Introduction : planet

Earth Day took place for the first time on April 22, 1970. It came to materialize an emerging planetary consciousness, fueled by the vitality of anti-war and civil rights movements, where environmental concerns took center stage for the first time. Since then, the date has become a symbol and a worldwide celebration of global environmentalisms. Some of the first images to illustrate this new awareness of a global environment, which later became exhausted by overuse by the environmentalist movement in the global north during the 1970s and 1980s, were the famous images taken by the Apollo missions. First, the 1968 image of the Earth rising on the Moon's horizon taken by the Apollo 8, but most notoriously, the famous image of the "blue marble" taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. In 1988 the same image was used on the cover of Time magazine to illustrate that year's Man of the Year (now Person of the Year): "The Endangered Planet Earth." Environment and global are in fact two notions that have developed forcefully in tandem since the appearance of environmental studies in the 1940s and the development to planetary sciences stemming out of the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year.