Graham Caswell . com

As humanity grows in numbers and in technological power and as we become ever more interconnected, more and more of the challenges that we face are truly global.  Climate change, endemic poverty, disease, resource depletion, terrorism and other problems all require a planet-wide point of view if they are to be understood and effectively

confronted.  To address these issues we must see ourselves not only in terms of our nationality, our region, or our religion, but as human beings who share a small and finite world.

A common criticism of politicians and other leaders today is that they lack political will when confronted with global problems.  Part of the reason for this lack of political will is the weakness of constituency pressure concerning trans-national issues. Politics is largely local, and most people naturally focus on the day-to-day issues of their lives, their societies and their immediate location.  Most people, most of the time, lack a planet-wide perspective, and this lack is felt throughout the political hierarchy. Conversely, encouraging a more widespread global perspective and identity would help empower ordinary people with a worldview within which to think about the issues we face today.  It would help us to ‘think global’ so that we might more effectively ‘act local’.

Images are a very powerful way to communicate ideas and points of view and photographs of our planet taken from space during the last 40 years have had a profound influence on the way we see the earth and ourselves. 

The iconic “Earthrise” photograph taken by the crew of Apollo 8 in December 1968 was the first to show our planet as a whole, and has been credited with developing planetary consciousness and with jump-starting the environmental movement.  Another photograph of earth taken by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972 has become one of the most reproduced images in the history of photography.  It remains the only photograph of our planet ever taken with the sun directly behind the camera, thus illuminating the entire globe.

In more recent years two other images of earth have had a widespread impact.  The first was taken from the Galileo spacecraft on December 11, 1990, when the spacecraft was about 1.5 million miles away. It consists of a 500-frame motion picture showing a 25-hour period of earth’s rotation and remains the only video of our home ever taken.  The second significant image was also taken in 1990, this time by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a distance of over 4 billion miles.  It shows the earth as a ‘pale blue dot’ and has been popularised by the late Carl Sagan in his book of the same name.  All of these photographs, and others, have helped us to think beyond our place and time to see ourselves and our home as we are - a beautiful and fragile oasis of life amidst an ocean of empty space. 

I therefore propose that a small spacecraft be launched into a solar orbit parallel to that of the earth.  This spacecraft would consist simply of a camera that would continually broadcast video and still images of our planet to a series of ground stations.  The orbital location of the camera would place it directly between the earth and the sun so that, from the camera’s perspective, the earth would always be fully lit, and would rotate beneath.  High-resolution video feed and still photographs taken from it would be available to the world both in real time and in archived format via a dedicated website and would be free of copyright and other restrictions on use.

The cost of this project would not be prohibitive - several million dollars at most, some of which might be in the form of goods and services donated by space-related businesses and organisations wishing to be associated with the project.  While the complexities of placing a satellite into a solar orbit exceed that of an earth orbit, the spacecraft could be piggybacked onto a scheduled launch as a “secondary passenger”. The satellite itself would be very small and very simple, consisting only of the camera, a radio transceiver, solar panels to provide power, the casing and perhaps small rockets to fine-tune the orbit. Once stabilised it should last indefinitely - decades at least.  While several ground stations would be required for reception (due to the planet’s rotation) it is likely that existing facilities would suffice.  The minimal ongoing costs would include maintaining the feed from the ground stations and operating the website. Effective placement of the satellite would be insured, as is standard practice in the space industry.

The development, launch and indefinite operation of such a spacecraft and camera would have innumerable benefits.  Publicity surrounding the launch and the reception of the first images would offer an unprecedented global publicity platform from which to draw attention to climate change, endemic poverty and other planetary issues.  The website itself would be a continuing medium through which to reach a large and global audience with messages concerning these issues. 

But by far the most important and enduring advantage of implementing this project would be the spread of video and photographic images of our shared planet.  Around the world individuals, schools, businesses, NGOs, governments and other organisations would use and distribute these images widely.  They would be broadcast on television, reproduced in newspapers and magazines, and printed as posters for classroom and bedroom walls.  We would witness the changes in the earth as it tilts through the seasons, see our own nations and regions from afar, and watch as large weather and other events unfold.  This camera would, through the Internet, bring live, real-time and real-colour images of our planet into the homes of many millions of people around the globe.  We would see ourselves as we have never seen ourselves before.

And that, I believe, would change the world.

Climate change affects all of us and all of our descendants.  National and sectarian conflict continues to plague us.  Technology has brought us together as never before in human history.  Whether we are Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish or Hindu, whether we are Irish, Chinese, American or Indian, whether we are liberals or conservatives, realists or idealists, this planet is our only home.  In the vastness of space it is a small place and, faced with the power of our technology and the multitude of our numbers it is increasingly fragile.  We are one humanity and we live on one world.  It is very important that we see it - and ourselves - that way

Those who are cynical and despairing about facing and dealing with climate change often say that solutions and not realistic because people will not vote for poverty.

However the problem is not that people will not vote for poverty, it is that people ARE

voting for poverty. Older people are voting for poverty for others and for their children and grandchildren, while younger people are actually voting for poverty for themselves.

If they are in conflict, political and social reality will always lose to the physical and environmental reality upon which they are based, and scientists are very clear about what we are doing to our physical and environmental reality. Maintaining the political and social status quo does not avoid change, it merely postpones it and takes it out of our hands.

Part of the problem in facing and dealing with climate change is that solutions have been framed as losses and costs and sacrifices rather than as movement towards a better life and a better world. Even in the absence of climate change it makes no sense to cling to imported and diminishing fossil fuels. Or to spend large parts of our lives in traffic jams. Or to pay heavily to heat the air above our leaky homes. Or to destroy the community and diversity of local farmers in favour of bland produce ripened in containers from the other side of the world. Many of the solutions to climate change are true ‘no-regrets’ solutions that make perfect sense anyways.

And our current consumer-focused lives are nothing to be proud of. Depression, suicide, yobbery, obesity and widespread emptiness and lack of meaning exact a huge and unquantified cost for living in an age focused almost exclusively on the material. As the newly emerging field of positive psychology is discovering, the things that make us happy (health, strong relationships, community connection, goals compatible with values, etc.) have little to do with consumption. (1)

We suffer from a lack of imagination and a resulting inertia. It is difficult for many people to imagine the world and their lives as different from what they are today, and thus they accept the prevailing social and political ‘realities’ not because alternatives are not possible, but because they cannot envision them. And, of course, in any dramatic change there are losers as well as winners. Unfortunately the losers in a change towards a sustainable world are some of the most powerful organisations in our society, and will defend their current positions without regard to any greater good.

This is why real leadership is so vital. John F. Kennedy could envision a moon landing only a few short years after man had first reached the edges of space. American and other leaders of the 18th century could imagine a world in which all men are equal. Many others could see the possibilities in great building projects, new technologies and new ways of organising ourselves when most others could not.

From the conventional perspective we seem to be caught between the unstoppable force of political and social reality and the immovable object of physical and environmental reality. But we are not. We can redirect our energy and our efforts to escape catastrophic climate change and to create a better, happier and more secure world for ourselves and our decendants. We just have to lift our eyes from the mental and political rut of ‘the way things are’ and see what is possible.

(1) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/happiness_formula/