Episode 7 Part 3 - Captain Planet

Episode 7: Pale Blue Dot
E7.1 Rio to RuinE7.2 Mr Vice PresidentE7.3 Captain Planet
On Valentine’s Day, 1990, we humans received a love letter from space. NASA’s Voyager 1 probe, from its position somewhere out past Neptune, turned around and took a picture of Earth, gifting us the iconic image that planetary scientist Carl Sagan would dub the ‘pale blue dot’. In this episode, Emma and Chloe ask why, when the decade opened with such promise for our little speck of dust in space, we didn’t see the progress the 1990s promised when it came to environmental protection. They discuss the failure of global negotiations, the role of Emma’s favourite almost-president and environmental activist Al Gore, and why all of us promising to be ‘Planeteers’ wasn’t ever going to be enough.
LinksEllen Spears, Rethinking the American Environmental Movement post-1945 (especially Chapter 5, “Globalizing Environmentalism (1990-2000)”), Taylor and Francis, 2019, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780203081693
“Voyager 1’s Pale Blue Dot,” NASA Solar System Exploration, https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/536/voyager-1s-pale-blue-dot/
Tom Griffiths, “The planet is alive: Radical histories for uncanny times,” Griffith Review 63, 2018, https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/planet-is-alive-radical-history/
Niels von Kohl (Producer), “The Earth Summit,” UNTV, 1992, https://www.unmultimedia.org/avlibrary/asset/2078/2078993/