I. “Why Do You Look In A Mirror?”
InFebruary 01966, Stewart Brand, a month removed from launching a multimedia psychedelic festival that inaugurated the hippie counterculture, sat on the roof of his apartment in San Francisco’s North Beach, doing what he usually did when he was bored and uncertain. He took some LSD and got to scheming.
“There I sat,” Brand later recalled, “wrapped in a blanket in the chill afternoon sun, trembling with cold and inchoate emotion, gazing at the San Francisco skyline, waiting for my vision. The buildings were not parallel — because the Earth curved under them, and me, and all of us; it closed on itself. I remembered that Buckminster Fuller had been harping on this at a recent lecture — that people perceived the Earth as flat and infinite, and that that was the root of all their misbehavior. Now from my altitude of three stories and one hundred mikes, I could see that it was curved, think it, and finally feel it. But how to broadcast it?”
Scribbled in his journal entry for that day was the answer, in the form of a question: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?”
In the aftermath of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for nuclear dominion on Earth. With the 01957 launch of Sputnik, the contest expanded to space. But in the race to the moon, neither side had given much thought to the value of training their satellites’ apertures on the world left behind. Brand glimpsed the power such an image could hold.
“A photograph would do it — a color photograph from space of the earth,” Brand said. “There it would be for all to see, the earth complete, tiny, adrift, and no one would ever perceive things the same way.”
Brand mounted a spirited campaign selling buttons that posed the question “Why Haven’t We Seen A Photograph of the Whole Earth?” on college campuses across the country. He often showed up in costume, and he often was chucked out by security. He sent buttons to Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, NASA officials, and members of Congress.
According to a 01966 Village Voice article, a student at Columbia asked Brand: “What would happen if we did have a picture? Would it eliminate slums, or meanness, or anything?”
“Maybe not,” said Brand, “but it might tell us something about ourselves.”
“What?” asked the girl.
“It might tell us where we’re at,” said Brand.
“What for?” asked the girl.
“Why do you look in the mirror?” asked Brand.
“Oh,” said the girl, and bought a button.
Brand would soon get his photo. On November 10, 01967, the NASA geostationary weather and communications satellite ATS-3 captured the first color photograph of the whole earth. Brand used a reproduction of the photo for the cover of the first Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural bible and forerunner to the World Wide Web that Steve Jobs once called “Google in paperback form.”
But the image didn’t enter the mainstream, as the first copies of The Whole Earth Catalog seldom strayed far from the communes. (That would change by 01972, when The Last Whole Earth Catalog won a National Book Award).
The moment of revelation for a global audience came in 01968, at the conclusion of a year of violence and unrest that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the escalation of war in Vietnam, and the brutal suppression of student protests across the globe.
During the Apollo 8 lunar mission on Christmas Eve, 01968, Astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and Bill Anders left Earth’s orbit for the moon, traveling further than any humans before. And then they looked back.
Anders later said the view of a fragile earth hanging suspended in the void “caught us hardened test pilots.”
“Here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth. “— Astronaut Bill Anders
The descriptions of awe, connection, and transcendence Lowell, Borman and Anders said they felt that day when they looked back at Earth would be echoed by future astronauts.
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’” — Astronaut Edgar Mitchell
Psychologists call this cognitive shift of awareness during spaceflight the “overview effect.”
The Apollo 8 astronauts reached for their cameras and started snapping photos. Later that day, in what was, at that time, the most watched television broadcast in history, the astronauts read from the Book of Genesis as the cameras showed a grainy, black and white image of the Earth.
When the astronauts returned to Earth three days later, they brought with them the boon of their new whole earth perspective in the form of a photograph. Earthrise captured what the grainy television cameras could not.
“Up there, it’s a black-and-white world,” James Lovell later recalled. “There’s no color. In the whole universe, wherever we looked, the only bit of color was back on Earth…It was the most beautiful thing there was to see in all the heavens.”
Earthrise and its companion Blue Marble (01972) are among the most widely disseminated images in human history. By approximating the overview effect for the earthbound, the photos helped launch the modern environmental movement and reframed how we think about our relationship to the planet.
“The sight of the whole Earth, small, alive, and alone, caused scientific and philosophical thought to shift away from the assumption that the Earth was a fixed environment, unalterably given to humankind, and towards a model of the Earth as an evolving environment, conditioned by life and alterable by human activity,” writes historian Robert Poole.² “It was the defining moment of the twentieth century.”
Be that as it may, historian Benjamin Lazier argues that by the twenty-first century, Earthrise and Blue Marble became victims of their own success.
“Views of Earth are now so ubiquitous as to go unremarked,” he writes. “These two images and their progeny now grace T-shirts and tote bags, cartoons and coffee cups, stamps commemorating Earth Day and posters feting the exploits of suicide bombers.” The whole earth’s very omnipresence means that “we ceased, in a fashion, to see it.”
Perhaps. Benjamin Grant, founder of the Daily Overview, believes we just need to look closer.
