The Briarpatch Contribution
Living in the Cracks and Creating a New Culture
What good are these "Briars" doing anyway?
I believe that social change has almost reached critical mass.
So many people have undergone personal transformation that their effect on society is having a geometric – not arithmetic – impact.
This coalescence of energies brings about meeting, networking, and a sophistication in communications that is unprecedented in history.
Marilyn Ferguson, Author
The Aquarian Conspiracy
What We Have To Say For Ourselves
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What Others Have Said About Briarpatch
Historically, many Briarpatch members were engaged actors in the counterculture movement launched in the mid-20th century.
The following books offer brief, if questionable, commentary from the perspective of historians and pundits regarding the contribution of Briarpatch to the counter-culture movement.
None of these descriptions is completely accurate. As so often happens with history’s chroniclers, assumptions are made and conclusions are drawn that fail to match the lived experience of the actual members of the Network.
These efforts, while limited, are fascinating nonetheless, especially the parts they got “right.”
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Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry by Warren James Belasco, (pp. 101-2, 105, 128, 213, 249).
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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner, (p. 70).
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Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism by Andrew G. Kirk, (pp. 122, 123, 154).
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Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s by Sam Binkley, (pp. 198-203).
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New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future by Jeffrey Jacob, (pp. 160-168, 250 n. 2, 251 n. 9).
To expand upon the simple histories presented in those books, sharing stories of our own telling, you may want to check out the pages in the “What We Have To Say For Ourselves” section above.