“Earth, pale blue dot, we will fail you not…” affirms Amanda Gorman in this Climate Reality video from 2018, in a reading of her poem Earthrise. Gorman, who riveted the world with her poetry reading at the 2021 presidential inauguration, is the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, as well as an award-winning writer and cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she studied Sociology.
The Earthrise moment, witnessing our planet from outer space in an astronaut’s photo from the moon, and dubbing the now famous photo the Blue Marble, is THE moment when homo sapiens began to remember their connection to Earth… and to take action to save our planet and ourselves.
In her poem, Earthrise, above, Gorman points to a pivotal moment in human history – the moment when millions of Earth’s indigenous homo sapiens first saw a photo of their living planet from the moon. This moment and photo, historically referred to as the Blue Marble, is credited with shifting human consciousness to the now indisputable fact that we only have one Earth, one home, and it is finite in its resources and capacity to continue to heal itself from ecological degradation. A year after the photo of the Blue Marble shook human perceptions, the first Earth Day was held in 1970.
We’ve written about and referred to this Blue Marble moment many time in the past two decades of Kindred’s nonprofit work. It is this photo of our beloved home world that inspired Gorman’s poem above, and our ongoing work to serve our human family. From this vantage point, it has only been a half century since we collectively began to wake up and act to save ourselves. Kindred hopes you will immerse yourself in our website’s two decades of stories intended to help us continue to wake up and take life-affirming action.
Visit Amanda Gorman’s website.
Watch the Earthrise documentary from 2018 here.
Read more about the Blue Marble in our New Story Glossary.
Read more about the Blue Marble, in the article Our Consciousness Journey from Kindred’s editor, Lisa Reagan, here.
Find more stories on climate change and conscious activism on Kindred.