ON CHRISTMAS EVE of 1968, the first manned mission to the Moon reached its destination. As the crew completed its fourth orbit, astronaut Bill Anders snapped a photo of the horizon. “Earthrise,” as the image came to be called, showed the bright blue orb — our bright blue orb — suspended in black above the moon’s gray surface. From the time of its release the photo was widely circulated. Its stark visual language made it ripe for commercialization: a 1969 postage stamp issued by the USPS commemorated the voyage, it became the symbol of Stewart Brand’s countercultural Whole Earth Catalog, and has since appeared on any number of bumper stickers and tote bags. Audiences worldwide reacted to the image’s simplicity: the only patch of green and blue in a vast and inhospitable universe. “Earthrise,” followed by the similar “Blue Marble” photo in 1972, became icons of the nascent environmental movement.
But the embrace of “Earthrise” and “Blue Marble” by the environmental movement also obscured the circumstances of their capture. As the photographs transformed into icons of planetary unity, the irony of the NASA images was lost: they were the products of Cold War tensions, funded by hefty investments in military research and development, and photographed by a small cohort of experts.
Two new books help to restore this perspective, exploring how the idea of a global, interconnected, and vulnerable environment developed in the postwar world. They show us how contemporary notions of the environment were informed by experts and developments in science and technology. The first of these two books, The Environment: A History of the Idea, is a collaboration between three prominent environmental historians Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin, based in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Sweden respectively. They trace the concept of the environment beginning in 1948, focusing on the networks of interdisciplinary experts who transformed its meaning through their work. The second work, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth, is the first book by Perrin Selcer, a professor of history at the University of Michigan. Also focusing on the decades after 1945, Selcer traces the idea of a global environment by following experts involved in UNESCO and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Readers may be surprised to learn that the idea of the environment is of such a recent vintage. Together, the two books persuasively show that it was during the postwar years that it became possible to speak of “the environment” as a single entity. The two books take somewhat different approaches: while Selcer focuses on the migration of ideas about world community from the social to the natural sciences, Warde, Robin, and Sörlin focus on the evolution of the term “environment” as an integrative concept, enrolling actors and interests from different epistemic communities. Yet both succeed in shifting the focus of environmental history from marginal figures to international diplomats and technocrats. In doing so, they show how the language of science — supposedly neutral, objective, and universal — was used to overcome political and regional divisions and assert the necessity of international institutions like the United Nations. Ultimately, they also raise questions about the value and limitations of expert knowledge in the continued fight to mitigate anthropogenic climate change.