Earth Matters
You’d have to be living under a rock to have missed NASA’s release earlier this week of the first images of the universe from the James Webb Space Telescope stationed some 1 million miles from Earth. The dazzling photographs — revealing galaxies formed more than 13 billion years ago — reminded us all of the mind-boggling vastness of the cosmos and just how infinitesimally teeny and fragile our life-bearing planet is in comparison.
One would think this humbling reminder of our place in the universe would move even the most hard-hearted among us to consider the fate of our warming world; to understand that an uninhabitable Earth will leave humanity with nowhere to go. But that’s wishful thinking.
By this morning, Americans, at least, were back to grappling with news of a holdout coal-baron Democrat refusing, yet again, to support more funding for climate action, dooming the party’s legislative plans to fight climate change. (On the positive side, President Biden has promised to take “strong executive action to meet this moment” if the Senate refuses to act.) Scanning the news today, reading about all the political doublespeak, the presidential fist-bumping with a despotic leader, the horrific toll of the never-ending war in Ukraine and more, I couldn’t help but think of poet Matthew Arnold’s description of humanity as being “swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight” as our tiny blue dot hurtles on through a cosmos we still know so little about.
We’ve got to do better than this.
Maureen Nandini Mitra
Editor, Earth Island Journal
Image of a young star-forming region in the Carina Nebula courtesy of NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI.
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