Seeing the Amazon burning or hungry children in a slum changes one forever. Haunting and difficult as these experiences are, photographers are strangely privileged to learn about the world directly. The pictures I take are driven by an overwhelming sense of urgency to convey these experiences, relatively directly, to anyone who will pay a moment’s attention.

It is exactly 09.32 hours on 20 July 1969. Inside the Command Module Columbia on Apollo II’s mission to the moon, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins look through the observation window and see the Earth as it appears to rise above the rim of the moon. It is not recorded who picked up the on-board Hasselblad camera and took the most famous and arguably the most significant series of photographs of all time. Almost everyone who has lived since that moment has shared the view of the Earth from space.

The images are beautiful and their effect was, and is, overwhelming. The conspicuous contrast between our living planet and its lifeless moon is buried deep in our collective consciousness.

Earthrise showed us just how fragile and isolated our situation is. It marked the beginning of the contemporary environmental movement. We now know that the ‘giant step for mankind’ that lies ahead of us is regaining nature's cyclical pattern, where every piece of waste we produce is the beginning of new growth.

‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’

At the time of the moon landing, I was lost on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. A Tuareg nomad rescued me and took me to his companions. He went into his hut and reappeared with two pieces of wood, a rolled umbrella and a cassette player. He rubbed the sticks together and made a fire. We had a nice cup of tea. He warmed the batteries, turned on the cassette player and played Bob Dylan’s song ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’. The effect was extraordinary.

Dylan wrote the song in 1963, when the world seemed on the brink of nuclear wipe-out. Yet by 1969 we had begun to realize that it was not just war that could bring about our extinction. The way we live our lives makes us dangerous passengers on this beautiful planet. The pictures below are a selection from my slide show, Hard Rain, which seeks to illustrate this message

From   A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

Oh, what’ll you do now,
my blue-eyed son?

Oh, what’ll you do now,
my darling young one

1.  I’m a-goin’ back out ‘fore the rain starts a-fallin’,

2.  I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,

3.  Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,

4.  Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,

5.  Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,

6.  Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden,

7.  Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,

8.  Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,

9.  And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,

10.  Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’,

11.  And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.