15 years after resurrecting and refining Mother Earth News, Cheryl Long is retiring, and they are looking for a new editor-in-chief, as follows:

“Topeka, Kansas-based Ogden Publications is looking for an experienced professional with passion for, and knowledge of, all things sustainable to lead its flagship media brand, Mother Earth News into the future. Ideally this person will have first-hand experience as a sustainable lifestyle community member as well as an impeccable record of innovation and leadership in the publishing business – or other closely related media area. But don’t let us define you too narrowly. If you have related experiences and the drive to lead a highly collaborative team devoted to creating and delivering the best, most relevant sustainable lifestyle content possible, we’d like to hear from you.

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From an article (long one) in yesterday’s The Observer, by Carole Cadwalladr, here. Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images

“…But then, it’s almost impossible, to flick through the pages of the Catalog and recapture its newness and radicalism and potentialities. Not least because the very idea of a book changing the world is just so old-fashioned. Books don’t change anything these days. If you want to start a revolution, you’d do it on Facebook. And so many of the ideas that first reached a mainstream audience in the Catalog – organic farming, solar power, recycling, wind power, desktop publishing, mountain bikes, midwife-assisted birth, female masturbation, computers, electronic synthesizers – are now simply part of our world, that the ones that didn’t go mainstream (communes being a prime example) rather stand out.…

“It changed the world, says Turner, in much the same way that Google changed the world: it made people visible to each other. And while the computer industry was building systems to link communities of scientists, the Catalog was a ‘vernacular technology” that was doing the same thing.…

“John Markoff, who wrote What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, says, simply: ‘Stewart was the first one to get it. He was the first person to understand cyberspace. He was the one who coined the term personal computer. And he influenced an entire generation, including an entire generation of technologists’.…

“Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, tells me how he first came across the Catalog when he was still in high school ‘and it changed my life. But then it changed everybody’s life. It inspired me not to go to college but to go and try and live out my own life. It was like being given permission to invent your own life. That was what the Catalog did. It was called “access to tools” and it gave you tools to create your own education, your own business, your own life’.…”

Sent us by Vic Long

From Megan Paris on New Year’s day:

“Mayan priests and spiritual guides in Guatemala have said, “The end of the period of the Fifth Sun (which happened on Dec. 21, 2012)
will usher in a new era, in which there will be positive changes in every respect for humanity.

   A Mayan era consisted of 13 cycles, each named B’aktun, and concluded every 5,125 years.
According to the Mayan calendar, Dec. 21, 2012 was the end of the current era, which began in 3114 BC, and the beginning of a new era.0   If you do the math, I think we are in pretty good shape to go…”

Yesterday late afternoon, when an almost-full moon had risen over the ridge, Lew informed Rick and me that if you have somone hold a quarter up and view it from a distance of 8 feet, it will be the same size as the full moon. Sure enough it worked.

In the Chinese Zodiac, this is the year of the Hare. Next year, ta-da! — The Dragon. Who knows, maybe things will get kicked up a notch. Maybe things need to get kicked up a notch.