Whole Earth Skills: Practical Tools for Living Well

In the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalog’s mission to provide “access to tools”

The Philosophy: Competence as Liberation

The Whole Earth Catalog understood something profound: true freedom comes not from consuming more, but from becoming more capable. When you can build, repair, grow, heal, and create, you’re less dependent on systems you can’t control or understand. This isn’t about retreating from the modern world—it’s about engaging with it more skillfully and on your own terms.

The catalog’s genius was recognizing that the dividing line between “expert” and “amateur” was often just access to information and tools. Give people good instructions, honest reviews, and where to find what they need, and remarkable things become possible.

Making Things: The Craft Renaissance

Starting Simple
The path to making begins with repair. Before building something new, learn to fix what’s broken. A bicycle is an excellent teacher—mechanical enough to be interesting, simple enough to understand completely. Every repair teaches you about materials, tools, and problem-solving.

Essential Tools for Makers

A good multitool and a real hammer
Set of screwdrivers (both types, multiple sizes)
Adjustable wrench and basic socket set
Hand saw, utility knife, tape measure
Cordless drill (18V minimum)
Soldering iron and basic electronics supplies

The craftsperson’s secret isn’t having every tool, but understanding how tools work so you can adapt what you have. A chisel becomes a screwdriver in a pinch. A file can reshape metal. Creativity emerges from constraints.

Modern Making
Today’s maker movement extends the Whole Earth ethos into digital fabrication. A 3D printer is essentially a photocopier for objects. CNC routers democratize precision woodworking. Open-source hardware like Arduino and Raspberry Pi put custom electronics within anyone’s reach.

The key is starting with projects just beyond your current ability. Build a wooden box with hand tools. Solder an LED circuit. 3D print a replacement part for something broken. Each success builds competence and confidence.

Living Off-Grid: Energy, Water, and Resilience

Energy Independence
You don’t need to live in a remote cabin to benefit from understanding independent energy systems. Start by observing your energy use: what actually requires electricity? What could be passive (like solar water heating)? What could be reduced or eliminated?

A small solar setup teaches you more than any textbook:

100-watt solar panel
Charge controller
Deep cycle battery
Simple inverter

This modest system can power LED lights, charge devices, run a small refrigerator. More importantly, it teaches you about energy density, storage, conversion losses, and the relationship between latitude, season, and solar gain.

Water Wisdom
Water is heavy (8.3 pounds per gallon), so traditional gravity-fed systems remain elegant solutions. A rainwater catchment system is straightforward: roof area times rainfall equals available water. A 1,000 square foot roof in a place with 30 inches of annual rainfall can theoretically harvest 18,750 gallons.

The practical skills:

Installing gutters and downspouts
Calculating first-flush volumes
Understanding filtration stages
Managing storage (tanks, cisterns, ponds)
Basic plumbing and irrigation

Waste Streams as Resources
Composting toilets, greywater systems, and waste heat recovery transform problems into assets. These aren’t fringe technologies—they’re proven systems that work anywhere from apartments to homesteads. The skill is in understanding flows: what goes in, what comes out, and how to cycle it productively.

Building Business: Tools for Economic Autonomy

The Solo-Preneur Toolkit
The Whole Earth Catalog reviewed tools for living; today we need tools for earning. The barrier to starting a business has never been lower:

Website builder (Squarespace, WordPress, Webflow)
Payment processing (Stripe, PayPal, Square)
Accounting software (Wave, QuickBooks)
Project management (Notion, Trello, Asana)
Communication (Zoom, Slack, email campaigns)

But tools without strategy are just expensive hobbies. The critical skill is identifying what people actually need and will pay for. Start by solving your own problems—there are likely others with the same needs.

Crafting a Sustainable Practice
Whether you’re a consultant, maker, artist, or service provider, sustainable business comes from understanding three numbers:

What it costs you to live monthly (your overhead)
What it costs you to produce what you sell (your direct costs)
What people will pay (your market rate)

The gap between these numbers is your viability. Treat business as an experiment: small tests, quick feedback, adjust and repeat.

The Digital Commons
Open source tools for business are everywhere: Linux for servers, LibreOffice for documents, GIMP for graphics, Audacity for audio. Learning these tools saves money while teaching you how software actually works—knowledge that makes you more capable regardless of which tools you eventually choose.

Healing and Medicine: Body Knowledge

Preventive Living
The best medicine is staying healthy. This isn’t mystery—it’s maintaining the basics:

Moving regularly in varied ways
Eating mostly whole foods, mostly plants
Sleeping enough in true darkness
Managing stress through practice, not avoidance
Cultivating meaningful relationships

These aren’t optional extras; they’re the foundation. Everything else—supplements, therapies, interventions—works better or worse depending on this base.

