The editorial focus was on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, "do it yourself" (DIY), and holism, and featured the slogan "access to tools".

This is why, while not a regularly published periodical, numerous editions and updates were required to keep price and availability information up to date.

He thought the image might be a powerful symbol, evoking a sense of shared destiny and adaptive strategies from people.

In 1968, Brand, who was then 29, and his wife Lois embarked "on a commune road trip" with the truck, hoping to tour the country doing educational fairs.

The so-called Last Whole Earth Catalog (June 1971) won the first U.S. National Book Award in the Contemporary Affairs category.

Baldwin served as the chief editor of subjects in the areas of technology and design, both in the catalog itself and in other publications which arose from it.

[6] So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains.

The Catalog's publication coincided with a great wave of convention-challenging experimentalism and a do-it-yourself attitude associated with "the counterculture," and tended to appeal not only to the intelligentsia of the movement, but to creative, hands-on, and outdoorsy people of many stripes.

With the Catalog opened flat, the reader might find the large page on the left full of text and intriguing illustrations from a volume of Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China, showing and explaining an astronomical clock tower or a chain-pump windmill, while on the right-hand page are a review of a beginners' guide to modern technology (The Way Things Work) and a review of The Engineers' Illustrated Thesaurus.

On another spread, the verso reviews books on accounting and moonlighting jobs, while the recto bears an article in which people tell the story of a community credit union they founded.

Early editions reflected the considerable influence of Fuller, particularly his teachings about "whole systems," "synergetics," and efficiency or reducing waste.

By the mid-1970s, much of the Buddhist economics viewpoint of E. F. Schumacher, as well as the activist interests of the biological species preservationists, had tempered the overall enthusiasm for Fuller's ideas in the catalog.

The 1980s also saw two editions of the Whole Earth Software Catalog, a compendium for which Doubleday had bid $1.4 million for the trade paperback rights.

Published in 1994, The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog (ISBN 0-06-251059-2) was subtitled Access to Tools and Ideas for the Twenty-First Century.

A slender 30th Anniversary Celebration was published in 1998 as part of Issue 95 of the Whole Earth magazine (ISSN 0749-5056), reprinting the original WEC along with new material.

An important edit to this reprint was a limitation placed by book publishers who "begged" the Catalog not to promote titles they no longer carry.

Steve Jobs compared The Whole Earth Catalog to Internet search engine Google in his June 2005 Stanford University commencement speech.

Then at the very end of this commencement speech Jobs quotes explicitly the farewell message placed on the back cover of the last 1974 edition of the Catalog (#1180 October 1974 titled Whole Earth Epilog[18]) and makes it his own final recommendation: "Stay hungry.

"[23] As an early indicator of the general Zeitgeist, the catalog's first edition preceded the original Earth Day by nearly two years.

The idea of Earth Day occurred to Senator Gaylord Nelson, its instigator, "in the summer of 1969 while on a conservation speaking tour out west," where the Sierra Club was active, and where young minds had been broadened and stimulated by such influences as the catalog.

[citation needed] The Whole Earth website[24] continues the WEC legacy of concepts in popular discourse, medical self-care, community building, bioregionalism, environmental restoration, nanotechnology, and cyberspace.

A year later, in 1971, Kahn again borrowed WEC equipment (an IBM Selectric Composer typesetting machine and a Polaroid MP-5 camera on an easel), and spent a month in the Santa Barbara Mountains producing Domebook 2, which went on to sell 165,000 copies.

With production of DB 2, Kahn and his company Shelter Publications followed Stewart Brand's move to nationwide distribution by Random House.

[35] On April 17, 2018, My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James announced the release of his third solo album Uniform Distortion, which he stated was inspired by The Whole Earth Catalog.

Notable examples include works by Theodore Roszak, Howard Rheingold, Fred Turner, John Markoff, Andrew Kirk, Sam Binkley and Felicity Scott.