Earthrise: Celebrating the photograph that changed (how we view) the world

On Christmas Eve, 1968, the NASA crew on Apollo 8 took the Earthrise photograph, the first photo of the earth from the perspective of the moon. It was immediately influential, and the first Earth Day followed soon after, in the spring of 1970. Bruce Clarke moderated a discussion about the rich cultural impact of the photo on the U.S. space program and the environmental movement.

Bruce Clarke, Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, moderated a discussion on the rich cultural impact of the photo on the US space program and the environmental movement.

Participants included:

John Haskell is the director of the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

Bruce Clarke is the Paul Whitfield Horn professor of literature and science in the department of English at Texas Tech University. His research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century literature and science, with special interests in systems theory, narrative theory and ecology. As Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology at the John W. Kluge Center, he worked on a project titled "Astrobiology, Ecology and the Rise of Gaia Theory," which postulates that the Earth's living and nonliving components form a self-regulating planetary system.

David McConville is the board chair at the Buckminster Fuller Institute and the creative director of the Worldviews Network, a collaboration of artists, scientists and educators integrating storytelling and scientific visualization to facilitate dialogues about social-ecological regeneration.

Anne Collins Goodyear is co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. She is a former curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, where she became the first curator to collect digital and time-based art. Goodyear has curated numerous exhibitions and published and lectured widely about modern and contemporary American art and portraiture. She is currently co-curating, with Jonathan Walz and Kathleen Campganolo, "This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912-Today," which traces, over the course of the past century, the dissolution of a portraiture based on mimesis to one stressing instead conceptual and symbolic associations on the part of the maker with the portrait's subject. The exhibition will open at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in June 2016 and will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Yale University Press.

Neil Maher received his doctorate in history from New York University in 2001, and is currently an associate professor in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark, where he teaches environmental history and political history. Maher has received numerous fellowships, awards and grants from institutions such as Harvard University, the Organization of American Historians, the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). During the 2013-2014 academic year he will be a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, where he will be researching and writing his next book on the environmental history of the space race during the 1960s and 1970s. He has published articles in academic journals including the Western Historical Quarterly, Environmental History, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, in popular on-line publications and blogs such as the History News Network and The Edge of the American West, and he has served as historical advisor for a PBS American Experience documentary on Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps, which aired in September 2009. He has edited a collection of essays by historians, scientists and policy analysts titled "New Jersey's Environments: Past, Present, and Future," and co-edited a special issue of the Radical History Review titled "Transnational Environments: Rethinking the Political Economy of Nature in a Global Age." His 2008 book "Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement" received the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award for the best monograph in conservation history. His second book project, "Apollo in the Age of Aquarius," shows the significant connections between the aspirations of NASA's Apollo space program and the earthbound concerns of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War struggles, as well as environmentalism, feminism and counterculture.

Margaret A. Weitekamp is curator at the space history department of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Weitekamp earned a bachelor's from the University of Pittsburgh and a master's and doctorate in history from Cornell University. During her graduate work, she was a Mellon fellow in the humanities and spent a year in residence at the NASA Headquarters History Office in Washington, D.C. as the American Historical Association/NASA Aerospace History Fellow. Before joining the Smithsonian, Weitekamp taught in the women's studies program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.

For transcript and more information, visit https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-8710