Opinion | Did an Acid Trip Inspire the First Photo of Earth?

I’ve always wondered if this story about you is true, that the reason we have NASA’s picture of the whole Earth came from you doing psychedelics on a roof one day. Yeah, I was in San Francisco and bored. And one of the things you did with boredom at that time was drop some acid and see what happens. It was kind of a minor dose. It was about 100 micrograms. And I went up on the roof of the $20-a-month place that I lived in North Beach. – Twenty dollars a month in North Beach? – Yeah. Wow. That’s already hard to believe. But it was true. Somehow it’s easier to believe that you got NASA to take a picture of the Earth than that anything in North Beach ever cost $20. Well, it turns out I didn’t really get NASA to do that. We’d been in space for 10 years at that point. We and the Soviet Union. And the cameras had always been looking outward or at pieces of Earth, but they could have been looking back to see the Earth as a whole. And I was pretty sure that would change everything. I wound up starting a campaign. There was a button that said, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” And I know it got looked at by a lot of people in NASA and in Congress and so on. I got to know some of the astronauts, like Rusty Schweickart. So when they took photographs, it came just a year or two later, after my campaign. – Cause and effect. – Got it. So it was a little coincidental. You had the idea on the roof, but it didn’t —— The roof is not what led to the picture. I think that’s correct. But it led to understanding the picture, – I think, for a lot of people. – That metaphor of the camera pointing outward as opposed to inward at what we don’t yet have, as opposed to what we do have. That actually feels like a nice metaphor for “Maintenance.” And I hear this in the Whole Earth Catalog, too. That in a way, it feels like a lot of your career and thinking has been building up to it, building up to this topic, that the Whole Earth Catalog was also a manual for maintaining your life, for maintaining the things you had. Let’s begin with the most basic question: What is maintenance? It’s good to keep things going. I’m a biologist by training, and so you find that everything alive spends a lot of its time basically maintaining being alive. Even to the extent of reaching outside itself. So you’re not just eating; if you’re a beaver, you’re busy cutting down trees to maintain your dam, which is what protects your lodge. Most plants spend a lot of time basically helping the soil around them do things that work well for the plant, and the soil itself is alive. And so we’re always maintaining our bodies. We maintain our vehicles and our houses and homes and cities that we live in. And we’re catching on that civilization is something to maintain as a whole. And even the planet, we’ve now stepped up to terraforming. So we’ve been terraforming badly, and we need to terraform well. So the levels of maintenance are enormous, and the constancy of it is a given.