Samantha Harvey’s Orbital and the fragility of Earth | Letters

Peter Reason says the Booker prize winner’s novel may encourage the idea that we have to get off the planet to see what we are doing to it

I was moved by Samantha Harvey’s Booker prize acceptance speech and look forward to reading Orbital (‘I’m so not an astronaut!’ Samantha Harvey on her Booker-winning space novel – and the anxiety that drove it, 13 November). However, it concerns me that her book may encourage the idea that we have to get off the planet in order to recognise, in her words, that “what we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves”. This view was encouraged by the famous photograph Earthrise, and by astronauts like Edgar Mitchell, who thought that seeing the beauty and fragility of Earth from space would bring about a shift in consciousness and a sense of unity and oneness.

This shift has quite simply not happened, as evidenced by the accelerating loss of other life forms brought about by human action. To seek a view from outside may stop us from seeing what is before our eyes and in each breath: that every moment we’re part of a living planet.
Peter Reason
Emeritus professor, University of Bath

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