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THE MELLENNIUM WHOLE EARTH CATALOG
---------------------------------
If you want to maintain independence in the era of large
institutions and think fresh thoughts in the age of mass media, you are
going to need good tools. Since 1968, Whole Earth Catalogs have transformed
the world, one person at a time, by introducing world-changers to
world-changing tools.
Whole Earth is a network of experts who find, evaluate, and share
tools and ideas. Over the past twenty-five years, we have coevolved a
worldwide community of information hunters and gatherers. This community
now focuses upon what we need to know to build our own practical utopias in
the 1990s and beyond.
The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog integrates the best tools from
the past twenty-five years with the best tools for the next twenty-five
years, including old Whole Earth Catalog standards such as environmental
restoration, community-building, whole systems thinking, and medical
self-care as well as new categories of resources such as backyard
biodiversity, electronic mail, eco-tourism, and green investing.
Watersheds are still important. Ancient forests are still
important. Technology policies and cheap telecommunication software are
important too, these days.
Some people who are trying to take the world in their hands are out
in the rainforests. Many world-changers are in cities and suburbs; they
have tools and lore to share, too. Others are in cyberspace. Here are the
field reports, recommendations, and reviews from the ethnobotanists in the
Amazon and the cybernauts of the Internet.
Given the tools we show you here, you (or your family, village,
community) have the power to influence the thoughts and beliefs of others.
The price of computing power has dropped so far since the first Whole Earth
Catalog that we have entered the era of desktop everything: desktop
publishing, desktop audio, desktop video. Book publishing, radio and
television production, and music distribution used to require buildings
full of heavy machinery. Communications capabilities that once were
reserved for government or corporate elites now reside on tens of millions
of citizens' desktops.
Here are the tools for producing knowledge, reporting and
broadcasting the news as you see it, and creating communities according to
your own values and ideals. Here we point to what you need to know to
design, print, and bind books, and how to distribute them. Here's how to
set up a computer bulletin-board system and link it to the world's
interconnected computer networks, and why a librarian, a political
activist, an environmental scientist, might want to do so. Here's how to
equip your own digital audio studio, press your own CDs, distribute your
own media; how to turn a desktop computer into a television editing
console; how to create and publish a zine, build a pirate radio station,
set up a village satellite uplink, organize a street-theater troupe.
New tools are not necessarily high-technology. Part of what you
need to know to protect your privacy today involves knowing how to use your
Social Security number (and how not to use it). Good information about sex
in the AIDS era, good information about substance abuse that neither
demonizes nor glorifies drugs, information about how to organize a
grassroots political movement, information about birth and death,
parenting, preserving and restoring ecosystems, are all appropriate to the
zeitgeist of the third millennium. And none of this information is about
high technology.
We're still talking about the environment, but now that we aren't
alone in that concern, our job is to cut through the glut of environmental
books, magazines, organizations, and to continue to point out the best and
the most effective. We're talking about new ways to revitalize
corporations, ways to install more sustainable home energy systems, ways
for citizens to protect their privacy in the face of invasive technologies.
We're still talking about home schooling, but we're also talking about
transforming schools and lifelong education. We're still committed to
helping people think and act independently. We still believe we're learning
how to steer spaceship Earth. - Howard Rheingold, 1994.
Millenium Whole Earth Catalog <
[email protected]>
27 Gate Five Road * Sausalito, CA 94965 * 415 332 1716 * Fax 415 332 3110
