Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30

Начало книги

Hi, Paul McCartney here.

1968. That was quite a year. The people were on the streets, revolution was in the air, we released the White Album, and perhaps the most influential photograph of all time was taken by an astronaut called William Anders. It was Christmas Eve. Anders, his navigator Jim Lovell and their mission commander Frank Borman had just become the only living beings since the dawn of time to orbit the moon. Then, through the tiny window of their Apollo 8 spacecraft, their eyes fell upon something nobody had seen before, something so familiar and yet so alien, something breathtaking in its beauty and fragility. ‘Oh my God,’ Anders cried. ‘Look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!’

‘You got a colour film?’ he asked the others. ‘Hand me that roll of colour quick, would you…’ For a minute or so, three human beings in a tin can nearly 400,000 kilometres from home scrambled furiously to fix a roll of film into their camera. Then Anders lifted it to the window and clicked the shutter and captured our delicate home planet rising slowly over the horizon of the moon. Earthrise. That single image made such an impact on the human psyche that it’s credited with sparking the birth of the global environment movement – with changing the very way we think about ourselves. That was nearly half a century ago, the blink of an eye in the grand sweep of time, but something quite remarkable has happened since then. For as long as humans have inhabited the Earth, the Arctic Ocean has been capped by a sheet of sea ice the size of a continent. But in the decades since that photo was taken, satellites have been measuring a steady melting of that white blanket.

Читать дальше →