23/12/2025
Maggie Aderin-Pocock said in an interview for Financial Times this weekend:
"When we see our planet from space, it changes our perspective completely. We see it as smaller and vulnerable and in need of protection, whereas when we are here we drop bombs and argue and squabble. It can be a unifying thing."
It should be a unifying thing.
Since most of us will never see Earth from space let me take you to Christmas Eve 1968 when during the Apollo 8 mission, the first ever colour photograph of Earth was taken. Earthrise. A blue and white swirled miracle suspended above grey lunar dust. The astronauts saw our entire world as a single fragile sphere, and that perspective shift changed everything. From orbit, pollution has no nationality. Climate systems ignore borders. Environmental damage in one region ripples across the entire globe. The divisions we defend so fiercely on the ground simply don't exist from above.
We live down here, in the squabbling. In the complexity. In laundry rooms and traffic jams and endless small choices that feel too mundane to matter. But they do.
Last year, at a conference in San Francisco, I met another wise woman. Shana Swan was presenting on endocrine-disrupting chemicals in plastics, and after her talk, I rushed to her babbling about how I hoped her research would finally make people take this seriously. How maybe the threat to human health (especially male s***m) would shift our perspective where environmental devastation hadn't. She listened to me patiently. Then she took my hand. "One Health, my dear. There is just One Health."
The health of nature, the health of animals, the health of humans—it's one very same thing. Intertwined so intricately it cannot be separated from one another.
Two wise women. One reminding us to see our planet whole—small, vulnerable, precious. The other reminding us that we cannot separate ourselves from what we're protecting. That there is no "nature over there" and "us over here." Just one interwoven system of life.
This year, you acted on that understanding. Not from space, not from laboratories, but from your homes.
You understood the connection. Between water and soil. Between soil and food. Between food and bodies. Between your choices and someone else's future.
Down here, we still drop bombs. We still argue. We still squabble.
As Christmas Eve approaches, 57 years after astronauts first showed us that blue marble hanging in darkness, think about what unites us. We all live on that same small sphere. We all breathe the same air. We all drink from the same water. We are all part of One Health. There is no "us versus them”, there is only us.
My wish for you: peace, unity, health, and joy across all of our beautiful planet we call home.
Thank you for being part of this journey. For seeing the connections. For choosing protection even when it's inconvenient. For understanding that down here, in the mundane and the daily, is where the real work happens.
