Whole Earth Business Model
The 30th Anniversary Edition of Whole Earth
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Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, can be credited with pushing the contamination of the mainstream ideals of the late 20th Century with the counterculture environmentalism of the 1960s (Kirk). Brand wanted to find a way to help his friends who were starting their own civilizations "hither and yon in the sticks" (Kirk 1). He also wanted to combine the growing technological enthusiasm of the counterculture with the growing ecological worldview he got from Stanford. Mostly he wanted to supply information to like-minded people of the counterculture. The catalog appeared irregularly over 30 years, educating people on all things relating to the earth. It quickly became the unofficial handbook of the 1960s counterculture (Black and Lybecker vol. 2, 132).
Looking back, Brand wrote, "If I had to point at one thing that contains what the whole catalog is about, I'd have to say it was Alloy" (Kirk 74). Alloy was the first "programmatic gathering" of "outlaw designers" (Kirk 74). Organized by Steve Baer and Barry Hickman, Alloy lasted three days in March 1969 and joined the doers and world-thinkers and dropouts of specialization--"Hope freaks" (Kirk 74).
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Stewart Brand came up with Whole Earth while he was flying over Nebraska, leaving his father's funeral. He was reading Spaceship Earth by Barbara Ward and wanted to try and think of a way to save it. He modeled the catalog on the L.L. Bean catalog, which he thought was priceless and a "practical service to humanity" (Kirk 1).
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Whole Earth was an attempt at reconciling "nature and capitalism, freedom and safety, technology and environment, rural and urban, adventure and domestication, and the holy and the profane" (Kirk 206). It was at the forefront of greening American business that was "at least two decades ahead of its time (Kirk 206). Brand was pushing for a counterculture capitalism while others were looking toward a socialist revolution. Businesses with similar ideals include Ben and Jerry's, Apple Computers, Smith and Hawkin, Williams-Sanoma, and Patagonia.
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The Whole Earth business model provided inspiration for a new generation of business leaders. Green consumption, along with the desire for environmentally friendly alternatives, motivated national effort to change American business practices without harming the economic structure. It helped to create the "consumptive niche known today as green consumerism, which seeks to resist products contributing to or deriving from waste or abuse of resources, applications of intrusive technologies, or use of non-natural raw materials" (Black and Lybecker vol. 2, 132).
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One early protest against the un-environmentally conscious business is the 1989 "Mctoxics" Campaign. Aimed at McDonald's, Love Canal activist Lois Gibbs planned to rid McDonald's of Styrofoam packaging. Along with her organization Citizens' Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, Gibbs convinced American consumers that it was unacceptable that a corporation like McDonald's would dump 1.3 billion cubic feet of CFC (critical flocculation concentration)-laden styrene foam into landfills each year. This soon went national with consumer boycotts and "send-it-back" efforts against McDonald's. This effort illustrated the degree to which environmentalism had successfully infiltrated consumer culture and had shown a model of alternative ways of a consumer-based political action. Because Americans were forcefully against the way companies like McDonald's were run but not that they existed at all shows that Americans were ready to stand up for their health and environment but not get rid of the economic structure all together. They "still wanted the hamburger, and they were willing to buy it from an enormous corporation, but they preferred it not wrapped in Styrofoam" (Kirk 207).
Because the American people were becoming increasingly more aware of their health and safety as well as the environment's safety, they were taking greater action to stop harm caused to both. Though many of these environmental concerns have made life better, i.e. saving us from toxic waste, they may have started a chain reaction of contamination that has led to the popularization of "going green" but has not gotten rid of the large corporations who are causing more harm to the environment just by existing.