Hello and welcome to the new blog everyone. For those of you who weren't following me before, I've changed the name of the blog from The Roaming Environmentalist to My Pale Blue Blog. I did this for a few reasons, but mainly because it was time for a change.
So, what's up with the name?
The new blog name is a reference to Pale Blue Dot, a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 space probe. The picture was taken from about 4 billion miles away and shows our planet as a tiny dot in the vastness of space. It was taken at the request of Carl Sagan, an astronomer who then wrote the book Pale Blue Dot. The gist? All of human history has occurred on a speck of dust we know as Earth. It is nothing compared to the rest of the universe, and it is the only place we have to live.
Here is an excerpt from his book:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
Given our planet's insignificance, and therefore my own insignificance, and the insignificance of my blog in a universe of millions of blogs, I thought this name was appropriate. It also means I can write about pretty much anything under the sun-which I prefer. As much as I love environmental science and traveling, I like to know a little about everything rather than everything about one-or a few-topics.
I'm going with a new look and feel, but there will still be all of the same past, present, and future content.
I hope you enjoy.