Love Your Mother

Pictures of planet Earth “our home planet” capture our imagination.  This one commemorates Earth Day and its message is simple: we need to love the planet we live on.

It’s easy to take our ability to see the whole Earth for granted and to forget that until the ‘Space Age’ at the end of the 1960’s we had simply never seen it that way:  we’d never got the whole thing in perspective.

“The Blue Marble”, the photograph that appears in our logo, was taken in 1972 by Harrison Schmitt, one of the astronauts of the Apollo 17 mission.  Robert Poole is his book Earthrise:  How Man First Saw the Earth describes it as ‘A photographic manifesto for global justice, and the single most reproduced image in human history.”

The image puts “foreignness” in the right perspective. The obvious physical truth expressed by it is that the Earth is one physical entity which we all live on.  The borders which we make it so difficult for people to cross are creatures of our own imagination.   What we see is the world of nature – deserts – forests – oceans – ice and skies.  We humans are so small and insignificant as to be entirely invisible, yet we are all part of this wonderful thing we call Earth.  The land mass we see is Africa: where science tells us humanity originated and from which we migrated to populate the whole planet. Foreignness really makes no sense from such a perspective.  It makes no sense at all because the Earth (and we together with it) are really as we appear in this image. 

“The Blue Marble” and images like it have influenced and been used to promote causes as varied as environmentalism, peace, nuclear disarmament and human rights.  They fit naturally with the aim of ending human rights violations on the basis of citizenship.  Concepts such as home, country, community and citizenship all look different when the world is seen as a whole. 

Astronauts who travelled to space and saw the Earth from this perspective were deeply affected, as were many others.  Edgar Mitchell of Apollo 14 said “We went to the Moon as technicians.  We came back as humanitarians”.  Russell  Schweickhart, an astronaut on the Apollo 9 mission, was similarly affected.  These are some of his words about the experience of seeing Earth from space.

You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again, and you don’t even see them. From where you see it the thing is a whole and its so beautiful … there are no limits, there are no frames, there are no boundaries.

 

… And you know very well at that moment, and it comes through to you so powerfully, that you’re the sensing element for man.   

 

There you are – hundreds of people in the Middle East killing each other over some imaginary line that you’re not even aware of, that you can’t see. And from where you see it, the thing is a whole and it’s so beautiful. You wish you could take a person in each hand, one from each side in the various conflicts, and say, “Look. Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What’s important?”

And you realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you – all history and music and poetry and art and  love, tears, joy, games, all of it on that little spot out there that you can cover with your thumb.  You look down and see the surface of that globe you’ve lived on all this time, and you know all those people down there and they are like you, they are you – and somehow you represent them.  

 From “No Frames – No Boundaries” Russell Schweickhart

A predecessor of the Blue Marble was the  picture known as “Earth Rise” – a picture taken of the Earth rising above the lunar horizon.  Even more evocatively this 1968 image taken during the Apollo 8 mission tells of a far away home.  Unlike Blue Marble, Earth Rise is not a fully illuminated Earth, yet its beauty and fragility is emphasised by the gray and barren surface of the moon.   The two are so different, and if we were in any doubt, there can now be none that our planet is special.

Below is a video presentation which includes audio of Russell Schweickhart’s meditations on his experience of space.  It was made in the 1980’s by Beyond War, a non-profit organisation dedicated to nuclear disarmament.   What is striking in listening to the words, the inspiration and aspirations from that time is how little we have moved forward since.   Rationally and emotionally we seem to know that we are one human species sharing a common home, yet we are far from having translated that understanding into human behaviour consistent with it.  Mere sentiment is not enough – if we simply ‘consume’ the messages the images give us and then carry on as we had before.  How we act in relation to the environment has certainly changed – but how we respond to our fellow human beings has a long long way to travel.  The journey to the moon may turn out in comparison to have been short.

Reference:   Earthrise:  How Man First Saw the Earth by Robert Poole Yale University Press 2008