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Adam Rome revisits five prescient classics that first made sustainability a public issue in the 1960s and 1970s.

This paper is a short survey of the work of Ignacy Sachs - one of the pioneers of structuralist development economics and an outstanding economist dedicated to environmental economics. Sachs is Polish and a disciple of Michael Kalecki, but he is also a Brazilian and a French, given his strong ties with these two countries. He knows the importance of markets in the coordination of the economy, but, as a developmental economist, he attributes a key role to economic planning. Only through the deliberate action of the state it will be possible to achieve economic growth, reduction of inequalities, and protection of the environments - only through deliberate action way men and women will be able to conduct the Spaceship Earth to economic, social and environmental development and assure a decent work to all.

The diffusion of both paradigms of sustainable environmental practice and sustainable peace practice has quickened in the last thirty to forty years, but has occurred unevenly across time and space, across regions, and even within individual countries and subregions of countries. Some disciplines have been more hospitable to one or the other. In large part, until recently, environmental studies has not found peace issues relevant, nor peace studies environmental issues. The beginning of the coming together of these paradigms and their practice is a significant change. This chapter examines the evolution of the separate paradigms of sustainable environment and sustainable peace, and their gradual but as yet incomplete engagement with each other. It also examines texts at the level of global governance, particularly at the United Nations, with respect to the same issues, asking how and why UN and other documents and conceptualizations in the 1970s have increasingly begun to reflect the linkages between these issues.

Circulation has long been present in China through the ancient theory of the five elements. The newer circular economy concept can be traced back to the rise of environmentalism. The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth written by American economist Kenneth Boulding in 1966 presents early circular economy theories. Boulding believed that “the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system.” The theory sees pollution as residual resources that have not been used rationally. Since resource and environmental problems are caused by development, they must be resolved by replacing the traditional economic development pattern with a circular economic pattern to protect the Earth from destruction. The circular economy theory prompted earlier research on environmental resource issues, but various obstacles prevented significant progress at the time. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that the circular economy concept finally garnered enough attention from governments and the public as global environmental problems intensified and sustainable development grew in popularity. British environmental economists David Pearce and Kerry Turner first formally used the term “circular economy” in the book Economics of Natural Resources and the Environment in 1990. Germany drafted circular economy and waste management legislation in 1996, which was the first use of the term “circular economy” in national legal texts. Some developed countries have created a new, circular economy development pattern to increase environmental benefits and reduce environmental pollution, which includes planning industrial development in accordance with ecological theories. This pattern has seen considerable success in Germany, the United States, Japan, and other developed countries, where a circular economy has gradually increased in popularity in the recent years. Most developed countries have regarded a circular economy as an important approach to sustainable development. A growing number of government officials, scholars, and entrepreneurs are studying circular economy theories, offering increasingly diverse and mature options.

The Second Earth Summit to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 2012 will coincide with the ratification by the International Commission on Stratigraphy of the concept of a new geological era, the anthropocene. This term emphasizes the acknowledgement of the increasing impact of human intervention on the future of the Spaceship Earth. Humanity is thus at a crossroads and we need, more than ever, to abide by the principle of responsibility. We must mobilize ourselves to learn how to speedily mitigate deleterious climate change without losing sight of the urgent need to reduce the abyssal social disparities. The immediate imperative is to propose long-term development strategies to go hand in hand with an aggiornamento of long-term democratic planning. Such strategies must rely on two pillars: food security and energy security. Last but not least, the United Nations ought to take advantage of the forthcoming Earth Summit to set in motion a global transition towards a socially inclusionary and environmentally sustainable path.

This study critically surveys the environmental thinking and design philosophy Of R. Buckminster Fuller by revisiting two of his major theoretical works, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and Utopia or Oblivion. It highlights Fuller’s fascination with economic efficiency and environmental justice in his own pursuit of the practices of industrial design, urban planning, and vernacular engineering. In addition, the analysis stresses how the optimism and energy that Fuller gave to rethinking environmentalism so radically during the 1960s are vital qualities that contemporary green thinkers need to rekindle in their works today.

