Op-Ed: Earthrise, The Image That Changed Our View Of Ourselves

By Tony Guerrieri, Executive Director Joint Conservation Committee

Images have always meant something to our culture. When you think of any environmental event over the last century, chances are it calls to mind an image.

Environmentalism is defined by images: the 1930s Dust Bowl and soil conservation; the “Crying Indian,” who in 1971 shed a tear in response to litter and pollution; and, the cooling towers of Three Mile Island, site of the 1979 nuclear accident.

But who could have predicted that the Apollo moon missions would produce the first quintessential symbol of environmental idealism by offering a new perspective of Earth.

Fifty years ago, Apollo 8 succeeded as the first manned mission to the Moon. On December 21, 1968, three astronauts blasted off from Florida and left the earth’s low orbital confines. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were aboard the command service module that was headed towards the Moon.

The astronauts knew they were on an epic journey, but as it turned out, the image that would come to represent their journey was a single picture looking backwards.

Anders was the mission’s photographer and he captured the image on Christmas Eve 1968 that changed our view of the planet--  the now famous photograph known as “Earthrise.”

As the Apollo 8 spacecraft, flying 70 miles above the desolate lunar surface, emerged from behind the moon’s dark side, the astronauts saw something that nobody had ever seen before a splash of color rise above the gray lunar horizon.

Anders grabbed a handheld camera and began snapping pictures. Of the ten or so photos taken, Anders snapped the single iconic image of Earthrise-- a startling blue, startling fragile half-sphere-- hanging in the blackness of space above the pockmarked surface of the moon.

Later, speaking about the photo, Anders said, “We came all this way to explore the Moon and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.

After the mission, NASA released the color picture the astronaut had taken of Earthrise. Images don’t tell a whole story, imaginations do. Images just guide the way.

Artists, poets, philosophers and scientists were inspired by the photo.

In the New York Times, the American poet and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Archibald MacLeish wrote that the image of the earth would create a paradigm shift: “To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together.”

Time magazine closed out 1968 with the Earthrise photograph on its cover, with a one-word caption, “Dawn.”

In Life’s 100 Photographs that Changed the World, Galen Rowell, the famed nature photographer, dubbed it “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.”

Earth seems so big and indestructible from our perspective, but yet so tiny and vulnerable when seen from space.

An inspiring image raises awareness of possibilities, of worlds beyond the one we directly experience and of other ways of living.

People saw their planet for the first time as a whole world – a single snapshot of humanity. Not as continents or oceans, but an entire entity.

Our entire world was shown as a small, blue finite globe in the distance with 3.5 billion human beings depending on it for life.

It’s the image that is credited with capturing the burgeoning environmental movement and has been used as a hopeful symbol of global unity.

As they rounded the moon for the ninth time, the crew made their memorable television broadcast in which they took turns reading the story of the world’s creation from the Book of Genesis.

The broadcast closed with a holiday wish from Borman: “We close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.”

In 1969, the U.S. Postal Service issued a six cents stamp commemorating the Apollo 8 flight around the moon.

The stamp featured a detail (in color) of the Earthrise photograph and the words, “In the beginning God…,” recalling the Apollo 8 Genesis reading. As for the original Earthrise photo, the environmental movement’s iconic image – it is cloistered away at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Click Here to watch a video of the Apollo 8 Book of Genesis Reading.

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(Reprinted from the December newsletter of the Joint Legislative Air and Water Pollution Control Committee.)