Whole Earth Catalog was first published in 1968 by Stewart Brand as a countercultural tool for living otherwise. Subtitled “access to tools,” it was not a magazine in the traditional sense but a sprawling index of resources for self-sufficiency, ecological awareness, and experimental design. Its pages carried everything from guides on organic gardening and geodesic domes to book reviews on cybernetics, anarchism, and alternative education.
What made Whole Earth Catalog remarkable was its format as much as its content. It was collage-like, gathering disparate sources into one shared space where readers could encounter new tools and ideas side by side. With its bold typography and hand-drawn annotations, it mapped a worldview: that knowledge, when circulated widely, could equip people to re-imagine how they lived, built, and related to the planet and each other.
As both an archive and an invitation, Whole Earth Catalog seeded a generation of ecological design, communal living, and technological imagination that continues to echo in movements today.
Images from Whole Earth Index.
