Come together, to save the Arctic

1968. That was a hell of a year. The people were on the streets, revolution
 was in the air, we released the White Album, and perhaps the most
 influential photograph of all time was taken by an astronaut called William
 Anders.


It was Christmas Eve. Anders and his mission commander Frank Borman had
 just become the only living beings since the dawn of time to orbit the moon.
 Then, through the tiny window of their Apollo 8 spacecraft their eyes fell
 upon something nobody had seen before, something so familiar and yet so
 alien, something breathtaking in its beauty and fragility.
 
"Oh my God!" Borman cried. "Look at that picture over there! Here's the 
Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!"
 

"You got a colour film, Jim?" Anders snapped back. "Hand me that roll of 
colour quick, will you...".
 For a minute or so, two human beings in a tin can nearly 400,000 kilometres
 from home scrambled furiously to fix a roll of Kodak into their camera. Then
 Anders lifted it to the window and clicked the shutter and captured our
 delicate home planet rising slowly over the horizon of the moon. Earthrise. That single image made such an impact on the human psyche that 
it's credited with sparking the birth of the global environment movement -
 with changing the very way we think about ourselves.
 

That was more than forty years ago, the blink of an eye in the grand sweep 
of time, but something quite remarkable has happened since then. For at 
least 800,000 years the Arctic ocean has been capped by a sheet of sea ice the 
size of a continent. But in the decades since that photo was taken, satellites have been measuring a steady melting of that white sheet. Much of 
it has now gone, and it seems likely that there'll be open water at the 
North Pole in the lifetimes of my kids. I might even see that moment for
 myself.

Think about it. Since Earthrise was taken we've been so busy warming our 
world that it now looks radically different from space. By digging up fossil
 fuels and burning our ancient forests we've put so much carbon into the
 atmosphere that today's astronauts are looking at a different planet. And here's something that just baffles me. As the ice retreats, the oil
 giants are moving in. Instead of seeing the melting as a grave warning to 
humanity, they're eyeing the previously inaccessible oil beneath the seabed 
at the top of the world. They're exploiting the disappearance of the ice to
 drill for the very same fuel that caused the melting in the first place. Fossil fuels have colonised every corner of our Earth, but at some time and 
in some place we need to say "No more." I believe that time is now and that
 place is the Arctic.

That's why I've joined Greenpeace's campaign to create 
a legally protected sanctuary around the North Pole and a ban on oil
 drilling and industrial fishing in Arctic waters. My name will be among at least two million that Greenpeace is taking to the pole and planting on the seabed
 4km beneath the ice. We're coming together to secure the Arctic for all life 
on Earth.

In just one month, over a million of us have already signed up at www.savetheartic.org  
but if you're not one of them there's still a chance to ensure your name is
 planted at the bottom of the ocean at the top of the world.

And if you, like
 me, are irresistibly drawn to the stunning Arctic wildlife then you'll want 
to join Rising online movement. You can choose to be one 
of five animals - either a polar bear, a snowy owl, an Arctic fox, a walrus 
or a narwhal. Once you've joined an animal clan you hunt in a pack for new
 supporters for the campaign and compete against the other animals to get new
 people involved. It's a kind of Earthrise, where we try to spark the dawn of 
a new mass movement, one that draws a line in the ice and says to the
 polluters, "You come no further".
 So now I've got to decide which animal I'm going to be.
 

Yeah, you've guessed it. I am the Walrus.

That Hippie Penny Lane