Little analysis exists of the interaction between the two most influential modern science-based social movements: space exploration and environmentalism. Since 1970 the term “Spaceship Earth” has been in common usage and the notion that the world requires careful stewardship has been acknowledged. Yet NASA had comparatively little to do with this important process of conceptual change for decades. It was meteorologists and oceanographers, among others, who established new government agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to pioneer areas like climatology. This paper examines how NASA’s view of itself as a “space” agency long underplayed Earth as a part of the Solar System. Conceptual conflicts continue, to the detriment of political and public support for space.

Although global environmental politics (GEP), like other areas of international relations, should be theorized, no single unified theory of GEP is in the offing, nor should be. Nevertheless, assuming that the ultimate societal goal is ecological and social sustainability, at least three elements are necessary in that theorizing: starting points, metaphors, and normative content. The primary starting points for GEP include concern for irreversible diminution of the earth's life support systems, the consequences of ever-increasing throughput of material and energy, and the injustices of uneven distribution. Inappropriate metaphors of the environment include the machine and the laboratory; appropriate ones include spaceship earth and a watershed. Appropriate norms include ecological capping and zero waste. Finally, the theorizing effort needs to be explicit about the questions being asked. Are they about environmental improvement or sustainability? Are they about easing the environmental burdens of the powerless or easing the adjustment costs of the powerful?

Buckminster Fuller’s experiences in the Navy became a model for his ecological design projects and suggestions for the global management of ‘Spaceship Earth’. Inspired by technocratic ideas of the 1930s, Fuller envisaged, in the 1970s, an elitist world without politics, in which designers were at the helm, steering the planet out of its environmental crises.

Kenneth Boulding was a renaissance intellectual with varied interests, as presented in this book. Borrowing Robert Heilbroner’s phrase, Boulding was a worldly philosopher, but also a moral philosopher. Boulding did not work within one school of economic thought. He was always a disciple of Keynes, but he also branched out into institutional economics, behavioral economics, ecological economics, Post Keynesian economics, and others. Boulding was critical of neoclassical economics early in his career. For example, he admonished neoclassical economists for adopting a positivist approach to economic analysis and ignoring the normative elements of economic issues. Today, ethics in economics is a hotly debated issue, and there is still significant resistance to recognizing that economic inquiries are not value-free. As early as the 1930s, Boulding (1932; 1934) dismissed neoclassical economics’ theories of utility maximization, profit maximization, and marginal productivity. Boulding saw himself as a modern political philosopher who was primarily concerned with the well-being of people (humanomics). Boulding’s methods went against the grain of mainstream/neoclassical economics, and arguably still do today. In part, because of Boulding’s nonconformity and concern for social issues, much of his work had originality and emotion. But stepping back and looking at Boulding’s entire research output reveals two areas where he was especially prescient and original: First, his work on peace and conflict resolution; and second, his metaphorical Spaceship Earth as an argument for sustainability and controlling rampant consumption and economic growth.

Since the 1990s, indigenous issues have come to occupy a consistent place in the Global Conservation Movement. In 2000 the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) published a position paper entitled Indigenous and Traditional People of the World and Ecoregion Conservation, which posited significant overlap between biodiversity and cultural diversity on a global scale. The most recent World Parks Congress (2003) was attended by 120 indigenous representatives. Optimistic observers have heralded these events as a convergence of the Indigenous Peoples’ Movement and Global Environmentalism. More cynical observers argue that it is an opportunistic political move by indigenous leaders and their western supporters to take advantage of conservation, or conversely a move by large conservation NGOs to present a ‘people friendly’ facade to capture larger sums of donor money. This article outlines the global historical and political trends that have brought together conservationists and indigenous peoples in the global are...

