Samantha Harvey’s Orbital and the fragility of Earth | Letters – Guardian

I used to be moved by Samantha Harvey’s Booker prize acceptance speech and explore ahead to learning Orbital (‘I’m so no longer an astronaut!’ Samantha Harvey on her Booker-successful area contemporary – and the dismay that drove it, 13 November). Nonetheless, it issues me that her book would possibly presumably unbiased motivate the hypothesis that we grasp got to obtain off the planet in expose to recognise, in her words, that “what we attain to the Earth, we attain to ourselves”. This peep used to be encouraged by the well-known list Earthrise, and by astronauts admire Edgar Mitchell, who thought that seeing the beauty and fragility of Earth from area would suppose a number of shift in consciousness and a sense of unity and oneness.

This shift has moderately merely no longer took place, as evidenced by the accelerating lack of different lifestyles kinds ended in by human action. To gaze a peep from outdoors would possibly presumably unbiased terminate us from seeing what’s earlier than our eyes and in every breath: that every second we’re section of a residing planet.
Peter Reason
Emeritus professor, College of Bathtub