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43.
THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS #1 -16 (Madison, OH: January 1970 - July 1972).
4to. Stapled wrps., 62pp.-198pp. Illustrated. The first 16 issues of this bi-monthly ecology magazine, founded in 1970 by John and Jane Shuttleworth and published from home on a shoestring budget.
The opening three pages of the first issue reprints an early draft of Gary Snyder's environmental manifesto, "Four Changes", taken from the Whole Earth Catalog Supplement (September 1969), and both the simple artwork depicting outer space on the front cover and the magazine's appeal to the back-to-the-land movement echo that of Stewart Brand's Catalog.
Mother Earth News emphasised do-it-yourself and how-to articles for rural living, with a banner on the front cover of the second issue announcing "How To Get Out Of The City And Back To The Land". By issue #16 the page count had increased to incorporate an 83pp. "Lifestyle!" supplement, including a lengthy 'Contacts' section intended for like-minded people to share information and resources. Many of the magazine's articles focus on practical matters for rural dwellers, such as DIY home building, organic farming, foraging wild food, cooking, gardening, geodesic domes, recycling, solar power and alternative energy, combining these with reports of visits to communes throughout America.
Its regular series of "Plowboy Interviews" (some reprinted from other UPS publications) begins in issue #2 with John Shuttleworth, followed by, among others, Ed Van Buskirk (owner of Berkeley natural foods restaurant Arbor Café), Buffy Sainte-Marie, Buckminster Fuller, the anarchist and environmentalist, Murray Bookchin, and Lola Redford and Ilene Goldman, founders of CAN (Consumer Action Now), who aimed to show consumers how their buying habits affected the environment.
A rare surviving run of the first 16 issues, spanning the first two and a half year of its publication. Time has not been kind to them, with the newsprint pages tanned and the covers grubby and in some cases brittle along the spine. Overall Fair to Good, but each issue now preserved in an archival sleeve.
