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Earth-Observing Media

2013; Jilin Academy of Agricultural Sciences; Volume: 38; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.22230/cjc.2013v38n3a2756

1499-6642

Chris Russill,

Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life

Earth-Observing Media"Why haven't we seen the whole Earth-observing system yet?"O ne day in 1966, at the height of his fame, Marshall McLuhan was asked, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?"Stewart Brand, a Northern California hippie, had printed the question on pin-back buttons and sent one to McLuhan as part of a quirky liberation campaign (see Figure 1).Brand's goal was not the emancipation of a people or a territory.He sought only to liberate a single photograph from the bureaucratic confines of NASA.The campaign originated in an acid-induced vision Brand had on a rooftop in San Francisco (Brand, 1977).In staring down at the city's buildings, Brand could see the landscape curving beneath them.Or so he hallucinated (those without the benefit of LSD will have little success).Brand projected his vantage point higher and higher into the atmosphere, and the Earth's curvature became more and more pronounced, until it yielded a perception of a "whole Earth" suspended in outer space.If only people could see the Earth in this way, Brand thought, popular misconceptions would dissolve, the mistreatment of nature would end, and global consciousness of ecological interdependency would ensue.A single photograph, once liberated for the masses, could distribute a perception hitherto limited to astronauts and acidheads.An environmental movement, Brand prophesied, would emerge from the shift in consciousness this perception would entail.Brand's tweet-length message was sold on the campuses of elite U.S. universities in a spectacle-generating way, and mailed to celebrities, politicians, and a list of NASA officials, among others.Brand was aided by Lois Jennings, his soon-to-be wife from Ottawa, and they busied themselves conducting "street-clown seminars on space and civilization" (Brand, 1977, p. 169).Fresh off a stint as wheelman for the Merry Pranksters, Brand's "whole Earth" campaign (or at least its retelling) embodied perfectly the Pranksters' ideal of drug-induced spontaneity colliding with the institutions of conformity.Brand obtained his picture within months.In fact, a torrent of images