Creating New Units of Culture
The ground of our cultural landscape is always moving, quietly and imperceptibly. Country music has taken decades to change in its sounds and stories. The designs of our buildings evolve iteratively and over generations. Our spiritual relationship to nature, from the naturalist poetry of Thoreau to the nature-shaping ideology of Roosevelt, took nearly a century to evolve. Flipping through the pages of culture, it’s hard to know when something ended and something new began. But unlike music genres and architecture, I can tell you the exact moment when modern environmentalism took hold of the public consciousness. The 1968 “Earthrise” photo taken on the Apollo 8 mission, among the first photos of earth taken from space, immediately changed our understanding of what it meant to be a human on this planet. Seeing the Earth through the universe’s eyes, a planet whose entirety we could suddenly hold in our heads, fundamentally changed the way we measure our relationship to it. There were famo
Explore this link on the map →