ABSTRACT
The planet Earth was seen in its entirety for the first time in December of 1968 as photographs taken from the Apollo 8 spacecraft were diffused through the television networks and in the press.1 It was a beautiful thing, floating in the night sky. According to one commentator, the color photograph of the Earth rising over the moon “established our planetary facthood and beauty and rareness and began to bend human consciousness.”2 These images spoke of the oneness of the globe, the interdependency of its systems, and the fragility of the planet. While the space program that produced this photograph used the rhetoric of the frontier, the vision of the Earth as a planet in space became an icon for the emerging ecology movement.3 On this day, the ecology movement made a quantum leap forward, as millions of people could see the idea of global interdependency.
