Richard Harrington Raymond (November 30, 1923 – September 16, 2015), entrepreneur, publisher, and organizer, was a key figure in Northern California environmental and cultural developments. Some of his projects had a role in the Santa Clara Valley becoming a premier high-tech industrial district nicknamed the "Silicon Valley."
After his employment as an economist and land-use planner in the Stanford Research Institute in the early to mid-1960s, Raymond supported numerous ventures through the Portola Institute, a non-profit organization that he founded and presided over. His Institute supported developments in digital tech and personal-computer applications, explored potentials of computers in educational contexts, and published the Whole Earth Catalog. The WEC'''s 1971 edition met an unanticipated nationwide success; it not only sold over a million copies, but has been the only catalogue to receive a National Book Award, bestowed the following year in recognition of its readership, and also its unique concept and scope.
Raymond later co-founded the POINT Foundation to financially support the organization of environment- and community-related projects. The Foundation's many undertakings included sending Bay Area environmentalists to the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm, as well as supporting the founding of the Trust for Public Land. POINT also published the CoEvolution Quarterly which, a decade later, was expanded in scope as the Whole Earth Review.
The Briarpatch Network — a mentoring and mutual-aid system to support small-scale entrepreneurs — was a brainchild of Raymond's, launched in collaboration with a few of his friends.
In the 1980s and later, he worked in planning in the Pacific Northwest and leadership training in California’s corporate world.
Early life and education Raymond was born in Newark, Ohio, in 1923. His father worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While growing up, he moved with his parents through the Midwest. He graduated from Miami University and served in the U.S. Navy Air Corps during World War Two. Following the war, he earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Early career Generally known as Dick Raymond, while living in the Portland, Oregon area he gained experience in some start-up companies, which included his co-founding of Rayturn Machine, developer of the IrriGage irrigation-water testing device." Moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s, he worked in urban planning at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), in Menlo Park, California where his specialties included land use, recreational economics, and community development. At SRI, collaborating with strategic planner William S. Royce, one of Raymond's clients was the Century 21 Exposition (the 1962 Seattle World's Fair); Raymond convinced the organizers to plan buildings that would remain on the site as part of the city's heritage. While employed at SRI, among the colleagues he became close friends with was chemist Roger S. Stringham, who decades later became deeply involved with independent experimentation in 'low energy nuclear research' or LENR.
During his years with SRI, Raymond worked as a consultant to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. At Stanford, he met Stewart Brand a man in his mid twenties who was, at that time, an aspiring photographer and journalist. In 1963, Raymond was able to offer Brand a photography job on the reservation.
Raymond's professional life began a venturesome new chapter when he committed to launching a non-profit company; it's beginning, under the name Portola Institute, coincided with his departure from SRI in 1966. But overlapping with the ensuing shift, he led research into recreational-economic opportunities, under the authorship and publishing umbrella Richard Raymond Associates; the results surfaced as book-length reports, concentrating on the San Mateo County coastside (published 1967) and the Monterey Area (published 1969).
Under Raymond's direction, Portola published all the early editions of Whole Earth Catalog
Portola Institute Raymond had become enthusiastic about emerging possibilities in alternative education. Upon leaving SRI, he used his own funds and established the Portola Institute specifically to explore and support education projects." The Institute's office was located on Merrill Street, in Menlo Park.
Psychologist J. Richard Suchman, an associate professor at the University of Illinois in the 1960s, had done research on fostering investigation and critical thinking among elementary-school students. In line with Portola's objectives, during the late 1960s and early ’70s Suchman was an associate of the Institute. He organized the Ortega Park Teachers Laboratory,, which Portola funded.
By 1967 Raymond believed that computers could contribute a valuable ingredient to education, even though personal computing (microcomputer) equipment was at that time known to few people. Computer-application pioneer and author Robert Albrecht worked for a time with Portola, starting a "computer education division." Looking back a half-century, a 2018 article in The New Yorker described the Institute as "a gathering place and incubator of sorts for computer researchers, academics, career engineers, hobbyists, and members of the counterculture."
Close by Portola’s location was the Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center, where engineer Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, was employed. Due to the activities of Portola teammates Bob Albrecht and Stewart Brand, links developed between Portola and Engelbart’s projects .
University of Nevada history professor Andrew Kirk wrote that "The Portola Institute was one of the best examples of how creative communities were coalescing around a loose set of shared social and cultural goals in an effort to create new means for achieving personal and community success."
