Ten years after Silent Spring was published, British economist Barbara Ward helped set the intellectual scene for a new phase of environmental thinking, characterising the planet as a ‘fragile orb’ that could only survive if people joined together globally. Ward's vision helped define the first international conference on the environment and development, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, having been set out earlier that year in her co-authored book, Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (Ward and Dubos 1972), and the accompanying short film, Survival of Spaceship Earth (IIED 2014 [1972]). The image on the book's front cover is, unsurprisingly, the ‘earthrise’ image taken by astronaut William Anders in 1968 as part of the Apollo 11 space mission (see Interlude 2). Both the book, which was commissioned by the newly established United Nations Environmental Program, and the film evoke the shared biophysical, earth system as the basis from which to forge a truly global community. ‘Spaceship’ earth is our home, we learn, a web of fragile connections that needs protection. It is this planetary call that demands global unity and collaboration.

An eminent white academic, Ward provided a rallying call that galvanised social and political action, just like Carson's did. Yet the new imagery was problematic in related and in new ways. While emphasising justice in her cooperating planet – this newly forming global community requires a more equitable use and allocation of resources, between rich and poor, she argues – the planet itself is presented as unifiable, universalisable and whole. Meanwhile, although Ward references the frustrations of a younger generation fed up with the ‘blatant forms of materialism’ and the inability of established institutions to change, the imperative to act is still placed on northern global leaders and white scientists (of the ‘First World’ in the 1970s). This vision is markedly disconnected with the aesthetics and claims of mass social and political movements organising against war, colonialism, patriarchy and industrial capitalism in the same period. How and why did environmentalism base its vision in one shared world, when so much of that world was insisting that this unified world did not exist?