“I don’t know if I’d die for it,” Stewart Brand wrote of the Earth Flag in the Fall 1970 issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, “but it’s the first flag I’ve seen that I don’t feel… somehow excludes me.” This sense of inclusion for all of humanity was a central goal for the flag. John McConnell, the Earth Flag’s creator, recalled in 1982 that his aim was “to remind us that each person has a basic right to use the Earth and an equal responsibility to build the Earth.”¹ He meant to transcend the “divisive” role of national flags and raise a universal banner “for people.”²

The symbol that McConnell, a lifelong peace and environmental activist, chose for this cosmopolitan flag was an image of “our home planet.” He had been “deeply stirred” by “the first photo of Earth [which] appeared in Life in 1969,” feeling that the view from space inaugurated “a deep and emotional… new awareness of our planet”: a “new and reverent wonder about the nature of the human adventure.” Peering at the pages of Life magazine, McConnell later wrote, “it occurred to me that an Earth flag could symbolize and encourage our new world view and that the Earth as seen from space was the best possible symbol for this purpose.”

McConnell called NASA’s head of public relations who enthusiastically sent him the photograph to use for a flag. Friends suggested that he add additional elements to the flag, such as “the figure of a person.” But McConnell, wisely in my view, maintained his original vision: a “simple design of the Earth centered on a dark blue background.” The original Earth Flag, the one found in the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog, featured a photograph of the planet centered roughly on California. This image, NASA Photo 69-HC-487, was taken 36,000 nautical miles into space from the Apollo 10 spacecraft as it journeyed toward the moon on May 18, 1969. (Since 1973, the Earth Flag has used the more famous The Blue Marble photograph [NASA AS17-148-22727] taken aboard Apollo 17 in December 1972.)

Five hundred flags were quickly produced so that they could be flown and waved at New York City’s “Moon Watch” celebration, held in Central Park, of the first moon landing on July 20, 1969. (The rushed production led to a misprinting, and the colors were accidentally reversed, with the ocean printed in white and the clouds in blue.) Right after the moon landing, McConnell went to California, where he claims that he “initiated the first efforts for Earth Day,” held on March 21, 1970, in San Francisco.³ This must have been when McConnell visited the Whole Earth Truck Store, in Menlo Park, and told Brand “that since all the nations have flags, and the UN has a flag, and states and businesses have flags, maybe there ought to be a flag that’s just for people.”

Drawing a comparison to other flags helps to explain why the image of the Earth on a flag stands out from the many other images of our planet that frequent the Whole Earth Catalog. Photos of Earth from space appear on multiple covers of the publication, beginning with the very first issue. The page that features the flag, in the Fall 1970 issue, includes images and ordering information for two different posters of the planet. But catalogs and posters aren’t flags. Flags are things that nations, states, and the UN have—they are political objects. Placing Earth on a flag gives the image a political resonance not found in the other reproductions of the photograph and not found much in the pages of the Catalog at all. Indeed, as Brand has recalled, the Whole Earth Catalog deliberately “eschewed politics” and maintained “an explicitly nonpolitical stance.”⁴

McConnell, by contrast, created the flag to promote an explicitly political stance. And many of the Earth Flag’s devotees—McConnell calls them “Earth patriots”—have understood it as such.⁵ A number of individuals, for instance, wrote their own pledges of allegiance to the flag. An advertisement in a 1989 issue of the leftwing magazine In These Times promotes the Earth Flag as a means to “pledge allegiance to the planet,” “an eloquent way to declare your allegiance to a global vision of liberty, peace, and environmental justice for all.”⁶ And there is, as I write, an active legal battle in the far-northern California town of Arcata over whether the city government can fly the Earth Flag above the American flag on a municipal flagpole. The champion of this emblematic reordering, which was approved by local voters in 2022 and then rebuffed by a judge in 2024, advocated for the change on the grounds that it would “make a strong symbolic statement of our priorities,” that “the focus must be shifted from national interests to the safety and well-being of our planet Earth.”⁷

Flags, moreover, are fundamentally and quintessentially political symbols. They make and display claims of territorial rights, sovereignty, and other political ideals. Above all, flags proclaim the boundaries of belonging and exclusion. They are, as Eric Hobsbawm puts it, “emotionally and symbolically charged signs of club membership.”⁸ Flags, as emblems, can even come to stand in for the political community they embody. “The soldier who falls defending his flag,” argued Émile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, “certainly doesn’t believe he has sacrificed himself to a piece of cloth.”⁹ The power of symbols like flags that give collectivities “tangible form” is so great, he claimed, that without them “the clan can no longer even be imagined.”¹⁰ It’s not for nothing that one of the first things that nationalist and other political movements do is make a flag.¹¹

