You look that river, gently flowing by

You notice the leaves, rusting with the wind

You hear the birds

You hear the tree frogs in the distance,

You hear a cow .You feel the grass

The mud gives a little bit on the river bank

It’s quiet, it’s peaceful

And all of a sudden, it’s a great shift inside you

And it’s like taking a deep breath and going

Oh, yeah, I forget about this

This is the first picture of the earth from space

That any of us ever saw

It was of us ever saw

It was taken on Christmas Eve, 1968.during the Apollo8 mission within relatively comfortable boundaries. But we are filling up that thin shell of atmosphere with population.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am Algore; I used to be the next president of the United States of America

I don’t find that particularly funny

I’ve been trying to tell this story for a long time and I feel as if I’ve failed to get the message across

I was in politics for a long time and I’m proud of my service

You got be kidding me, this is a national disaster

Get every doggone greyhound bus line in the country

And get their …morning to New Orleans

That’s them thinking small, man.

And this is a major, major, major dead

What do you need right now

There are good people who are in politics in both parties

Who hold this at arm’s length because if they acknowledge it and recognize it then the moral imperative to make big changes

Unless you fix the biggest damn crisis in the history of this country

Scouted out landing spots and they lost radio contact when they went around the dark side of the moon and there was inevitably some suspense

Then when they came back in radio contact, they looked up and the snapped the picture and it became known as “earth rise”. And that one picture exploded in the consciousness of humankind, it lead to dramatic changes .within 18 months of this picture, the modern environmental movement had begun.

The next picture was taken on the last of the Apollo mission’sApollo17. This one was taken on December 11.1972. And it is the most commonly published photograph in all of the history. And it’s the only picture of the earth from spacecraft, so that the earth is fully lit up and not partly in darkness.

The next image I’m going to show you has almost never been seen, it was taken by a spacecraft called the Galle that went out to explore the solar system .and as it was leaving earth’s gravity ,it turned its cameras around and took a time lipase picture of one day’s worth of rotation here compressed into 24 seconds

Isn’t that beautiful?

This image is a magic image in a way

It was made by a friend of mine, Tom Van Sant

He took 3,000 separate satellite pictures taken over a three year period, digitally stitched together

And he chose images that would give a cloud free view of every square inch of the earth‘s surface all of the land masses accurately portrayed when that’s all spread out, it becomes an iconic image I show this because I want to tell you a story about two teachers I had, One that I didn’t like that much, the other who is a real hero to me. I had a grade school teacher who taught geography by pulling a map of the world down in front of the blackboard I had a classmate in the sixth grade who raised his hand ,and he pointed to the outline of the east coast of the south America and he pointed to the west coast of Africa and he asked :”did they ever fit together” ,and the teacher said:” of course not, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard that student went on to become a drug addict and a never do-well.