William
who?
Anders
was an astronaut who was assigned to Apollo 8, a particularly dangerous lunar
orbit mission in end December 1968, as humans had never been outside earth’s
orbit before and he didn’t expect to make the return trip. Yet, he and two others went off into space
and he was hardly excited when they reached the moon itself, for it was a
stark, grey, barren and bleak moonscape of depressing monochrome. ‘Ugly’ he often said when recalling the
sight.
But
they had to do their task of finding the proper landing sites for the missions
to follow and photographing these sites, so they got down to work. All of them
were equipped with cameras, and Anders was photographing the grey and
forbidding moonscape in monochrome when – unexpectedly – he saw something
unusual in rich colour from the corner of his weary eye, ‘a shining blue marble
that was rising above the moon, wreathed in cloud’, a gorgeous, fetching sight
and he realised, with surprise and feverish excitement, that this was the
Earth.
It
was so beautiful and enthralling to see - that little, shining blue marble -
that he was emotionally overwhelmed. “Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that
pretty!” he told the others and scrambled to load the camera with colour
film. He had no light meter, so he took
a number of photos, changing the F-stops and the aperture with every click,
hoping that a few would come out well.
Once
that was done, all Anders wanted to do was to look out of the window at the
Earth. It was Christmas Eve and that
little blue marble looked like a fragile, delicate, gorgeously ornate ornament
on a Christmas tree. Anders thought of
the tumultuous events that were underway in that marble beyond the moon: a
catastrophic Cold War underway in Vietnam, a young generation across the
developed world in rage and protest with riots in Europe and campuses in the US
in flames, the ravaging of soil, water and mountain and burning forests leaving
depredation in its wake….all in that delicate blue marble that needed people to
work with each other, not at each other, that needed collaboration, not
conflict, hearts not guns, forests not giant dams and gouged-out ravaged land.
Years
later, Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut on Apollo 14 and the sixth man to walk on
the moon, memorably put it like this: “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 ---.’”
Three
of Anders’ photographs developed well and one of them became known as Earth
Rise. It was printed on the covers of
magazines, on stamps and on posters that decorated countless walls in campuses.
It was the catalyst that, alongside Rachel Carson’s book, ‘Silent Spring”,
birthed the environmental movement in the developed world, for a photograph is
worth a thousand words and stirs a million emotions. One of the world’s greatest wilderness
photographers, Galen Rowell, described it as “the most influential
environmental photograph ever taken.”
Those photos did more that capture our earth, they captured our imagination.
And he was repeatedly
reminded of the wonder he had seen and of what he had said on his return: “We
went all the way to the moon to discover the Earth.” And William Anders always
wondered if he had actually said it.
Those photos did more that capture our earth, they captured our imagination.
