Unearthly Earth

In my earlier post I was trying to remember a recent book which tells the story of the iconic NASA image, above. The book, "Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth," offers an interesting theory. Author Robert Poole argues that when people saw the whole earth for the first time, it gave a crucial spark to the birth of environmental or green politics:

The most important result of the space age was that mankind first saw the Earth. At Christmas 1968 the crew of Apollo 8 became the first people to journey to the Moon, and the first to behold the whole Earth. Their photo, 'Earthrise', changed mankind's view of itself.

Poole's interesting claim is that the 'look back,' the astronauts' first sight of the Earth from space, was almost an unintentional byproduct of projects which were vastly scientific and forward-focused: send probes to the moon; orbit the moon; land on the moon, and so on.

The Sixties were turbulent times, and so that image of Earth, our only home, must have been a powerful one for many people (aside from proving to any remaining flat-earthers that they were likely wrong): the Earth appears lonely, yes, and vulnerable, against the infinity of space, but the photograph also suggests serenity. From that perspective, all the struggles of the Sixties vanish, replaced with an image that ought to unite all people, all the time.

One gets a sense of how unhinged things seemed in American poet Robert Lowell's poem from 1967, Waking Early Sunday Morning, which sounds like a sermon, a sermon of doom. It ends with a plea for mercy and this bleak vision, which sort of conjures the "Earthrise" photo:

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war – until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

Can anyone smell the melodrama? Doom and gloom for Lowell had to be on an epic scale.