Decisions You’ll Make
covered with swirls of white—quite miniature compared with the Moon.
As astronaut Bill Anders later retold the moment: “We could see a very
fragile-looking Earth, a very delicate-looking Earth. I was immediately
almost overcome by the thought that here we came all the way to the
Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home
planet, the Earth.”
The images of Earth captured by the Apollo 8 astronauts were not the
first taken from space. Unmanned lunar probes and communication
satellites had come before. But this occasion was different. Instead of
impersonal circuitry and mechanical technology, three warm-blooded
humans had boldly left the safety of Earth, traveled beyond its gravi-
tational reach, and snapped the pictures. The vivid appearance of our
planet, providing the only color in an otherwise black expanse of space,
had been there all along.
From 40,000 miles away, Earthrise portrayed the precariousness
of our own existence. As historian Robert Poole later wrote, “Looking
back, it is possible to see that ‘Earthrise’ marked the tipping point, the
moment when the sense of space age flipped from what it meant for
space to what it meant for Earth.”
This awakening spread worldwide; people began to see the Earth as
a living dynamic organism. Words like stewardship and sustainability
became meaningful. Looking after the planet’s resources and environ-
ment took on importance. Life magazine declared, “Suddenly we are
all conservationists.” For a brief time, people caught a glimpse of how
their own lives, those of other living beings, and a solitary planet were
inextricably bound together.
For me, the tipping point came not from space but deep in the Kalahari
Desert, though I would not realize its full impact until later. On that
warm, sunny day when Paul and I accompanied a single Bushman in
search of food, I saw that he had free rein to act with impunity. Had he
acquiesced to our urging and carried back all of the eggs, he would have
reinforced our Westernized beliefs; my memories of that day would
have melted away and the event would have been forgotten. Instead,