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

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SHUTTLEWORTH: You're very persuasive.

All right. A great number of conservation, ecology, and environmental publications that have failed were doomed from the start because their editors and publishers were what I call "aginners". They were only against things: strip mining, clear cutting, automobiles, freeways, oil spills, nuclear reactors, non returnable containers, TV dinners the list goes on and on.

Now I'm against all those things too ... but it doesn't do a damn bit of good to just wring your hands in print from the first page to the last of issue after issue after issue of a publication. Give your readers at least the benefit of the doubt. Chances are, if they weren't intelligent enough and concerned enough to have already figured out for themselves that things ain't exactly right in the world ... well, they wouldn't be reading an environmental publication in the first place.

What these folks want — and what I've always been convinced they're entitled to get when they plunk down their money for your rag — is some positive answers. Tell 'em how to be for something.

Of course you've got to be a little careful here too, as far as I'm concerned. Because about 90% of the editors, publishers, and writers who get this far are so damn impressed with themselves that all they want to do is print long, learned, rambling discourses about problematical utopian social orders and population trends in the year 2020 and the production of edible protein from shellac beetles.

God, I despise those dry, arms-length discussions! All you have to do to lose my interest — immediately! — is to start dropping words like "proletariat" into your magazine. And I don't think I'm exactly alone in that regard. The only people in the world who talk that way on purpose are college sophomores and they only impress each other.

Conversely, it seems to me that a fairly large handful of environmentally oriented publications — especially some that shaded over quite heavily into the alternative lifestyle end of the spectrum — were just flat out swamped when the people responsible tried to sail too far out on The Whole Earth Catalog lake. Stewart Brand, you know, was so damned successful with The Whole Earth Catalog that a lot of people including some who should have known better — tried too hard to copy him too closely.

They copied Brand's succinct style of writing ... only, in their hands, it became just clipped or — worse yet — coy. They aped the rather haphazard Whole Earth Catalog layouts with seemingly no inkling of the underlying mixture of genius, timing, and national mood that made it work so well one time and one time only for Stewart. And horror of horrors, they slavishly insisted on publishing Whole Earth Catalog sized books when any paper salesman, printer, magazine distributor, news dealer, or postmaster — not to mention any reader who's ever wrestled with a Whole Earth Catalog in a bus seat — could have told them the disadvantages of that format. Even Brand has come down to something nearer news magazine size for Co-Evolution Quarterly, his latest publication.

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