EARTHRISE 🌎The ethical challenge of one of the greatest images of all time

IMAGE: Earthrise, perhaps the most beautiful photograph ever made, 1968, Astronaut William ANDERS & the great crew of APOLLO 8… ETHICAL IMPERATIVES, a meditation on Earthrise We shape the world, and the world shapes us. The price of freedom is no longer war. The price of freedom is the revolution of thought and consciousness that ends conflict--BEFORE-- it happens. The first imperative of ethics is that ethics itself should not be thought of as belonging primarily to what is now considered religion, but rather as a primary dimension of all human activity. 'Primary' means that it is the first aspect to be considered in all action and decision making, and not the last. All action resonates in space and time. Sometimes only a second or two, sometimes for centuries; Sometimes only a few centimeters out from my own body, sometimes perhaps to infinity. Outwardly, this is ethical consequence; inwardly, it is ethical conscience. The key feature of this complementary inner and outer movement of consequence and conscience is the breadth of the circle of awareness and responsibility. The great leap of consciousness brought home in the historic Apollo 8 Earthrise photograph made by astronaut William Anders in 1968--perhaps the most important image of our time--is that it shows to the mind of compassion with granite-like clarity that the necessary breadth of this circle of awareness and responsibility begins and ends with the whole of the living Earth, and not with the largely arbitrary, conflicting fragments like current nations states. Necessity is a thing of great philosophical beauty. This is so because necessity awakens, and in a most powerful way brings together, the very best of our intellectual and spiritual energies, both individually and collectively. Just as the wild proposal of the poet-politician that we must go to the Moon not because it is easy, but because it is difficult, crystallized and brought together an entire generation of creativity, we need now to see that the dual imperatives of the new millennium are ending waste and war: Waste, because it in one word summarizes where the conventions of Culture are out of tune with the laws of Nature. Eliminate waste, and you solve the problems of pollution, renewable energy, corrupt agricultural practices and climate change all at once. And War, because of its destructive insanity—and it is insanity because the entire Earth is now at stake given contemporary weapons technology—and because it stands before us as the central fact of our time: that it is no longer a question of violence or non-violence, as Dr. King suggested also about forty years ago, but rather of non-violence or non-existence. Seen from this larger perspective, it becomes clear perhaps that War and Waste are essentially two sides of but one problem. For who would not say that, from the perspective of the Moon, waste is indeed humanity's total war on Nature, and that, in turn, war is not humanity's total waste of its own spiritual essence and promise? +++