At the time perhaps no one appreciated this more than the writer and futurist thinker Stewart Brand, who passionately felt that the image of the whole Earth from space would be a powerful symbol, evoking a sense of shared destiny among all people living on the planet. He relentlessly lobbied NASA to release the first images in 1967, which he then used on the cover of his highly influential Whole Earth Catalog, one of the great icons of the 1960s and ’70s.
