Spaceship Earth
The hugely influential report, ‘Our Common Future‘1 (also known as the ‘Brundtland Report’) was released in 1987. It’s a work, widely credited for launching the ‘Sustainable Development’ movement centered around environmentalism. Thing is, however, that’s not technically accurate, as the IUCN report ‘World Conservation Strategy - Living Resource Conservation for Sustainable Development‘2, commissioned by Maurice Strong predates it by 7 years (1980).
But though it wasn’t defined as such, prior art exists predating even the IUCN report.
From an IIED article written about Barbara Ward in 20143, we learn -
‘The institute played a key role in the Stockholm Conference of 1972, the Brundtland Commission of 1987, the 1992 Earth Summit and the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development. Indeed, when the Brundtland Commission sought to define sustainable development, it drew from Ward's landmark book with Rene Dubos, Only One Earth; Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, that was published in 1972.‘
And on the topic of Sustainable Development, we also commonly encounter the hugely influential4 1989 book by Pearce and Turner; ‘Economics of natural resources and the environment‘5, which further goes to outline the ‘Circular Economy’, and in an early chapter even draws in Kenneth Boulding and his essay titled ‘The Economics of the coming Spaceship Earth‘.
The essay by Kenneth Boulding6 was penned in 1966, and though I could cover this period in detail through Adlai Stephenson and Buckminster Fuller, that’s not where I want to take this story.
There are however two related links I will document, and the first is Kenneth Boulding, who in 1956 was elected the first president of the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory7. And in the yearbook of 1956, he penned the paper ‘General Systems Theory — The Skeleton of Science‘8.
The other link relevant in this context is a book, released in 1966 and titled ‘Spaceship Earth‘, and it was penned by… Barbara Ward9.
What I get at here is that ‘Spaceship Earth’ is General Systems Theory (GST). In short, you define a ‘system’ which can be ‘open’ or ‘closed’, and the general gist is that whatever you have in your little ‘system’… that’s it! There will be no ‘Call of Duty medpack’ magically appearing in front of you, nor will a large copper mine suddenly appear from out of nowhere. The resources on planet earth are finite, in short, and this was the inspiration for the failed experiment ‘Biosphere 2’ back in 199110.
Of course, the entire ideology is completely flawed as we will see in a minute, however it’s important to understand why GST in general is a big deal, and certainly important in contemporary context.
As outlined above, GST is the basis of not just the ‘Spaceship Earth’ metaphor, but also the concept of‘Sustainable Development’ as well as the ‘Circular Economy’ - a topic of which, the Club of Rome is all over -
But it spans more concepts, including the Ecosystem Approach, which in short describe a top-down management strategy not entirely unlike feudalism -
The Ecosystem Approach was further mentioned in the 1968 UNESCO Biosphere conference proceedings, along with ‘Spaceship Earth’,
I keep linking these proceedings11, but there’s a reason. It is legitimately one of the most mind-blowing documents I have ever read. Because apart from the overt references to the Ecosystem Approach and Spaceship Earth, this conference also led to the development of FOUR initiatives (Man and the Biosphere12, Global Environmental Monitoring System13, World Resources Institute14, and GRID15), it also retargeted the efforts of the World Bank16, established a new direction of scientific research, and used this to drive policy; considered the ‘education’ of the masses, utilised social science heavily in this educational rollout; outlined the need for a globally coordinated approach, and launched an early version of sustainable development.
And of all things I have covered, the Global Environment Monitoring System - aka global surveillance - is probably the one I have covered the most, all the way up to and including how it links into the Conservation on Biological Diversity’s targets.
But GST also include One Health and Planetary Health, the latter of which also links up with the 1968 UNESCO Biosphere conference in the most unexpected way, and One Health links up with the contemporary Pandemic Treaty negotiations ongoing, as well as the 2019 Berlin Principles (the sequel to the Manhattan Principles aka One Health).
So it’s actually a concept fairly revelant to contemporary ideology - and that’s not forgetting that in 1970, one of the very founders of GST - with the fantastic name ‘Ludwig von Bertalanffy‘ - even started to drag in ‘Theoretical Psychology’, and though I won’t cover here, that initiative very much still is ongoing17.
