As we celebrate Earth Week, there is no better way to remember why we work so hard to conserve it, than to gaze down at our home from above.  NASA collected and published this week a video compilation of the best satellite images and data visualizations they captured over the last year. In these images, you can see the planet changing before your very eyes.

And if you want to stretch your mind further about our living planet, consider the Gaia hypothesis.  As explained in an essay by Ferris Jabr, the science writer for The New York Times, “‘Life is not something that happened on Earth, but something that happened to Earth,’ said David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist at the Planetary Science Institute. ‘There is this feedback between the living and nonliving parts of the planet that make the planet very different from what it would otherwise be.’ As Dr. Margulis wrote, ‘Earth, in the biological sense, has a body sustained by complex physiological processes. Life is a planetary-level phenomenon and Earth’s surface has been alive for at least 3,000 million years.'”  #EarthDay #PictureEarth