About CoEvolution Quarterly

CoEvolution Quarterly

CoEvolution Quarterly was an American journal published in Sausalito, California, from 1974 to fall 1984, when its forty-third issue appeared under the cover line The Last CoEvolution Quarterly. Edited by Stewart Brand and published by the POINT Foundation, it grew out of the Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog and was funded initially from the proceeds of the Whole Earth Catalog. It appeared quarterly, under the International Standard Serial Number 0095-134X, and covered environment, science and politics in the widest sense, mixing ecology, technology, poetry, futurism and social criticism. In 1985 Brand merged it with the Whole Earth Software Review to create the Whole Earth Review, whose first issue, number 44 in January 1985, was explicitly billed as the continuation of both publications. In its decade of life CoEvolution Quarterly became the principal intellectual journal of the Whole Earth network, the first place of publication for Ivan Illich's Vernacular Values essays and an early forum for the Gaia hypothesis, watershed consciousness, voluntary simplicity and personal computing.

Brand said he founded it to see what would happen if an editor were totally unleashed, and that he would print anything that kept him turning its pages. The result was one of the most inventive small magazines of the 1970s.

From the Whole Earth Catalog to a Quarterly Journal

The Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, had given the American counterculture a tool catalogue and a publishing network, and its final edition had generated substantial proceeds. Brand established CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974 using those proceeds, evolving it out of the original Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, which had kept Catalog readers supplied with updates between editions. Where the Catalog had been a compendium of short reviews and access information, the Quarterly gave Brand and his contributors room for full-length articles on specific topics in the natural sciences and invention, in the arts and social sciences and on the contemporary scene generally, aimed primarily at educated laypeople. The publisher was the POINT Foundation, the nonprofit vehicle of the Whole Earth enterprise, and the editorial base was Sausalito, California, the houseboat and workshop community north of San Francisco that served as the network's home.

The Idea of Coevolution

The title expressed the journal's founding concept. Coevolution was a term coined by biologists Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven, a zoologist and a botanist, to account for events neither of their disciplines could explain alone, such as plants carrying costly alkaloids that made sense only in relation to the caterpillars deterred by them, and other insects, such as the monarch butterfly, adapting to those poisons in turn. Brand drew the moral in an early founding statement: the coevolutionary perspective required readers always to look one level larger and one level finer than where they stood, at their soil, yard, watershed, biocommunity, human community, weather, tools and night sky, and to recognise that those systems were studying them in return. A related theory the journal championed asserted that the climate and even the chemical makeup of the atmosphere were highly coevolved with all of Earth's organisms, including human beings. That systems view, ecological, cybernetic and anti-reductionist, organised the magazine's otherwise bewildering range.

Contents and Range

The content of CoEvolution Quarterly often included futurism and risqué topics alongside hard science and practical ecology. It introduced or popularised, among many subjects, the Gaia hypothesis, watershed consciousness, voluntary simplicity, personal computers and discussion of the flat tax, together with the effects of chemicals on the human gene pool. Besides giving space to unknown writers with something to say, Brand presented articles by respected authors and thinkers including Lewis Mumford, Howard T. Odum, Witold Rybczynski, Karl Hess, Orville Schell, Wendell Berry, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Bateson, Amory Lovins, Hazel Henderson, Gary Snyder, Lynn Margulis, Eric Drexler, Gerard K. O'Neill, Peter Calthorpe, Sim Van der Ryn, Paul Hawken, John Todd, Kevin Kelly and Donella Meadows. Brand's own sense of the magazine's promise appeared in issue number 4, which carried a transcription of technology historian Lewis Mumford's talk The Next Transformation of Man, arguing that human beings still had resources enough to alter the direction of modern civilisation rather than remaining passive victims of irreversible technological development.

Contributors, Cartoons and Guest Editors

The contributor community widened across the decade to include Gregory Bateson, Kevin Kelly, James Lovelock, Anne Herbert, Wendell Berry, Howard Rheingold, Art Kleiner, Gary Snyder, Ivan Illich, Peter Warshall, Paul Krassner, J. Baldwin, Paul Ehrlich and William Greider, among many others, while R. Crumb and Dan O'Neill cartooned often. Unusually, the journal opened its doors to guest editors who occasionally took over entire issues: the Black Panthers and City Lights Books each guest-edited, as did Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, and the fall 1978 issue, number 19, was guest-edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, David Meltzer and Gary Snyder, with Anne Herbert as assistant editor and Brand listed as usual editor. Lynn Margulis appeared in its pages often, as professional biologist and big thinker, and a 1977 issue on space exploration carried her characteristically direct contribution to the debate over establishing colonies in space. Such openness to handing the magazine to outsiders was central to its identity as a network publication rather than a conventional edited journal.

