Sustainability can be a hard concept to explain and interestingly one of the best talks I have heard wasn’t by a sustainability professional but by the physicist Professor Brain Cox. He spoke at Ecobuild 2011 and used the ideas from Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space as the basis for his discussion.
Really enjoyed #ecobuild . Thanks to everyone who queued up!
— Brian Cox (@ProfBrianCox) March 2, 2011
The Pale Blue Dot in question was Planet Earth as viewed from the Voyager 1 spacecraft six billion kilometres away, the most distant photograph ever taken of Earth. It is a striking image and in his book Sagan used it to argue the need to protect humanity’s only home from environmental catastrophe.
By kind permission of NASA/JPL
I think this lovely little animation beautifully illustrates Sagan’s words, and our need to focus on sustainability.
