The cover was a photo of the whole earth taken from space, against a black background. An image with an implication directly related to the concept of the catalog itself. The purpose and function, as stated in the front of the catalog, kicked everything into overdrive.

Purpose

Function

An item is listed in the CATALOG if it is deemed:

1) Useful as a tool,
2) Relevant to independent education,
3) High quality or low cost,
4) Not already common knowledge,
5) Easily available by mail.

This information is continually revised according to the experience and suggestions of CATALOG users and staff."

The catalog was divided into seven sections defined as follows:

Understanding Whole Systems
Shelter and Land Use
Industry and Craft
Communications
Community
Nomadics
Learning

Most of the items listed in the Catalog were books. The typical format for the review of a book was a one or two short paragraphs of actual review, a few representative paragraphs taken from the book, usually a picture of the book cover, a few illustrations from the book and access information, i.e. publisher, address and price. This was all achieved with an appealing graphics layout and with a remarkable talent for communicating the essence of the reviewed product and where it fit in the scheme of things.

The Whole Earth Catalog was the concept of Stewart Brand, inspired by the insights of Buckminster Fuller, and was edited and published by Stewart and some of his friends. There were numerous issues of the Catalog and at one point The Last Whole Earth Catalog, which as it turned out was not the last of the Catalog. There was a Whole Earth Epilog, The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog and then in 1998 a 30TH Anniversary Celebration Whole Earth Catalog which included a reprint of the original Catalog. Along the way there have been two quarterly publications that carried on the same mission as the Catalog. First there was The CoEvolution Quarterly and more recently The Whole Earth Magazine (A free issue is available at their Web site.). Also along the way there have been numerous special Catalog projects and publications related in one way or another to the main focus of the Catalog.

R. Buckminster Fuller may be the world's best known futurist. The Buckminster Fuller Institute is probably the best source of information about 'Bucky' and his legacy. Their Web site is fantastic and it just keeps getting better. They describe their vision as follows:

In his 1969 Book Utopia or Oblivion, Bucky made the case that there is enough for everybody, that the alternatives today are abundance for all or survival for none. Repeatedly he made the case that humanity has the option for success. Anticipatory design science is the means by which we can obtain success for all humanity.

Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth may be the best introduction to Bucky's thought, Synergetics may be his most complex book. Everything I Know is a 42 hour Bucky video online with accompaning text.

Bucky often said that his designs were modeled on the way that nature builds things. At about the time of Bucky's death a new form of carbon was discovered that so resembled his geodesic structures that it was named buckminsterfullerene. These molecules (sometimes called buckyballs) have many unique characteristics and represent one of the most active areas of materials research.

Nanotechnology is molecular manufacturing or, more simply, building things one atom or molecule at a time. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter (3 - 4 atoms wide). Though nanotechnolgy is a technology of the future, nanotech products have already entered the market. In late 1994 or early 1995 I did a Web search for "nanotechnolgy" and found a total of three links, today I did a similar search, with Google, and there were "about 431,000" links. This is of course as much a reflection of the growth of the Internet as of the growth of nanotechnology.

The first book I read on the subject of nanotechnology was Unbounding the Future by K. Eric Drexler and Chris Peterson. This book convinced me that nanotechnology would play a huge part in our future. Drexler's earlier work, Engines of Creation is a classic in the field. His Nanosystems: molecular machinery, manufacturing, and computation is a more technical work on the technology.

Sometimes science fiction gives us an imaginitive view of what the future might be like. There is good representation of nanotechnolgy in science fiction. Sometimes reading about the future of nanotechnology reads like science fiction. For me there is a fine line between cutting edge science and science fiction.

In the foreword to Unbounding the Future Stewart Brand writes:

An authors" note:

A few scenarios from various chapters:

The Foresight Institute may be the best nanotechnology site on the Web. It features information for the general reader and the technical reader. Their Nanodot News and Discussion of Coming Technologies is a good place to get the latest nanotech news.

Nanotube Animation

NASA - The Right Stuff for Super Spaceships

"Imagine, for example, a substance with 100 times the strength of steel, yet only 1/6 the weight; materials that instantly heal themselves when punctured; surfaces that can "feel" the forces pressing on them; wires and electronics as tiny as molecules; structural materials that also generate and store electricity; and liquids that can instantly switch to solid and back again at will. All of these materials exist today ... and more are on the way."