This article explores how and why imagined and real environments in space came to serve as models for ecological design of earthly landscapes and buildings in the 1970s. It claims that life in space came to represent the peaceful, rational, and environmentally friendly alternative to the destructive, irrational, ecological crisis down on Earth. Spaceship management aimed narrowly at the biological survival of astronauts, an ethic which also came to dominate ecological design proposals on board Spaceship Earth. The result was a design programme which was at the expense of a wider aesthetic and social understanding of the human condition. The article reviews the work of leading ecological designers of the period, such as Ian L. McHarg, John Todd and the New Alchemists, Alexander Pike and John Frazer, Brenda and Robert Vale, Ken Yeang, Phil Hawes, and others. It situates their projects in the perspective of ecological research methods of the period and puts forward an understanding of their thinking in the c...

Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment Museum of the City of New York, New York 27 September 2011–5 February 2012 Two projects by Kevin Roche, the Oakland Museum of California (1961–68) and the Ford Foundation Headquarters, New York (1963–68), received accolades from contemporary critics and continue to stand out today as paradigmatic examples of the phenomenon this exhibition’s curator, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, calls “architecture as environment.” A community’s sense of identity, Roche’s designs for each project suggested, might be framed by its collective relationship with a garden or gardens. On a metaphorical level, the designs poetically highlighted the beauty of the natural environment at a time when “environmentalism” began its move to center stage in politics and the public conversation about the future, as demonstrated by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring of 1962 and Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth of 1969.1 Recently on view at the Museum of the City of New York, Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment is a condensed version of the exhibition originally shown at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery 7 February–6 May 2011, a venue distinguished architecturally by spaciousness, height, and natural light. At the Museum of the City of New York, by contrast, the exhibition occupies two confined spaces, an entrance vestibule followed by a main gallery extending the full length of a narrow, windowless room. At the start of the exhibition in New York, the visitor is greeted with a brief introduction to Kevin Roche’s career. Roche left Ireland for America in 1948 to study with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and in 1950 he began work with Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. There he assisted with the General Motors Technical Center, and after Saarinen’s death in 1961, he oversaw the completion of the CBS Building, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, and Bell Telephone Laboratories. In 1964 he became a United States citizen, and in …

Assume that you are reading this book review from the comforts of your office chair or some stationary position. How fast are you moving? Come on, quickly close your eyes and guess without peaking at the answer in the next paragraph! When I ask this question of my students, the typical response is zero miles an hour, which is the wrong answer. When our bodies are fully stationary, we are actually travelling at approximately 67,000 miles an hour as spaceship earth orbits the sun. Simultaneously, we are rotating on the earth's axis at 1.000 miles an hour. Yet, we don't feel dizzy, do we? Next, how many breaths do you take in a day? Come on, guess again! Several years ago I participated in a week long silent Buddhist meditation retreat where we counted our breaths for several hours and then extrapolated the amount over 24 hours. The average rate was 18,000 breaths a day, with a range from 15,000 to 21,000. In order to take one breath, many bodily functions must harmoniously interact. Otherwise, we die. How many of those breaths are you

Concern over the earth’s limited resources is sometimes linked with the dynamic idea of spaceship earth. At least as far back as the biblical legend of Noah’s Ark, voyagers have chosen various means of protecting themselves. Noah’s boatbuilding and rescue operation was designed to avoid the flooding that, according to the Bible, accompanied the Earth’s creation.

Discussion of schools and schooling typically focus on their role in society. How do they serve as a civilising medium? How do they integrate young people into the prevailing norms and values of society? How do they assist in the creation of citizens? How do they arouse learners’ capacity for thinking? And how do they prepare them for an unknown future on spaceship earth?