Practical Herbalism
Growing medicinal plants reconnects you with healing traditions while teaching botany, pharmacology, and patience. Start with easy, safe, useful herbs:

Chamomile for relaxation and digestion
Peppermint for upset stomach and alertness
Calendula for skin healing
Echinacea for immune support
Lavender for calm and sleep

Learn to identify, grow, harvest at the right time, dry properly, and prepare as teas, tinctures, or salves. This is accessible, practical knowledge that works.

First Aid Competence
Everyone should know: CPR, how to stop bleeding, how to stabilize injuries, how to recognize emergencies. Take a Wilderness First Responder course—it’s comprehensive training that prepares you for situations where help isn’t minutes away. This builds confidence and capability that serves you everywhere.

Body Literacy
Understanding your own body is empowering. Track your sleep, energy, digestion, mood. Notice patterns. Most health problems announce themselves long before they become crises. The skill is in paying attention and responding early.

Art and Music: Creating Beauty and Meaning

The Case for Making Art
Art isn’t frivolous—it’s how humans process experience and create meaning. You don’t need talent to benefit from creative practice. You need curiosity and willingness to play.

Start simple: draw what you see for 15 minutes daily. The subject matters less than the practice of looking closely and translating observation into marks. Your drawings will improve, but more importantly, you’ll see differently.

Music as Accessible Magic
A ukulele costs $50 and has four strings. You can learn three chords in an afternoon and play hundreds of songs. A digital audio workstation like Reaper or Ardour costs nothing and turns any computer into a recording studio.

The barrier isn’t talent—it’s permission. Give yourself permission to be bad while you’re learning. Everyone starts bad. The difference between musicians and non-musicians is that musicians kept going.

The Practice of Making
Whether visual art, music, writing, or crafts, the practice teaches you:

How to see and hear more deeply
Patience with process over product
Problem-solving through doing
The satisfaction of making rather than just consuming

These capacities transfer to everything else you do.

Family: Creating Capable Humans

Teaching Through Involvement
Children learn what they do, not what they’re told. Involve them in real work: cooking, building, fixing, growing. Let them use real tools under guidance. Let them fail safely and learn from consequences.

The alternative—keeping children away from anything challenging, sharp, or risky—produces fragile adults who feel incompetent and anxious. Capability builds confidence. Confidence enables exploration. Exploration leads to learning.

The Home as Classroom
Formal education is valuable, but limited. Home learning opportunities are everywhere:

Cooking teaches chemistry, measurement, planning, culture
Gardening teaches biology, patience, responsibility, seasons
Building projects teach math, physics, problem-solving
Repair teaches economics, troubleshooting, resourcefulness

These aren’t supplements to “real” learning—they are real learning, often more relevant than abstract academics.

Creating Culture
Families create culture through rituals, stories, shared projects, and ways of being together. This is intentional work worth doing well. What do you want your children to remember? How do you want them to feel about home? What capabilities do you want them to have?

You can’t outsource this. You create it through daily choices and attention.

Education: Learning How to Learn

Self-Directed Learning
The most important educational skill is knowing how to learn anything. This means:

Identifying what you need to know
Finding good resources (books, videos, mentors, practice)
Creating feedback loops
Practicing deliberately
Persisting through frustration

With internet access, you can learn almost anything for free or cheap. The constraint is rarely information—it’s motivation, direction, and effective practice.

Building a Learning Practice

Morning pages: Write three pages daily, stream of consciousness, no editing
Deep reading: One book at a time, with notes and reflection
Project-based learning: Learn by building things that interest you
Find mentors: People ahead of you who will share their knowledge
Teach others: The best way to solidify understanding

The Library as Tool
Public libraries remain one of civilization’s best inventions: free access to knowledge, computers, meeting spaces, and community. Use them. Support them. They’re infrastructure for the mind.

Ecology and Technology: Whole Systems Thinking

Understanding Your Place
Where does your water come from? Where does your electricity come from? Where does your food grow? Where does your waste go?

Most people can’t answer these questions. This disconnection makes us vulnerable and wasteful. Reconnection begins with curiosity and investigation. Walk the watershed. Visit a water treatment plant. Tour a farm. Follow your trash.

Appropriate Technology
Not every solution needs to be high-tech. Sometimes the best tool is the simplest one that reliably solves the problem:

A clothesline is solar-powered clothes drying
A root cellar is zero-energy food storage
A bicycle is efficient local transportation
A well-insulated building is passive climate control

Technology should serve human needs at human scale, not create new dependencies or problems.

