History
In 1974, Stewart Brand founded the CoEvolution Quarterly using proceeds from the Whole Earth Catalog. It evolved out of the original Whole Earth Supplement in 1974. Brand founded it "to see what would happen if an editor were totally unleashed. I would print anything that kept me turning its pages." It introduced a number of topics and works by authors including, "The Gaia hypothesis, watershed consciousness, voluntary simplicity, personal computers, the flat tax, the effects of chemicals on the human gene pool; the ideas and stories of Amory Lovins, John Todd, Christopher Alexander, Donella Meadows, beat poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure (who edited an issue), Paul Ehrlich, Ken Kesey, Gary Snyder, R. Crumb, Mary Catherine Bateson, Gregory Bateson, Admiral Hyman Rickover, James Baldwin, Sallie Tisdale, Ivan Illich, Paul Hawken, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, Anne Herbert."
Issues of the Catalog — concerned with "access to tools" — were put together by Brand, his wife, friends and associates. They were published regularly until 1972, and sporadically until 1998. The Catalog embraced many sorts of things as useful "tools": books, maps, garden and carpentry tools, specialized clothing, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers and personal computers. Brand invited "reviews" of the best of these items from experts in specific fields. The articles also told where the reviewed items could be located or bought. The Catalog's publication coincided with the great wave of experimentalism, convention-breaking, and "do it yourself" attitude associated with the "counterculture."
The offshoot publication, CoEvolution Quarterly, was aimed primarily at the educated layperson. The industrial designer and educator J. Baldwin served as the technology editor. The Catalog's sort of tool and book reviews were still there in abundance, and ecological and technology topics were interspersed with articles treating social and community subjects. Content wandered through many byways of modern life. Stewart Brand, J. Baldwin, and other early editors usually sought to ground the more unusual and speculative feature articles in good science — in natural science, social science, engineering principles, etc. Besides giving space to unknown writers with something valuable to say, Brand's quarterly (under its several successive names) presented articles by many highly respected authors and thinkers, including Lewis Mumford, E.F. Schumacher. The magazine was a lively multi-disciplinary meetingplace that didn't smack at all of academia.
Brand invited reviews of books and "tools" from experts in specific fields, to be approached as though they were writing a letter to a friend. In this, he adopted a technique which editor Byron Dobell had worked out with Tom Wolfe, early in the latter’s career, a method which had started a whole literary genre called “the new journalism” known for its intimacy and impact. Other new-journalism characteristics to be found in many of the magazine's articles included telling the story (or describing the situation) using scenes rather than historical narrative, when possible, and recording everyday details to provide tangible reality.
The Quarterly was one of the journals born in the 1970s that, in effect, bridged the gap of what has been called the two cultures (science and the humanities). This was an inheritance from the Catalog, which had, for instance, run a review of Gerald Heard's work.
In the early 1980s, Brand pulled back from hands-on editorship of CoEvolution Quarterly, turning over editorship to Art Kleiner and Jay Kinney (1983-1984), and then to Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, and others.
Fred Turner notes that in 1985, Brand merged CoEvolution Quarterly with The Whole Earth Software Review (a supplement to The Whole Earth Software Catalog) to create the Whole Earth Review. This is also indicated in the issues themselves. Fall 1984, Issue No. 43 is titled The Last CoEvolution Quarterly.The cover also states, "Next issue is 'Whole Earth Review': livelier snake, new skin." In January 1985, Issue No. 44 was titled Whole Earth Review: Tools and Ideas for the Computer Age. The cover also reads "The continuation of CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Software Review." The journal's pages began to give more emphasis to the personal computer revolution and to useful software. Later the journal's title was again modified, to the simpler Whole Earth.
Read more about this topic: CoEvolution Quarterly
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)