A great deal of nonsense has been written and said about globalization in recent years. Some has come from the political right, some from the political left, some from business and political leaders, some from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and people in the streets. The term globalization has become so slippery, so ambiguous, so subject to misunderstanding and political manipulation that it should be banned from further use, at least until there is precise agreement as to its meaning. In particular, those involved in economic and political policymaking and debate must clarify their meaning and their messages in this sphere if they are to be taken seriously. The term globalization confuses two discrete phenomena. The first is the shrinkage in space and in time that the world has experienced in consequence of the technological revolutions in transport, communications, and information processing. Although these developments have not affected all countries or people uniformly, the world has for many become a much smaller place. References to our "global village" or "spaceship Earth" or, more prosaically, "the global economy" capture the reality that actions and decisions in one part of the world have greater impact on other parts of humanity and do so with greater speed than was experienced in years past. The behavior of the world's interrelated twenty-four-hours-a-day financial markets typifies this trend. This new globalization has bred more detailed and up-to-date knowledge of people's activities. But income and wealth imbalance have also created totally unbalanced information flows and what C. P. Snow has described as the "ultimate obscenity": the rich sitting in the comfort of their living rooms watching other people starve on color television. This new technology-driven globalization is the new reality to which we all are trying to adapt. And there truly is no escape from it. The second usage of globalization relates to matters of human policy choice-the degree to which one mindlessly submits oneself to surrounding external forces. Individuals, firms, governments, and NGOs all have choices. While globalization in the first meaning is a fact, and it may constrain some choices, it does not totally foreclose them in the way that many imply. One cannot argue--in the sense of being for or against globalization--with globalization as fact, although one can like it or dislike it. To equate globalization with external liberalization and full reliance on global "marketplace magic," however, is logical confusion and quite misleading. It is certainly convenient for those pushing an external liberalization agenda to be able to depict it as an inescapable concomitant of the globalization fact. But globalization (the fact) and external liberalization are logically quite distinct. Globalization (the fact) will proceed more quickly if all countries externally liberalize-that is, open to the world-their goods, services, and factor markets, including their labor markets. Liberalization enthusiasts, as they preach the virtues of full and free mobility of capital, are generally reticent about discussing the latter. The trend toward external liberalization in recent decades has undoubtedly accelerated the pace of globalization. This recent association of externa l liberalization policies with the technology-driven fact of globalization has contributed to the deplorable logical and terminological confusion to which I have referred. External liberalization policies involve political, economic, and social choices. The effects of liberalization and opening up are not agreed and uniform for all places and times. [1] The challenge--both at the national and global levels-is, through conscious policy choices, to make the new globalized system work for maximum human welfare. The task before us is to make globalization functional, to civilize it. There are few, if any, reputable developing country analysts or governments that question the positive potential roles of international trade or capital inflow in economic growth and overall development. …

Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map (Figure 3.1) first surfaced as a sketch in 1927 entitled “One-Town World.” A decade and a half later, in 1943, Life magazine published a refined version of it called the “Air Ocean World map.” By 1954 the Dymaxion Air Ocean World map had become the full expression of what Fuller referred to as “Spaceship Earth” (Marks, 1960, p. 50). As it circulated, one of Fuller’s biographers explains, “many geographic facts, not usually observed, became dramatically apparent” (ibid., p. 50). The final version of the map represents the planet as an island in one ocean without any visible distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the land areas and without splitting any continents. It is relevant to the mapping of orbit for several reasons. First, it exemplifies an experimental and conceptual approach to the mapping of earth that challenges methods and assumptions of traditional cartography, which tend to reinforce elements that divide societies, obscuring the relational patterns emerging from processes of globalization. Second, it foregrounds principles of contiguity and integration by presenting the earth, air and oceans as continuous domains, and in so doing implies that change in one inevitably affects conditions in another. Third, it became a template for the demonstration and analysis of the unequal distribution and use of world energy resources, and thus articulated broader global political, economic and environmental concerns (ibid., pp. 50-53). Finally, the map changed the ways in which the public thought about the world as well as the ways in which geographers thought about mapping it.

