This famous image, which became known as “Earthrise”, is the first photograph of our world ever taken from space. It was captured over Christmas Eve in 1968, and was published about two weeks later in January 1969.  It’s hard to imagine, in our era of infinite and immediate information, where we’ve seen and known already virtually everything there is to see and know, that this was the first time in history that humans had ever looked upon their home with any perspective, as a single, whole, and incredibly small world floating in space.
But it was.
And it was only a little over forty years ago.
     Volumes can be written about the philosophical, spiritual, and mythological shifts that this new perspective, necessarily, forces upon us as a species. It was well noted that seeing Earth from this vantage point had a profound emotional impact on the astronauts who were there — as I imagine it must have also affected any human being on Earth who was able to absorb the simple, plain reality the image presented us with.
     To me, it’s not surprising that Earth Day was founded within a year of the publication of this photograph, and then inaugurated about seven months later on April 22, 1970, marking the beginning of the modern environmental movement.