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[ 242 ] “Soylent Green is people!” Charleton Heston screamed at the climax of the 1973 environmental science fiction cult film Soylent Green. The movie appeared during a period of scarcity-fueled apocalyptic nightmares, climaxing with the Arab oil embargo and the energy crisis. Soylent Green was just one example of a subgenre of 1970s sci-fi b movies that refashioned the technophobia of the 1950s and gave it a Mod Squad twist. Inspired by the urban dystopian science fiction of writers like Phillip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein, the films of this genre often concluded with a hopeful journey away from the technologically demented city into a pristine countryside devoid of humans and their tainted technologies. This escape-to-nature theme was in tune with the environmental advocacy of the day even if it was out of step with an American culture that was building cars like the giant gas-guzzling Ford Galaxie. Yet, while Heston dramatically fought technology gone wrong in Planet of the Apes (1968), Soylent Green, and the Omega Man(1971), Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand and a cohort of Bay Area innovators were articulating an alternative vision of pragmatic technologically—enthusiastic environmentalism aimed at Americans who lived in and around cities and planned on staying. If Brand were the hero in a Whole Earth–inspired film (there was a proposal for a Broadway show) he might have shouted, “Counterculture green is people!” Because his version of environmentalism was all about people, culture, and technical innovation aimed at ecological living in the places were people were, not preserving the choice morsels of wilderness where they weren’t. He and his peers believed that any version of a sustainable future would have to include innovative people working on human-centered environmental solutions in the cities and suburbs where they lived. This film might have concluded with Brand and crew The Whole Earth Catalog, New Games, and Urban Environmentalism a n d r e w G . K i r K [ 243 ] W H O L E E A R T H , n e w G a M e s , a n d u r B a n e n V i r o n M e n Ta l i s M leaving the countryside and driving back to the city with a trailer full of windmills, solar panels, an“Earth Ball,” and blueprints for how to build a rammed earth home, “living machine,” or rooftop urban garden. The Whole Earth Catalog captured a new alchemy of environmental concern, small-scale technological enthusiasm, design research, and innovative outdoor recreation. Initially aimed at countercultural communes, and remembered best as the bible of the back-to-the-land movement, Whole Earth moved quickly away from these enthusiasms and became one of the most significant forums for urban environmentalism. Unlike the Bay Area environmentalism of the Sierra Club that encouraged members to leave the city to commune with and recreate in the nature of the Sierras or elsewhere, Whole Earth provided a forum for those ecologically minded Bay Area residents who wanted to find ecology within the city and its immediate hinterlands. Behind the scenes of Whole Earth was The Point Foundation. Brand founded Point with the substantial profits from his National Book Award–winning Last Whole Earth Catalog (1972). Point was an effort to create a model for foundation organization and philanthropic activism informed by the social context of the counterculture. Brand’s “anti-foundation” became a means for exploring what board member and The Seven Laws of Money (1974) author Michael Phillips called, “way-out money schemes,” grounded in careful considerations of right livelihood, simple living, and British economist E.F. Schumaker’s “economics as if people mattered .”1 Looking back, environmentalist and Point board member Huey Johnson said the efforts at Point were a “classic and important way” to think about philanthropy .2 Further, Point was a meaningful attempt to support social causes, mainly in the Bay Area, related to quality of life and social justice. Most importantly, Point represented a directed effort to help convert the constellation of alternative environmentalism presented on the pages of Whole Earth into something resembling a coherent movement. The history of American philanthropy in the twentieth century raises complex questions about wealth and power in a country that has never resolved the issue of private versus state responsibility for social welfare. As Waldemar Nielsen argued in his monumental survey of twentieth-century foundations:“In the great jungle of American democracy and capitalism, there...

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