ABSTRACT
The idea that Earth has unlimited capacity to provide for human desires and absorb human wastes was undermined when the first pictures of the planet from outer space were published. The US Ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, stated in 1965:
We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. (quoted in Hardin 1977)