In Portola's early years, Stewart Brand conceived of something he thought of as an "access catalogue" to help people locate useful information and tools to facilitate translation of their ideas into reality. Raymond provided mentoring and connected Brand with other local advisors. With Brand investing some of his own money, supplemented by backing from Portola, a trial 64-page issue of the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) was produced in 1968. PBS's "American Masters" series called the publication of the WEC a milestone in the history of environmentalism.
A Cornell University online publication, in 2025, declared the "Whole Earth Catalog captured the spirit of America's first Earth Day celebration" — while preceding the inauguration of that globally recognized observance by nearly two years.
The author of a 1972 future-of-education policy paper from the Syracuse University Research Corporation understood, and valued, the Portola Institute’s praxis as being "based on the premise of learning for survival in a chaotic world".
In the mid-1970s, Dick Raymond expressed the idea that "wealth" had two aspects: the physical (the credit system, measured in money) and the non-physical (consisting of people, information, and ideas). He viewed the non-physical as having to do with problem solving. He felt this interpretation accorded with some writings recently published by economist Robert Theobald. Raymond was more concerned with the private sector than with governmental policies and programs; he espoused the idea that modern times called for American individuals to consider putting a little more weight on giving (in terms of the non-physical aspect of wealth) as compared with getting (or, as Raymond termed it, money-mindedness).
Portola's location provided space for the Media Access Center, which offered workshops and classes in the use of video technology. Among other projects Raymond supported via the Portola Institute were the Homebrew Computer Club, and the Integral Urban House. An article in the New York Times, opined that Raymond's Portola Institute "was Silicon Valley's first true incubator."
Portola also published Richard Merrill and Thomas Gage's technical Energy Primer: Solar, Water, Wind, and Biofuels, considered, for its time (1974), a fairly comprehensive introduction; Portola (in cooperation with Delta) published a second edition four years later.
The WECs, published through nearly three decades, spawned a number of descendants and permutations, often involving editors who'd had first-hand experience with the Catalogs; these publications included the Whole Earth Ecolog (1990) and the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog (1989, a CD Rom version, utilizing hypertext).
POINT Foundation The first large (448-page) edition of the Whole Earth Catalog was published in late 1971 with an arrangement between Portola and Random House, enabling an extremely wide circulation. This edition won acclaim the following year, when it received the 1972 National Book Award for Contemporary Affairs. The WEC's remarkable financial success ensuing from this point enabled Raymond and Stewart Brand to found the POINT Foundation. purposed with providing grants for promising ventures. One among the very many academic papers exploring the emergence of environmentalism mentions this: "Public concern over toxic contamination of our air, water, land and food and the startling loss of natural beauty and resources to development rose sharply in the 1960s and 1970s." Raymond and Brand were among those whose concerns aligned with this values-based public concern, rooted substantially in ecological science, and, in certain ways, they pioneered aspects of endeavors based on it. Raymond expressed a personal "premise" that "It's more rewarding to ask good questions than to acquire a collection of everybody's answers" — one of his guiding principles.
Raymond and Brand invited a group of board members with varied viewpoints but united by concern for the natural environment. Michael Phillips served as POINT's first president, and early board members included Bill English and Huey Johnson. Paul Hawken, who became successful as a futurist and one of the best known American writers on the subject of environment and business, spent two decades as an advisor or a member of the board. Phillips and Raymond brought their experience-based creative ideas around social capital with them.
In 1972, one of POINT's first large grants enabled a group of environmental scientists, activists, and Native Americans to attend the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. Huey Johnson, a POINT board member who was enabled to attend the Stockholm Conference, was influenced by his time wth the foundation to found a new park-creation and land-conservation advocacy organization, the Trust for Public Land. POINT funded him toward this objective subsequent to his serving on the board for two years. The Trust's projects took root nationwide. Other early POINT grant recipients included Steve Baer's solar-technology Zomeworks, and the research center for agriculture, aquaculture, and bioshelter headed by John Todd and Bill McLarney, on Cape Cod.
Portola Institute transferred the publishing of WECs to POINT in 1974. Among varied other projects, POINT published the eclectic CoEvolution Quarterly (CQ) starting in 1974, and Soft Technology (a 1978 book edited by James T. Baldwin and Stewart Brand). Conservation biologist Peter Warshall served as CQ's science and land-use editor. The POINT publications CoEvolution Quarterly and the Whole Earth Software Review, were merged in 1985, creating a new POINT offering, the Whole Earth Review.
Also in 1985 POINT launched The WELL, an early online discussion community. It represented an advance over the solely text-based Usenet that had been established in 1980; though launching during the dial-up era, The WELL displayed the capacity to enable threaded conversations, to quickly integrate into the World Wide Web, and to otherwise attentively revamp over time.