Terra Infirma

An Earth in Need of Care
Milestones in the History of Sustainability

The History of the Sustainability movement is peppered with events, people, groups, ideas.

Our ancestors had a healthy respect for the forces of nature. They lived off the land, were sustained by it. And so they worshipped it and lived in harmony with it, using just as much as they needed. We now use hundreds of times the amount of resources that we need to survive. Somewhere, the seesaw has dipped, an imbalance caused.

An iconic image, called Earthrise is one of the most influential environmental photographs of all time. This illustration of the original image taken by the Apollo 8 team simultaneously captures the Earth’s bold vitality and its fragility. We combine it with Schumacher’s words, that the ideal is sufficiency, not surfeit.

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Environmentalism has been around since Aristotle, sparked off in later centuries by the Darwinians like Humboldt, and Ernst Haeckel, who invented the term ecology to describe the study of organisms and their relationship with their environment. Self-sufficiency and the concept of a life in tune with the natural world have consistently appeared through time, from Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond, to Gandhian economics which speaks of community management of precious natural resources.

Terra Infirma, a book on the landmarks in the history of the movement, is broken down into four thematic groupings with further sub themes helping laymen easy entry into key concepts in sustainability. A combination of short text pull-outs, quotes, info graphics, illustrations, a mini graphic novella – all laid out with a rhythm and hierarchy reveal the narrative to discerning readers.