SPACESHIP EARTH
"We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, 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. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave-to the ancient enemies of man- half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all." 1 Adlai Ewing Stevenson (1965).
While not the first analogy regarding the Earth and its scarcity of resources in the fashion of a spaceship, Adlai Stevenson's speech before the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations did preclude an image and concept that would remain influential. Spaceship Earth became a popular term in the 20th century, particularly the late 1960s due to the societal concerns regarding the climate and the attitudes spurned from the Industrial Revolution. Buckminster Fuller notable tied these attitudes in his book titled, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, "...we can make all of humanity successful through science's world-engulfing industrial evolution provided that we are not so foolish as to continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the orderly energy savings of billions of years' energy conservation aboard our Spaceship Earth." 2
As Ecology began adopting terminology from Space Age discourse, Spaceship Earth as an idea became more relevant to the major concepts of the Enclosed Environment, notably ideas of separation and survival. Related terms like 'biosphere' and 'carry capacity' further reinforced this imagery.