1968 IN HINDSIGHT: EARTHRISE
Episode 6 of our podcast on 1968 examines the rise of the environmental movement in the United States
Today we may take for granted a popular planetary consciousness and an awareness of Earth as the only life-filled planet amid the vast darkness of space. But it is only recently, within the past 50 years, that this perspective emerged.
In the final episode of our podcast 1968: In Hindsight, we examine how a rising environmental consciousness that gained firm footing in the 1960s. Historian Paul Rosier draws our attention to that decade’s writers and reformers who chronicled industrialization’s hazardous effects on air, water, and the climate. A series of books, beginning with Rachel Carson’s landmark Silent Spring posed existential questions about humanity’s capacity to survive. At the same time, the Space Age increasingly documented the character of the cosmos beyond Earth. Scholar Sibylle Machat discusses how in 1968, three astronauts were the first humans to leave Earth orbit. The photograph they sent back changed how we think about the planet.