Another prominent member of the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory was Ervin Laszlo18, who in 1993 founded the Club of Rome spinoff Club of Budapest19, and the General Evolutionary Research Group in 1984 behind the iron curtain20. And as for the Club of Rome21, that was co-founded by Aurelio Peccei22, who also partook in the founding of the IIASA; the ‘International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis‘23.
… and that link further drags in Jay Forrester24, who founded the field of ‘System Dynamics’ - essentially the origin of the 1972 Club of Rome report - Limits to Growth25.
Contemporary influence of ‘Sustainable Development‘ should be clear, but the ‘Circular Economy’ is highly present as well. Here’s a G7 summit from Berlin, 202226.
… and an EU document from 2023 on much the same topic27.
Then we have ‘One Health’ which similarly is all over contemporary ideology, starting with a document from 2022, courtesy of the UNEP28 with bonus ‘Sustainable Development’ incorporated, ‘Covid-19’, and the ‘Ecosystem Approach’ - plus noteworthy references to ‘Ecosystem Services’, and the UNFCCC and CBD present all over, along with the One Planet Network.
And the One Planet Network can then be found to link back to the Circular Economy29.
… and we can then continue over on the IPCC30 site with Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, who also served on the United Nations’s Scientific Working Group on Climate Change, is a research scholar with the IIASA, and a member of Ervin Laszlo’s… Club of Budapest.
And as for the Club of Rome affiliated IIASA - they’re all over the ‘Spaceship Earth’ metaphor as well31.
… they even explicitly dragged in ‘Sustainable Development’ and even ‘Malthusianism‘ in 199132, which you can then link back… to the Club of Rome‘s Limits to Growth.
Then we can link up the One Planet Network to the Circular Economy… and the One Planet Summit33… with bonus SDG goals highlighted on the right.
And it was at the very first One Planet Summit in France - launched by ex-Rothschild banker Emmanuel Macron - that the Network for Greening the Financial System34 launched - though this, in fact, was a year after Mark Carney announced35 we collectively had to spend a crazy amount of money producing monetisable ecosystem services on UNESCO Biosphere Reserves through the Global Environment Facility for those Natural Asset Companies which hadn’t yet been announced. The very same Mark Carney who in 2021 would be referred to as ‘UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance‘36.
We also have this NGFS37 report from 2022 featuring even more of the same buzzwords, also dragging in the EU’s stated mission of a ‘transition to a circular economy’, ‘ecosystem services’, ‘Earth System’, ‘planetary boundaries, and a reference to the Global Landscapes Forum, which is not unimportant.
And those ‘Planetary Boundaries’38 is - I quote - ‘Planetary boundaries are a framework to describe limits to the impacts of human activities on the Earth system. Beyond these limits, the environment may not be able to self-regulate anymore‘… and this conveniently also drags in the Earth System as per above…
…. which can then be found39 to drag in Buckminster Fuller and his Spaceship Earth metaphor.
I hope I made my point. I could genuinely sit here for hours and hours connecting all this terminology, which is all part of the same enterprise. But before we move on, I just wish to make a point about buy-in. We have a ‘This Spaceship Earth’ website40, we have David de Rothschild being suggested our new ‘Spaceship Earth navigator’ by CNN41 (lol!), and we have a message in the 2006 Rockefeller Brothers Fund annual titled ‘Transforming Societies’42 not only quoting Buckminster Fuller and his ‘Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth’, but also making explicit mention of ‘General Systems Theory’.
Then we have the European Environment Agency pondering ‘Spaceship Earth’ in an article on green growth43, further looping in ‘Malthusian thinking’, Kenneth Boulding, and ‘Planetary Boundaries’. And the GEF44 is similarly enthusiastic, though with mention of ‘Spaceship Earth’ prefer to add ‘blue carbon credits’. Hey, a billionaire’s gotta eat.
And not seeking to leave out institutional capacity, here’s UNESCO and their 2018 report on ‘The Postwar origins of the global environment: how the United Nations built spaceship earth‘45, we have a 2020 report by the UN Global Compact on ‘Future of Spaceship Earth‘46, signed by their CEO. Finally, let’s loop in an Austrian paper from 2020 titled ‘Spaceship earth's odyssey to a Circular Economy‘47 simply because… I needed something small to squeeze it the picture.
