I just finished Andrew Kirk's Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. The book is a few months old but it will be an authoritative resource for the next fifty years.
Kirk does a masterful job, the first one, to examine and understand one of the roles that the Whole Earth Catalog (and the unnamed movement I was a key part of) played in modern America. Kirk focuses on one role, the shaping of the modern American environmental movement. He gives due credit to the two great figures in this movement, Stewart Brand and Huey Johnson.
Kirk's most viable thesis is
that the Whole Earth Catalog and its various progeny, changed the
environmental movement from a wilderness saving, Luddite exercise in
Sierra Club conservation to a vital, technology accepting, forward
looking, consumer driven personal living movement. The hippies via
Stewart's extraordinary vision in the Whole Earth Catalog, radically
shaped and defined the contemporary environmental movement.
Since I played a central role in the whole history I want to make a few additions, a correction and some comments.
Start
with the inception of the Portola Institute (Dick Raymond founded it;
it was in Menlo Park and I was a board member from its inception) was
founded to profoundly change education (and failed like everything else
in education reform). Kirk tells about me bringing together, for lunches at Glide Church, many diverse people who
later played important roles in the hippy movement and the Whole Earth
movement.
The sequence is wrong. I became the business manager of Glide Church in 1971 and established the Point Foundation offices on the roof half a year later. The lunches were part of my life long pattern of using my station and status to build an organization. From 1966 to 1971 I was head of a department in marketing at the Bank of California (later becoming the youngest vice-president of a major American bank). I had an expense account which I used for long Friday lunches at the Yamato Restaurant on California at Grant. I invited 8-10 guests every Friday for three years at the Bank's expense. Dick Raymond and others had the power of invitations. These lunches are what helped form the cohort of people who later were the Whole Earth movement.
Kirk
mentions that before Stewart got the Whole Earth started he was
impressed with an education fair put on at S.F. State College for
teachers showing all the current aids and tools in education (it was
called Innovation in Education). A true story. Missing is the fact
that I put on the fair. As president (from 1966 to 1967) of the Service Committee in Public Education
a blue ribbon citizen's group to improve the S.F. schools, I looked
around for a way to communicate directly with teachers and particularly
the teachers at the college-prep-school, Lowell High, who had a $200
budget each. My solution was to organize the education fair that
Stewart saw and was duly impressed with. My fair was duplicated by
others all over the U.S.