Blue Marble 2016: environmental inspiration for a new generation

It has been over 40 years since humankind first saw pictures of our Blue Marble – arguably the most significant moment in human history.

The photograph of Earth was taken 5 hours into the Apollo 17 mission, from a distance of 28,000 miles as the spacecraft left its orbit to begin its trajectory to the Moon. It was not the first time our planet had been photographed from space, but never before had the image been taken by a person or so widely disseminated. Its release coincided with a surge in environmental activism around the world and was seized upon as a powerful depiction of our planet’s beauty, frailty and vulnerability.

Blue Marble 2016

NASA released to the world last week images of the sunlit side of Earth captured by a satellite-borne camera over the course of a year from its orbit 1 million miles from Earth, a point in space where it is perfectly balanced between the gravity of our home planet and the sun.

EPIC takes a new picture every two hours, capturing the ever-changing motion of clouds and weather systems and the fixed features of Earth such as deserts, forests and the distinct blues of different seas. The footage will allow scientists to monitor ozone and aerosol levels in Earth’s atmosphere, cloud height, vegetation properties and the ultraviolet reflective properties of Earth.

The significance of such images is perhaps best put by the late American astronomer and astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, in his book “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.”

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

If blue marble spoke to the world about the need to protect our planet, the footage from the EPIC camera once again reminds us of our vulnerability.
After all, Sagan referred to the Earth as “where we make our stand.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFrP6QfbC2g

Your journey, our world

The ETA has been voted to be an ethical company like no other in Britain for the second year running by the Good Shopping Guide. Beating household-name insurance companies such as John Lewis and the Co-op, the ETA earned an ethical company index score of 89.

The ETA was established in 1990 as an ethical provider of green, reliable travel services. Twenty six years on, it continues to offer cycle insurance, travel insurance and breakdown cover while putting concern for the environment at the heart of all it does.

The Good Shopping Guide each year examines the companies behind the brands - both big and small. In some cases apparently ethical insurance brands score much lower than you might expect because the holding company is involved in less ethical practices.

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