Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (review)

In the last week of December 1968, a series of photographs appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. Shot by the astronauts of Apollo 8, they depicted Earth, blue and white against the black of space, appearing to "rise" over the surface of the moon. The images triggered a wave of wonder. Diplomats glimpsed a new era of human unity, the religious saw evidence of a benevolent god, and cold war politicians opined that these pictures might spark a new search for international peace. The astronauts who took the pictures were perhaps the most enthralled: "It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me," recalled Commander Frank Borman.

According to historian Robert Poole, the instant in which the astronauts first snapped a picture of Earth's rise over the moon "was the defining moment of the twentieth century." Poole's claim clearly suffers from hyperbole. If that dark century had a single defining moment, it might just as easily have been the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima or the revelation of the Nazi concentration camps. But as this thoroughly researched and exceptionally engaging history makes clear, our ability to suddenly see our planetary home had a dramatic effect on American culture. In the wake of Apollo 8, the militaristic visions of extra-planetary exploration that had driven both mid-century science fiction and the rise of NASA itself gave way, at least for a moment, to something softer. For a few years at least, Americans could imagine themselves as citizens of the whole Earth.

Poole tells this story from several angles and, as a result, captures it with a kind of kaleidoscopic richness. His most compelling accounts emerge from within the space program itself. Poole opens his narrative with the astronauts, in the Apollo 8 capsule, as they first spot Earth rising over the moon. He then steps back and walks his readers through a brief, informative history of manned space flight and of the Apollo 8 mission in particular. By doing so, he neatly shows how the sight of Earthrise surprised even the professional explorers: aimed as they were at the conquest of distance, none had expected to suddenly see what was closest to home. Poole also deftly traces the history of earlier visions of Earth, from the Middle Ages to early airplane flight. Set within this history, the image of Earthrise represents the culmination of a slow process of recognition. As Poole puts it, humans finally understood that they inhabited a planet, and not just a landscape.

That understanding in turn helped drive the rise of the environmental movement and of a new understanding among scientists of Earth as a single living system. Poole tells the first of these stories by following NASA's image of Earth onto the cover of hippie entrepreneur Stewart Brand's counter cultural bible, the Whole Earth Catalog, and from there onto the dark blue fabric of the flags that hung from windows nationwide on the first Earth Day in 1970. As Poole points out, the image anchored a widespread shift toward a less exploitative vision of Earth. That vision in turn received its scientific articulation in James Lovelock's "Gaia" theory of 1979. As he looked at the NASA photographs, Lovelock saw Earth as a single organism, and a female organism at that. As Poole demonstrates, Lovelock's writings ultimately informed both scientific research and New Age mysticism.

Thanks to his multilens approach, Poole makes a powerful case for the influence of the Earthrise images on American culture and does so with uncommon economy and grace. His study suffers from two weaknesses, however. First, though he and many of his informants suggest that the sight of Earthrise had an impact on the whole of humanity, Poole's account focuses almost exclusively on Americans. Second, when he does turn his gaze abroad, his evidence often undercuts...