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The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog” | The New Yorker

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The baby-boomer communards leave behind a frightening, if unintentional, inheritance—a ravaged environment, eviscerated institutions, and an eroding democracy.

Save this story Save this story In the fall of 1968, the Portola Institute, an education nonprofit in Menlo Park, California, published the first edition of the “Whole Earth Catalog”: a compendium of product listings, how-to diagrams, and educational ephemera intended for communards and other participants in the back-to-the-land movement. The catalogue’s founder, Stewart Brand––a photographer, writer, former army lieutenant, impresario, and consummate networker––had spent part of the summer driving a pickup truck to intentional communities in Colorado and New Mexico and selling camping equipme

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