While Earth Day now gets lost in the chaos of all the other awareness days and months, the early environmental movement used it very effectively. In this interview Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand talks about this campaign to make public the now famous first full image of earth published by NASA in 1972. Wisconsin governor Gaylord Nelson focused on creating the first Earth Day as noted in this history.
Brand's life fascinates me for his role on Ken Kesey's magic bus, his founding of the Whole Earth Catalogue, his life on a houseboat in Sausalito in San Francisco Bay, and now his latest venture, The Long Now foundation. This organization is trying to help us understand the world across incomprehensible time scales.
This year NASA is celebrating Earth Day with the #GlobalSelfie project. I hadn't heard of it until I did a bit of research for this post, so I don't know if it's really working. And while crowdsourcing is amazing, I'm less sure about selfies.
As we move toward your final projects and the end of this class, I'm weighing the balance between hope and despair in these conversations. Climate change conversations tend to produce fatalism, and this bleakly hilarious viral video w/ 8 million views tries to make humor out of it. Yet this seems to be a long way from the 60's hope that an image could change how we think about our relationship to the planet. As I write this on a bright spring morning, everything seems momentarily right with the world. I believe these questions are the most important ones we face.
I hope this term has increased your appreciation for them. We're all going to have trouble doing homework today as the pull of the sun and warmth and first signs of spring call us back after the long, cold winter. Who couldn't love these days? I want to believe we act more out of love than fear, and I hope we can enjoy spring and consider these ideas in our final days and projects.
Brand's life fascinates me for his role on Ken Kesey's magic bus, his founding of the Whole Earth Catalogue, his life on a houseboat in Sausalito in San Francisco Bay, and now his latest venture, The Long Now foundation. This organization is trying to help us understand the world across incomprehensible time scales.
This year NASA is celebrating Earth Day with the #GlobalSelfie project. I hadn't heard of it until I did a bit of research for this post, so I don't know if it's really working. And while crowdsourcing is amazing, I'm less sure about selfies.
As we move toward your final projects and the end of this class, I'm weighing the balance between hope and despair in these conversations. Climate change conversations tend to produce fatalism, and this bleakly hilarious viral video w/ 8 million views tries to make humor out of it. Yet this seems to be a long way from the 60's hope that an image could change how we think about our relationship to the planet. As I write this on a bright spring morning, everything seems momentarily right with the world. I believe these questions are the most important ones we face.
I hope this term has increased your appreciation for them. We're all going to have trouble doing homework today as the pull of the sun and warmth and first signs of spring call us back after the long, cold winter. Who couldn't love these days? I want to believe we act more out of love than fear, and I hope we can enjoy spring and consider these ideas in our final days and projects.
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