We are All One on this Planet

• The mother welcoming her newborn in Baghdad breathes the same air as all young mothers, whether they are in Baltimore, Berlin or Beijing.
• Scientific experts on climate change predict rising waters could radically alter the lives of islanders on New Guinea, Galapagos, Madagascar and Manhattan.
• Traces of radiation from nuclear accidents in Russia or Japan are discovered embedded in the teeth of children living in South America, North America, Africa, Australia, Asia and Europe.

From these examples and many more, we know our earth is one unique, fragile, life-support system. All of us depend upon it. None of us can live without it. We are bound, beyond ideologies and religions, by an overwhelming number of universal biological and physiological needs. But this understanding was not always common knowledge. For thousands of years, we “identified with”—gave our allegiance to—local or tribal, and later national, affiliations.

It was just forty years ago that views of earth from space began to make their profound imprint on the human psyche. Twenty years before that the noted British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle predicted that “Once a photograph of the earth, taken from space is available … an idea as powerful as any in history will let loose.” Hoyle’s prophecy was realized as we looked back and saw the earth, our home, from the new perspective of space.

“What strikes me, is not only the beauty of the continents … but their closeness to one another … their essential unity.”
                                               —Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin

               “From where you see it, the thing is a whole, and it is so beautiful.”
                                                             —American astronaut Russell Schweickart

Science confirms it. Whether we look down at the whole globe or simply look deep into our own hearts, we know we are one, interdependent human family—and all war is civil war.

Our species has been on a journey for thousands of years. It is the destiny of our own generation to make a global shift of momentous proportions. The opportunity we now have is to fully grasp that the implications of “we are all one on this planet” go way beyond arms control. It’s a call to a new level of understanding about the strength available not only from our own cultural diversity but from the diversity of all life upon which human life depends: a higher, more compassionate plane of human maturity.

            "The earth is a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side."                                                 —A Peace Corps volunteer