we had a lot of Illusions about Earth one of them was that it was basically flat and infinite with no itude to our resources and we had very stereotyped ideas of what the Earth look like from space you look at all the images that people made before we had the photographs almost none of them have clouds in weather and climate there's such a thing as icons and icons help frame people's thinking my sense was that a photograph of Earth from space would be different in every possible way from a painting the Earth from [Music] space
in uh 1966 I uh took some mesty on a rooftop in San Francisco I noticed that the buildings of downtown were not parallel to one another it as if you were looking with a fisheye lens they had this slightly Divergent quality to them so basically I'm mentally elevating myself higher and higher and higher until the Horizon closes around me in a circle what I'm looking at is the surface of a sphere I was just trying to call forth that reality and what I thought was you know taking my what 100 mics of LSD on a
rooftop I know that I'll just make a button I come up with a phrasing that I like why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet I'll distribute the button through the world and everybody will understand when you to see a photograph of the whole earth and we do everything will be different so I printed up a bunch of these buttons and I went around to various universities sold the buttons for 25 cents a piece I sent them to Buck Mr Fuller and Marshall mclen and all the Senators that and their secretaries that
I could find I sent them to various Professionals in NASA and po Bureau members in Russia I just you know floated this stuff out there see what would happen [Music] at that time you know in the late 60s the whole earth catalog became kind of the SE catalog of the back to the land generation with this intelligence behind it of Stewarts Stuart's motto was we are as gods and we might as well get good at it the whole earth catalog had uh basically appropriate technology is our contribution photovoltaic things that you could put on your
roof that you would get 12vt power out of that was deemed uh appropriate technology putting something in a creek that would pump water was appropriate technology geodesic domes and and solar uh equipment organic gardening in that sense was appropriate technology people were going back to the land Back to Basics reinvent civilization get it right this time and uh the sense was that was one was going to blend with [Music] nature the idea of going back to the land is to become more capable of providing your own subsistence and to reduce your impact and your complicity
in long chains of [Music] Supply it was saying our way of life has to change and I loved all that because it was [Music] [Applause] Radical by and large the people who were starting rural communes people who were going quote back to the land in the 1960s on on into the 70s were pretty much liberal educated college [Music] students the naive Tay that was carded from college campuses out to these uh places in the bush was [Music] breathtaking people try to Garden imagining that they could just put seeds in the ground where we have a
uh nobody's in charge put all your money into the pot uh kind of uh social economic environment and that would crash and burn the women would leave and the men would leave soon after all of us who went out and tried to live together uh in totally egalitarian mode got over it it because we had our noses rubbed in our fondest fantasies and you know it only took us a couple of years and we did no great harm in the [Music] process it was tempting to try to throw out everything and start [Music] over I
thought about that and tried various efforts at it uh lived on a commune and thought about simply retreating back to the hills spent some time in the mountains of Virginia way up on a Mountaintop none of that seemed to be an answer the world around us is pretty much the world we're going to have we're either going to work with [Music] that or we're going to lose one peculiarity of the culture in the' 60s was that it was inherently really anti- technology I think it thought technology came from government it came from corporations and we're
going back to basics we don't need technology except our hii of course and our drugs and those could be as you the more technically refined those were the better but by and large technology was supposed to be bad so much of the counterculture disapproved of the Space Program it was military guys with crew cuts it was the government wasting money let's take care of things here on Earth before we leave it all of this kind of roric was out there except for one guy Shak custo the oceans guy he had a better sense of the
the sphericity of the earth probably than any other surface bound person at that time what he knew was that the oceans 2/3 3/4 of the planet you could not Monitor and yet terrible things were happening to it so his sense was that you had to have satellite imagery and people looking down on the Earth from outside in order to protect the [Music] [Music] oceans they just said we've got to get out there e
