José Teixeira
The 1960s are often talked about as one of the bloodiest decades in American History. With the student protests, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., it's hard to contradict such a statement. In all this chaos, however, we tend to overlook the good things that happened in this decade.
Today, you'll learn about one of those good things about the 1960s. Most specifically, you'll learn about a photograph, its meaning, and its repercussions to society.
On December 21st, 1968, the Saturn V rocket launched the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon. This would be the first crewed spacecraft to leave low-earth orbit and circle the Moon. The Soviets were determined on reaching the Moon before the Americans, so this was a crucial mission to further American supremacy in space. This militaristic view of space exploration is further confirmed by the fact that all members of Apollo 8's crew (Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders) were all part of a US military branch.
It was Christmas Eve when the spacecraft reached its destination and began circling the Moon. They went from the near side to the far side of the Moon, and when they came back from the far side, astronaut Bill Anders caught an astonishing view. He picked up his camera right away, in order to capture this amazing view of Earth coming up the Moon soil, much like the sun comes up the Earth soil in a sunrise.
He took this picture, for everyone back home to have a glimpse of the significance of what they had seen. The picture showed the Earth, not as this color-coded ball we put in our classrooms, but as a borderless, fragile world, which must be protected at all costs.
Now I want to look at the events that followed the taking of this photo:
Before this photo, nobody thought of drawing Earth with clouds on it.
The frequency of the use of the word "environment" in published literature almost tripled.
The "Comprehensive Clean Air Act" was passed by US Congress in 1970.
The first "Earth Day" happened in San Francisco in 1970
The first "National Earth Day" happened in the US in April 1970
The Environment Protection Agency is formed in 1970
There's virtually no account for all this, except for that photo of our fragile world. In leaving Earth to see the Moon, we ended up seeing Earth for the first time.
Although this didn't specifically happen in the 1960s, I couldn't finish this article without leaving a quote from Apollo 13 astronaut Michael Collins, in 1972, when asked what was it like to see Earth the way he did:
"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-million miles out and say 'Look at that, you son of a bitch'".