In 1966, after taking L$D on a rooftop in San Francisco, Stewart Brand had a transformative realization: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” Convinced this image could shift humanity’s self-perception, he launched a campaign from the back of a VW van, selling buttons emblazoned with that very question for 25 cents each.
The idea came after Brand recalled a lecture by Buckminster Fuller, who suggested that people misbehaved because they still perceived the Earth as flat and infinite. Brand, a Stanford biology student and a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, believed a satellite image of our planet could inspire a new worldview—one grounded in shared destiny and ecological responsibility.
Using countercultural tactics, Brand printed hundreds of buttons and posters and mailed them to NASA officials, Congress members, Soviet scientists, UN dignitaries, Marshall McLuhan, and Fuller himself. He then donned a white jumpsuit, costume top hat, and sandwich board, selling his buttons to students at Berkeley’s Sather Gate.
The buttons reportedly made their way to the lapels of many NASA employees and the organization soon released the first full-Earth photograph later that year.
That first image—our glimpse of Earth as a singular, fragile sphere—profoundly impacted the public consciousness, catalyzing the environmental movement and helping lay the cultural groundwork for the first Earth Day in 1970.
Brand’s legacy didn’t end there. He went on to help launch the WELL (one of the first online communities), co-found the Long Now Foundation to encourage long-term thinking, and champion the idea of planetary stewardship—always returning to that catalytic moment on the rooftop.
At MINDS, we honor this lineage of insight and impact. Like Brand, we believe altered states—when paired with intention—can generate catalytic questions, foster systems-level thinking, and help humanity tackle its most urgent challenges.
This Earth Day, let’s celebrate the power of perception shifts to foster creativity, empathy, and meaningful action for our shared future.
