Whole Earth Review

By Jay Walljasper Utne Magazine
Published on May 1, 2004

Our family tree here at Utne includes a long line of
distinguished dissenting publications going all the way back to
Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense and the abolitionist
newspapers that published Frederick Douglass. Among our more recent
ancestors are I.F. Stone’s Weekly, the underground papers
of the ’60s, Mad magazine, and — because we reprint a lot
Reader’s Digest. But the publication that exerted
perhaps the strongest influence on our birth and early upbringing
was Whole Earth Review, which ceased publication late last
year.

Founder Eric Utne kept a complete run of the magazine within
arm’s reach as he launched Utne Reader, frequently
grabbing a copy for inspiration and repeatedly quoting editor
Stewart Brand. Whole Earth, which emerged from the
best-selling Whole Earth Catalog in 1974 but was titled
CoEvolution Quarterly until 1985, was a bible of sorts for
alternative thinkers of many stripes. It was a place in print where
Luddites and computer zealots, ecological radicals and mossback
conservatives, renewable energy technicians and spiritual searchers
could mingle and exchange ideas. Whole Earth‘s
breathtaking breadth can be seen in the contrast between
Utne and another publication that it spawned more
directly, Wired. (Whole Earth‘s publisher-editor
from 1984 to 1990, Kevin Kelly, helped launch the high-tech mag in
1993.)

Appropriately enough for a magazine born from a catalog, each
issue of Whole Earth was chock full of recommendations for
tools, books, organizations, Web sites, gear, ideas, and anything
else that might be useful or interesting to someone somewhere. Yet
it also published some of the most outlandishly visionary articles
ever to see print. In the midst of the Cold War flare-up of the
early ’80s, Whole Earth offered an earnest manifesto
calling on American and Soviet leaders to merge their peoples into
one nation. It even offered suggestions for what the new nation’s
flag might look like. Whole Earth was also famed for
hurling itself headlong into topics that few other magazines
thought to cover. A case in point is the 1985 special issue on
Islam, published at a time when few Americans gave the religion any
thought except as a bad influence on faraway countries.

The world is a little poorer in fresh ideas, bold initiatives,
crazy schemes, and eminently practical suggestions with the loss of
Whole Earth.

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