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A Moment in the Sun with Planet Citzens...

Memories of George, a planet citizen who envisioned an environmental renaissance Rep. George E. Brown, Calif

Remembering the 'start-up' of the environmental movement and the first US environmental laws... founding legal precedents many of which came from forward-looking green visionaries like your GreenPolicy siterunner's friend and mentor, George, who passed away suddenly in 1999.

George's decades of work in Congress in air quality/clean air, water and the founding of the EPA highlighted the era's achievement... George was out in front in "big science" -- his profound accomplishments are esp missed now as anti-science positions threaten in the current Congress (2015-16)

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Astronauts Sam Cristoforetti and Ron Garan, the 'Overview Effect' few citizens have ever experienced

Yes, to Italian "Astro Sam" and her #HelloEarth views and messages to us here on the home Planet.

And we greatly appreciate the newest from Astronaut Ron Garan as his interactive project "Orbital Perspective" is published this week. Some 45 years ago, near the end of December 1968 and beginning of an auspicious 1969, we began seeing the Apollo 8 mission's first-ever images of our "whole earth". It's not overstating to say - these images from above changed everything. These pictures from space looking back at Earth, taken as Apollo circled around the moon, carried realizations with the images -- that together we are planet citizens.

We welcomed a perspective that no human had ever had.

January 1969 was an eye-opener as the images of Earth were broadcast. We celebrated the images and our place in the cosmos even as we, the planet and our populations, were in the midst of violent war and troubled times.

Today, the famous Earthrise photo rekindles our memory, and the serendipity of how the Apollo 8 crew was lucky that day as, looking out their window, the Earth suddenly came into view. There was no "mission plan" to take Earth photos and the astronauts scrambled to get to a camera, put in film and shoot a few frames. They were in awe, they said, and fortune was in play that day. There we were, us, Earth. In the Earthrise images our space traveling planet citizens captured a realization of our wholeness, connectedness, and our shared future as together we spin thru space.

Later, the Apollo 17 mission, as the program was coming to its end, brought home the "Blue Marble" photograph, the first complete 360° image of our planet, a high-res Earth described as the most reproduced photo in history. It is the first photograph taken of the whole round Earth and still is only one of the whole earth ever snapped by a human being. Of the two living astronauts, Cernan and Schmitt, who believe they were the photographer who took the photo, here is how one describes his view.... Whichever astronaut of the three aboard Apollo 17 who snapped the picture, what is most memorable is Earth360:

"You have to literally just pinch yourself and ask yourself the question, silently: Do you know where you are at this point in time and space, and in reality and in existence, when you can look out the window and you're looking at the most beautiful star in the heavens -- the most beautiful because it's the one we understand and we know, it's home, it's people, family, love, life -- and besides that it is beautiful. You can see from pole to pole and across oceans and continents and you can watch it turn and there's no strings holding it up, and it's moving in a blackness that is almost beyond conception."

The sense of awe, an Earth point of view, has continued to be communicated by astronauts since and has continued to be shared, more recently with high tech ways to see and experience our Earth as planetary citizens as we see from the International Space Station. The term "Overview Effect" begins to share the experience.

We celebrate our Planet Citizens who bring home messages how we can collaborate to make a difference, to make the world a better place.

Ron Garan: "You don’t need to be an astronaut to have the orbital perspective"...

"When we look down at the earth from space, we see this amazing, indescribably beautiful planet. It looks like a living, breathing organism. But it also, at the same time, looks extremely fragile... Anybody else who's ever gone to space says the same thing because it really is striking and it's really sobering to see this paper-thin layer and to realize that that little paper-thin layer is all that protects every living thing on Earth from death, basically. From the harshness of space.

"The Goal is to bring people along on our space missions not as spectators but as fellow crew mates -- http://www.rongaran.com/gallery/

"It is truly moving to look at Earth from space. And when we do – we also have the privilege of sharing this orbital perspective with people back on our planet. We are all riding through the universe together on this spaceship we call Earth, we are all interconnected, we are all in this together. We are all family."

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Naomi Klein, "This Changes Everything"

Speaking @ the Bioneers conference, 2014

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Bill McKibben, founder of www.350.org (and former advisor to GreenPolicy)

http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Bill_McKibben,_planet_citizen

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GreenPolicy360 highlights Rebecca Moore

Rebecca envisioned setting up Google Outreach -- and she did.

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Pope Francis, the first Catholic pontiff to name himself after the patron saint of the environment

Catholic pontiff speaks of the environment

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John Rensenbrink, Maine Green and US Green Party co-founder

Editor, Green Horizon

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Rebecca Solnit, Writer

"There are really only two questions for activists: what do you want to achieve? And who do you want to be? And those two questions are deeply entwined. Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style. That is the small ongoing victory on which great victories can be built, and you do want victories, don't you?" -- July 4, 2016

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Charlenes Spretnak, Author/Green, Green Key Values

https://www.amazon.com/Green-Politics-Charlene-Spretnak/dp/0586085238

https://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Dimension-Green-Politics/dp/0939680297

http://www.charlenespretnak.com/

Fritjof Capra and Charlene Spretnak - Green Politics: The Global Promise

http://www.amazon.com/Green-Politics-Promise-Charlene-Spretnak/dp/B000SDE8SO

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Long time, very good friends of GreenPolicy360 and a preeminent eco-network, here's to the Bioneers

A moment at the Climate March, September 2014 -- Bioneers Dennis Kucinich, Chief Lyons & Leonardo DiCaprio