Human perceptions of the Earth were forever changed by the flight of Apollo 8 in December 1968. Humans flew to the back side of the moon and out of sight of Earth for the first time and then emerged from behind the moon to see an Earth’ small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence’ as the poet Archibald MacLeish described the astronauts' view. Long known in the abstract, but now seen in its full reality, the Earth became a whole entity viewable on home television screens.
There is a nice coincidence here: the means to’ see’ the Earth in its entirety at a point when human impacts have become global in extent must necessarily be followed by global responsibility for those actions. It is not a question of responsibility for the Earth itself – that is a conceit which is still beyond human means – but an ‘epidermal ethic,’ a responsibility for human impacts on other organisms and on the surface environment in which humans and those other organisms live.
The existence of life on our...
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© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Young, G.L. (1999). Earth, planet (global perspective). In: Environmental Geology. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4494-1_85
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