New View, Old Earth 🌏
A journey from a static earth to mountaintops and a photo that should have changed the world.
Distance from the ordinary lends pause and a break from normal grants us a new perspective. I think this is as true for an overseas trip as it is a five-minute meditation or a four-day long weekend. Evidently, it’s true too for a journey to the moon and back.
It’s Earth Week and to celebrate, I’m sharing some stories that gave us a new perspective on good old earth.
More Earth Perspectives…
READ: Mountains of the Mind - Robert Macfarlane
I’m not a mountaineer by any means. I’m very afraid of heights and have a tendency toward catastrophic thinking - both very bad for adventures in the mountains. However, I do love the company of mountains and have shlepped up my share of slopes for a good view.
I’m currently in the middle of Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane - a beautifully written exploration of the human fascination with the mountains. He is a mountaineer and his adventures pepper the pages with accounts of climbs that I, as a scaredy-cat, could never fathom but am still thrilled by.
It also weaves the story of how understanding geology drove exploration at altitude and shifted the worldview of earth from static to ever-changing, and how that has lured people to the mountains for adventure and pleasure throughout history.
Here are some highlights from the chapter, Glaciers and Ice: the Streams of Time:
Terrifying in their slow impacability, ripe with history and, at least to the properly primed imagination, thrillingly beset with hazards - it was unsurprising that glaciers attracted such a quantity of avid guests to them in the nineteenth century. Above all, glaviers offered somewhere that was utterly different… People came - as they still come, as I have come - to enjoy them in their tens of thousands, and to die by the dozen: drawn to the ice by feelings that had, like the glaciers themselves, accumulated over centuries.
🤯
WATCH: Earthrise by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
In 1968 NASA shot a rocket into space to do a loop-de-loop around the moon. The astronauts were Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders and what they came back with was ‘Earthrise’: a photo that gave the world a new perspective of our home.
‘Earthrise’ by William Anders, credit: NASA
This short film tells the story of the mission and that photo using recordings of the mission itself. It’s very The Last Dance, but for space exploration.
Like the image itself, this doco moved me. Especially hearing the astronauts talk about how seeing the earth in space changed them and how they’re disappointed that it didn’t change our collective perspective in the same way.
If you’re less in the mood for a 30 min movie, there’s a really cool multimedia story on Emergence Magazine inspired by the film.
WATCH/LISTEN: Amanda Gorman - Earthrise
When William Anders reflected on the photo that he took, he said it should have made clear to us ‘exactly how we existed’. That the earth was our ‘spacecraft’, and we were all ‘astronauts’ and that we needed to work together to navigate.
One of the other Apollo 8 astronauts, Frank Borman, said that it was a pity a poet wasn’t sent on the mission to put the view and their feelings into words. Thankfully now we have Amanda Gorman.
50+ years after we first saw that photo, there’s much more on earth to reflect on. She wrote this poem for The Climate Reality Project in 2018 and it’s stayed with me ever since. You can probably guess what it’s about. It’s beautiful, inspiring and glorious and I’m going to let it speak for itself…
THEME SONG: Pale Blue Dot - Big Wild
So, the point. Days like Earth Day exist to remind us that we should be taking better care of the earth. But the situation that we’re in kind of forces that reminder on us daily. It’s all over the news, our feeds and our brains.
Maybe this Earth Day, before you fall into the guilt and stress of environmentalism, fall into feeling. Nature is filled with curious creatures and awesome views that work wonders on a weary human soul. I think feeling that connection to the earth is the necessary spark to any action and it certainly helps fuel the fire that you need to keep doing good.
I hope that on Earth Week you find your Earth Rise and that it feels as majestical as this tune:
Til next time,
Alegria x