The New Yorker:

By Bill McKibben

The inaugural Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, had many triggers: an oil spill in Santa Barbara, a river that kept catching fire in Cleveland. But possibly the most important incentive was a picture that arrived, sixteen months earlier, from Apollo 8. “Earthrise,” as it came to be known, showed a blue-and-white orb floating through black space. (“You got a color film, Jim?” Bill Anders asked his fellow-astronaut Jim Lovell. “Hand me a roll of color, quick, would you?”) With that image, we saw where we lived for the first time.

Earth doesn’t look like it did in that image anymore. After millennia of stability, huge change is now afoot. For one thing, there’s a lot less white up north, in the Arctic, where sea ice covered less surface this winter than ever before. And, though you can’t see it with the naked eye, the thin layer of atmosphere that makes our planet so special is markedly different: the amount of carbon dioxide in the air is more than fifty per cent higher now than it was before the Industrial Revolution; last year saw the single largest increase ever measured, amid other signs of our forests’ diminishing ability to sequester carbon. By some measures, March, 2025, was the hottest March ever observed. In short, the Earth that we’re meant to honor on Earth Day is in far worse trouble than anyone could have predicted fifty-five years ago, as they were celebrating the planet and raising awareness for its preservation.

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