Exploring our ecological consciousness through Carl Sagan's perspective on Earth

Welcome to the first of our series Notes from a Small Planet. Maverick Earth was started out of concern over global warming, declining biodiversity and the unravelling of the fabric that holds life together. For five years we have reported from the frontlines of conservation, energy use, pollution and developments concerning the impact of humans on the biosphere.

Notes from a Small Planet takes you deeper, to the people and ideas that can and have brought about the healing of our small, blue dot in the depths of space, the only home we have. There can be no better starting point than the words of astrophysicist Carl Sagan who was involved with Nasa’s Voyager space programme.

He wrote these words after viewing a photograph taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 when it was about 6.4 billion kilometres from Earth. The small spacecraft turned its camera back towards the solar system and captured Earth as a tiny speck of light suspended in a sunbeam.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar’, every ‘supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” DM