This is a continued comment on Andrew Kirk's book Counterculture Green.
Kirk
does an excellent job of connecting the dots between the Whole Earth,
the Point Foundation and the entire environmental movement that
followed. Two parts where I played a central role are not included.
The breadth of our activities were far too great for any historian to
grasp or examine.
One part that connected my
activities and the Point Foundation was my role in the corporate social
responsibility movement. I played a major role in starting this
movement. The movement was in its inception when I became business
manager of Glide Church which was also a foundation with a
multi-million dollar portfolio. I did several things. I went to New
York in my role as a foundation treasurer to personally call on all the major
foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, New York Foundation, Carnegie etc )
and talked to the treasurers in each foundation. 
I explained how I
was using my foundation portfolio to support social activism both in
the choice of companies to put in the portfolio and in supporting proxy
fights for social issues. I was laughed at...really.
I did support many proxy fights and paid for many with my Point Foundation grants. I was also the first investor in several later socially responsibe mutual funds.
The most
useful outcome of my New York visit was to meet Alice Tepper Marlin
(founder of the moving force in the corporate social responsibility
movement the Council on Economic Priorities).
I later funded Alice's activities directly with a major Point
Foundation grant. With Alice's help I convened and paid for a
conference of all the key American organizers in the corporate social
responsibility movement in the hills of Inverness (Tomales Bay North of San
Francisco) in Fall 1972.
By the late 1970s I
personally no longer supported the ideas of the corporate social
responsibility movement and frequently argued against it in private. I
concluded that no corporation could ever be environmentally pure, could
never meet many social responsibility criteria (certainly not the
multiplicity of criteria, women, health, minorities etc.) and that the
whole movement was an ideological fantasy. I frequently said and wrote
that individual simple living was the most effective form of
environmentalism, in my opinion. 
Only wise regulatory legislation
could direct the flow of funds to benefit the environment and shape
corporate behavior in a democratic industrial society, not shareholders.
A second part of my activities that bore on the Whole Earth and the environmental movement was the creation of the Briarpatch.
Next blog.