Most environmentalists champion the idea that spaceship Earth has finite and nonrenewable resources. The exponential increase in population suggests that nonrenewable resources should become depleted and hence more valuable on the open market. Historically however, the open market shows that nonrenewable resources actually have become more abundant and cheaper. A bet between Paul Ehrlich, an ecologist, and Julian Simon, an economist, rekindles a debate on the future of world resources. By posing as either doomsters (Ehrlich's view) or boomsters (Simon's view), students can reenact this debate and find their own answers to the future of world resources.

This chapter discusses how to see and understand complex environmental phenomena by focusing on the finite size of the Earth and its limited availability of natural resources. Spaceship Earth is complex, and running it properly is much easier said than done. One reason for this is that it requires an enormous amount of knowledge and creativity to understand the relationships between human activities and the environment. Another reason is that, although humans are attentive when it comes to short-term profits, they are not so good at thinking and taking action on matters that may affect the distant future, on timescales longer than an individual life. Thus, it is necessary to convince people on matters of this type by presenting things to them in easy-to-understand terms, explaining the need to act and the benefits of taking action, and providing an accounting of advantages and disadvantages. To help with these explanations a variety of model-based computer simulations, cost–benefit analyses, and other studies have been developed, but not everyone will be convinced even with such tools. This is why, more than ever, there is a need today for environmental systems studies that evaluate the issues from a variety of perspectives.

This chapter presents a perspective to view the global ecosystem as a complex system that is undergoing continuous changes and sometimes abrupt transitions, subject to the law of thermodynamics and the law of evolution. The global ecological system is a complex system created through interactions between a constantly changing climate and biodiversity. By the ways in which they regulate themselves to these changes, other changes occur at the genetic level, by which the special characteristics of life forms either develop or disappear, with the result being evolution. There is neither good nor bad in evolution caused by the forces of the natural world, but human activities are having enormous impacts on the processes of evolution. We must be reminded, however, of the metaphor of the lions, which may seem to be dominant but will die out if they eat all the deer they prey upon. Nobody knows if we humans will end up as a fleeting presence on a page in the history of evolution in the global ecological system, but we are a dangerous presence that is risking a destructive knockout blow to the other species sharing Spaceship Earth with us which make us biological diversity.

I. Abstract STRONAUT Joseph Allen recently made the observation that exploring the Moon in the 1960s was never really about going to the Moon. ―With all the arguments, pro and con, for going to the Moon,‖ he commented, ―no one suggested that we should do it to look at the Earth. But that may in fact be the one important reason.‖ This observation serves as the entree point for this essay that lays out a long range research project exploring the manner in which Western Civilization has conceived of the Earth as an entity and as a home. This essay represents a sneak peek of a new book project now underway. The study will begin with ancient ideas about the Earth as a sphere or as a flat body and trace this theme to the present, as well as the themes of hollow Earth, Spaceship Earth, and Gaia. It will then explore the manner in which scientists came to understand the size and shape of the Earth and its geodesy. It also offers a discussion of the nature of Earth maps and their evolution over time, with all of the attendant issues associated with them, privileging Europe and North America over other regions, etc. Finally, it pursues the place of imagery from space and its contribution to the public understanding of how Western Civilization envisions this planet and its place in the universe. II. Introduction While researching the history of space-based instruments in understanding the Earth as a system, I came to appreciate as never before the manner in which the Earth has been understood by humans from the ancients to the present. Of course, perceptions of a spherical Earth date back to Greek philosophy in the sixth century BCE, and Hellenistic astronomy established beyond serious doubt this planet‘s spherical shape. It was accepted by all those who were educated within Western Civilization by at least the medieval era. Maps, some of them enormously complex and sophisticated, tried to depict what was known about the planet and to a greater or lesser degree communicated this to the literate of the civilization. As humanity explored more fully, especially after the European expansion that began in the fifteenth century, more comprehensive data began to coalesce around the idea of the Earth as a spherical planet like other bodies seen beyond Earth. With the scientific revolution this perception grew deeper and more refined with the result emerging in the latter twentieth century of the Earth as a system; and a new perspective on this planet becoming apparent to the population of the world.

