Fragile Planet

—by Philip Kennicott

Since the first pictures of the Earth were taken from outside its atmosphere by a camera on a V-2 rocket launched in 1946 there has been something uncanny about looking at our planet from on high. They confirm, of course, that the Earth is round. But they also capture a frailty in the planet, its “separateness” in space. In Paradise Lost, Milton sees our planet rather the way the first astronauts may have seen it—as a “pendent world.”

As if it were just hanging there, unprotected, innocent, waiting to be despoiled. Which is, of course, exactly what hurricanes and wildfires do with no insidious intent (or no intent at all) but horrible consequences.

Photographers in California have captured the personal cost of lost homes and displaced people, and they have documented the viciousness of the drifting flames, but only the view from space could capture California—that instantly recognizable bent-sided, ocean-girdled geographical icon of the good life—going up in smoke.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) maintains a web page devoted to images of natural disasters that can be seen from space (www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards). New images are posted as they become available—a dust storm in Egypt, a haze in eastern China, flooding in Central America, fires in northern Australia

The view from above captures not only the power of nature, but the hubris of man. “The only man-made object visible from space” has become a cliched claim, made for any number of our species' more ambitious monuments. The Great Wall of China qualifies, but so, too, do many cities, rendered to blotches in the view from above.

Satellite images also show how our environment is changing, and they often evoke conflicting feelings. In the desert in Dubai, for instance, developers' petrodollars have added, since 1973, new waterways and islands, peninsulas shaped like palm trees, and unprecedented urbanization. Yet, though offered with a sense of pride, one cannot but ask, “what's the other side of the coin.” For satellite images have become a kind of visual truth check, a way of seeing our impact on the world and the world's enduring power to undo our work.

Part of the sensed ambiguity “with the view from above” may have something to do with fears of being spied upon. Back in the early sixties, when the U.S. sent its first satellites into orbit, John Foster Dulles, the then secretary of state, drafted a clearly annoyed statement to reassure Americans that the sky wasn't falling—though Sputnik itself would fall three months later. “What has happened involves no basic discovery and the value of a satellite to mankind will for a long time be highly problematical,” he wrote. It would be awhile before satellites started sending back images of Earth, but not a long while.

Now we have Google Earth, which lets you check out the car in your driveway, even on some particular day over the past few years, depending on where you are and how old the images (gathered from satellites and aerial photography) in the database are. The fears that Americans may have felt half-a-century ago have been replaced by an appreciation of the visualizations enabled by satellites.

Google Earth is [often] all about virtual tourism, a way to remember places that you once lived in or to visit places you'd like to see in the future, But, pan out, and suddenly you see the same pendent world, floating in the vast darkness of space, surrounded by a think blue haze of atmosphere.

The artists who have made this such a user-friendly web site have enhanced the frailty of our planet by surrounding it with a thin, brilliantly blue halo. There's no reason to do this in terms of the web tool's ability to map places on Earth. It's a borrowed gesture, an artist's addition that harks back to the longer tradition of finding the Earth both extraordinarily beautiful and vulnerable.

Indeed, the view from above is very often enhanced. Colors are added and state boundary lines are drawn in. It is, like every other form of photography, a representation, and it's remarkable how quickly we've learned to read and internalize the very unnatural views satellite photography offers.

In the space of less than two generations—and after millenniums of seeing our world limited by the horizons—we've developed a sense of the Earth as a whole. It was a technological achievement, but it's had powerful emotional and ethical consequences. For every time we see the Earth from on high, as we've been seeing it during the disaster in California, and in New Orleans, and in Ace,,,, we are reminded that we live in a time when not all problems can be kept at a distance. The satellite image, if employed when the news gets ugly, is almost always a Cassandra image, a reminder of our collective responsibility to the only home we have.