The Ultimate Tool?

Perhaps the most speculated-about, and the most important "enablers" of a world of nanotechnology manufacturing, is the "nano-assembler" -- a tiny nanobot whose purpose is to use the atomic detritus around it to build the actual nano-machines that will eventually do our bidding. Some envision a nano-project as beginning with a single nano-assembler that is "programmed" with what it's supposed to build. It sizes up the problem and scavenges atomic raw material in its vicinity to build another nano-assembler. The second nano-assembler joins in this task, as does every subsequently-built nano-assembler, dramatically increasing the pace until an optimally-sized fleet of nano-assemblers is ready. At that time they quit replicating themselves and begin the actual construction project.

This idea of, nano-assemblers, may seem like good science fiction. But reader Kenneth LaCross brings our attention to an interesting timeline in a July 15 "Nanotechnology Now" article titled "Ten-Year Assembler Timeline and Weather Forecast" . Chris Phoenix makes the case that nano-assemblers (or as he calls them, an "industrial revolution in a box") aren't an "if" question, but only a "when" question determined by research dollars and (hence) by political will, which might well come to fruition in ten to fifteen years!

In 1969 John McHale wrote The Future of the Future: Where the New Technology Is Taking Us and What We Can Do About It. Though this book is now over thirty years old it is remarkable how relevant McHale's observations are for today. Clearly there is much of today's world that he did not anticipate, however, he did anticipate many of the major trends, many of which were in their early stages at that time.

What I like about this book is that it gives us an approach to thinking about the future. What follows is a number samples from the text:

"Section I The Sense of the Future

The future is an integral aspect of the human condition. Man survives, uniquely, by his capacity to act in the present on the basis of past experience considered in terms of future consequences. By assuming a future, man makes his present endurable and his past meaningful. Pasts, presents, and their alternative futures interweave in the anticipation and prediction of his future actions.

Culturally, however, the idea of the future, in the sense that we now employ it, is relatively new in human experience. Most previous societies operated with quite different models-of the past present, and future of man, of society, and of the universe.

Thinking about the future remains, therefore, an idealistic and value-bound enterprise. It assumes a unique character, however, in a period in which the material means become available for the first time, on a scale that measures up to the idealism. The conscious degree of material control which man may now exercise in determining his individual future, and collectively that of human society, is quite unprecedented in all historical experience.

The material control of future possibilities comes largely through the development of science and technology which have been traditionally value-free agencies. But the present range and scale of our actions and their consequences require increasing value commitments to specifically preferred and possible futures in human terms.

The more knowledge and power, and the larger the scale of material actions, the greater the number of alternative paths and the longer the range of possible consequences.

It is the modern hubris. . . . What stands in our favor is that knowledge is cumulative. And, within the open community of science, it is self-corrective.

The future of the future is therefore what we determine it to be, both individually and collectively. It is directly related to how we conceive of its possibilities, potentials, and implications. Our mental blueprints are its basic action programs-whether immediate or not depends on the individual and his society.

We have the means to provide almost any, and as many, kinds of futures as man may desire, but our collective futures tend to be oriented toward those models and scenarios that receive public attention and support. Much professional futures research is already overbalanced toward the technological, the economic, and the politico-military. Moreover, its alternatives are tied to the traditional premises and priorities that reside in our respective national ideologies and local value systems.

While science and technology must be allocated a prime role in the changing of past and present, the more crucial aspects of the future are now more clearly non-technological, in the traditional sense. The "hardware" to solve many of our physical problems is available for use. The "software" or social thinking, through which we may apply our developed capacities in humanely desirable terms, is less than adequate.

At the daily level of experience we may note this in increased awareness in more popular acceptance of a "one world" view. Even where this lacks positive action and is most often qualified in "their world" and "our world" terms, it marks a shift toward recognition of the planetary interdependence of the human community and the sustaining system of natural forces within which it exists. Such awareness is due, in no small measure, to the swift and myriad diffusion of images and message in the global communications network. The significance of local events of any consequence for the larger community is rapidly felt and reacted to around the world.

