To the Moon and back. We have always pondered the Moonscape. We have looked up at the night
sky and longed for it, sang to it, written about it, drawn it, woven it into the fabric
of who we are and who we want to be. Apollo 8, piloted by William Anders and his fellow
crewmen Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, knew that this was a pioneering adventure. Something
so bold and audacious that their trip was always destined to be etched in history. And
after 68 hours of travelling, and some sickness in the cabin, they reached the Moon for their
lunar orbits. And when their space craft came out from behind the Moon for its fourth pass,
the crew witnessed an Earthrise for the first time in human history.
What an extraordinary photograph. We're seeing for the first time the Earth viewed across
a barren Moonscape. We see quite a lot of pictures of the Earth from space, right, where
you have the Earth sitting on its own. But in that particular picture you've got that
juxtapositioning, so you're definitely "other," you're in another place, and there is no life,
and then you've got, you know, the Earth, sort of teeming with life.
Pictures that evoke a strong emotional reaction are the ones that make us just pause. And
that can be any kind of emotional reaction. You know, it's interesting, when we see Earthrise
I think the emotion is one of elation. We celebrated human triumph, we'd actually put
humans right around the Moon. We get to that beautiful moment on Apollo
8; there's actually been an automated camera, outside the spacecraft, taking this image
for hours! But then the humans recognise it out the window, and this is what Anders says:
"Oh my God, look at that *picture* over there." So this is a picture that has been made for
us. It's actually a picture that evolved. All pictures have a history. They don't actually
just pop out of nowhere. They have an evolution. They're artefacts that we make, and that we
enjoy, we learn from and then we make something else. So they have this sort of evolutionary
process that goes along with them. The Earthrise: at the time, it was that new
viewpoint, it was that image that people hadn't seen before. What are some of the images that
have had an impact on me? I thought of this one: Hurricane Andrew was one of the most
impactful of hurricanes at the time, one of the category five hurricanes to impact on
Florida so, 1992. Earthrise has had a profound impact on my field, the field of weather,
climate, meteorology, not the least of which was that power of perspective, really seeing
the Earth as that one system. So, you know, weather wasn't just something that happened
in your back yard, what happened here maybe then went on to affect other parts of the
globe, weather happened everywhere. An image like Earthrise makes you realise
that we're in it together and that there are no borders and no lines and that it's just
this sphere. And we're all part of it. This image is, in size, it's one tenth of
the diameter of the Moon. And within that image, every little speck of light there,
bar one, is a galaxy. When the Earthrise picture was taken, in 1968, we didn't even really
know that this sort of universe existed. Astronauts circumnavigated the Moon and took
this picture that showed us just how fragile and beautiful this tiny planet is we live
on. Looking back over the last 50 years is really
looking over my lifetime. And in that time, the human population has doubled in size.
We've had an outbreak of peace, really, we've had a very peaceful period. People are living
longer than ever, many, many people are now what you'd call Middle Class and so really
there's so many good things have happened. But it has happened at the expense of our
planet. The way that we live, the number of people that are on the planet, has meant that
we are polluting, we're running down the resources of this beautiful planet.
We started tackling extreme poverty, basic education, literacy, democracy, vaccination
and child mortality. We made it better for humans. We doubled the number of humans on
the planet from 1968 till now, in fifty years. And what that meant was there was no space
left for animals. We've taken every square inch we can and we've covered it with our
city. We've covered it with the areas we need to make food, whether we are subsistence farmers
or large scale farming. And it's never more stark than when you actually fly over the
top of a protected area and you see the difference of what the land used to be, into what it
is now, and you realise that all we've left behind are mountains and swamps. We look for
the image that evokes a reaction, and the stronger the reaction, the better and probably
sadness is going to be the one that drives us to do something different. We see the lone
orangutan against a destroyed forest, those are the images that make us pause and think
about our own behaviours. I think the images that are going to become
much more evocative are more local. So, you know, pictures of the breaking up of the ice
caps and things like that, I - you will have seen some of those recent images and they're
extremely powerful - and I mean they're very beautiful, in a way, because of the ice, but also very
scary. The Earthrise image, you know, it was an image
of its time. So I think that, if there was to be an image akin to the sort of power and
capacity for communication that the Earthrise image has, it needs to be very connected to
what's going on in society at the time. Maybe there isn't one, big image that can
accomplish the same goal as the Earthrise image. We - I think this is why this is such
a good idea to celebrate the anniversary, to get people thinking about that global image
and perhaps in future it's going to be a lot of small images that speak to people in their
own lives. What's the next big, powerful thing, not just
an image, but something else that we can think about, beyond facts, beyond images, bringing
disciplines together to do something about changing our behaviours to save the environment?
And this leaves us all asking the question: "What are we going to do?" What are we going
to do with the next 50 years, so that when they look back at us, at this time, they know
we've done something good? Will we succeed in continuing to live well,
leave peacefully, but not damage our planet? So we've got to make some choices and it's
not just all up to individuals, it's things that we've got to do together to make that
- get to that balance. 50 years down the track one picture won't
be able to solve the world's problems, but maybe we can learn from the fact that it wasn't
facts, it was art and an image that really brought people together to do something about
the environment. I think we've got to figure out new stories
and find those new images through the imaginings of artists.
So, I thought I'd share this image with you: the colour's actually showing the levels of
ozone, with the redder colours showing more ozone. So, the ozone hole could have been
a big one this year, but it wasn't. Those global efforts to reduce atmospheric chlorine
are paying off. I just thought, "wow." This is just a beautiful image to illustrate that
and what an encouraging headline. So we need to use the power of images such as Earthrise,
such as this, and this global effort and the changes that we've seen, all the work that
we've done over the last fifty years, really to choose our path that we're going to take
for the next fifty years. And it's up to each and every one of us to
take the decisions and the actions that will make sure this planet carries on journeying,
full of diverse wildlife.