Perspective

"There hangs a lonely luminous gem in the vast silence of space...there is only one story... [it] needs many voices and many versions, but if it is to be everybody's story then those venturing to tell it must stand out there, at some distant remove, where the earth can be seen whole." Loyal Rue

In the spring of 1966, Stewart Brand did 100 micrograms of LSD and sat on top of a roof in San Francisco.

Perched there, he looked toward a curved horizon and imagined the spherical Earth and just how limited resources on our planet are. Out of that psychedelic drug-induced vision, he developed the Whole Earth theory. He campaigned for NASA to release satellite images of the Earth, and created the influential and generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog...
Watch the Virtual Reality Recreation of the LSD Trip That Inspired the Whole Earth Catalog
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"...Brand then had two epiphanies. First, there were no public photos of the entire earth. Second, if people like him were going to return to the land and lead natural lives, they would need tools.

He lobbied NASA to release a photograph of the whole earth, which became an iconic image for the environmental movement. Then he slapped the picture on the cover of what he called the “Whole Earth Catalog...

When a culture changes, it’s often because a small group of people on society’s margins find a better way to live, parts of which the mainstream adopts. Brand found a magic circle in the Bay Area counterculture. He celebrated it, publicized it, gave it a coherence it otherwise lacked and encouraged millions to join...

...there’s a need for future Brands, young cultural craftsmen who identify those who are building the future, synthesizing their work into a common ethos and bringing them together in a way that satisfies the eternal desire for community and wholeness." David Brooks, on Stewart Brand

"Space exploration may be a key to human survival and evolution, and perhaps even more than that... an even higher purpose than our own evolution as a species..." Frank White

Happy Trails, MALA "Evolution in America" class of '18!