Not wanting to be left out, the WEF in 2021 released the paper ‘Space for Net Zero‘48, which in addition to the ubiquitous reference to ‘Spaceship Earth’ also outlines all the global surveillance building taking place around us - though naturally dressed up as ‘Earth Science’ and ‘Earth Observation’, claiming this for sakes of ‘Greenhouse Gas monitoring’ though ultimately revealing that this is for sakes of ‘successfully managing the planet’. And bam. We’re back in 1969, and the UNESCO Courier release outlining ‘Blueprint for Planetary Management’, produced on the back of (and even mentioned by) the UNESCO Biosphere conference proceedings.
And just in case you question this, here - let me source that for you. Here’s the UNESCO Courier from 196949 in question, which also include a hidden reference to the as-yet undefined ‘Ecosystem Approach’, along with those 1968 proceedings which on page 224 states (and I will link it here again)50 -
‘92. The conference stressed the importance of the education of individuals and groups in the framing and implementation of a policy of conservation and rational use of resources of the biosphere.
93. The conference emphasized the usefulness -of the mass media (television, radio, cartoons, etc.) in the education of the public, and also the need to obtain the co-operation of tourist and travel agencies in such education. It recommended that an issue of the Unesco Courier should be devoted to the conference, to the functioning of the biosphere, and to the work of organizations with responsibilities in this field.‘
The 1969 Courier release, ftr, was an epic load of doomsday porn, where man repeatedly was identified the enemy of… man, and two of the main contributors were Rene Dubos of the Rockefeller Foundation, and who co-authored ‘Only One Earth’ with Barbara Ward, and Frank Fraser Darling, a former Carnegie research fellow who was engaged with Julian Huxley’s IUCN.
I hope you get the picture - I genuinely can carry on doing this. These will be final three, I swear. We have more ‘Spaceship Earth’ references going to the Club of Rome51, there’s a 1972 movie52 on the topic starring Maurice Strong, Margaret Mead (who led the Society for Advancing General Systems Theory in 197253), John D Rockefeller III himself, Barbara Ward, and Rene Dubos… and finally, even the Baha’i sect54 is in on the action. And this final item along I could rattle on about for hours.
And the movie is definitely worth a watch, if for no other reason but the hilarious alarmism, dialled way past even Spinal Tap’s ‘11’.
The movie can be located over here. So you see - it really is a big, big club… but of which you are not a member.
And I realise this was quite the lengthy introduction, but I’m a firm believer in the concept that extraordinary claims require extraordinary sourcing. If there’s anything I missed out, let me know. The bottom line is that ‘Spaceship Earth’ is the visible component of ‘General Systems Theory’, but it’s certainly not the only one. And yes, the ‘Ecosystem Approach’ is General Systems Theory55, and as is ‘One Health’56, the latter furthermore connecting through ‘Resilience Thinking’, which ultimately is about progressively training a network to replace the function of human input.
And on the back of essentially sourcing my dog’s diet above, I will now leave those references to the side, and have a good ole’ rant instead -
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In a Circular Economy (system), no resource ever truly disappears. The resource simply takes on a different state, from which recovery takes on a different pricing structure. An example here could be the small quantites of rare earth metals which go into the manufacturing of computer motherboards. Consequently, when Spaceship Earth zealots declare us to be running out of a given non-renewable resource… it’s not so much that the resource no longer exists - it’s that the recovery has taken on a different pricing structure, which generally tend to make it pricier to extract. Ie, of what we really speak, is that it’s not financially recoverable at current price of the resource.
But that recovery price also changes. In days of yore, for instance, those motherboards were casually discarded, but these days industrial scale operations do exist which recover a select few metals - gold, generally - from these motherboards. It’s still not an enormeously profitable business, but this recovery process will progressively improve and hence the price of recovery come down - consequently, most gold used during this manufacturing process will probably eventually be fully recovered.
