ABSTRACT
The first pictures of earth from moon orbit were taken on Christmas Eve 1968 and published in January 1969. These iconic images subsequently became known as ‘Earthrise’. The earth, its land, oceans and atmosphere often seem limitless to us; in the 1970s these views from our natural satellite began to raise awareness of how small our planet is in the cosmos. We live on a finite planet. We are polluting it and depleting our resource base at an increasing rate – there are natural limits to growth for our species on spaceship earth (Meadows et al. 1972). In 1990 images sent from Voyager 1, from 3.7 billion miles away, revealed earth as a remote pale blue dot. Striking though those images are, we have largely failed to understand the finite nature of ‘spaceship earth’ (Fuller 1963) and the urgency of addressing the challenges of sustainability: pollution and resource depletion, problems of our own making, which we shall bequeath to future generations as the earth exceeds its carrying capacity.
