What We Can Still Learn from the Whole Earth Catalog
Mr. Kirk is an associate professor and director of the Public History Program at the University of Las Vegas. He is the author of Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (University Press of Kansas, 2007).
Recently one of America’s most insightful environmentalists, Bill McKibben, pointed out that it is “swell” that you bought a hybrid but now it’s time get some boots on the ground in the political arena because small-scale technology alone is not going to be enough to combat the looming catastrophe of global warming. McKibben is right, individual technological choices will not, by themselves, solve our current environmental dilemma. None of us should be too smug as we watch our twisty florescent lights slowly warm up in the winter chill to light our homes, or marvel at the silence of our hybrid as it shuts down at the red light. We will all need to do more in the near future and so will our political leaders.
It is telling, however, that McKibben like most environmentalists today starts the discussion about what shape that expansion of activism will take with acknowledgments to pragmatic enviro-friendly technologies. Americans are, in the words