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.