Paul McCartney on Saving the Arctic

23 Jul, 2012

by Paul McCartney, via The Huffington Post

1968. That was a hell of a year. The peo­ple were on the streets, rev­o­lu­tion was in the air, we released the White Album, and per­haps the most influ­en­tial pho­to­graph of all time was taken by an astro­naut called William Anders.

It was Christmas Eve. Anders and his mis­sion com­man­der Frank Borman had just become the only liv­ing beings since the dawn of time to orbit the moon. Then, through the tiny win­dow of their Apollo 8 space­craft their eyes fell upon some­thing nobody had seen before, some­thing so famil­iar and yet so alien, some­thing breath­tak­ing in its beauty and fragility. “Oh my God!” Borman cried. “Look at that pic­ture over there! Here’s the Earth com­ing up. Wow, is that pretty!”

“You got a color film, Jim?” Anders snapped back. “Hand me that roll of color quick, will you…” For a minute or so, two human beings in a tin can nearly 400,000 kilo­me­ters from home scram­bled furi­ously to fix a roll of Kodak into their cam­era. Then Anders lifted it to the win­dow and clicked the shut­ter and cap­tured our del­i­cate home planet ris­ing slowly over the hori­zon of the moon. Earthrise. That sin­gle image made such an impact on the human psy­che that it’s cred­ited with spark­ing the birth of the global envi­ron­ment movement—with chang­ing the very way we think about ourselves.

That was more than 40 years ago, the blink of an eye in the grand sweep of time, but some­thing quite remark­able has hap­pened since then. For at least 800,000 years the Arctic Ocean has been capped by a sheet of sea ice the size of a con­ti­nent. But in the decades since that photo was taken, satel­lites have been mea­sur­ing a steady melt­ing of that white sheet. Much of it has now gone, and it seems likely that there’ll be open water at the North Pole in the life­times of my kids. I might even see that moment for myself.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at HuffingtonPost.com.

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