[cool music] - [Vincent Brown] The overview effect.

The idea is that if we pull back far enough from the Earth, we can see the entirety of our planet as a beautiful and fragile home, and be inspired to protect it.

Until 1972, that image of a fully-illuminated Earth could only be imagined.

But then, astronauts aboard Apollo 17 captured it on film -- a photograph that's become known as the "Blue Marble."

At the time, many people hoped this image would transform human consciousness and usher in a new era of environmental action.

But could a photograph really change the fate of our planet?

The Blue Marble is one of the world's best-known images -- but the story of how it was taken, and what it did and did not achieve, might surprise you.

[cool music] In the 1960s, Americans began to wake up to the damage being done to the planet: air and water pollution, sprawling development, devastating oil spills, and the threat of extinction.

But what would inspire people to take action?

One idea came from within San Francisco's counterculture movement, from a leading thinker named Stewart Brand.

- [Neil Maher] Stewart Brand was one of the most important environmentalists of that period.

In 1966 February, he dropped a 100 micrograms of LSD on his tongue, went up to his rooftop in North Beach in San Francisco to take in the view, and he claimed he could see the curvature of the Earth.

And that made him realize that the Earth was finite, not infinite, and that we had to take care of it -- you know become stewards of it.

- [Vincent Brown] Brand spent the rest of that acid trip trying to figure out how he could communicate this big idea to the world.

His conclusion: We needed a photograph -- a photograph of the full Earth.

- Next day goes to a local print shop and prints up hundreds of buttons with a really simple question: "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?"

And then he sends them to politicians in D.C., politicians in the Soviet Union, scientists at NASA.

And all of a sudden, within three months, the story goes that engineers and scientists at NASA had his buttons on their lapel pins.

So then after that, NASA... consciously changes the trajectory of Apollo 17 so that the mission can capture that image.

- So do you know how true that story is?

- Well, they were definitely wearing the lapel pins, and they definitely consciously changed the trajectory of Apollo 17 to capture that image.

So whether it goes directly back to Brand or not is tough to say... but it seems like the lines are pretty straightforward.

[upbeat music] - [Vincent Brown] NASA may have been responsive to Brand's request, but they still faced significant challenges.

- [Jennifer Levasseur] So, to get the image of Earth as a whole takes being far enough away that its single lens could capture the entire disc.

So it really wasn't until the advent of the Saturn V rocket, the first rocket that could actually move people away from the Earth, to get that perspective on the way to the moon.

- [Vincent Brown] So what would it have been like to try and take a photo from inside something like this?

It's not a tripod setup.

It's not an ideal setup for taking a picture.

- [Jennifer Levasseur] Well, it's constantly moving through space at about 24,000 miles per hour towards the moon.

If you wanna capture a photo of the Earth, your windows have to be pointed in the right direction.

And so, when the vehicle was in a particular position, you could point the camera out, observe, take photographs, and make that moment happen.

- [Vincent Brown] To get a spacecraft into position for astronauts to take the full Earth image that Brand envisioned, meant positioning the command module precisely between the Earth and the sun.

NASA finally scheduled that trajectory in 1972.

On December 7th, Apollo 17 blasted off.

- [mission control] We have ignition.

Two, one, zero -- we have a lift off.

- [Vincent Brown] Five hours into the mission, the spacecraft's journey had taken it almost 20,000 miles from the Earth.

Looking out the tiny capsule window, the astronauts saw something remarkable.

- [Vincent Brown] They picked up their camera, a 70-mm Hasselblad like this one, and started shooting.

[camera clicks] Among the images they captured was the one that Brand had dreamed about: a fully-illuminated view of our planet.

With no orientation in space, the original photograph was what we would consider upside-down.

It would need to be rotated and cropped to turn it into the image we know today.

That happened as soon as Apollo 17 returned to Earth on December 19th.

Four days later, the Earth image was released to the press and went viral.

- [Jennifer Levasseur] It got published all over the world.

In fact, the Boston Globe made it an entire front cover of their Christmas issue.

In the long term, this thing has gone into children's books and science textbooks, and all kinds of places.

So that single image really becomes an icon for what we conceive of as the Earth.

And that's something that's set in our minds, I think, somewhat permanently.