By condensing, visualizing, and concretizing the abstraction that is the “imagined community” of a nation, Benedict Anderson contends, flags and other emblems promote a sense of “deep, horizontal comradeship” among members.¹² McConnell certainly intended the flag to represent and make imaginable “a global community of conscience… dedicated to the care of Earth.” He hoped that it would inspire a feeling of comradeship, not within national borders, but across them—a “loyalty to Earth that will transcend national loyalties and differences.”¹³

The political program that emerges from viewing Earth from above, however, is not as straightforward as McConnell may have liked. The message of these photographs, observed the historian Donald Worster in 1987, is “elusive and contradictory.” “For some,” Worster wrote, “it seems to say that, at last, the earth is ours—we own it all, we dominate it, and it is our launching pad for further quests of power into outer space. For others, however, it says that we live on a very small and vulnerable ball, the blue and green planet of life, floating alone and unique in the solar system, drifting in all its miniscule fragility among billions of other planets and suns and galaxies.”¹⁴

For the environmental movement that was emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Earth Flag—which they adopted as their own banner—clearly stood for the Earth as small and vulnerable, alone and unique. Influential environmentalist books from that era had titles like This Endangered Planet (1971) and Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (1972).¹⁵ The “national teach-in” that Senator Gaylord Nelson first organized on April 22, 1970, to raise attention to and concern for “the problems of the environment” wasn’t called Environment Day, but Earth Day.¹⁶ The early environmentalist perspective looked at the sphere called Earth and saw a planet—a finely-tuned system of systems of life, matter and energy that impacts humans and is impacted by humans, but is so much more than humans.

At roughly the same time, we see the emergence of another strain of thought that also took seriously the Earth as a unified whole: neoliberalism.¹⁷ Through the lens of neoliberal economics, the resonant message of the image of the planet from afar was “the earth is ours.” They saw Spaceship Earth as the vessel for global capitalism, and they wanted to capture the steering wheel. Neoliberals were not concerned about global flows of pollution but about global flows of capital—more specifically, they were concerned about sovereign nation-states fettering capital flows through the “single world economy.”¹⁸ The neoliberal perspective looked at Earth as a globe—an object framed by and for human concerns.¹⁹

Of the two ideologies invested in the idea of the whole Earth that developed around the same time as the birth of the Earth Flag, it was neoliberal global capitalism that emerged triumphant.²⁰ The flag of the World Trade Organization, the international organization founded in 1995 to promote a neoliberal vision of unfettered and unified global capitalism, features an abstract representation of the Earth’s sphere, with “six graphic arcs,” in the words of its designer, teasing “a hint of the globe.”²¹ The planet on this flag, in this vision, is merely the field for capitalists’ global adventures.

By the turn of the millennium, the victory of the capitalists’ globe over the environmentalists’ planet was complete. The world was “a seamless whole” made “flat” by globalization, as Thomas Friedman famously crowed.²² The Earth Flag itself exemplifies this process. The 1970 Catalog listed a 3 by 5-foot flag for $12, which adjusted for inflation is $97.²³ Today, the Amazon’s Choice 3 by 5-foot polyester Earth Flag is listed for $11.99.²⁴ This price reduction is a product of the way the Earth was knit together “as a single market,” as Friedman put it, by globalization.²⁵ In 1970, the flags were manufactured in New Jersey by American Flag Co. Today, they are made in China by Aimto (“Happy life is caused by a pleasant thoughts [sic],” according to its Amazon storefront banner). The very successes of global economic integration that make the Earth Flag so cheap and readily available, however, have accelerated the destabilization of the planet that the flag celebrates. This destabilization has helped to reveal our inescapable planetary condition. “[T]he harder we work the earth in our increasing quest for profit and power,” writes Dipesh Chakrabarty, “the more we encounter the planet.” To put it bluntly, it’s not good for the Earth that the Earth flag is so easy—one click to Buy Now!—to fly. 

All these changes to the planet, however, are unobservable in the image of Earth displayed on the flag and in the pages of the Catalog. The photograph of our planet against the black background of space projects a timeless quality. The metaphor of the “blue marble” suggests a static, unchanging ball—when, of course, our wondrous Earth is anything but.²⁶ Many changes on and to the Earth’s surface (the part captured by the photo) have taken place for billions of years and would have occurred regardless of human activity. But there have also been unmistakable alterations to the Earth caused by human beings since the shutter flicked aboard Apollo 10. Photos of the planet taken today may look basically the same as NASA Photo 69-HC-487, but they are of a different Earth. In 1969, to take but two measures, there were about 3.6 billion of us and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 324 parts per million. By 2024, the human family had grown to about 8.2 billion and we had increased atmospheric CO2 to 424 parts per million.

In much the same way that Earth photos both conceal and reveal, so too does the statement that “we” increased atmospheric CO2. The “we” of humanity, as critics of the Anthropocene concept have argued, papers over vast differences in responsibility for altering Earth.²⁷ Some humans have disturbed the Earth system more than others. This false universality is at work in the Earth Flag as well. By representing Earth with a single image, the flag—though reaching for a well-meaning, even noble cosmopolitanism—ends up collapsing “diverse life on earth into a vision of unity,” writes geographer Denis Cosgrove.²⁸ Human unity, even or especially when it seems distant, can and should remain a goal, but we must also interrogate who is setting the grounds for this claim.

