John Schaeffer (environmentalist)

John Schaeffer was born November 9, 1949 in Los Angeles, California. He is an American environmentalist, author, entrepreneur, and the founder and president of Real Goods, a sustainable lifestyle catalog and Real Goods Solar, a solar electric system installation business in California and Colorado. He has been actively involved in promoting and popularizing renewable energy since the mid-1970s.

While attending the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s, Schaeffer was inspired by Stewart Brand and his colleagues who published the Whole Earth Catalog, particularly by the cover of the issue that featured a 1968 image of Earth taken from space by Apollo 8 Astronaut William Anders. Schaeffer became one of many young people rejecting the established values of the 1950s in favor of the communal living practices associated with the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The Whole Earth Catalog, which promoted access to tools, became the bible of this movement and the inspiration for Schaeffer's own catalog, the Real Goods catalog, which sold products useful for independent life in the commune. By the 1980s the Real Goods catalog had become the successor to the Whole Earth Catalog.

In 1971, Schaeffer graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and moved north to a 300-acre commune in Mendocino County, California. He embraced the self-reliant lifestyle that included growing his own food and building his own shelter. While he adopted the communal lifestyle, he never accepted that doing so meant he had to sacrifice modern amenities, including watching Saturday Night Live on TV. By hooking up a direct current television to the battery from his VW Bug, he was able to watch his favorite shows. Later, as solar electric panels developed for the space program became available commercially, he used those as the source to charge his storage battery.

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