This paper offers some perspectives about the shifting place and status of values in education as globalisation affects the activities, participants and stakeholders in learning and teaching. The substance and inculcation of values is both explicit and implicit and framed through factors such as religion, nationalism, capitalism and technology. A constructivist lens helps understand how values are perceived and acted on in the personal and social contexts of learning and teaching. The ideas of Korzybski (1931), Kelly (1955), McLuhan (1962) Schutz (1964) among others illustrate the usefulness and durability of constructivist understandings in the contemporary context of values in education.

This paper explores the convergence of anthropology and ecology in the recent work of Peter Sloterdijk. Firstly, it is argued that Sloterdijk proposes an important new interpretation of Heideggerian Gelassenheit for which I propose the English word `relief '. The concept of relief rests on the substitution of ontological difference by what I propose to call 'natal' or 'natural' difference. Secondly, I will develop the significance of these concepts in relation to complexity theory and cybernetics, focusing on a key subject in the Spharen trilogy - insulation - and on a key subject in Sloterdijk's essays on Heidegger - homeotechnics. Thirdly, it will be shown how the concepts of relief and natal difference can be further developed into an ethico-aesthetic paradigm for experimentation with new technologies, based on a reinterpretation of the Gestell as total work of art. Finally, by relating Sloterdijk's work to that of Michel Serres, it will be demonstrated why, for Sloterdijk, this paradigm finds its exemplary modal in the spaceship.

The Historical Foundations of World Order: The Tower and the Arena is long - 844 pages, not including the index - but a reading of this seminal work will leave the reader limp with the sheer audacity and astounding breadth of the mind and vision of Douglas Millar Johnston. To have a history of international law written at the start of the 21st century is rare enough. To have one written by a polymath like Douglas is a gift from the gods. As Douglas properly notes in his Introduction, histories of international law are not thick on the ground in the 21st century, and most of the histories that are gathering dust on law library shelves around the world verge on the unreadable. One of the key challenges facing the future of international law is that of managing the Arctic region of Spaceship Earth, a favourite subject of Douglass. Keywords: Douglas Millar Johnston; international law

In this chapter methods for analysing the physical interactions between the economy and the environment will be discussed. The historic roots of such methods lie in the 19th century and go back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who used the term 'metabolism' (Stoffwechsel) to imply a relationship of mutual material exchange between man and nature, an interdependence beyond the widespread notion of man simply 'utilising nature'. Like many of his contemporary economists in the mid-19th century, John Stuart Mill linked this concept of metabolism to the idea of a 'stationary state', a form of economic development with no physical growth. This fi rst phrasing of 'sustainable development' was then forgotten for some time. It was not until the 1960 of the 20th century that the physical interactions between the economy and the environment again formed a basis for scientifi c thought, induced by the upcoming acknowledgement of the side effects of economic growth. Thus the economist Kenneth Boulding was worried that a 'cowboy economy' might not be compatible with 'Spaceship Earth', and outlined a coming change to a 'spaceman economy' that was suitably cautious in its dealings with fi nite resources. At the end of the 1960s, the physicist Robert Ayres and economist Allen Kneese laid the basis for a physical model, for the United States, of the material and energy fl ows between the economy and the environment, proposing to view environmental pollution as a mass balance problem for the entire economy.