Our major problems evidenced in present disparities between the developed and lesser developed regions of the world (food, shelter, health, and education) may be more clearly and operationally defined in terms of ecological imbalance. The urgency of their solution therby broadens, from its present evaluative level of appeals to the humanitarian concern of the more fortunate minority, to the common self-preservation of all.

We need to face up to a world that has been made into one interdependent community, less by political or ideological ideas than by scientific and technological facts.

Ours is possibly one of the most critical periods in human experience. Poised in the transition between one kind of world and another, we are literally on the hinge of a great transformation in the whole human condition.

Important, but comparatively neglected, areas of futures thinking are: (1) the psychosymbolic aspects of the future-the ways in which viable images of future life styles and social forms are provisioned in the arts and communications media; (2) the study of future scientific and social implications as a fertile common ground for the various academic disciplines; (3) the communication of the sense of the future, and its participative forming and controlling, to the wider public.

Section II The Future of the Past

Individual and social events occur in time. What we have discussed as the sense of the future is intimately liked with the sense of time in its individual subjective dimensions, in the social time conventions and periodicities of specific and cultures, and with what may be loosely termed the historical time sense.

In all these dimensions, past, present, and future have no actual fixed time locus. The future is compounded of past and present. The past is constantly re-created in the future. Past, present, and future commingle in any conscious instant.

For various social purposes (scientific, historical, or religious) we assume various modes in which events are connected in time. In our present Western mode, time is unilinear in that the past comes before the present and the future follows upon the present. So pervasive is this mode that it is difficult for us to imagine a practical way of relating events other than in such a sequence. "Time's arrow," in Eddington's phrase, pints toward the future and history follows the course of the arrow.

But memory continually reshapes our biographic past in the same manner that our selective perception and means of communication screen the present and future.

Expectation, intention, anticipation, premonition, and presentiment-all these have a forward reference in time.

We tend to rearrange and reselect events and impressions of the past, and this realignment to a new point of view in the present alters our past and future. Any deep emotional experience, such as religious conversion, causes us to see our past selves in a new light and carries with it an implied change in the present and future; thus psychoanalysis, as secular redemption, significantly re-creates the "persona' by reordering and reinterpreting its past experience.

Entering into both individual and social time is the element of myth. Mircea Eliade suggests: "The myth relates a sacred history that is a primordial event that took place at the beginning of time." It is before and out of time in the ordinary sense.

Any serious study of the future implies an equally rigorous hindsight operation on the past. Rather than approach this in terms of traditional historical moes, we need to refview the past as a vast collection of incompletely recorded social and cultural experiments conducted under many different degrees of local controls and environmental determinants. The records of that past are our experimental data for charting the future.

Given a more pragmatic and secular approach to our sacred pasts, we may find that the laws of history are inexorable only when and where we deem them to be so. As laws, they belong more in the realm of self-fulfilling prophecies; their inferences return circularly upon the premises from which they were inferred.

One might even say that this reevaluation of the past is of greater priority than the elaboration of more futures. This is particularly true in relation to evidence in the sociopolitical theories, which constitute the latent assumptions and take-off points for all social futures. From such theories, we derive our images of man, his institutions, and the possible forms of his societies. Yet, patently, many of these theoretical assumptions were formulated in the preindustrial phase or under the transitional stress to the industrial period.

The obstacle and limitations to the fullest use of our resources and knowledge are now nonmaterial. They reside mainly in the obsolete economic, fiscal, and political structures that are the quasi-sacred legacies of our recent past.

The central issue within "the future of the past" is the need to reexamine the kinds of a priori assumptions and conceptual models with which we operate in the present, and upon which we are endeavoring to preview the future.

To invent the future, we need, in certain senses, to reinventory the past. … to disentangle ourselves and our societies from those linearly deterministic theories of history that have come, almost, to replace history itself.

Section III The Future of the Present

The symbolic transition into the realities of the twentieth century world occurred at the end of World War Two, with the use of the atomic bomb in 1945. The transition was to a world that has been changed not only physically by the war itself, but more profoundly and psychically by Auschwitz and a Hiroshima. In this world, the ideas and ideals of the recent past-of reason, progress, and the future perfectibility of man and his society-seem oddly tenuous, they have lost their ebullience and inevitably.

Donne's poetic metaphor, "No man is an island entire of itself, " is now writ large on the surface of the planet.