Permaculture Principles
Permaculture—permanent agriculture—offers a design framework for sustainable systems:

Observe before acting
Stack functions (each element serves multiple purposes)
Value diversity
Capture and store energy
Produce no waste (everything cycles)
Work with nature, not against it

These principles apply beyond gardening to business, relationships, communities, and personal development.

The Edge Effect
The most productive and diverse ecosystems are at edges—where forest meets field, land meets water, different systems intersect. The same is true intellectually and creatively. The most interesting work happens at intersections: art and science, technology and nature, tradition and innovation.

Cultivate your edges. That’s where new possibilities emerge.

Tools and Resources: Getting Started

Making and Building

Books: The Complete Manual of Woodworking (Albert Jackson), Make: Electronics (Charles Platt), The Anarchist’s Design Book (Christopher Schwarz)
Tools: Begin with quality hand tools before power tools
Communities: Local makerspaces, tool libraries, online forums

Homesteading and Self-Sufficiency

Books: The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It (John Seymour), The Hand-Sculpted House (Ianto Evans), The Carbon-Free Home (Rebekah Hren)
Skills: Take workshops in natural building, permaculture design, foraging
Resources: Local extension offices, WWOOF, YouTube channels like “Edible Acres”

Business and Economics

Books: The $100 Startup (Chris Guillebeau), Company of One (Paul Jarvis), The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
Tools: Start with free versions of everything until you know what you need
Learning: SCORE mentoring, Small Business Development Centers, online courses

Health and Healing

Books: The Herbal Medicine-Maker’s Handbook (James Green), Where There Is No Doctor (David Werner), The Body Keeps the Score (Bessel van der Kolk)
Training: WFR certification, herbalism courses, yoga/meditation instruction
Resources: Local herb shops, farmers markets, community health clinics

Arts and Making

Books: The Creative Habit (Twyla Tharp), Art & Fear (David Bayles), The War of Art (Steven Pressfield)
Tools: Start with whatever you can afford; technique matters more than equipment
Communities: Open studios, art co-ops, online courses, local music venues

Family and Education

Books: Last Child in the Woods (Richard Louv), The Unschooling Handbook (Mary Griffith), How to Talk So Kids Will Listen (Faber & Mazlish)
Resources: Scouting, 4-H, nature centers, children’s museums, libraries
Communities: Homeschool co-ops, forest schools, skill shares

Ecology and Sustainability

Books: Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual (Bill Mollison), Cradle to Cradle (McDonough & Braungart), Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer)
Learning: Permaculture Design Certificate, Master Gardener programs
Action: Join local conservation groups, native plant societies, community gardens

The Path Forward

The Whole Earth Catalog closed its final edition with the words “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” This wasn’t advice to remain desperate or ignorant, but to maintain curiosity and willingness to try things beyond your current competence.

Capability is built through attempting things you’re not sure you can do. Each new skill expands what’s possible. Each project completed builds confidence for the next one. Each connection with real materials, real work, and real consequences teaches something textbooks can’t.

The tools are available. The information is accessible. The question is whether you’ll use them to become more capable, more confident, and more able to live according to your own values.

Start somewhere. Start today. The learning is in the doing.

Addendum: Accessing the Original Whole Earth Catalog

The Complete Digital Archive

In a fitting tribute to Stewart Brand’s original vision of democratizing access to tools and information, nearly the entire run of Whole Earth publications is now freely available online. This remarkable archive spans from 1968 to 2002 and represents one of the most significant counterculture collections digitized for public access.

The digitization project was directed by Barry Threw of Gray Area (a San Francisco art collective), working with the Long Now Foundation and the Internet Archive. Brand himself endorsed the project enthusiastically, noting that he and the original publishers had always wanted this content “to be free out there all along.”

What’s Available Online

The Original Catalogs (1968-1972)
The complete first issue from Fall 1968 is available, along with subsequent editions including the famous “Last Whole Earth Catalog” from 1971. These are the foundational documents—the dense, oversized volumes packed with product reviews, contact information, and essays that defined the catalog’s revolutionary approach to information sharing.

CoEvolution Quarterly (1974-1984)
Founded by Whole Earth Catalog staff, this magazine evolved the original concept into a small-circulation journal exploring ecology, technology, and social issues. The name came from biologists Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven’s concept of coevolution—the idea that organisms and systems evolve together in relationship.

Whole Earth Review (1985-1997)
Born from the merger of the CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Software Review, this publication continued the tradition of tool and book reviews while expanding coverage of technology, ecology, and community subjects. A recurring theme was “the commons”—resources, institutions, and spaces belonging to the community as a whole.