The flash of the atomic bomb dispelled the darkness that provided cover for the illusion that science was an ethically neutral enterprise. In the light of the flash it was also revealed that while man as a scientist grew into a giant, as a student of ethics he gradually shrank into a dwarf (Jaki, 1978). For the first time in his history, man, whom Pascal described as a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but, nevertheless, a thinking reed, (1947, p. 83) now has at his disposal a scientific tool with which he could extinguish all life on this Spaceship Earth. The likelihood that he may do so is well within the realm of possibility. After all, men are imperfect, greedy and ambitious. It was also the same Pascal who wrote: "All men naturally hate one another. Concupiscence has been somehow or other pressed into the service of the public; but this is only a sham and a false picture of charity, for in reality it is but hate" (1947, p 89). Because of man's imperfections, his concupiscence, rules of law, of morality, of etiquette even, have been established in order to place restrictions on man's freedom to act for the sake of the greater good. All these restrictions may be "summed up in the word civilization, which through the underlying notion of civis, reveals its real origin" (Ortega, 1932, p. 75). In this way, man has endeavored to create his own particular culture, to provide an ambience within which man is free to cultivate himself, to reduce his imperfections, to strive to perfect himself. In this essay, perfection is understood not only in its moral sense, but also in its ontological sense. That is, it is concerned with the full reality of humanity, of human existence and in reason is sought "the ground for the excellence, perfection, and full reality of human existence" (Messner, 1949, p. 16).

After a burst of interest in environment news after the first Earth Day in 1970, the number of reporters assigned to cover environment news declined sharply. Today, there are fewer reporters on such beats than in 1970, raising questions about newspapers' commitment to such coverage.

Environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s believed that they had lived to see Thomas Malthus’s principle of population (that population outpaces food supplies) become reality. They said that the world’s resources, including its fresh water, arable land, oil reserves, forests, and open spaces, groaned under the stress of unprecedented human numbers and economic growth. In the years before Garrett Hardin published “The Tragedy of the Commons,” the essay from which this excerpt is taken, humans left the earth’s atmosphere for the first time, and they photographed a lonely blue planet (see page 3). The photograph offered a new image of terrestrial fragility and a new metaphor: Spaceship Earth. Hardin added another element: Competition to accumulate wealth results in resource depletion, because no one has a logical motive not to consume. The essay is a statement of environmental doom, driven by the same human nature that Malthus so feared. A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero. (The case of perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial variant that need not be discussed.) When this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind? Specifically, can Bentham’s goal of “the greatest good for the greatest number” be realized?1

On the face of it, no issues are better suited to treatment in terms of globalisation than environmental ones since leading environmental threats appear physically or biologically global. There is only one Earth, only one, interconnecting biosphere. During the late 1980s and 1990s, the prime focus in international environmental problems settled on successive global issues, first on ozone depletion and on the atmospheric circulation of POPs (persistent organic pollutants), and then on biodiversity protection and global climate change. The label of ‘global environmental issues’ came to feature prominently in research agendas and environmental action programmes throughout the Northern world. At the same time, these countries’ inhabitants have repeatedly been offered new identities as citizens of planet Earth. Novel imagery has proposed that the world’s population is the crew of spaceship Earth. Voluntary organisations have offered us the chance to become Friends of the Earth (FoE) or supporters of the World Wide Fund for Nature. We are invited to put the EarthFirst! These verbal images have been reinforced with innumerable pictorial variations on the Earth seen from space: Planet Earth, a brilliant blue and green jewel, hangs isolated in the vastness of the Universe.

I was taken with the metaphor of the “trim tab” in the editorial about Linda Rosenberg's perspectives about health care reform (Merrens & Drake, 2013); so when asked to comment on it from the persp...

This paper will discuss policy and institutional issues that have emerged during the author's half a century experience as a State Water Administrator and senior professional. Issues which will be discussed include: Federal-State Relationships, Education and Careers, Organization, Public Participation, Toxics Integration, Values and Water Law. Much of my experience came from the field of water quality management- drinking water protection and water pollution control primarily in my home state of Pennsylvania from 1957 to 1983 but also in other parts of the country and the world. Water quality management represents only a small part of what we call environmental management. Because chronologically it came first it was a pioneering effort and set a pattern for those that followed, it provided important experience and set a pattern for other endeavors in environmental management. It is therefore not inappropriate for one who has his roots in water quality management to attempt to expand his view and contemplate questions, and decisions that may present themselves in the years to come. This paper is written with an understanding that the world is still in the formative stages of learning how to deal with complex scientific institutional social and economic questions that confront us in trying to maintain the quality of life and beauty of the globe - of our "spaceship earth" as Adelai Stevenson so aptly called it.

