CoEvolution Quarterly

CoEvolution Quarterly (later re-named Whole Earth Review) was one of the publishing ventures of the same visionary biologist (with interests in cultures and in art) who launched the Whole Earth Catalog and an early Internet community, still functioning, called the WELL. Stewart Brand is the name of this editor and writer.

Brand chose the term co-evolution, important in biology, as the title for his journal, which grew from the Whole Earth Catalog project. Brand and his staff and contributors adhered to the idea that co-evolution can and should occur in the spheres of ideas, human social life, and the development and use of technology.

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."

A 1972 edition of the Catalog sold 1.5 million copies, winning a U.S. National Book Award, and its influence was widespread, especially perhaps in promoting appropriate technology. To publish full-length articles on specific topics in natural sciences, invention, social evolution, arts, etc., Stewart Brand founded the CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974, 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, various arcane subjects (e.g., island biogeography), and at times explored futuristic scenarios. 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.

The journal was a lively multi-disciplinary meetingplace that didn't smack at all of academia.

Besides giving space to unknown writers with something valuable to say, Brand presented articles by many highly respected authors and thinkers, including Karl Hess, Christopher Swan, Orville Schell , Ivan Illich, Ursula K. LeGuin, Gregory Bateson, Amory Lovins, Howard Odum, Steve Baer, Gary Snyder, Lynn Margulis, Peter Calthorpe, Sim Van der Ryn, Paul Hawken, John Todd, Kevin Kelly (future editor of Wired magazine), Malcolm Margolin, and Donella Meadows.

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 suggested to 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.

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. This was an inheritence from the Catalog, which had, for instance, run a review of Gerald Heard's work.

In 1985 CoEvolution's name was changed to Whole Earth Review. This was around the time that the journal's pages began give much emphasis to the "personal-computer revolution" and to useful software - reflecting the rapid evolution of Silicon Valley, etc. Later the journal's title was again modified to simply Whole Earth. Publication has ceased (at least for the time being), but this unique journal was for a long period in touch with the concerns of the sustainability movement and also the forefront of technological innovation (being an early vehicle for articles about personal computers, speculation about the possibilities of space colonization, and molecular nanotechnology). Stewart Brand also founded the Point Foundation and is now active in the Global Business Network.