John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part II

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PLOWBOY: Elaborate on that point, please.

SHUTTLEWORTH: I'll be glad to. Take direct mail. Direct mail is a marvelous invention from both a business and an environmental standpoint. One ecology group can rent a mailing list from another conservation organization and then zero in its appeal for funds or its offer for a wildlife calendar or whatever directly on an audience that, in theory at least, is guaranteed to be most receptive and responsive to that message.

This is great. Simply great. The minimum number of trees get cut, the minimum amount of ink gets used, the minimum number of trucks haul the message to the minimum number of people for the maximum result. Direct mail is many times more effective from the standpoint of resources used to accomplish a given end than magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, or anything.

Yet, thanks to a snide article that appeared in the Reader's Digest years ago, we now suffer from a mindless mob psychology in this country. Certain morons among us consider it clever and the mark of an intellectual to thoughtlessly parrot the catch phrase "junk mail" whenever they really mean direct mail. They find it somehow chic to devise elaborate plots to sabotage such correspondence. And they feel that passing legislation against direct mail is at least as important as witnessing the Second Coming.

Now these actions are bad enough when engaged in by well-meaning but fuzzy-minded nerds who've never learned to think for themselves. But when they're advocated by people in the name of the environment! It's easy to see how Hitler and his sleazy crew were able to direct the German populace in the burning of all those books.

PLOWBOY: So?

SHUTTLEWORTH: So no matter how an idea is positioned when it's presented to you, check out the facts and learn its true identity for yourself before you make your own individual decision about the idea's merits or lack thereof. In all the world, there's nothing more dangerous than a mob of addlebrained ninnies who've embarked upon a grand and holy quest ... on somebody else's say so.

PLOWBOY: John, it's becoming increasingly apparent that you've spent a great deal of time thinking about what an environmental publication must do to succeed. It therefore follows that you must have some definite ideas about why so many ecology magazines, newsletters, and papers have folded during the same period that has seen Mother Earth News grow from a subscription list of 147 to a pre-sold bi-monthly press run of 250,000.

Now I know you have a firm rule against criticizing any other periodical in the field in the pages of Mother Earth News ... but I don't think you'd be breaking that rule if you were to tell us why you think some of those defunct periodicals went down the tubes. As a matter of fact, since you've only agreed to this interview because you want to encourage others to carry on the environmental fight, I think you owe it to anyone inspired by this conversation to point out the pitfalls that he or she should avoid.

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