The present global political situation is serious. It desperately invites public awareness and concern. Local solutions to global problems are of no use except when they can raise public awareness sufficiently to expand and become global. Public awareness should raise a mass-movement that may stimulate. The first thing that it should stimulate is more research. This requires that the leaders of the movement should acknowledge our ignorance of operationally feasible solutions. The movement has to seek a comprehensive view through public critical discussions and efficient means for the dissemination of minimal scientific literacy. The movement must be educational and democratic and it must encourage individual autonomy. It should develop ideas in a combination of imaginative propaganda and proper research. Philosophy can contribute significantly to this by assisting the rise of a comprehensive view. Academic research should attend to practical problems. This already happens to some extent, but in a manner that is not sufficiently comprehensive. The key is grassroots education that should enable participants in it to compel appropriate institutions to discuss global problems and enact legislation towards their global solutions.

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew ! (Marshall Mcluhan). Understanding the emergence of new zoonotic agents requires knowledge of pathogen biodiversity in wildlife, human-wildlife interactions, anthropogenic pressures on wildlife populations, and changes in society and human behavior [1].

With all due respect to Rod Serling, for your consideration, you are an unsuspecting traveler on the spaceship Earth. Suddenly, you notice a bright streak across the daytime sky to your left. As the long streak starts to seemingly head for you and the Earth’s surface, it becomes discernible as an incredibly huge, misshapen chunk of rock more than a kilometer wide. As it sinks lower, pulled by the Earth’s gravity, it pushes a violent shock wave ahead of it. By now, you hear only the crackling sound as layer by layer of the rock is peeled off by the friction of the atmosphere. The shock wave hits next, but it does not matter.

Through their increasing impact, people have been weighing decisively on the course of the spaceship Earth. The entry into a new geological era, the anthropocene, marks an unprecedented disruption in the long history of the co-evolution between our species and the biosphere. Our immediate task is to draw long-term development strategies, environmentally sound and socially inclusionary, at the opposite of strategies based on the free interplay of market forces. Thus, we must give, within each nation and between nations, the utmost priority to an aggiornamento of long-term democratic planning as the main instrument of governance. The success of the second Earth Summit, due to take place in 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, will largely depend on the participants’ ability to take inspiration from these principles.

Spaceship Earth needs a pilot – at Rio we will have to push for a global system of “environmental governance”

Food, energy and mineral resources appeared to be available in limitless quantities. The accelerated growth in global population during recent centuries brought about a new situation. We reached the resource limits of “Spaceship Earth”. This, along with the dawning awareness of the extent of environmental damage to date, have made it necessary to turn to new attitudes as to the use of renewable and non-renewable resources. IRM (Integrated Resource Management) is proposed as a way to rationally balance the use and conservation of natural resources. A databank based on the Geographic Information System (GIS) concept, bringing together all relevant resources of a nation, is the centerpiece of IRM and will make it possible to establish strategies to optimize the long term use of resources, including all relevant environmental factors.

"Bucky" was one of the most revolutionary technological visionaries of this century. As an architect, engineer, entrepreneur, poet, he was a quintessentially American, self-made man. But he was also an out-sider: a technologist with a poet's imagination who already developed theories of environmental control in the thirties ("more with less") and anticipated the globalization of our planet ("think global - act local"). This visual reader documents and examines Fuller's theories, ideas, designs, and projects. It also takes an analytical look at his ideology of technology as the panacea. With numerous illustrations, many published here for the first time, as well as texts by Fuller and the editors. The publication presents Buckminster Fuller's creations as a dazzling expression of this unconditionally optimistic technocrat whose vision of driverless Spaceship Earth led him to examine the principles of maximizing effects in the most diverse sectors of design and construction.