“No house should ever be on a hill — or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together, each the happier for the other.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
Earthrise
Just over half a century ago, on December 21st, 1968, a monumental event occurred—one many are unaware of—which changed the course of human history. Image AS08-16-2593 was taken by the crew of Apollo 8 on their outbound journey to the moon, it was the first image of planet Earth ever taken by human hands. Three days later, after having circled the moon four times, the very same crew snapped another irresistable image: the famous Earthrise photo.
Earthrise later became one of the most replicated images in human history. But AS08-16-2593, which to this day is little known, represents a profound inflection point in the history of human species. It offered a profound glimpse into our species’ relationship to the planet. There is humanity before this image, and humanity after it.
As a filmmaker I have been particularly interested in the experiences of the men and women who have seen our planet firsthand from space. In my pursuit to document this unique perspective, I have interviewed 38 astronauts, including the three-person crew of the Apollo 8 responsible for the Earthrise photo. Regardless of their ethnic, cultural, religious, and national backgrounds, their stories have a strong, surprisingly simple, central theme. They describe an embodied feeling of deep connection with the blue pearl outside of their spacecraft window. In short, they describe awe.
This phenomenon, known as The Overview Effect, was coined by Frank White in his groundbreaking book of the same name. In addition to the profound experience of interconnectedness, those who have seen Earth from space go on to describe another kind of realization—that they are planetary beings. To put it simply, the experience of the overview effect makes people aware that they are not on the Earth, they are of the Earth. This profound shift in worldview is symbolized by Image AS08-16-2593. A stark contrast to the geopolitical maps that hang in our history and geography classrooms. For the first time, we saw our true home. Having glimpsed our home, we glimpsed an unseen part of ourselves.
Greeks
As I continued to film interview after interview, documenting the individual experiences of astronauts and mapping their collective experiences, I began to see parallels between our current orientation to the planet and many of the fundamental themes in Greek tragedy, which I was fortunate enough to discover as a student. In their recollections and retellings, I realized there is a lack of lexicon for astronauts to fully express the scope of their experience. This gap reflects a discrepancy in the relationship between our natural world and our named world.
In Greek tragedy there are two primary forces: nomos (convention/construction/law) and phusis (natural/organic/inherent). I first came across the importance of these ideas in the work of the contemporary social philosopher, David Loy.
The first claim, that human civilization is something we have constructed, is a truism today, yet it is not something most pre-modern, traditional societies understood. The West owes that insight to classical Greece, which distinguished nomos – the conventions of human society (including culture, technology, etc.) – from phusis, the natural patterns of the physical world. The Greeks realized that, unlike the natural world, whatever is social convention can be changed: we can re-organize our own societies and in that way (attempt to) determine our own destiny. — David Loy
For the Greeks, phusis was the Mediterranean — its coasts, forests and mountains. Nomos was the laws of the polis — the institutions of law and culture. In the modern context, these ideas do not seem particularly revelatory. Our reality remains similar, differing only in minor details. However, our modern-day understanding of the relationship between nomos and phusis is profoundly different than the Greeks’, and that difference hinges on our understanding of what is primary and what is embedded. The Greeks understood that nomos and phusis had to be in harmony, and this is where our modern endeavor has deviated.
In our contemporary setting we can claim that phusis is the biosphere, our home planet. Our human ancestors ventured forth out of East Africa 60,000 years ago, and we have now adapted to every ecosystem, including low Earth orbit. It’s clear that while we may have romantic visions of colonizing the solar system or mining asteroids, we are firmly ensconced here on planet earth. It is our field of phusis (for now). If phusis is our planet, then what is our nomos? It is our global civilization, made up of globe-spanning financial systems, logistics and transportation, increasingly narrowing cultural homology, and of course, our built environment.
In the Greek tradition, we humans are phusis. We emerge from it and are of it. In turn, our creation—our nomos—is of us. By this logic, nomos is embedded within phusis. When nomos becomes primary, pushing phusis to the margin (often due to hubris), it upsets the natural order and leads irrevocably to tragedy.
One of the most famous examples of this role reversal between nomos and phusis is Sophocles’ masterpiece, Oedipus Rex, which follows the story of King Oedipus of Thebes as he discovers that he has unwittingly killed his own father, Laius, and married his own mother, Jocasta. Over the centuries, it has come to be regarded by many as the Greek tragedy par excellence and certainly at the summit of Hellenistic achievements. Oedipus violates the natural order (phusis), which causes a plague and upends his kingdom (nomos). Blinded by his ego, Oedipus sets into motion the destructive inversion of nomos and phusis. In the end, having realized the error of his ways, the tragic protagonist physically blinds himself, as he cannot bear to look upon the world he has brought to fruition.
The Greeks understood the delicate relationship between nomos and phusis. They understood that nomos is embedded within phusis, and they knew if the two were inverted, tragedy was inevitable.
As I filmed interview after interview, the missing lexicon became evident. The reason the overview effect strikes such a profound chord in humans is that, when faced with the contrast between the serene beauty of a planet in space and our tumultuous human civilization, we realize the harmonious orientation of our nomos and phusis has been disrupted.
Ron’s Experience
Of the 38 astronauts I have spoken to, the person I have spent the most time with is Ron J. Garan.
Ron first flew to space in 2008 on a space shuttle mission to the International Space Station (STS-124). His retelling of the moment he glimpsed the planet is a quintessential experience of the overview effect. Ron describes, in perfect detail, the feeling of unbuckling his seatbelt and floating toward the window where he was awestruck by the wondrous tans and crimsons of the Levant. Floating above the thin blue line of the Earth’s atmosphere, Ron recounts the strange feeling that arose within him. While staring down at the iridescent planet, memories of being in his F-16 fighter jet in 1991, dropping bombs in the first Gulf conflict, returned to him.