But even if that was not the case, there’s virtually an unlimited amount of rare metals in the world’s oceans - again, it’s just a matter of extraction cost - which change over time. The claim that we’re anywhere near running out of anything is alarmist to the extreme.
Take oil, for instance. I’ve always been somewhat of a geek, and around 2008 I spent the best part of a year, reading up on peak oil, and the oil industry in general - from up- to downstream of the production pipeline. And sure, conventional probably has peaked, and other types eventually will just as well. But deposits which were not financially recoverable just a few decades back now regularly are - counting Bakken deposits of shale, and Athabascan tarsands.
Venezuela, for instance, has the largest single deposit of tar sands in the world via the Orinoco Belt - and this is virtually entirely undeveloped. And while the process of processing tar sands initially was very expensive and hardly worth the effort, this process, too, has improved massively in scale and pricing structure, with in-situ development especially rapidly improving as a technology, with processing cost per barrel rapidly declining.
All of this is not to say it’s necessarily a great idea to use all available resources - that’s an entirely different debate. What I say here is merely that we are absolutely nowhere near running out - especially not of oil, given the Fischer-Tropsch process since the Nazis put it to use has improved significantly. This process converts coal to oil, and our deposits of coal are a multiple of oil deposits, growing every year, and we don’t even tend to look for coal the way we do oil.
And then, of course, we could even conceivable switch to nuclear to supply electricity. That, also, is a long discussion in itself that I do not wish to engage in - at least, at this point in time.
But that’s not quite all. Because when it comes to all matters of General Systems Theory, the primary matter is defining the system - who get to do that, and what’s the granularity thereof? Should we define the granularity of the world on even an atomic level, then you cannot account for the production of electricity through nuclear, and in the event you dive into the sub-atomic, you’ll arrive at the uncertainty principle. How will that be predicted?
Besides - in the context of the arbitrary definition of the system - if the Spaceship Earth considers Planet Earth alone - hence our system is a closed one - then please do explain how solar panels work. And should you include the sun into our ‘system’, then please explain tides, caused by the moon, which certainly do impact planet earth just as well, with outcomes reflected in the production of those ‘ecosystem services’ our ‘benefactors’ are so desperate to exploit through GEF-structured blended finance deals.
And the very same people who push this deeply flawed ideology are also incredibly intent on pushing through global surveillance. This is easily visible through GEOSS and the many derivates thereof, like GEO BON for biodiversity, and GBIOS for the monitoring the the Aichi targets. And all this surveillance information will then be routed through a ‘Digital Twin’ for sakes of simulation at Planet level through DestinE and Fraym and others, from biosphere level, to ‘seascape’ and ‘landscape’ level, city level, block, neighbourhood, house level, down to the humans that live within, and through sensors right down to simulating big pharma drug trials in those humans.
But all this monitoring for sakes of simulation takes of a whole new issue with granularity of information, because even at the level of the atom, you end up with virtually infinite quantities of material. How do you accurately simulate that?
As I’ve stated repeatedly - we cannot predict the path of an ant, crossing a garden tile on a hot summers’ day, nor even the distributions of its pauses. We cannot predict the path of a hurricane as it hits the deep south. We cannot predict when or where the next volcano will erupt, nor how severe this eruption will be. And what you see here below, is a fairly simple, 2-D Navier-Stokes simulation. I’ve used this example a lot, primarily because I love playing with Navier-Stokes simulations, but also because even this fairly simple simulation should easily demonstrate the complexities of a chaotic system which build almost immediately, making the system completely impossible to predict with any level of accuracy within just a few seconds. Now include a third dimension, include a reflexive environment, all biota, scale up the simulation to include every particle on the planet, and it should be painstakingly obvious why weather simulations always fail. The sheer quantity of material is practically infinite. But even if it wasn’t, even the precision of the individual time step will impact the simulated outcome, meaning that should the time step of the simulation be set to a second, the outcome will be very different should it be set to a microsecond. Very, very different. In other words - the definition of the timestep itself will very quickly prevent the simulation at the level required of accuracy to be useful.
You cannot ‘tame chaos’, and those who claim they do, have absolutely no concept of what chaos entails. Well, either that, or they are frauds. Or both, possibly!