- [Vincent Brown] But thinking of the Earth like this, gaining this overview, didn't immediately inspire people to environmental action, as Brand had hoped.

It's conspicuously absent in images from Earth Day in the 1970s.

Things only began to change in the '80s, when scientists began to combine the image of the full Earth with data.

- [Neil Maher] The best example, I think, is the ozone issue.

So there had been a team studying ozone depletion in the Antarctic for decades, a British team, and they had a graph and the graph just showed ozone going down.

NASA placed the data on an image of the Earth, a circular image of the Earth.

So you have these colors, like a bullseye, and in the middle, that red dot in the middle is the ozone hole.

That transforms both NASA science, but also the meaning of that photograph.

And all of a sudden we have Whole Earth and data [claps] together, and the image is becoming green.

It's becoming environmental.

It did a lot of good work for environmentalists.

It became a symbol of environmental consciousness.

It became a shorthand version of, "Let's take action.

Let's think globally and act locally."

- [Vincent Brown] As an environmental icon, the full Earth image has become a powerful shorthand for the challenges facing our planet.

You'll see it everywhere used that way.

But could it be that in pulling back like this... something important has dropped out of the frame?

- On one level I love the image.

I think it's done incredible amounts of positive work to create awareness about environmental issues.

But I think one of the problems with the image is that it erases people.

And that's a problem because it -- it removes the inequities that are inherent in the climate crisis.

- [Vincent Brown] Removing people from the picture obscures the fact that some communities face more significant environmental challenges than others... often connected to where people live.

[cool music] The limitations of the Blue Marble as an environmental icon can be seen here in Newark, New Jersey, one of the most polluted cities in the country.

- [Maria Lopez-Nuñez] Our racialized society makes some places sacrifice zones and disposable -- disposable places, disposable people, and that those things are interconnected.

If we don't get rid of racism, in a lot of ways, we're gonna keep treating the Earth this way.

- [Vincent Brown] Maria Lopez-Nuñez is an environmental justice organizer living and working in the Newark neighborhood known as the Ironbound community.

-[Maria Lopez-Nuñez] We're only a four-square-mile neighborhood with probably a mile of it being intense industry.

- Wow.

- Three power plants, a garbage incinerator, a sewage treatment plant, fat rendering.

- Mm.

- [Vincent Brown] And all this right next to the people who live here -- over 50,000 residents, largely immigrants and people of color.

- People turn on their electricity, they flush their toilets, they throw out their trash... they don't think about what happens next.

-Mm.

-We live with what happens next.

- [Vincent Brown] What happens next is that people are exposed to chronic pollution, leading to significant health challenges.

Here in Newark, one in four children suffers from asthma -- three times the national average.

It's problems like this that Maria is tackling trying to improve conditions for local residents.

She also lobbies for environmental policy change.

In 2021, the White House appointed her to its Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

She's clear that the Blue Marble has less significance for her than it did for Stewart Brand and other environmentalists in the '60s and '70s.

- [Maria Lopez-Nuñez] It's okay to have an image of the Earth, but we can't stop there.

You have to struggle in your neighborhood 'cause you're hearing so many trucks, and you start worrying about the air quality.

-Mm.

-Then you're worrying about the water you drink.

I think that actual living struggle and realizing that things are messed up, that things are broken and we need to fix them, that's where activism and organizing should come from.

- Are there images that resonate with you that you think can motivate people toward a more holistic understanding of our relationship with the environment, our relationship with each other?

- [Maria Lopez-Nuñez] Yeah.

We shouldn't be connecting with nature as if it's external -- it's connecting with ourselves.

So like watching people planting seeds, picking food, right, that they're gonna eat, walking in the forest, walking in the jungle, like watching the lungs of the Earth breathe.

We need a different perspective, I think.

- Right.

Our experience is here.

It's right in front of us.

It's right where we are.

- Mhmm.

I think we're missing out on relationships if we're being taught to care about things from an external point of view.

- [Vincent Brown] The taking of the Blue Marble was an incredible technical feat and its impact on the environmental movement is undeniable.

But *the * world is not necessarily our world, especially if we live somewhere like the Ironbound.

Maybe it's time to acknowledge that the overview effect can only take us so far.

In this case, we need to see things close up in order to see "The Bigger Picture."

[cool music] [cool music]