Read a fascinating book – GROWTH. Astronaut Rusty Schweickart looked down on Earth from space with a sense of awe. “You realise on that little blue & white thing that there is everything that means anything to you. All history, music, poetry, art, death, birth & love. All of it on that little spot out there that you can cover with your thumb.” NASA calls this realisation “an overview effect.” No matter what country we’re from, we return from space with a feeling that our home is tiny, magical & evolving.
Czech-Canadian professor Vaclav Smil approaches things from a scientist’s point of view, not an astronaut’s, but reaches the same conclusions. Earth is fragile, “before it’s too late, we should embark in earnest on the most fundamental existential tasks of making any future growth compatible with long-term preservation of the only biosphere we have.”
Growth is a brilliant synthesis of everything that we can learn from the patterns of growth in our natural world. Encourages us to see the big picture.