I could then further drag other topics into the discussion like social phenomena and the pricing of goods in a western-style economy, the concept of intellectual property and the evaluation thereof, but hopefully, I won’t have to. Because all of those impact human behaviour, which then leads to more people going on holiday, increasing their ‘carbon footprint’ and so forth. The bottom line here is that these, too, are practically impossible to simulate with any level of accuracy, and the random walk of a truly free stock market can’t be predicted with any level of accuracy either. What Wall Street in short has recently specialised in, is ever-more complex schemes of fraud and systemic theft - such as buying order flows from specialist outfits, and then front-running said a microsecond ahead of time - which is absolutely nothing short of outright theft.
But as for the monitoring, and the issue of simulating excessive quantities of particles - the answer here is that they don’t. Instead, they replace material with ‘approximations’, where one could be a field producing cotton, a city block, or… what it generally all comes down to - simulating human behaviour. And this is more easily done, because most people at all times drag with them a surveillance device, though they tend to go by the name of ‘mobile phones’. These contain accelerometers, GPS transmitters, microphones, and even bi-directional cameras. We can then further throw in external triangulation should GPS fail, which essentially through determining your nearest mobile masts can narrow down your present location hugely.
The point here, of course, is that ultimately, all the tech they’ve put in place - sure, they’ll keep an eye on the location, quality, and state of natural resources. They’ll keep an eye on the ease of extraction of resources, as pricing mechanics eventually allow us to recover hitherto financially unrecoverable resources - like extracting gold from computer motherboards, for instance, or oil from the Orinoco Belt in Venezuela - and suddenly, the powers that be will cook up some lie about why those ‘indigenous peoples’ and ‘women and children’ will promptly need to be… dumped in the ocean, so that they can recover the resources, so that they can produce you a next-gen surveillance tracking device aka ‘mobile phone’, to be used from within your 15-minute gulag, and which can be used to read up on your next ‘vaccination’ required to keep your digital ID enabled, and hence your CBDCs working. Or else, of course, you won’t be able to feed your children with that delightful diet consisting of gruel and insect protein.
But back up - the act of replacing material in the simulation with approximations in no uncertain terms lead to a loss of precision, which then in turn leads to more building instability in the simulation, with eventual ‘black swan’ events appearing everywhere. Yet, the new ‘financial paradigm’ constructed on the back of ‘ecosystem service valuation’, which generally work through the ‘contingent valuation model’ which is nothing but asking a focus group what they’d pay for, say, a stroll in the forest. No, really. That’s how it works. They really do use focus groups to establish valuation, and they really do seek to include subjective valuation into the picture, making the ‘new financial paradim’ they seek to push throug nothing short of fraud. Complete and utter fraud.
The entire ‘Spaceship Earth’ concept - in short - is complete trash. Absolutely flawed from beginning to end. And you can then take its cousins, like the ‘Circular Economy’ and ‘Sustainable Development’. Those, for the very same reason, are also complete and utter trash. But what all three are examples of is ‘General Systems Theory’. And this concept also further describe ‘One Health’, ‘Planetary Health’, and the ‘Ecosystem Approach’. And this really is no coincidence, because the end goal is to simulate the entire world, allegedly to protect it from human activity. In reality, however, it’ll be a pretty damn good protection for those at the very top as your ‘social credit score’ suffers a complete collapse because you questioned if those ‘vaccine boosters’ delivered under the ‘One Health’ umbrella really were necessary.
All of this is about control.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Looking forward to reading what you have to say about Bucky, who coined the term and made it one of his trademarks for a while. He's an odd duck, definitely some spooky background to him, but I'd find it hard to believe that he was *deliberately* pushing bankster / Fabian global governance. His final work, "GRUNCH of Giants", calls them out almost to the point of naming names. On the other hand, he was definitely *some* kind of globalist. Maybe he just went off the reservation?
Anyway, he was always vehemently opposed to the closed system, limited resources ("cap & trade") philosophy, and went out of his way over and over to insist that "resources" are what we make them to be, and that there is no real scarcity: the same argument you make here.
Not much mention of the immense Rockefeller Foundations and their controlling hands everywhere...