Rare Book Salon Spring 2025: The Whole Earth Catalog

At the Spring 2025 Rare Book Salon, faculty members in Biology, Chemistry, English, Philosophy, and Sociology share their disiplinary impressions of "The Last Whole Earth Catalog" from Salve Special Collections. The January 1971 issue of the counterculture magazine with the slogan "access to tools" featured product reviews, articles, and literature focusing on self-sufficiency, ecology, and holism. Salve faculty discussed how the catalog reflected or was a prelude to today's agricultural practices and hydroponics, tensions between embracing Earth and leaving it, food and recipes, the people who were left out of the catalog and the "Back to the Land" movement it represents, such as indigenous voices and enslaved people, and how women's voices were so conspicuously missing that a group of women created a responding text titled the "New Woman's Survival Catalog."