This discrepancy between the beauty of the planet and the often-harrowing reality of conflict, poverty, climate destruction, and suffering sparked a profound disquiet in Ron. In his second mission to space, Ron lived aboard the International Space Station for six months. After finishing his daily tasks and duties, he would float down every evening to the structure’s observatory, “The Cupola” and Earth-gaze.
As time went on, Ron’s understanding of his relationship to the planet began to transform. The more he looked upon the shimmering seas, textured mountain ranges, and ever-changing cloud formations, the more Ron became aware that he was not separate from the planet but was, in fact, of the planet. This shift turned Ron’s worldview upside down, leading him to claim, “We are all living a lie.” Our planet, our phusis, is primary. Humans are secondary, and our creation (our nomos, civilization) is tertiary. We are embedded, nested, in this reality.
This massive shift in understanding is most acutely present in the story of Ron’s return to the Earth’s surface. While the journey into space had been a relatively smooth ride (albeit at Mach 25), his landing with the Soyuz was a very different experience.
Ron and his two Russian colleagues (former Cold War enemies turned lifelong friends after 6 months of cohabitation aboard the ISS) blazed through the atmosphere like a bullet. As their small craft thrashed violently, jostled by the inertial shift of the landing parachute, the crew aboard laughed with ecstatic catharsis. After a short infinity, the capsule smashed down into tundra, bouncing once before rolling over onto its side. Once the stillness settled, Ron — an All-American, born and bred in Yonkers, New York — looked out the window and saw the grasses, flowers, and plains before him. With a huge exhalation he said, “I’m Home!” Ron, in fact, was in the middle of Kazakhstan. Nation-states and man-made borders no longer mattered. In that moment, Ron was simply glad to be back on the surface of the planet — his true home.
Planetary Design
The Greeks have a word for home: eco. This prefix is strikingly recognizable in our contemporary lexicon. And while these terms are undeniably referential to our world, they also point to the flaw in our current relationship to the planet. Remembering the Greeks’ understanding of the need for the alignment between Nomos as embedded within phusis, we can begin to understand in our collective reality—much like in Ron’s individual experience—there is a discrepancy in the relationship between our natural and our named worlds.
Within the very roots of ancient Greek, the experience of being planetary is present. From space it is obvious: our eco-nomos (economy), the management of our home, has to be grounded and embedded in our eco-logos (ecology), the knowledge of our home (phusis). Otherwise, as Ron remarked, we are living a lie. This lie that has caused tremendous destruction and despair will only lead us — as the Greeks warned — to tragedy.
From space, this reality becomes clear to astronauts like Ron who have flown in low Earth orbit and beyond. When they return, a magical event occurs. Suddenly, as they exit the spacecraft, it dawns on them that reality is inverted, much like in Oedipus Rex. Strangely, our Eco-Nomos, our economy, stands in as the primary reality. Humanity is secondary, and our planet is, at best, an afterthought. At worst, a utilitarian resource. These systems have been inverted. We must commit to a new orientation. Our work must aid the necessary collective shift towards this planetary identity both individually and collectively.
Much like the International Space Station (ISS), our planet has a life support system — as identified by Johan Rockström and the 127 planetary scientists who published a comprehensive scientific paper entitled “The Planetary Boundaries” in Nature magazine (2009). Those boundaries allow us to see the safe operating space in which our civilization can be nested.
The ISS is a profound example of how we should operate internationally. It’s one that serves as an apt metaphor for the kind of collaborative problem solving a planetary identity inspires. For example, if the oxygen fails on the ISS (as it did in October 2020), the fifteen nations that built the station stop what they are doing and come together to fix the issue. Spacewalks cease, experiments (however important) are put on hold, and everyone prioritizes fixing the life-supporting systems that sustain the six astronauts aboard the station. On Earth, our biosphere is the life-support system for our species and the 8.7 million other species in the planetary community. Now, more than ever, we need that international collaboration of all nations to protect, conserve, and prioritize the life-support systems of nearly 8 billion human beings, as well as all the lifeforms entangled in our collective destiny.
The industrialization of multiple civilizations into one single global nomos has launched us — as some planetary geologists have remarked — into the Anthropocene Era. The Age of Humanity. Our human activity now directly affects that life-support system of the biosphere, often detrimentally.
This reorientation to the reality of our situation — to being of rather than on the planet — is the foundation on which design of the built environment needs to be based, just as Frank Lloyd Wright intuited. By definition, a “planetary” civilization is a civilization (nomos) which is “of the planet” (phusis), meaning it is of benefit to the planetary life support systems.
Our future depends on our present design, and that design needs to serve as a mechanism for this reorientation. We must belong again. We must, as Janine Benyus has said, become a “welcome species.”
Guy Reid is a filmmaker, writer, and founder of Planetary Collective and the Constellation Foundation. He has spent the past decade creating films that highlight the work of astronauts, scientists, futurists, and thinkers — exploring stories of who we are as a species and how we fit in our world. Under the Planetary Collective banner, Guy writes and directs films such as the award winning Overview (8.5+ million views on Vimeo) and Planetary (Official Selection SXSW ’15, 30+ international film festivals) that delve into the understanding of our interconnectedness with each other, our biosphere, and the Earth itself. With Constellation, he is co-founder and executive director of a US based non-profit coalition of international astronauts that uses film and digital media to tell astronauts’ stories of being in space and works to inspire people with these messages to take action towards social and ecological good. Guy holds a Master’s degree in Leadership in Sustainable Development from the Forum for the Future in London, and a Bachelor’s in Religion (Eastern) and Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.