“How would you like to live in a spherical house? Not just a dome, mind you, but a complete ball.”1 This was just one of the many possibilities presented to Canadians in the early 1970s by the Canadian Whole Earth Almanac.
With its varied textual and visual content and unique design, the short-lived Almanac was a resource for Canada’s back-to-the-land movement, as well as a meeting place for a wider Canadian youth culture, both rural and urban, that sought to construct a new society based on alternative ideals.
The Canadian Whole Earth Almanac adapted the format of the massively popular California-based Whole Earth Catalog for a Canadian audience. In the pages of the Almanac, like the Catalog, “the technological and intellectual output of industry and high science met the Eastern religion, acid mysticism, and the communal social theory of the back-to-the-land-movement.”2 But the Almanac was distinctively Canadian. When the Almanac was featured in the 1971 edition of the Catalog, it was described as the
son of whole earth meets the mapleleaf mysteries
and superpress,
breeds with them,
and gives birth to
a beautiful babybeaver catalog.
thats the script.3
Created at Rochdale College and published by the “superpress” Coach House Press in downtown Toronto, the Almanac embodies a historically specific strand of ironic Canadian “anti-identity,” including a cynicism towards the rise in Canadian cultural nationalism following the centennial year, and a rejection of the “technocracy” that flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s.4 This attitude is exemplified by an iconic early Coach House colophon inscribed PRINTED IN CANADA ON CANADIAN PAPER by mindless acid freaKs.
The Almanac published five issues between 1970 and 1972, each focusing on a single topic: Food, Shelter, Industry, Healing, and a final catch-all Ephemeris issue. All but the last featured over a hundred pages of tightly packed and well-organized columns of text and illustrations. Essentially an extensive recommended reading list and mail-order catalogue, the Almanac primarily consists of short capsule reviews of books and products relevant to rural living. In each issue, one could find information and supplies for complex processes such as wind power, traditional practices for growing and preserving food, constructing homes, acupuncture, or weaving cloth, as well as an array of esoteric titles selected for their ability to ‘expand the reader’s mind.’
The cover of the first issue of the Canadian Whole Earth Almanac is clearly legible as Canadian. The image is a sparse outer space scene featuring an inscrutable beaver atop a large sphere, seemingly the only living thing in an otherwise barren universe. This image mirrored the use of recently released NASA photographs of Earth on the covers of the Whole Earth Catalog, but proposes a specifically Canadian vision of what the planet might look like from outer space. The position of the beaver humorously echoes the popular Canadian view of the country as a northern nation that is literally ‘on top’ of the globe.
The space beaver goes on to appear in nearly every issue of the Almanac, serving as the publication’s unofficial logo. Other beavers and their dwellings also appear in every issue of the Almanac, as a recurring motif in its print design. Throughout, the Almanac’s use of beaver imagery re-inscribes the rodent with an array of countercultural values, claiming it as a symbol for an alternative Canada.
From a countercultural perspective, beavers challenge the logic of the technocracy, representing traits that the back-to-the-land movement embraced and celebrated: self-sufficiency, do-it-yourself construction with natural materials, an intimate relationship with nature and the land, and so on. For instance, the Winter 1970 issue includes an excerpt from the book Sensitive Chaos by Theodor Schwenk, which celebrates the lasting effect of the beaver’s labour on the North American landscape through their construction of dams and slowing of rivers. The ‘sensitive chaos’ espoused by Schwenk is a strong metaphor for the aims of the counterculture more broadly, the opposite of the homogeneity, order, and discipline proposed by the technocracy. In the excerpt from his book, Schwenk writes that “the beaver is really like the embodiment of all this wisdom.”5
Beavers were also admired for the construction of their dwellings. Housing is among the central concerns of the Almanac, most prominently articulated in the dedicated Shelter issue of Winter 1970, which includes instructions for how to build several structures appropriating traditional Indigenous designs, such as igloos and tipis, as well as log cabins, yurts, geodesic domes, zomes, spheres, inflatable structures, hexagonal homes, and an array of other non-traditional shelters. Images of beavers and their lodges appear as illustrations scattered throughout the issue.
Beaver dwellings met the ideals of David Harvey, who described his construction of an “octagonal log cabin” in Ontario. Asking “What is the poetry of styrofoam?” Harvey declares his preference for materials which bound his structure to the natural environment—stating that “the last thing I wanted it to be was an arrogant assertion of apartness from nature.” For Harvey, adapting his vision to the materials at hand was a crucial part of his architectural ideology.6
However, with no sense of contradiction, the editors also understood that the form of the beaver lodge echoed the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller, resonating with the outer space beaver that reappears throughout the issues of the Almanac. The domes were originally developed by Fuller at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s, and presented as the height of modernity in the form of the United States pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, as well as in the state-of-the-art radar stations forming the joint American and Canadian Distant Early Warning (DEW) line in the high arctic.
By positioning the beaver alongside anxious claims about the dangers of contemporary life, the Almanac presents the beaver as a still-relevant symbol of extreme resilience in a hostile climate, a model that survivalists and back-to-the-landers would do well to emulate. Rather than a relic of the fur trade, or symbol of corporate Canada, the Almanac refashioned the beaver as a symbol that remains viable in the space age.
Invoking nostalgia for rural lifeways alongside mid-century futuristic hubris, The Canadian Whole Earth Almanac embodied a unique moment of Canadian countercultural ideals and aspirations. Fifty years on, the Almanac is a repository of these utopian impulses, and an inventory of the social currents, aesthetics, and environmental values of the early 1970s.
Notes
1 Canadian Whole Earth Almanac, Winter 1970, 94.
2 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago, 2006), 73. On Canadian countercultures, see Colin M. Coates, ed. Canadian Countercultures and the Environment (University of Calgary, 2016).
3 The Last Whole Earth Catalog, January 1971, 242.
4 Stephen Cain, “Imprinting Identities: An Examination of the Emergence and Developing Identities of Coach House Press and House of Anansi Press (1967-1982),” PhD diss, York University, 2002. On Rochdale College see Stuart Henderson, “Off the Streets and into the Fortress: Experiments in Hip Separatism at Toronto’s Rochdale College, 1968-1975,” Canadian Historical Review 92, no. 1 (2011): 107-133.
5 Quoted in Canadian Whole Earth Almanac, Winter 1970, 31.
6 Canadian Whole Earth Almanac, Winter 1970, 69.
Jeff Miller