Brunswick is an advisory firm specializing in critical issues and corporate relations www.brunswickgroup.com Critical moment The dawn of Earth’s new age
stronauts aboard apollo 17, Apollo 17 astronauts point of leverage on the world’s ills. … A en route to the Moon, looked back were 28,000 miles photograph would do it.” Brand made buttons from Earth when they on December 7, 1972 at the full Earth that said, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph snapped this famous Areflecting sunlight – and took a photo. photo. While NASA has of the whole Earth yet?” and distributed them Sometimes called “the Blue Marble,” this image since sent unmanned at universities. In 1967, NASA released the first from the last manned Moon mission is one of the probes deeper into satellite photo of the full Earth. the space – some of most famous of a handful of shots of the globe Brand immediately put that image on the cover them sending back taken during NASA missions. Together, they created photographs of our of his 1968 Whole Earth Catalog, a freewheeling, an important inflection point in human history, planet – this final lunar pre-internet database of tools and information that shifting our sense of identity and sparking an expedition was the last Apple founder Steve Jobs called “one of the bibles time a person was awareness of our responsibility to this fragile planet. of my generation.” A year later, peace activist John far enough away to Public demand for Earth images preceded these see the circumference McConnell proposed a holiday to raise awareness photos. In the early 1960s, with the Space Age still of the Earth of the environment; in 1970, the first Earth Day was in its infancy, visionary US engineer Buckminster celebrated. A global holiday today, the Earth Day Fuller was already lecturing students about the need flag still features the Blue Marble image above, with to visualize the Earth not as flat and infinite, but its characteristic view of the southern hemisphere. as a globe with finite resources. In 1965, the young In 1977, anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote US writer Stewart Brand launched a campaign to that “it was not until we saw the picture of the pressure NASA for photos of the planet. Earth, from the Moon, that we realized how small Brand saw that Fuller’s idea of “spaceship and how helpless this planet is – something that we Earth” could help steer humanity away from self- must hold in our arms and care for.” destruction. “But how to broadcast it?” he later carlton wilkinson is Editor of the Brunswick Review,
wrote. “It had to be broadcast, this fundamental in Brunswick’s New York office. GETTY GROUP, IMAGES UNIVERSAL PHOTOGRAPH:
86 brunswick review · issue 11 · 2017