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Whole Earth or No Earth: The Origin of the Whole Earth Icon in the Ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Robert Jacobs
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“Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available - once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known - a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” –Fred Hoyle, 1950

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 9 , Issue 13 , March 2011 , e5
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2011

References

Notes

1 Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1950).

2 Nasa website.

3 See, Robert Jacobs, “Dodging Dystopia: The Role of Nuclear Narratives in Averting Global Thermonuclear Warfare,” in, Antony Adolf, ed., Nonkilling History: Shaping Policy with Lessons from the Past (Honolulu: The Center for Global Nonviolence, 2010) 219-236.

4 David Bradley, No Place to Hide (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948).

5 Nasa website.

6 Gary H. Kitmacher, “Astronaut Still Photography During Apollo,” August 2004. See also, Neil Maher, “Shooting the Moon,” Environmental History 9:3 (July 2004): 526-31.

7 Stewart Brand, “‘Why Haven't We Seen the Whole Earth Yet?” in, Lynda Obst, ed., The Sixties: The Decade Remembered Now, By the People Who Lived It Then (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1977), 168.

8 Author interview, Stewart Brand, Sausalito, California, March 2006.

9 From “Whole Earth Button,” on Stewart Brand's website.

10 “Orbiting the Moon Christmas Eve,” Apollo Expeditions to the Moon.

11 Archibald MacLeish, “Bubble of Blue Air,” New York Times, December 25, 1968, 1.

12 Author interview, Stewart Brand, Sausalito, California, March 2006.

13 Stanley Kubrick, director, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 (MGM). The film premiered in Washington D.C. on April 2, 1968, two days before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

14 Kubrick obtained photographs of the partial Earth from the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories. See, Jerome Agel, ed., The Making of Kubrick's 2001 (New York: New American Library, 1970), 321.

15 In the novelized version of the film, Arthur Clarke includes a sequence at this point in which nuclear weapons are launched from the Earth, but the Star Child simply eliminates them, thus presenting the new human as able to transcend the nuclear dilemma. See, Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (New York: New American Library, 1968).

16 Stewart Brand, ed., Whole Earth Catalog (Menlo Park: The Portola Institute, 1968). See, also, Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

17 Steve Jobs, “You've Got to Find What You Love,” Stanford University Commencement Speech, June 15, 2005.

18 Whole Earth Catalog, 1.

19 Jack Lewis, “The Birth of the EPA,” originally printed in the EPA Journal in November 1985, reprinted at EPA.gov.

20 Barbara Ward, Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 15. See also, Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos, Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1972).

21 Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 50.

22 James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 6

23 Ibid., 6.

24 Ibid., 9.

25 Ibid., 10. Golding would win the Nobel Prize in 1983.

26 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 4E. They are reprinted by the Times from three different newspapers, the first from The Newark Evening News, the second from the New York Times itself, and the third from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

27 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 4E.

28 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 4E. They are reprinted there from three different newspapers, the first from The Newark Evening News, the second from the New York Times itself, and the third from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

29 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 4E.

30 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 6E.

31 New York Times, August 12, 1945, Sec. 4, 6E.

32 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct. 10, 1945, 2C.

33 The Saturday Review of Literature, March 30, 1946, 8.

34 Reprinted in, Herbert Block, The Herblock Book (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 33.

35 Washington Post, August 1945.

36 Reprinted in, Herbert Block, Herblock's Here and Now (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 193.

37 Dexter Masters and Katharine Way, eds., One World or None (New York: Whittlesey House/McGraw Hill Book Co., 1946), 25.

38 Albert Einstein, “The War Is Won But Peace Is Not,” Essays in Humanism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 65-8. This is reprinted from an address originally presented at the Fifth Nobel Anniversary Dinner at the Astor Hotel, New York City, December 10, 1945.