Reading List: Counterculture Green by Andrew Kirk

The book is Andrew Kirk's Counterculture Green - The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. Stewart Brand is the central personality in this exploration of politics and culture of the late 60s and forward. Brand has just published his latest book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

I love it when a book makes connections between patches of understanding or familiarity that I already have. It's like getting to know and enjoy one neighborhood, and the same with another neighborhood, and then finding out that they are just a couple of blocks from each other.

For example: Further and Bucky Fuller, two favorite subjects. How favored? Well, I named my last electric three-wheeler microfurthur after Kesey's bus. It, too, is hand-painted (by my daughter and my wife), and I hope that it has even a little bit of the spirit of engagement, surprise and optimism as the original. And The Grateful Dead traveled on Further. And Neal Cassady was often the driver... "there was Cowboy Neal at the wheel/on the bus to never-never-land." And so forth. The bus is a literal and figurative vehicle for enlightening experience. (Note that I am not making an endorsement for drug use. Indeed, Kirk highlights, in many places in the book, the difference between people like Brand, for whom psychoactive substances were an occasionally-employed means to an end, and many other hangers-on to the counter-culture ride, for whom the drugs, and more general hedonism, were ends in themselves.)

And then, Fuller. Fuller! I went to Reno in the 90s expressly and only to visit the last surviving Dymaxion car at the National Auto Museum. I spent a few hours with the guy who prepped it for display; we went over it inch by inch. (It's being restored in the UK at the time of this writing. More to look forward to!) I built a 20' frequency-three geodesic with my students. I built a rear-wheel steering, front-wheel-drive vehicle of my own. I have a sheet of Fuller stamps. I don't know how many books, articles... you get the picture.

Anyway, I am fond of saying, alternately, "It always comes back to Fuller!" or "It always comes back to Furthur!" ("Furthur," with a second "u," is the name the bus got in a smirking re-christening to disguise its identity on a trip to Mexico.)

And here come Fuller and Further: In the early pages of the book, there's a grainy black-and-white photo of Stewart Brand, in a Knievel-y, Elvis-y white jump suit, hanging off the side of Further in San Francisco with Kesey and a few other influential characters of the epoch, around the time that Brand was devoting the first section of the Whole Earth Catalog to Fuller because, for Brand, Fuller had his head fully around the systems approach that was the key to... it all. In the broadest sense. Brand writes, at the start of the "Understanding Whole Systems" section, simply: "The insights of Fuller initiated this catalog."

I was not yet politically aware in the 60s and early 70s, and my understanding of the era was a sparse, lumpy aggregate of facts, but also of feelings, having been a kid back then. This book filled in many of the gaps in the matrix. For example, looking backward from the current polarization in national politics: My gosh, Grateful Dead lyricist and EFF founder John Perry Barlow palling around with Dick Cheney on his ranch! The confluences, the contradictions, and the divergence of hippies and Hawks, the Libertarian ethos of the time, the western identity, and Reagan in a cowboy hat... they make so much more sense! (And, alas, wouldn't it be great to reunite at least some of the electorate by not only appealing to American self-reliance and independence, but also legislating according to trust in American self-reliance and independence!)

I remember seeing the Whole Earth Catalog around at parents' friends' houses... it was concise shorthand for declaring your Yankee-ness and hipness all at once. Kirk summarizes the resourcefulness, thrift, stoicism and pragmatism that pervade its pages as characteristic of the settlers of the American West. Ok. But, to be sure, it is also the very core of the Yankee ethic.

I am fond of thinking that these characteristics describe me, and that's part of another reason I liked this book. Just as I felt when I got to know Buckminster Fuller, I felt connected to not a just a person or a couple of people, but to a community and to a history of like-minded people, however geographically sparse, however diluted in the present. (Living in a tidy suburb as I do, I'm not near such people. For instance, I am unusual, if not unique, in this town, keeping a treasure trove of reusable manufactured goods at hand. I hide it all behind a squared and leveled fence.)

Next I'm off to learn a little more about J. Baldwin who is a Whole Earth Catalog contributor, editor, Soft-Tech proponent, "baling-wire hippie," and friend of Brand's, and who is a Fuller disciple and collaborator, prominently featured in the Fuller documentary, "Thinking Out Loud." I bet he rode on The Bus. (It always comes back to Fuller and Further.)

For me, this book hits just right thematically and seasonally: Hints of spring and a good book are influencing a nice trajectory right about now. I will try to have my electric amphibian in the water this summer, complete with its pontoons-with-empty-soda-bottles-cast-within (an homage, and practical thank-you, to the dome of the Pantheon - there are empty amphorae embedded in there! It, also, always comes back to Rome... more on that another time). Built with recycled parts, old and reliable technology, in my basement, with my own tools... all I have to write is a worthy how-to pamphlet and maybe I will be featured in the the next edition of the Catalog.