What We Keep Forgetting: Pandemics, Rivers and Roots

Abstract

1968 is remembered as a year of rebellion, worldwide protest, political assassinations and sweeping anti-war and anti-authoritarian struggle;a momentous year for the civil rights, feminist, labour and student movements across the globe. What is less often recalled is that 1968 was also the year of the last global pandemic before Covid 19— the 'Hong Kong flu' that by 1970 had killed between one to four million people worldwide. It was also the year of 'Earthrise', the first human picture of the Earth taken from Apollo 8 mission as the year approached its end and the spike of the 1968 pandemic hit its peak. 'Earthrise' together with Apollo Il's 'Blue Marble' from 1972 were the first to show the whole earth with glimmering blues and swirling white clouds floating alone in pitch-black darkness;they inspired a new way of understanding life on Earth as a total, autopoetic and self- regulating system or organism, what Jim Lovelock and Lynn Margulis would formulate as the Gaia hypothesis.