But then we didn't. The election of Ronald Reagan signaled that we'd taken the other fork, the one that would keep the old epoch rolling. There would be no more talk of limits: Instead, we'd push forward with the project of human expansion. We decided to care less about the earth as a whole and more about ourselves as individuals.
If you want a counter to Borman and Mead's optimistic vision, consider this crabbed sentiment from Margaret Thatcher: "There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women and their families." Pay no attention to the whole; think only of the parts.
In doubling down on our commitment to growth at all costs over the past five decades, we've managed to change that image of Earth rising in space in the most profound ways.
Fifty years is barely a blip in the vastness of astronomical time, but Earth now looks quite different when seen from space. In the Northern Hemisphere, the summer sea ice that once covered the Arctic is now half gone. Some of the islands of the Pacific have begun to disappear below rising seas. The great forests that covered South America and Africa are shrunken and ragged.
If you put different filters on the camera, you could see other major changes. The atmosphere, for instance, now holds considerably more water vapor, which is what happens when you warm it up. And the oceans, still so heartbreakingly blue, now have a different chemistry, growing more acidic at a speed the planet has never witnessed in all its geological past.
The Great Barrier Reef, easily visible from above and the largest living structure on Earth, is now half dead, its corals killed off by the ever-rising temperature. Siberia is on fire, five degrees of latitude north of where it ever used to burn. And as I write this, California is fighting the biggest fire in its history, the smoke all but blotting out the region in aerial shots. There are dead zones at the mouths of our great rivers, extending ever farther out to sea as the tide of fertilizer washes off the field, and at one point this summer, you could see five hurricanes at once, swirling off the coasts.
This view will, of course, get darker as the decades unwind. It's not hard to imagine that the view from space will soon show Florida truncated, Bangladesh inundated. The deserts will spread outward even farther than they already have, and the great ice sheets of the Antarctic, the largest physical feature on Earth, are in train to slide slowly -- and that's if we're lucky -- into the Southern Ocean.
We now increasingly think of space as an escape. Here's Elon Musk: "Either we spread Earth to other planets, or we risk going extinct. An extinction event is inevitable and we're increasingly doing ourselves in."
Musk and a host of other plutocrats, including Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and the late Paul Allen, have put their endless wealth where their fears are, underwriting our new round of space travel. But theirs is the emptiest of promises: no more than a tiny percentage of the population will ever make it off Earth (and given the latest research on the dangers to the human body of even the "short" flight to Mars, that may be optimistic).
If they do reach some other planet, it will be a barren place compared to our home. Find the most forbidding spot on Earth -- the top of the Himalayas, the center of the Sahara, the bottom of the Marianas Trench -- and it is a thousand times more hospitable than anyplace else in this solar system. We dig robotically through the sands of Mars in hopes we might find some faint sign of microbial life, even as we -- in the 50 years since Apollo 8 -- wipe out 60 percent of the animals on Earth.
Through the perverse glasses we're now wearing, the black-and-white void of space has come to seem a more likely oasis than the gorgeous planet on which we were born.
Our salvation may lie in actually seeing that image again, and in realizing once again that we live on the one place we'll ever live.
It's actually hard to remember that Earth is a planet. We live in a house in a neighborhood in a city in a country, and all of these seem more real and daily to us than the big ball we inhabit. We rarely climb high enough to sense the curve of the Earth, and when we do, the flight attendant is usually asking us to close the window so our fellow passengers can concentrate on the movie.
I've had the vagabond good fortune to end up in many of the places where that planet-ness is clearer: on the endless lava plains of Iceland, or at the Rongbuk monastery in Tibet, the highest year-round human habitation on earth, where you stare straight up at Mount Everest, with its peak sticking into the jet stream and pulling a pennant of cloud out of that rushing atmospheric river. On the ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic, where millennia are made real by the mile of ice straight beneath your feet. Atop the volcano cones of the Sierras, where the wisps of smoke remind you of the boil beneath; on the fringes of Hawaii, where magma flowing into the Pacific creates new acreage. Beneath the waves on the timeless reefs. High up in the canopy of the rain-forest.
These landscapes should provide us with a sense of permanence, but now all of them are in flux, making the effect just the opposite. That flux will be violent and chaotic, just one part of the ever-growing storms of our destabilized world. The victims of that chaos will be the people who have done the least to cause it; their plight is the best reason to embrace once again the vision of unity that came back to the Earth with those original images.
It's clear by now that the only path to safety for the 99.99 percent of us who will never board a rocket lies in joining the fight for environmental justice. It's the only battle we're all in together. In a world riven by every kind of division, the one thing that really does unite us is our shared citizenship of that world. Donald Trump has been trying to turn "globalist" into a curse word, but if the Earth-rise photo makes anything clear, it's that we do indeed inhabit a globe. That's our most basic identity.
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