Earth Days Page #4

---

I was just trying to call forth

that reality.

And what I thought was,

you know,

taking my 100 mikes

of LSD on a rooftop,

"I know, the--

I'll just make a button."

And 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

we need to see a photograph

of the whole Earth

and when we do,

everything will be different.

So I printed up a bunch

of these buttons

and I went around

to various universities

and sold the buttons

for 25 cents a piece.

I sent them to Buckminster

Fuller and Marshall McLuhan,

and all those senators and their

secretaries that I could find.

I sent them to various

professionals at NASA,

and politburo members in Russia.

I just, you know, floated

this stuff out there

to see what would happen.

At that time,

you know, in the late '60s,

the Whole Earth

Catalogue became--

kind of the Sears catalogue

of the back-to-the-land

generation with this...

intelligence behind it

of Stewart's.

Stewart's motto was:

"We are as gods

and we might as well

get good at it."

The Whole Earth Catalogue had, uh,

basically appropriate technology

as our contribution.

Photovoltaic-- things that

you could put on your roof

that you would get

12-volt power out of.

that was deemed appropriate

technology.

Putting something in a creek

that would pump water

was appropriate technology.

Geodesic domes and-and

solar equipment.

Organic gardening in that sense

was appropriate technology.

People were going back

to the land, back to basics,

reinvent civilization,

get it right his time.

And, uh, the sense was that one

was going to blend with 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 supply.

It was saying,

our way of life has to change.

And I loved all that,

because it was radical.

By and large, the people

who were starting rural communes,

people who were going

"back to the land,"

in the 1960s

and on into the '70s,

were pretty much liberal,

educated college students.

The navet...

...that was carted

from college campuses out

to these places in the bush

was breathtaking.

People tried to garden,

imagining

that they could just

put seeds in the ground.

Where we have

a nobody's-in-charge,

put-all-of-your-money

into-the-pot,

uh, kind of 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

in a totally egalitarian-mode

got over 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 process.

It was tempting to try

to throw out everything

and start 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 that,

or we're going to lose.

One peculiarity of

the counterculture 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 hi-fis, of course.

And our drugs.

And those could be as...

You know, 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.

Those 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 rhetoric was

out there, except for one guy,

Jacques Cousteau,

the oceans guy.

He had a better sense

of the sphere-icity of the Earth

probably than any other

surface-bound person at that time.

What he knew was

that the oceans--

two-thirds, three-quarters

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 oceans.

He just said,

we've got to get out there.

We totally identified with it.

The whole world identified

with it,

and the whole world

was proud of it.

Once you've got pride--

I learned this in the army--

a whole bunch of things

that seemed impossible start

to seem not only possible,

but let's get on with it.

There was a sense

of engineering accomplishment,

of being able to set

a damn-near impossible goal,

and then just haul off

and-and do it.

As an astronaut, I was

really emotionally invested

in what was happening

with the planet.

Being who I was,

and not just blasting my little

pink body up into space,

but being able to look back

with my human eyes

and my brain and my heart

and see this planet below me.

To me, you know,

technology has, clearly,

both good sides and bad sides.

It's how one uses it.

Sure looks like it.

Apollo 9 was the first

flight that flew the lunar module,

and I was the first

lunar module pilot.

And I also went outside

the lunar module,

and it would be the first time

that a human being

went outside a spacecraft

without an umbilical.

Okay?

Proceeding on out.

Dave's in the command module,

hanging out the hatch

with a movie camera,

when all of a sudden, he says,

"Um, hey, hold on.

My camera just jammed."

'Cause it ripped out

on a straight line.

So, Jim says, "Well,

"I'll give you five minutes.

Rusty, just stay right there."

I'm just floating there,

almost as if I'm naked in space.

And all-all this stuff starts

coming into my mind.

I'm here because life

has evolved on this planet.

We've developed brains which

enable us to invent machines.

In combination

with those machines,

we're able

to extend our environment,

and here I am on the frontier

of this evolutionary process.

What am I?

I'm a representative of life

moving out into the universe.

So the idea of Mother Earth--

that phrase has real meaning.

From the outside,

you can look back.

The child now sees its mother.

We human beings,

we, this life form

on this incredible planet,

just coated with life--

where are we going?

The photographs

of the Earth from space

were a different kind of mirror

than we had ever

looked in before.

It flips you from the world

that we're in

to a planet that we're on.

The image, I think,

was maybe the most reproduced

image in American history.

We suddenly realized that the

Earth was a very small thing.

Much as if you live

on an island,

you are much more acutely aware

of the limitations

on your resources

Rate this script:2.6 / 9 votes