Whole Earth Magazine (1997-2002)
The final incarnation, managed by longtime editors Peter Warshall and Michael Stone, launched with an updated slogan: “access to tools, ideas, and practices.” This version brought the catalog’s philosophy into the internet age.

Special Publications
The archive includes numerous one-off publications, supplements, and themed issues, including the groundbreaking Whole Earth Software Review that covered emerging computer culture starting in 1984.

How to Access

Internet Archive Collection
The primary access point is archive.org/details/wholeearth where you can browse, read online, or download PDFs of complete issues. Each publication is available in multiple formats including PDF, EPUB, and plain text versions suitable for different devices and accessibility needs.

Whole Earth Index
A beautifully organized portal at wholeearth.info provides chronological navigation through all publications with direct links to downloadable issues. This site offers context and descriptions for each publication era, making it easier to find what interests you.

The Electronic Whole Earth Catalog
Also hosted on the Internet Archive, this fascinating artifact is an early CD-ROM version created using HyperCard technology. It contains over 9,000 interconnected cards—essentially hypertext before the web existed, but offline. You can run it in your browser through emulation, experiencing what interactive digital publishing looked like in the late 1980s.

Why This Matters

This archive represents more than nostalgia. These publications documented the emergence of environmental consciousness, appropriate technology, personal computing, DIY culture, and the philosophical foundations of the internet itself. Reading through them reveals:

The Origins of Many Current Movements

The maker movement and hackerspaces echo the catalog’s tool reviews and self-sufficiency ethos
Modern permaculture and sustainable living draw directly from ideas first popularized here
The open-source software philosophy reflects the catalog’s approach to information sharing
Contemporary interest in off-grid living, natural building, and homesteading all have roots in these pages

A Different Approach to Technology
Unlike today’s uncritical tech boosterism, the Whole Earth publications maintained a sophisticated, questioning relationship with technology. They asked: What is this tool good for? Who benefits? What are the unintended consequences? This critical yet optimistic stance offers valuable perspective on our current technological moment.

Practical Knowledge That Remains Relevant
Many of the reviewed tools, techniques, and books remain useful today. Information on hand tool woodworking, natural building, food preservation, and sustainable systems doesn’t become obsolete. The catalog’s reviews were thorough and honest—they told you not just what worked, but what didn’t and why.

A Time Capsule of Possibility
The publications capture a moment when fundamental reimagining of how we live seemed possible and practical. The energy, optimism, and seriousness about creating alternatives to mainstream culture comes through on every page. This isn’t escapism—it’s engaged citizenship through practical competence.

How to Use the Archive

For Skill Building
Browse issues relevant to your interests. The tool reviews include specific brand names, contact information (often outdated), and detailed assessments of why something works or doesn’t. Look past the specific products to understand the principles being evaluated.

For Historical Context
Read chronologically to see how concerns and technologies evolved. The shift from 1970s back-to-the-land simplicity to 1980s computer culture to 1990s internet philosophy tells the story of how counterculture became mainstream.

For Inspiration
Simply browsing reveals possibilities you might never have considered. The catalog’s strength was showing what was possible—often things readers didn’t know existed. That function remains valuable today.

For Research
These publications documented emerging movements in real-time. They’re primary sources for understanding environmental activism, appropriate technology, personal computing culture, and numerous other developments from this period.

A Living Legacy

The availability of these archives online fulfills the Whole Earth Catalog’s original mission in ways Brand and his collaborators couldn’t have imagined. Where the catalog once mailed information to subscribers, now anyone with internet access can search, download, and share this knowledge freely.

This represents the ultimate realization of “access to tools”—not just physical tools, but the knowledge, context, and community understanding that make tools useful. The information that once required purchasing a catalog and waiting for mail delivery is now instantly searchable and freely available to anyone, anywhere.

More importantly, these archives demonstrate that the fundamental questions the Whole Earth Catalog addressed remain relevant: How do we live skillfully? How do we use technology appropriately? How do we build community and capability? How do we take responsibility for our lives and our world?

The answers may evolve, but the questions endure. Having free access to decades of thoughtful engagement with these questions is a genuine gift—and one that honors the catalog’s original spirit of sharing knowledge freely among people trying to live well.

Getting Started with the Archive

Visit wholeearth.info or archive.org/details/wholeearth and simply start browsing. Pick an issue from an era that interests you, or jump to topics you’re curious about. The catalog was designed for serendipitous discovery—you were meant to find things you didn’t know you were looking for.

That’s still the best way to use it today.