Earth as Art – From Near (Inside a Stone) and Far (the Space Station)

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who is 91 days into a yearlong mission as commander of the International Space Station, has been posting strings of photographs of our remarkable planet on Twitter using the hashtags #EarthArt and #YearInSpace. Here are a few examples from earlier in June:

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On June 22, Commander Kelly, posting an image of a meandering river, said, “[It’s] interesting how meaningless squiggles are until they stand for something else.” 

Exploring his output earlier this week, I was struck by how much the images, framed intentionally as abstractions, reminded me of a much more close-focus look at Earth — the spellbinding mineral macrophotography of Bill Atkinson, who’s best known as one of the pioneering programmers behind the Macintosh computer.

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A closeup photograph of a polished section of Dali stone, a form of marble from China's Yunnan province, from "Within the Stone," a book by Bill Atkinson.Credit Bill Atkinson

In 2004, I was one of a batch of writers, also including Diane Ackerman, John Horgan and Dorion Sagan, invited to describe our impressions of Atkinson’s mineralogical “landscapes” in prose or poetry for the book “Within the Stone.”

I wrote about a couple of the images in 2008. Below you can see a 1.8-inch cross section of pietersite quartz, followed by my little riff from the book, which centers on how time scales shape perceptions of what’s going on around us.

In the photograph, I saw the eternal battle between water and rock, which rock seems to win at any given moment as you watch waves break on a coast. But just wait awhile. 

 

Here’s my haiku:

We tend to recognize and give weight to agents of change mainly if they operate within our frame of reference, an attention span calibrated to the rhythms of human life—to hours and days, maybe years, rarely decades.

Waves are no such thing. They are fed by forces as near perpetual as the sun’s rays and the Earth’s spin. They know nothing of time, despite their metronomic manner. They roll until impeded.

It is the waves that break when surging seas collide with rocky shores. Thus is born the impression that water is weak and rock a bastion. But it is the human eye, of course, that is weak. Handicapped, really. Shortsighted in the most profound way.

With human perception of time and environmental change in mind, I hope you’ll read the invaluable essay on “Existential Risks” contributed by Martin J. Rees, the Cambridge University cosmologist and Astronomer Royal of England, at the 2014 Vatican meeting that built much of the foundation for Pope Francis’s encyclical on humans and the environment. Here’s a relevant excerpt:

We need to realize that we’re all on this crowded world together. We are stewards of a precious ‘pale blue dot’ in a vast cosmos – a planet with a future measured in billions of years, whose fate depends on humanity’s collective actions. We must urge greater priority for long-term global issues on the political agenda. And our institutions must prioritize projects that are long-term in a political perspective, even if a mere instant in the history of our planet.

We need to broaden our sympathies in both space and time and perceive ourselves as part of a long heritage, and stewards for an immense future.

I hope you can take the time to read the essay in full. There’s much more to explore at the Vatican website holding all of the lectures and papers contributed for that meeting.

By Andrew C. Revkin