Feeling like an Earthling
Earth Day reflections on planet and place
Friends in New York: Check out our curated event calendar for Earth Day and the rest of April. Park gatherings, DJ sets, gallery shows, spring migration walks, music festivals, theater shows, film screenings.
“If we would remember that we are first and foremost Earthlings, a term describing our shared heritage that should never have been ceded to science fiction, we might start paying more attention to what the planet itself has to say.” — Marcia Bjornerud in Wrinkled Time
For most of my life, I did not feel like an Earthling. The world was alive and I did not notice it.
Growing up, on the walls of my house, there were giant, gorgeous images of plants. My mom is a professional photographer of gardens and botanicals and she filled the home with her prints. To me, they were anonymous decorations. I didn’t stop to see the flowers (in the house or in the landscape) and certainly did not know their names. I suffered from a condition - which has a technical term - of “plant blindness.”
Beyond the walls, I could see a wild ecosystem: a tidal salt marsh at the edges of the Long Island Sound. On the scale of days and seasons, there unfolds a show-stopping performance of earthly happenings. Daily, the tides swell to submerge the cordgrass and recede to reveal the fiddler crabs scurrying out of their muddy burrows. Seasonally, the marsh fades to brown in the winter, hosting a diverse duck population, before enlivening to emerald green by summer, when egrets wade among the waters and a pair of ospreys nest and fish between the coves. The marsh now captures my full attention, but as a kid, I barely noticed the show was happening.
Somewhere inside - especially as kids - we have the seeds of an Earthling in us. I’m reminded of it whenever I play with my nieces and nephews. The adoration of a favorite animal, the wonder at the shape of a seashell, the impulse to pick up a pinecone and hold onto it the rest of the day. On the family computer, I used to make Powerpoint presentations about kangaroos and present them to my parents, fielding questions and concerns about wallaby behavior, while mispronouncing it willoby. I suspect it happens to many of us: the seed of curiosity in nonhuman life naturally goes dormant as we get consumed by human happenings.
In my case, the seed remained dormant as I went deep in the digital direction, toward virtual and augmented reality. Studying and working with those technologies, I felt that immersive experiences could deepen presence, facilitate empathy, and even lead to transformation. For a living, I made many more presentation decks, but none of them were about kangaroos, unfortunately.
Things shifted during the pandemic. The Great Pause in human happenings made space for the rest of the living world to recover and offered an invitation for us to notice it. I spent those years living in San Francisco, where ecology is all-encompassing. Paradoxically, but predictably, in the land of silicon and artificial intelligence, the screen started to lose its allure. My VR headset became a paperweight. I was magnetized instead by the simple act of noticing, sensing, (and photographing) my immediate surroundings.
I learned that the living world is the ultimate immersive experience. I discovered how to see and feel new dimensions of nature with the help of friends and partners, books and magazines, podcast interviews and YouTube videos, backpacking trips and botanical garden walks. And it was transformative - I started to engage with landscapes and lifeforms not as objects of human attention but as subjects with agency and perception all their own.
I found myself in new relationships. I recognized a plant. I heard the voice of a bird and remembered its name. I craned my neck at the crown of an ancient tree. I touched a rock that is 430 million years old. I smelled the blooms of a streetside magnolia. I breathed the thin air of the mountains and it steadied my turbulent mind. I swam in the frigid ocean, pushing my body against a big wave.
I felt like an Earthling.
This is a piece of my personal story, but I sense it emerging in so many of us - not a transformation into something else, but a remembering of something within.
Earth Day is a ritual to reflect on this shared reality: we are all Earthlings. It’s an elemental and physical feeling, more than an identity. Available in every whisper of wind or bite of fruit or watering of a houseplant. We are in reciprocal relationship with the living world - whether we notice it or not - wherever we are.
How else can we cultivate a collective sense of ourselves as Earthlings? In my last Earth Day essay, I wondered if a fresh impression of the Overview Effect - seeing our home planet from space, awash in the awe offered by the original Apollo missions - might be a unifying and galvanizing force. This month tested that hypothesis, when the Artemis astronauts became the first humans to see the Earth from deep space in 50 years.
The livestreams and photographs from Artemis II delivered on the overview. But I’m left wondering if we felt the effect. Did you? It was joyful, relieving, and deeply human. Still, the photos from the Orion capsule were scrolled past in our social media feeds and buried beneath the torrent of visual content. For me, the planetary perspective engaged the mind but did not land in the body. It felt distant, digitized, disembodied - like something was missing from the picture.
Feeling like an Earthling is a direct, sensory, embodied experience. The complement to the view from 252,756 miles away is the view right outside your window.
Today, I’m holding two images of the Earth in my mind. One is planetary: the crescent blue marble, tilting under the horizon of the moon, in Reid Wiseman’s Earthset photograph. The other is local: a glimpse of the oak outside my apartment in Brooklyn, with a cardinal perched on its budding branches, singing loudly during breeding season and fluttering back-and-forth to my fire escape to fuel up on some sunflower seeds.
Seeing with this bifocal perspective - the planet and the place - I feel fully, and deeply, like an Earthling.