Barbara Ward was a British economist, writer and adviser to policy-makers in the UK, US, and elsewhere who pioneered thinking on the overlap between environment and development – seeing a connection between wealth distribution and the conservation of planetary resources. Her 1966 book ‘Spaceship Earth’ revealed her as an early advocate of ‘sustainable development’ and a ‘new international economic order’ before these terms became widely used, highlighting questions of national self-determination, the spread of regional economic blocs as steps towards the global unity, and the role of the UN. 

Ward proposed that that richer countries should commit a certain proportion of their GNP in aid to the developing world, and she also spoke of the need for institutions to enable and manage both ‘aid and trade’, which she saw as both a practical and ethical concern, believing such policies would encourage stability and peace. She also used phrases “inner and outer limits” to refer to the inner limits of the human right to an adequate standard of living and the outer limits of what the Earth can sustain. (Wikipedia)

Also in 1966 Kenneth E. Boulding used the phrase ‘Spaceship Earth’ in the title of an essay, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth. Boulding described the past open economy of apparently illimitable resources, which he called the “cowboy economy”. “The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the ‘spaceman’ economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system.” (Boulding, 1966)

 

Sources:

Ward, Barbara (1966) Spaceship Earth, Columbia University Press.
‘Barbara Ward’, Wikipedia. Accessed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Ward

Boulding, K. (1965) ‘Earth as a Space Ship’. Washington State University, Committee on Space Sciences.  Kenneth E. Boulding Papers, Archives (Box # 38), University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries. Available online at http://www.colorado.edu/econ/Kenneth.Boulding/spaceship-earth.html

Boulding, K. (1966) ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’. Available online at http://www.eoearth.org/article/The_Economics_of_the_Coming_Spaceship_Earth_(historical)