“We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” wrote Stewart Brand in the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, echoing anthropologist Edmund Leach, “Isn’t it about time that we understood our divinity? Science offers us total mastery over our environment and over our destiny”.

Just as the Whole Earth Catalog tried to provide “access to tools”, each week we find knowledgeable amateurs who have designed their destinies by building their own homes, growing their own food, creating new vehicles and crafting their lives to show how each of us is truly capable of shaping our own environment.

Like Stewart Brand, who wrote of the shift from “hierarchy to heterarchy (“Heterarchy” was coined by early cybernetician Warren McCulloch at MIT to designate networked structures in which the center of control constantly moves to wherever is most relevant and useful)”, we eschew politics and instead believe in the power of basic tools and skills.

As homage to our knowledgeable creators:

• Lloyd Kahn: Shelter Publications, The Whole Earth Catalog (Steve Job’s Google of the ’60s)
• Graham Hill: LifeEdited, Treehugger (6 rooms into 1: morphing apartment)
• Derek “Deek” Diedricksen, Relax Shacks (Tiny houses polymath)
• Jay Shafer, Four Lights Houses (Tiny house pioneer)
• Brad “Darby” Kittel, Tiny Texas Houses (Willy Wonka of tiny houses)
• Chris Robinson, Tsunamiball (Extreme weather house boat)
• Matthew Hofman, HofArc (Airstream: vintage aircraft shells as luxury homes on wheels)
• Austin Hay (Teen tiny house builder Austin Hay finishes dorm on wheels)
• Alek Lisefski, The Tiny Project (Iowa couple pick CA landscape with tiny homeoffice on wheels)
• Danny Kim, Lit Motors (2-wheeled untippable EV gyrocar from SF automaker startup)
• The teens of Tribe Awesome (Teens create automated aeroponics garden kit with NASA tech)
• John Wells, Field Lab (From Gotham to isolated, code & debt-free West Texas estate)
• Luke Iseman: Boxouse, Growerbot (Containertopia: cargo container tiny home town on Oakland lot)
• Christian Salvati, Marengo Structures (Stacked cargo containers in New Haven’s “LEGO” apartments)
• Zach Rothholz, Chairigami (Origami-style cardboard furniture for dorms, urban nomads)
• Tom Duke, Earthship Biotecture (Earthships: self-sustaining homes for a post-apocalyptic US?)
• Gary Zuker, Place Patterns (Austin coder builds timeless cob home using precise patterns)
• Menthé’ (Art of living in a Dordogne tiny mud home with living roof)
• Marc Sirvin (Paris’ maison-stairwell stacks 4 floors in 25 sqm (269 sq ft))
• Dee Williams, Portland Alternative Dwellings (Micro-homesteading in WA with 10K microhome (84 sq ft) in friends’ yard)
• Jenine Alexander (DIY home for less than $3500)