Kevin Kelly reviews Mother Earth News in the the latest Cool Tools. Subscriptions are only $10 a year!
This old hippie magazine is the only place to keep current with back-to-the-land news. The old dream of thriving on a few acres of land is still serviced with enthusiasm here. Familiar subjects like backyard animals and all-year gardens are reliably addressed, but they also have solid reporting on the such technological innovations as the latest in modern cabin toilets, microgenerators, the best chain saws and solar panels, and so on. However, since a lot of homesteading chores haven’t changed much, their website offers 35 years of back issues online — some of the best stuff they published was written in the 1970s. (You can also get the archive on CDs).
UPDATE: Greg says: “Just a side note — Mother Earth News has recently lost a lot of its
appeal for the back-to-earthers (like me). It was bought out by a large
publishing firm, and the majority of its staff left to create Backhome
, which more closely follows the
‘feel’ of the original M.E.N. I’ve got subscriptions to both, and both
have good articles, though I find that Backhome doesn’t concentrate so
heavily on celebrities and making gobs of cash. M.E.N. recently took a
lot of flak and lost some readership by allowing ads for ‘safe’
cigarettes. They had to pull them after only one issue.
“I’m one of a growing number of geeks who are heading out of the
cities and into the small towns. There may be a story there. *shrug*”
UPDATE: SSG Terry L. Welch, currently stationed in Bagram, Afghanistan, says: “I would like to add my two cents to Greg’s comments about Mother Earth News. I used to edit a small collectibles magazine for Ogden Publications, the current publisher of M.E.N. Over coffee one day, I mentioned to the publisher that I had been raised on M.E.N., my dad being a do-it-yourselfer, and I noticed that the mag’s character had changed since Ogden had taken it over. He said that it wasn’t a magazine for hippies anymore. It was, instead, a magazine for suburbanites who didn’t want to admit to themselves they’d sold out. I’ll always remember that he said that people’s magazine purchases “reinforced their self-image.” In other words, people who buy M.E.N. aren’t going to go build themselves a cabin anymore than guys who buy Men’s Health are going to look like cover models anytime soon. He had a point, but I remember the original M.E.N. being a positive magazine which wanted people to change their ways, not cynically reinforce their shitty habits.”