The November 2012 issue of Verve magazine is on the streets and features a great tale of how Mother Earth News magazine, which took notice of a sweeping cultural movement of the 1970s, planted deep roots in Western North Carolina.
Editor Jess McCuan details the rise and fall of a magazine that, at its height, had millions of readers and captured the back-to-the-land ethos of American cutlure during the 1970s. It’s relevent now, of course, because Americans are once again finding value in sustainable living, DIY projects and the benefits of “living lightly” on this Earth. John and Jane Shuttleworth, the magazine founders, moved to Hendersonville in 1973 and took off from there.
Excerpts:
The very first cover of The Mother Earth News is an orange-ish earthscape that looks decidedly like a rock album. Published in January 1970, the headline reads: “…a new beginning.” Inside were instructions for building a teepee and a starting a career drawing cartoons. To understand the magazine’s lightning-fast rise in popularity, it helps to recall that the very first Earth Day took place that year, on April 22, 1970. The Shuttleworths, at first, seemed to be surveying Earth-friendly and DIY trends. John had also grown up on an Indiana farm, and the tone showed a reverence for simple living and hard work. But Mother’s stories, and the magazine’s voice, quickly gathered a sort of populist momentum.…
The magazine wasn’t the only product the Mother staff cranked out. Don Osby, now the BackHome art director, joined Mother in 1979. A Midwesterner with a master’s degree in geophysics, Osby’s first task was to draw up plans for an electric car. Most of Mother’s auto projects happened in a large tin-roofed building in downtown Hendersonville (now the Next to New antiques shop). In 1980 or so, Osby’s team built an early high-mileage hybrid there by attaching an electric aircraft motor and a small diesel engine to the body of an old Subaru. “It was loud,” Osby says, of the vehicle, which got 85 miles to the gallon. “It was definitely no Prius.” But the composite car was remarkable nonetheless, and one of a hundred similar projects that Mother staffers cooked up in company research facilities.
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What’s extraordinary about the Mother Earth legacy is not only its breadth of coverage, but also the fact that its main topics—alternative energy, sustainability and simple living—still fill the pages of hundreds of modern magazines. “We’re hearing it all again,” says Freudenberger, the BackHome publisher, who raises chickens and bees in his backyard.
Click over to read the well-told story of a the rise and fall of an amazing magazine and the personalities – some of them still around – behind it.