The late Buckminster Fuller latched on to the metaphor of the Earth as a spaceship hurling in an elliptical motion around an insignificant star, the Sun, in a corner of a minor galaxy, the Milky Way.

 

This emerging consciousness of what since fully evolved into an environmental movement was aided by the powerfully evoking picture of the planet taken by Apollo astronauts of a blue orb rising from the lunar horizon, now dubbed the "earthrise".   Spaceship earth showed no political boundaries that our map-oriented minds took for granted, and the definition of nation-states that visa-separated one earthling from another.

 

I would later gaze at a fabulous Mactan sight with my eldest daughter noticing how marvelous the sunset was until she said, "Dad, that's an earth turn!"

 

In the 60s, we were a youngish theolog gathered around a coal-fired furnace with members of a Faith and Life Community House near the campus of the NC-Greensboro U in the Piedmont when the earthrise image rose.  Steeped in the medieval tradition of gazing up unto Heaven, but increasingly getting lucid about the Egyptian-inherited practice of Rah-veneration as totally irrelevant to an earth-centric existence, we were pleased to replace Zeus of Olympus and Deus of the Roman pantheon with the old YHWH of Moses, and the Tao of Lao Tze, the Way Life Is.

 

In 1962, Rachael Carson penned disturbing Silent Spring that revealed extensive poisoning of North American air and aquifers caused by agrarian pesticides, insecticides, and fertilizers.   That led to the banning of DDT, a common chemical in many households.

 

We were a guest camp counselor in Maine for the United Church of Christ in the summer of '67 at a lake in Litchfield near Augusta when we encountered the DDT residual effect on mosquitoes.  The State tried to eradicate the critters earlier with widespread spraying of the chemical.  It resulted in a resilient breed that buzzed like mini-drones and stung like Mohammad Ali's bees!

 

We returned to Manila as an effete religious social activist with a Caucasian spouse ready to battle the forces of evil in the comfort of ecclesiastical garb at Ferdinand Marcos rather riotous watch.  He declared Martial Law in '72, though not without the assent of the US State Department, and quietly toasted by the merchants of war materials, as the move purportedly was cooked around a military camp in Korea.  Clark Air Force Base and the US Naval Base at Subic Bay were at the time Pentagon's hub in the Far East.

 

Right about the same time, the Club of Rome issued its Limits to Growth that highlighted the reality of the demand-and-supply equation as not infinite.  Earth as a supplier of natural resources is not limitless, so demand had to be more intentional.

 

Serendipitously, we joined an intentional community of religious clergy and laity the day Marcos declared martial.  For a decade, a corporate body sought to express their intense faith in the trustworthiness and goodness of life by fearlessly plumbing with their lives the profound depth of life's mysteries, deriving intense height of ecstasy from unconditional human expenditure, done within a comprehensive view of history and prophecy, (genesis to apocalypse), focusing on the human factor in world development.  A tall order, it was, but an engaging one in the new dispensation of politico-ecological awareness that was coming to vogue at the time.

 

We resided in Canada in 1976 when we staffed our NGO at the Vancouver United Nations Conference on Ecology.  Marshall McLuhan of the Medium-is-the-Message fame is often quoted as saying: "There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth.  We are all crew."

 

As a secular-religious in the 60s, we were only too aware of the boundaries of fragility, the intimations of our mortality, and the nuances of our finitude, but we were not yet ancient, and we soldiered on for a decade of relentless prodding the wealth of the human psyche around the world.

 

The UN's Bruntland Report of 1987 got our mission code into public discourse.  The report defined "sustainable development" as meeting the needs of the present without compromising future generations.  It identified three pillars: economic growth, environmental protection and social equity.

 

Economic growth continues today oblivious of a limitless supply of resource.  The earth consumes 150 percent of its regenerative capacity.  Definitely not sustainable.  The protest on the Keystone pipeline and northeast fracking of fossil fuel extractive industries challenges the nation's political union, reveals the reach of the oil political lobby, and questions the very nature of Wall Street itself.  Citizen's participation against Monsanto's chemically aided farming reached the global stage this week.

 

Entropy is the law existence.  Spaceship Earth is a singular trip, a one-time-only journey, and mine is but a measly 87-yr segment of it, not even a blimp in the HDTV of life.  I am but a crewmember, albeit, of a cancerous global brain.  Still, I aim to ride this baby with gusto, knowing that while intentionality may falter, the journey is what journeys on!