Earthrise and the Imagined Planet
In December 1968 a photograph turned the Earth from a landscape into an object. We have been imagining it ever since.
On 24 December 1968 the crew of Apollo 8, in orbit around the Moon, photographed the Earth rising above the lunar horizon. It was not the first photograph of the Earth from space, but it was the first of the Earth rising, taken from lunar orbit. The nature photographer Galen Rowell later called Earthrise the most influential environmental photograph of all time.1
What changed? For centuries the aesthetics of nature looked horizontally, at a landscape to be framed and travelled through, with a horizon always to be overcome. From space the Earth lies in the palm of the hand: closed, finite and frighteningly objectified. Our greatest technical power, the ability to reach another world, brought the most frightening realisation, that our living environment is finite and set in a cosmos unfit for life.
The overview effect
Astronauts speak of the overview effect, a profound and sometimes mystical experience of seeing the Earth from outside: wonder, admiration, oneness with nature, a sense of shared destiny.2 In his book on the subject, Frank White found that space travellers mostly come to see how thin and fragile the atmosphere is, and how unimportant borders look from that distance.3 The missions themselves were hardly romantic. Every minute was filled with tasks and checks, and in the 1970s the windows were often too small or too dirty for grand views. The experience broke through anyway.
An imagined community
Most of us will never go. We know the planet the way citizens know their nation: through images. Irene Klaver, building on Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined communities, calls this environmental imagination, and for her the Earth rising over the Moon is its emblem.4 It lets us imagine a planetary community and environment we will never travel through.
That is a real gift, and a shallow one. Nature mediated in this way is imagined; we meet it on screens, in magazines and on social networks. Earthrise made humanity imaginable as one. Whether it brought the Earth any closer is another question.
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