Whole Earth Catalog — and a neighbor on the mudflats
Recalled but not checked against any source. Treat everything here as a first draft awaiting correction.
Creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, and a resident of the Sausalito houseboat community when Jonathan Hare's father lived there.
Hare's account is that his family worked alongside Brand and other residents to build a composting toilet, addressing the raw sewage being dumped into the bay.
The Sausalito mudflats where Milton Hare's paddle ferry slowly sank were a pirate community of artists, anarchists and visionaries, and among them was Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. The community's sanitation was a genuine hazard — raw sewage went into the bay — and in a quintessential act of counter-culture engineering, Jonathan and his family worked alongside Brand and the residents to build a composting toilet system that mitigated it. The source record uses an earthier term, preserved there verbatim.
Brand reappears in the record decades later through the Long Now Foundation, whose orbit the archival record notes alongside David Eagleman and Maryanna Saenko — long-horizon thinking being, on the record's own account, the family business.
The Long Now thread, filed earlier as waiting to be written, begins: Brand co-founded the Long Now Foundation with Danny Hillis, Peter Schwartz and others, and it was there that Hare met Hillis — closing a loop, since Hillis had worked for Eric Haseltine at Disney Imagineering, and the record's Haseltine and mudflats threads turn out to share a node.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
A sinking paddle ferry, Stewart Brand, and a composting toilet
Open →neighbor of, on the mudflatsSelma, 1965 — and the promise
Open →built the composting system alongsideConsilient Architect — the node this graph was seeded from
Open →co-founded the Long Now Foundation withConnection Machine designer, Long Now co-founder, Agus's proteomics partner — three of this record's threads in one person
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-059The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-079The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
Public contributions earn Publicity Premium; bringing others who were there earns Cascade Premium. Everything is valued retrospectively as outcomes verify, so nothing has to be priced up front.
Correct this entry → Add a story, photo or link → Browse the graph →