Earth Day: The Overview Effect in Practice
Featuring: Orbital, Powers of Ten, Willow Defebaugh, NRDC, SunDay, Google Earth Timelapse
The Earth Action Index is a platform (coming soon!) to explore stories, discover ideas, and take action to shape climate futures. Before launch, we share glimpses through this newsletter: longform reflections, curated collections, and project updates. You’re invited to skim, click out, or stay a while.
In 1967, there was only one color image of the whole Earth. A lone blue island shimmering in the silent black sea of space. By 1968, there were two photographs. The satellite photo ATS-3 (1967) and astronaut Bill Anders’ Earthrise (1968) captured collective imagination and helped galvanize 20 million Americans to advocate for environmental action on the inaugural Earth Day in 1970.
Images of the whole Earth, once shining with singular aura, have since been dimmed by infinite reproduction. The wonder has waned. The whole Earth—in its beautiful complexity and indivisible oneness—has been flattened into a stock image, an emoji, a default iPhone wallpaper. Scrolled past, drowned out, taken for granted.
Our moment of climate crisis calls for a renewal of awe and a reinvigoration of wonder. We yearn for a fresh impression of the “overview effect”: the emotional impact of perceiving our shared existence on this fragile Earth from outer space. Here are two choice testimonies from astronauts Roy Garan and Edgar Mitchell. “I felt deeply interconnected and interdependent with everyone and everything,” says Garan. “You develop an instant global consciousness... an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it,” reports Mitchell. For more overview expressions, explore Emergence Magazine’s immersive story and film about the Apollo 8 astronauts.
Captured in those first images, the overview perspective lit a cultural spark—and people have been trying to keep it burning for 55 years. The Whole Earth Catalog also emerged from that moment, offering a manual for planetary thinking that continues to shape how I approach this work. Recently, people have tried to approximate the overview effect through viral Instagram accounts, Will Smith-narrated Netflix shows and Felix & Paul’s virtual reality experiences that all chase the verisimilitude of the real thing. One of my favorite photography books, Earth from Above by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, is due for a 25th anniversary edition this year. All are worthwhile. I can’t say the same for commercial space flight, which now offers “the real experience” to a precious few billionaires and their chosen pop stars, at unnecessary cost.
The catalytic cultural moment of ATS-3 (1967) and Earthrise (1968) may never be rivaled. Those first images stunned because they appeared from nothing—filling film negatives with light no human had ever seen. We have since lost this collective beginner’s mind, numbed to the view of Earth from above, as common as zooming out on Apple Maps. When images are omnipresent, imagination is overlooked. How can we restore expansive wonder in an age of instant answers? Will it take discovering life on another planet, like last week’s findings from the planet K2-18b, to awaken our awe?
A constellation of writers, artists, scientists, and experience designers are refreshing the overview effect for 2025—not through a single, stunning image, but through a sustained surge of cultural energy. Today, the overview effect finds us not through passive consumption, but through active practice. It’s a way of seeing the Earth that sharpens with attention, repetition, and imagination. Opportunities to feel this kind of awe are all around us, as Dacher Keltner explores in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder (more in my 2023 essay on awe and practice).
The daily practice of overview is at the core of the Earth Action Index project. It’s as much about exercising imagination and chasing wonder as it is about attending events and signing petitions. On this Earth Day, I’m sharing a brief menu of links that inspire overview thinking and invite earth action; each one worthy of a gesture of attention.
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There are so many impactful organizations to consider supporting. No right answer and no pressure. Today’s recommendation is associated with the first Earth Day.
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Appreciate your attention! Please leave a comment if you have insights or resources to share about the overview effect and Earth Day actions. More soon.
Beautifully and thoughtfully expressed
Beautifully written, Michael!!!