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

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PLOWBOY: You've just given me several don'ts. Turn that all around now, if you will, and give me the do's of making an environmental publication successful. You can use Mother Earth News as an example, if you like.

SHUTTLEWORTH: Well, as I've said, mapping out the identity of Mother Earth News was easy. When Jane and I started working on the first issue, I'd already spent large parts of 26 years researching decentralist lifestyles and environmental subjects. I had long since come to the conclusion that the highly interrelated, energy intensive, planned obsolescence of industrialized, urban life was a dead end for both people and the planet. It seemed only logical, then, that our magazine should promote family farms and small villages at the expense of large towns and big cities.

And of course, hating theory the way I do, I thought we should plunge right in with firsthand reports from people who had already carved out some part of the decentralist life for themselves. People who owned nearly self-sufficient homesteads. Folks who'd come up with small businesses that really worked. Individuals that had bought a farm for back taxes or built a house themselves for only a few hundred dollars.

By focusing in close on very personal stories that way, we got the lively quality and the immediacy I wanted. Which — for a lot of our readers — has been a revelation. We get thousands of letters every month that are a variation on the same theme: "I used to read about ecology and saving the environment but it didn't mean much to me. I didn't know where to start. Now, thanks to Mother Earth News, I've not only begun ... I'm having the time of my life!"

In other words, I guess our greatest gift to the environ mental movement is the humanizing quality of Mother Earth News. We refuse to be stuffy about the whole thing. We don't think that preserving the planet has to be a dose of bad medicine. And, as much as it still jolts some of the real purists in the ecology field, we like to show people that they can actually profit — often in dollars — by doing the earth a good turn.

PLOWBOY: Would you now care to sum up everything you've just said about setting editorial policy for an environmental publication?

SHUTTLEWORTH: Forget the problems. Concentrate on solutions. And present those solutions in down-to-earth, easily understood, easily duplicated, relevant terms.

PLOWBOY: Is there any other advice you'd like to give a would-be editor or publisher of an ecology magazine?

SHUTTLEWORTH: Yes. Be warned in advance that whatever glamor you think is attached to such a publication probably isn't there at all. What is there is simply staggering quantities of the hardest work you've ever done. Brutal, grinding, exhausting, devastating work. If you have no money to pay for help — as Jane and I had no money that first year — you'd better hope that you're as lucky as we were.

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