The Blue Marble
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine our Earth. The image in your mind most likely resembles that of “The Blue Marble”, a photograph taken by NASA astronauts during the Apollo 17 space mission in December, 1972. “The Blue Marble” became the first image of our planet available to the public that showed a fully illuminated globe (“Earthrise”, captured in 1968 showed Earth in partial shadow). Taken roughly 18,000 miles from the Earth’s surface, the image captures the Mediterranean Sea to Antarctica and almost the entire coastline of Africa. The photograph, now arguably the most reproduced photo ever, immediately became a symbol of the environmental movement. It was released to the public during a wave of environmental activism that had ushered in the first Earth Day celebration, the Clean Air Act and the first federal legislation protecting native endangered species.
The public release of “The Blue Marble” allowed humans a chance to finally lay eyes on their home, capturing it in all its previously indescribable beauty, but also its vulnerability. American astronaut James Irwin (Apollo 15) explained it well when he said ““As we got further and further away, it [the Earth] diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine.That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man.” Prior to “The Blue Marble” (and “Earthrise”) the average citizen would have had use a heavy dose of imagination to picture the Earth in their minds. Initial photographs and digital images of our planet taken from space during the 1940s and 50s were grainy, decontextualized and comparatively uninspiring. “The Blue Marble”, in contrast, could move men to tears.
Today, we are saturated with images of the planet we call home. Click on a link and in seconds Google Earth can carry you to the summit of a mountain range in Slovakia or fly you over a ruined Hindu temple in Laos. You can virtually walk the tree-lined paths of Aka Island in the South Pacific or zoom in a dairy farm in Southern Poland. We can see images of far off places we’d never dream of traveling to and images captured by satellites the size of shoeboxes distribute hundreds of thousands of images per day. My children’s generation can’t, and won’t, be spiritually and psychologically moved by any image of the Earth in the same way that “The Blue Marble” moved its viewers. We’re all jaded—but is that entirely negative?
At Nature Links, we explored the early images of our planet and discussed the impact that “The Blue Marble” had on our modern society. We debated this idea of Earth-image-saturation and whether or not our easy access to images of our planet can will help us to continue to recognize its vulnerability and save it. Participants were quite mixed on this topic. Some feel that connecting with people, landscapes and cultures across our globe will help us be kinder to each other and to our collective home. Others are more pessimistic. They worry we’ve seen it all and don’t quite care as much anymore as we should. No matter which side you’re on or where we live on this planet, we all have the Apollo 17 astronauts to thank for the image we have in our minds when we close our eyes. That must count for something.
