The famed 1972 "Blue Marble" photograph of Planet Earth (taken from the Apollo 17 spacecraft by NASA astronaut and notorious anti-environmentalist Harrison Schmitt) as seen from space offered a breathtaking perspective on our miraculously life-supporting—and ultimately minuscule—shared home. At the same time, it heralded an age in which humans were no longer inextricably bound to Earth. Leaving suddenly seemed like a viable—even, for some, desirable—possibility. The farthest reaches of the universe became open to study and exploration, as well as extraction and colonization.

In a 2013 interview author/cultural critic Naomi Klein expressed a similar view when she expressed the need for a reexamination of “'the astronaut's eye world view' which has governed the Big Green environmental movement for so long...the time has come to let go of the icon of the globe because it places us above it and...has allowed us to see nature in this really abstracted way and sort of move pieces, like pieces on a chessboard, and really lose touch with the Earth."

Half a century since the Blue Marble image was captured, billionaires are pushing luxury rocket rides and claiming that, upon the collapse of terrestrial ecosystems (hastened by the actions/enterprises of said billionaires), colonies on the Moon or Mars are the next (only?) frontier.

My ongoing Down to Earth series suggests a different vantage point. Small collages made from vintage imagery with the addition of Earth from space are odes to the inner reaches of the rare, precious place we already are.