Stewart Brand - eclectic visionary, big thinker, Merry Prankster, education advocate - dropped out of the late 1960s California counter-culture to create Whole Earth Catalog. Aided by a team of free thinkers including his then-wife Lois Jennings, Whole Earth blossomed from a pickup truck hauling catalogs and wares around a circuit of communes and communities in 1968 to a building in Menlo Park, CA and an estimated 1.5 million copies of the catalog sold in 1972.

The exponential growth of Whole Earth speaks greatly to an ideological shift in parts of the U.S. population, away from industry at all costs toward a desire to build for themselves in a responsible fashion.