Earth in culture
[2] Unlike the other planets in the Solar System, in English, Earth does not directly share a name with an ancient Roman deity.
[3] The name Earth derives from the eighth century Anglo-Saxon word erda, which means ground or soil, and ultimately descends from Proto-Indo European *erþō.
[4] The planet's name in Latin, used academically and scientifically in the West during the Renaissance, is the same as that of Terra Mater, the Roman goddess, which translates to English as Mother Earth.
He then took Day, the son of Night and Delling of the AEsir, who was bright and attractive and gave him a chariot pulled by a horse named Skinfaxi.
[19] In the myth of the god Tlaltecuhtli, her dismembered body was the basis for the world in the Aztec creation story of the fifth and final cosmos.
After a long struggle, Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl managed to rip her body in two — from the upper half came the sky, and from the lower came the Earth.
The other gods were angered to hear of Tlaltecuhtli's treatment and decreed that the various parts of her dismembered body would become the features of the new world.
Her skin became grasses and small flowers, her hair the trees and herbs, her eyes the springs and wells, her nose the hills and valleys, her shoulders the mountains, and her mouth the caves and rivers.
Orunmila also told him to take a snail shell with soil in it, a hen, a black cat, and a palm nut.
Obatala heeded the god of divination's words and descended the golden chain with all of the things he was told to take.
[22] While in general, a planet can be considered "too large, and its lifetime too long, to be comfortably accommodated within fiction as a topic in its own right", this has not prevented some writers from engaging with the topic (for example, Camille Flammarion's Lumen (1887), David Brin's Earth (1990), or Terry Pratchett's, Ian Stewart's and Jack Cohen's The Science of Discworld (1999)[23]).
Science fiction artist Frank R. Paul provided perhaps the first image of a cloudless blue planet (with sharply defined land masses) on the back cover of the July 1940 issue of Amazing Stories, a common depiction for several decades thereafter.
The crew of the Apollo 8 was the first to view an Earth-rise from lunar orbit in 1968, and astronaut William Anders's photograph of it, Earthrise, became iconic.
In 1972 the crew of the Apollo 17 produced The Blue Marble, another famous photograph of the planet Earth from cislunar space.
NASA archivist Mike Gentry has speculated that The Blue Marble is the most widely distributed image in human history.
[33] A photo taken of a distant Earth by Voyager 1 in 1990 inspired Carl Sagan to name it and describe the planet as a Pale Blue Dot.
The key issues of this socio-political movement are the conservation of natural resources, elimination of pollution, and the usage of land.
[45] Although diverse in interests and goals, environmentalists as a group tend to advocate sustainable management of resources and stewardship of the environment through changes in public policy and individual behavior.
