The parts and the whole: 'Earthrise' and the politics of seeing everything from nowhere

The first Earth Day in 1970 had many inspirations – Rachel Carson’s compelling Silent Spring, antiwar student movements across the US, and the devastation of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill – but one photo is often credited with the emergence of a new global environmental consciousness in the late 1960s. Earthrise was snapped by astronaut Bill Anders as the Apollo 8 spacecraft orbited the moon, and it depicts a blue and white planet floating in the blackness of space. While it highlights earth’s vulnerability to environmental destruction, the picture also showed us a different vision of ourselves. As Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman reflected, “We were the first humans to see the world in its majestic totality… this must be what God sees.”

In this Earth Day keynote, Joanne Yao explores the abstracted view of earth from above as an integrated whole and the politics of a whole humanity that this God-like view engendered. From this position, the 1968 moment becomes the culmination of a longer quest to know the earth in its entirety through scientific exploration into the unknown, which was often entangled with histories of colonialism and racialized and gendered exclusions. 

The keynote will explore the utopian imaginaries this view of earth inspired in how humans could rise above parochial interests to unite as one against the cold nothingness of space, but it also traces the silences and erasures that enabled what Donna Haraway calls the “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere.”

Registration will close two hours before the event begins.