Artemis II mission echoes ancient wonder of our world and local ecosystems
Ed.: The essays, analyses and opinions presented as Community Voices express the perspectives of their authors on topics of interest and importance to the community and are not intended to reflect perspectives on behalf of Salish Current.
From the moon’s far side on April 6, Artemis II Mission Commander Reid Wiseman shot a photograph of a crescent Earth sinking below a barren lunar horizon. The image, soon dubbed “Earthset,” echoed an iconic photograph from another lunar voyage nearly 58 years earlier.
Three days after launch from the Kennedy Space Center in December 1968, Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders spent Christmas Eve in lunar orbit looking toward home and taking a series of photographs. One of them shows the Earth’s swirl of blue ocean and snow-white clouds half-shadowed as it rises above the surface of the moon.
The “Earthrise” photo published in the January 10, 1969 issue of LIFE magazine met an environmental moment when exponential trends of population growth and resource use seemed destined to collide with the Earth’s hard-to-deny limits. Yet that whole-Earth image stood on still-earlier shoulders.
More than 1,200 years before, monks in the region of Europe then known as Gallia drew outlines of the known world onto a sheet of parchment 9 by 11 inches in size. Since the Eighth Century A.D., archivists have safeguarded the monks’ map in the collections of the Cathedral of Saint Cecilia in the small city of Albi in the South of France. The parchment is called the Mappa Mundi d’Albi.
The Mappa Mundi offers one of the oldest whole earth views available to us. Only two Babylonian and Mesopotamian tablets precede it, neither of them a “map” in the modern sense.
The Mappa Mundi’s lopsided, two-lobed image depicts the lands that encircle the Mediterranean Sea. Continental Europe makes up the left lobe, North Africa the right. The lobes are joined at the top of the image by the narrow neck of the Levant. Five islands dot the green-tinted sea that separates the lobes. Eight European countries and five African countries are labeled on the map, and an index on a facing manuscript page lists 35 seas and a dozen winds.
The monks inscribed their map without benefit of modern theories of cartography or a grid of latitude and longitude. It could not have been used to navigate. But the Mappa Mundi conveys something deeper than navigation: an impulse to root the human story in its territory.
The Mappa Mundi, like the NASA photographs, depicts the world as seen from above — a perspective then available only to the imagination. The sea encircles the landmasses with a void as mysterious as outer space. Centuries would pass before that mystery would begin to yield to voyages of exploration.
What might such an image have meant to minds in the Early Middle Ages? Devotion was surely part of the Mappa Mundi’s purpose, since the few people likely to view it in the cathedral’s archives were elites of the Catholic Church.
Innocent of scale, lacking topographic detail and bearing scarce resemblance to modern depictions of the same territory, the Mappa Mundi’s view of the whole nonetheless lit a path toward modernity. A path that would lead, inevitably, to the audacity of space exploration and the inescapability of environmental change.
I’ve been fascinated by such big-picture views ever since I encountered “Earthrise” in the pages of LIFE at age 10. When I learned about the Mappa Mundi during a visit to Albi, I had to see it. Unfortunately, the map is deemed too fragile for public display. I was forced to settle for a postcard facsimile.
I’ll never see an Earthrise or an Earthset, either. But that takes nothing from my awareness of our planet as an improbably tangled ball of vapor, land, water, and life turning on its axis in a deep sea of space.
What practical value does a glimpse of the whole possess? None, really — except an excellent argument for humility. The lands, the seas and the winds that the cartographer-monks recorded 12 centuries ago continue to compel our attention and defy our control. We’re encircled by an ocean of mystery beyond the bounds of what we know.
Several years ago, I shared the Mappa Mundi image and story with visionary Pacific Northwest landscape architect Grant Jones. “How precious the ring of Mediterranean landscapes was back then in the early Middle Ages,” he wrote. “It may have seemed vast but it was a continuum. The continuum of it all was understandable.”
“Imagine similar precious continuums like the cordilleras of the Incas, the valleys of the Navaho, the Mongolian steppes, the islands of Japan. Imagine the rolling high grasslands of the Missouri River, the great Columbian Plateau, the 20 glacial tributaries of the Salish Sea.”
“The human communities in these precious landscapes were ‘one, not two’ with their homeland place continuums,” Jones wrote. And then he asked, “Is this tiny planet too big for us to steward and protect?”
—By Edward Wolf
Edward Wolf is an environmental writer and activist who has worked for regional, national and international nonprofits for over 40 years. A graduate of Williams College and the University of Washington College of Forest Resources, he is a board member of Columbia Riverkeeper and board president of RE Sources. He and his wife, Karen McKay, keep an eye on the Salish Sea from Bellingham’s South Hill.