Environmental Crisis Or Crisis of the Heart?(Essay‪)‬

On December 7, 1972, three human beings found themselves at a distance of some 45,000 kilometers from Earth. Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Jack Schmitt had left their planet that day at 05:33:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in spaceship Apollo 17. Five hours and six minutes later, one of them took a photograph which was to become the most widely distributed photographic image of the Earth in the years to come. The Blue Marble, as the photograph was unofficially called (official designation AS17-148-22727), was the first clear image of a fully illuminated Earth. The South Pole, incidentally, was at the top of the photograph, which is how al-Idrisi (492-560/1099-1165) had drawn his famous Tabula Rogeriana in 1154. The Blue Marble tied to an image the ethos of the newly realized environmental crisis and the activism of the early 1970s and extended the range of human understanding of the planet. The Earth appears in extreme isolation in its full frailness and vulnerability in a vast galactic expanse. The already known fact that, out of the eight planets of the Solar System, the Earth is indeed the one and only planet where life is possible gained new meaning.