Questions regarding the human condition need no longer be phrased in terms of what we can do, but in terms of what we choose to do. The choices carry more alternatives and more positive and negative implications than ever before.

To remind ourselves that the future of the resent is in the past is an oblique way of emphasizing the need for a more comprehensive understanding of past change and past-change agencies as a guidance to present and future change.

Entropy is also used, in terms of information, as a measure of uncertainty or disorder of knowledge. But to the extent that information increases order and predictability in the system and reverses the tendency toward running down it is antientropic. The bioevolutionary direction is toward increased complexity of order; information increases and accumulates.

The balance between man's entopic (disordering) propensities and his antientroic (ordering) propensities is, this sense, a central point of our present discussions. We can only surmise, in terms of our brief historical record, that this balance is already tipped, through evolutionary development, toward the antientropic processes as more favorable to the survival of the species.

The personality system of the individual may be viewed as motivated toward action by his needs and desires, in terms of various goals, commitments, and socialized patterns of behavior. Different needs, desires, situations and purposes elicit different roles or learned patters of symbolic responses. The individual person, however, is always more than the sum of his various roles and responses!

We may note here, in conclusion, that the psychosocial extension of man throughout the biosphere has been characterized as adding a "noosphere" layer. This idea of organized human thought now covering the globe as a functional part of the overall ecological system is, to an extent, physically demonstrable in our present global communications networks, and in the enormously accelerated growth of human knowledge with its parallel increase in the numbers of messages, meetings, journals, etc., ceaselessly circulating around the earth.

It is not the origins of technology that concerns us here, but rather the fact that the system of artifacts which this now connotes, has developed in an organic evolutionary manner.

We do not yet fully understand or accept the organic evolutionary quality of technological growth. The idea is, in itself, somewhat alien to our comprehension.

To speak of the organic nature of technology as we have done is not simply to pose some technological determinism as accounting for all human development and change. One could as easily suggest poetry as the determinant, and with as much validity. Rather, the purpose is to reemphasize the integral nature of human activities, whether labeled technological, religious, economic, cultural, or whatever.

Given the nature of the organism and its enclosing environ, and some notion of the history of its development within that environ, we may observe certain periodicities and orders of growth. So far, our understanding of the larger patterns of the human ecological transformations has been limited by our tendency to compartmentalize our knowledge in the process. The periodicities and orders on one discipline are usually separated from and unrelated to those of another. The great dangers in our phase of development may well lie in extremes of academic specialization, which turn men into technically expert instruments, rather than in making the technologies themselves the instruments of man.

The most recently and spectacular area of technological evolution has been that of cybernetics, a word significantly and symbolically derived from the Greek for "steersman." It is noteworthy that this development, as with many other so-called breakthroughs, originated in the fusion and generalization of a number of separate specialties rather than in one are of academic discipline.

Although defined as the mechanization of sensory thought and other psychphysical processes, cybernetics is actually an extension of the control principles of the human nervous system into electromechanical devices.

Section IV The Future of the Future

In this section McHale writes mostly about things to come in the future, space exploration, telemetry, ocean technology, undersea living, utilization of the earth's recourses, various energy sources, the development of new materials, and the future of ecology. Much of what he discusses has already come to pass. I have chosen a more recent vision of the future for this course.

Section V Prophets of the Future

In this section McHale devotes about twenty pages to the futurists, science fiction writers and visionaries who have over the years contributed to our sense of the future.

Section VI Toward a Planetary Society

To address ourselves to the question of a planetary society is no wishful utopian fantasy but a sober recognition of everyday facts. Though we are presently split up into an agglomeration of separate principalities, their larger claims to autonomy and sovereignty are now more apparent than real.

This kind of statement may seem quite unrealistic when we are still enmeshed in a series of interminable wars and international tensions. But these conflicts, however bloody and reprehensible, have an air of stalemate and confusion, which they did not have before. They may be the tail-end convulsions of an old and obsolete system, which seem to be at their fiercest as they become increasingly irrelevant and inimical to the main directions of the world community. While these directions will probably never eradicate the possibility of armed conflict, they already attempt to limit its scale and wider repercussions.

As for the larger communication and understanding implied in a shared planetary culture, it is more than obvious today that we must understand and cooperate on a truly global scale, or we perish."

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