Island in Space

In 1986 I had a chance to visit the Vancouver World’s Fair. The United Nations Pavilion made the strongest impact. I purchased a beautiful publication - Island In Space: Prospectus For A New Idea. This is where I first read Hoyle’s prescient 1948 observation: Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available . . . an idea as powerful as any other in history will be let loose.

Further on in the text, there’s an essay by the astronaut Russell Schweickart. After his 1969 space flight he wrote:

You look down there and you can't imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross again and again ... and you don't even see them. From where you see it the thing is a whole and it is so beautiful ... And there you are - hundreds of people killing each other over some imaginary line that you're not even aware of, that you can't even see ... You realize that on that small spot, that little blue-and-white thing is everything that means anything to you - all history, and music, and poetry, and art, and birth, and death, love, tears, joy, games [1986:10]

The first photo of earth from space I ever saw was on cover of the Whole Earth Catalogue in fall 1969. It affected me from the start just as Hoyle predicted. The catalogue’s founding publisher, Stewart Brand, had first learned about an earth photo taken by a NASA satellite in 1966. In fact, he vigorously lobbied to have the photo released to the public. In a 2003 interview, Brand said he felt it would become a ‘powerful symbol’ of Earth ‘as an island’.

We finally saw our home planet as it is. No escaping the visible fact we live on a ball. The photo also gave new credence and impetus to that old saying what goes round comes round. One-sided, narrow thinking slowly began giving way. Great thinkers from diverse fields - such as Kuhn, McLuhan, Fuller, and Bohm - began creating a new language to help describe such holistic concepts as global village, geodome, paradigm, and holomovement.

It’s almost forty years since that first photo of earth. During this time, ingenious new tools like computers and the World Wide Web have emerged to further catalyze this budding consciousness of the greater whole. And yet such tools have always been available through the ages. For example, Mandalas, Labyrinths, and Medicine Wheels are all designed to help us perceive and live life holistically.

TED Media Director June Cohen states this well: The newest digital technologies are returning us to the most ancient form of media — one in which a natural order is restored; our individual stories take center stage, with the rest of the world as a backdrop.

Birds make their nests in circles; we dance in circles, the circle stands for the Sun and Moon and all round things in the natural world. The circle is an endless creation, with endless connections to the present, all that went before and all that will come in the future. ~ Black Elk