Point Foundation (environment)

For other uses, see Point Foundation (disambiguation).

POINT Foundation

Company type	Nonprofit
Founder	Stewart Brand and Dick Raymond
Headquarters	San Francisco, California , United States of America

The POINT Foundation was a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco and founded by Stewart Brand and Dick Raymond.[1] POINT was established in 1971, for the role of distributing funds deriving from profits of the Whole Earth Catalogs to innovative and promising ventures.[1]

The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), was an American magazine and product catalog.[2]

The foundation's board members were united by concern for the natural environment. Besides Brand and Raymond, board members included computer engineer Bill English, who became the co-inventor of the computer mouse, and Huey Johnson, former western-regional director of the Nature Conservancy.[1] One of POINT's first large grants, in 1972, enabled a group of environmental scientists, activists, and Native Americans to attend the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm.[3]: 57 

POINT took over publication of the WEC from its original publisher, the Portola Institute, by 1980, when the publication had swelled to a 452-page edition. As well, the foundation published a number of mostly periodical offshoots of the WEC.[1] POINT was also a co-owner of an early online discussion platform titled The WELL.[4]

Notes

1. Kirk, Andrew G (2007). Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press. pp. 120–122. ISBN 978-0700615452.
2. Turner, Fred (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. p. 294. ISBN 0-226-81741-5.
3. Brand, Stewart (2009). Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (first ed.). New York: Viking. ISBN 9780670021215.
4. Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. p. 142.

External links

• The future of POINT: a growing dialog - the POINT Foundation