Ivan Illich and Vernacular Values

CoEvolution Quarterly was the first place to publish Ivan Illich's essays Vernacular Values, which later became his book Shadow Work. Illich, the Austrian philosopher and critic of industrial institutions, used the journal to develop his argument about the vernacular realm of subsistence, language and everyday competence threatened by professionalised, commodity-based society. That a countercultural quarterly from Sausalito served as the first venue for work by one of the period's most formidable social critics illustrates the magazine's intellectual reach. Illich also wrote on computers for its audience, and his presence linked the Whole Earth network to European debates about technology, schooling and medicine that paralleled its American ecological concerns. The Illich essays remain among the most cited of the journal's contents and a standard example of its habit of publishing major thinkers outside commercial academic and trade channels.

Gaia, Space and Systems Thinking

The journal was a principal early conduit for the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, the proposal that Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and soil form a coupled system tending to maintain conditions favourable to life. Readers encountering Lovelock and Margulis in CoEvolution Quarterly received the idea years before it became a mainstream environmental reference point; Lovelock responded to critics in its spring 1981 pages, and W. Ford Doolittle's sceptical 1981 article asking whether nature was motherly staged, within the magazine itself, one of the earliest scientific arguments over Gaia's mechanisms. Space colonisation received the same open treatment: Gerard K. O'Neill's space colony ideas, discussions involving Admiral Hyman Rickover, Herman Kahn and Governor Jerry Brown, and debates over whether humanity should settle space at all, all appeared in its pages, reflecting Brand's long involvement with space advocacy through the POINT Foundation and the wider Whole Earth community.

Toward Computers and the WELL

As the digital revolution began, CoEvolution Quarterly stood close to its ground zero. Its articles moved from tools and watersheds toward systems and networks, biodiversity, personal computing and virtual communities, years before those subjects had a mass press. Kevin Kelly, a regular contributor, went on to become an early editor of Wired magazine, and Brand and Kelly, out of their Whole Earth Catalog and Quarterly work, co-founded the WELL, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, in 1985, one of the first and most influential virtual communities. Fred Turner, in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, his standard history of the Whole Earth network, traced how the journal's pages connected countercultural ecology to the emerging digital utopianism of Silicon Valley. In 1984 Brand had founded the Whole Earth Software Review as a supplement to the Whole Earth Software Catalog, intended to do for computing what the original Catalog had done for the counterculture; when the software catalogue proved a business failure after two editions, its review supplement became the Quarterly's merger partner.

The Last Issue and the Whole Earth Review

The fall 1984 issue, number 43, was titled The Last CoEvolution Quarterly, with a cover announcing that the next issue would be the Whole Earth Review, in the phrase used on the cover, a livelier snake in a new skin. In January 1985 issue number 44 appeared as Whole Earth Review: Tools and Ideas for the Computer Age, described on its cover as the continuation of CoEvolution Quarterly and the Whole Earth Software Review. Brand explained that the new review addressed three audiences together: readers of the Whole Earth Software Catalog, of the Software Review and of CoEvolution Quarterly. The Review's office stood next door to the WELL, another Brand project, physically embodying the merger of print ecology and online community. CoEvolution Quarterly as a title therefore ended not in failure but in transformation, after forty-three quarterly issues across ten years.

Anthology and Scholarly Standing

The journal's best work was collected in News That Stayed News, 1974-1984: Ten Years of CoEvolution Quarterly, edited by Art Kleiner and Stewart Brand and published by North Point Press in 1986, a 337-page selection of forty-one items that Publishers Weekly praised for a range including Paul Ehrlich on the biology of communities, R. Crumb drawings, Earl Butz debating Wendell Berry, a poem by Gary Snyder, Ivan Illich on computers, Ursula K. Le Guin on menopause and a wide-ranging discussion between Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Library Journal called it a convenient second look at one of the most inventive small magazines of recent times. Academic standing followed: Andrew G. Kirk's Counterculture Green and Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture both treat the Quarterly at length as a bridge between 1960s counterculture, 1970s environmentalism and 1980s cyberculture, and its back issues are preserved at the Internet Archive and indexed through the Whole Earth Index.

Legacy

CoEvolution Quarterly's legacy is that of the Whole Earth Catalog's thinking successor. The Catalog had taught a generation to seek access to tools; the Quarterly, from Sausalito between 1974 and 1984, taught the same readers to think in systems: watersheds, atmospheres, economies and, eventually, computer networks as coevolving wholes. It published Illich before his arguments were books, Lovelock and Margulis while Gaia was still heresy to many biologists, Le Guin, Snyder, Berry and Bateson alongside cartoonists and unknown writers, and it handed whole issues to guest editors from the Black Panthers to City Lights. Its merger into the Whole Earth Review in 1985 and its proximity to the founding of the WELL mark the moment the counterculture's print network became part of digital culture. For a directory of American magazines, it remains the essential journal of the systems counterculture, and the clearest print record of how ecological thought and personal computing first met.