The view of Earth and of humanity presented by the Earth Flag is what Cosgrove calls the Apollonian eye: “the viewpoint above the earth, proclaiming disinterested and rationally objective consideration across its surface.”²⁹ (The Apollo that Cosgrove references is the Greek sun god, but it takes additional meaning here, since the photo in question was taken by the space program named for the deity.) But of course, the proclaimed disinterested and rational objectivity still smuggles in bias. The Earth is oriented with north at the top of the flag. That may be how we typically think of our planet, but it’s a social, not astronomical, feature.³⁰ Even the shape and dimensions of the flag itself betray certain prejudices, conforming to the Western vexillological tradition. Flags do not need to be rectangles, as the Nepalese know well.

Despite projecting an ostensibly neutral view—the view from nowhere—the Earth Flag in fact adopts a highly particular perspective. The photo was taken not just from the towering heights of space but from the towering heights of technological modernity, as mobilized by the U.S. government for its Cold War space race. It is a product of the Great Acceleration, the period since 1950 marked by vertiginous growth in global population, GDP, energy and resource usage, and more, summing to “the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind.”³¹ Indeed, the means that put the Hasselblad 500 EL camera off the planet transformed the Earth in its own small way.³² The first-stage Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 10 burned fuel at a rate of 20 tons per second—the observer effect on a planetary scale.³³

Given this baggage, can we expect everyone on Earth to feel as included by the flag as Brand—an American techno-optimist—did? More pointedly, can we expect everyone to rally behind it, to act on behalf of a universal humanity living on one unique and fragile planet? Folks have been waving this flag for over fifty years and the Earth system, by any measure, is in worse shape. Certainly, some people reacted to seeing “the earth as it truly is” by feeling like “riders on earth together, brothers in eternal cold,” as the poet Archibald MacLeish exhorted readers of the New York Times on Christmas Day 1968.³⁴ But that same month, Garett Hardin—alas one of the most influential thinkers of the planetary scale—published “The Tragedy of the Commons” in Science, in which he excoriated “the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons” of Earth.³⁵ Six years later, having, I presume, seen the immediately ubiquitous Earthrise and The Blue Marble, Hardin concluded that we aren’t riding on Spaceship Earth but on a national lifeboat with “limited capacity,” where it would be “suicidal” for “rich nations” to share “our resources” with the world’s poor.³⁶ We are stuck, yet again, between the universal and the particular.

The Whole Earth Catalog tends to read the whole Earth in a holistic, universal register—more “riders on earth together” than fear of suicide by “unrealistic generosity.”³⁷ It encourages readers to understand “whole systems” and to observe our planet from high above, “as gods.” The back cover of the first issue, Fall 1968, features a whole Earth photograph, the same one as the front cover, with the caption, “We can’t put it together. It is together.” 

The Earth may be “together,” but are we? The answer is yes and no. We humans—along with all other lifeforms—undoubtedly live together on one interconnected planet. At the same time, we live such different lives that any sense of unity quickly falls away. Our “one planet,” Chakrabarty observes, contains “many worlds.”³⁸ A fundamental challenge of the present is to live in and with both these realities simultaneously.³⁹

One place to start, perhaps, is to look up from, rather than down upon, Earth. This view, fortuitously, is offered by the cover of the Fall 1970 issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. After three covers featuring Earth from space (and one featuring the M-31 Andromeda galaxy), this cover, designed by Brand, also displays a circle of blue with white clouds, but it isn’t a photo of our planet. It’s a photo of “THE UNIVERSE from planet Earth on a sunny day,” as captured by a 180-degree fisheye lens in August 1970. 

This orbicular, heavenward image starts to thread the needle between place-based particularism and view-from-nowhere universalism. It is particular because it is grounded, not just on Earth but in the earth of a specific setting—“a few miles east of Albuquerque”—with specific ecologies and economies, geologic and human histories. At the same time, it is universal—it’s a photo of the universe, yes, but more decisively it captures a perspective available to any human being. All one must do is place one’s feet on the earth and look up. Unlike the view of Earth from an Apollo spacecraft—an exclusive vista if there ever was one, having only been seen live by twenty-four human beings (all Americans, all men, all between 1968 and 1972)—the view of the universe from the surface of the Earth is open and multiple. 

Maybe the thing to do as we tilt back and peer out to the heavens, filtering the skyscape through all the places and particulars that cast our unique experience, is to grip the Earth Flag—that banner of our shimmering, lively planet as seen from the outside—in one hand, holding it firmly, with universal conviction. After all, Brand remarks, it “feels nice to wave.”