening our ship. We’re tapping into new sources of information.”

The 35 contributing editors are as eclectic as the new catalogue’s topics, which range from organizing communities during disasters to drug education and, of course, livestock.

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Baldwin has experience as a land steward for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. “And I still hold a white-water guide’s license,” he says. DiLucchio is a public health nurse. The catalogue’s librarian is a scuba diver and naturalist. The new executive director, John Sumser, once worked as a manager in the defense contracting division for Westinghouse Electric Co.

Contrasting the new edition with previous ones, Baldwin says, “The focus is very different, not in spirit, but in detail.”

Brand has a longtime interest in computers, which is not incongruous with his early “Whole Earth” concerns. “Personal computers were a product of the counterculture in the ‘60s. They didn’t do much dope because they got high on computers. But they were counterculture in every way. Steve Jobs is a flat-out hippie,” says Brand of the Apple Computer Inc. co-founder who helped launch the personal-computer revolution.

The “Taming Technology” section of the catalogue will include six pages on Internet, as well as information on desktop radio broadcasting and electronic democracy.

“It’s not technology for its own sake, but (for) finding the best tools,” says Managing Editor Michael Stone. “Six years ago, we were introducing people to high technology. Now, we want them to know how to protect themselves from it. How do you keep it from controlling you?”

As the world becomes more complex, Whole Earthers promise to continue to work hard to provide everyone the means to create their own utopias. “This is a mission,” Baldwin says.