He opined recently that planetary health is “ a capacious interdisciplinary inquiry is neither capacious nor interdisciplinary enough”. The unity of life and the forces that shape those lives”. However, at least one leader within the contemporary planetary health movement, Lancet Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton, expressed concern that planetary health might slip into a cubbyhole as a retooled environmental health discipline, rather than its true enterprise, which in his words is “ an inquiry into our total world. The example given was our over-reliance on gross domestic product as a measure of human progress. The 2015 Lancet Commission on Planetary Health specifically identified the great need to address the failure of empathy and “imagination challenges” in addition to knowledge failures (“information challenges”) and implementation failures (“governance challenges”). The aim of this brief sortie into Earthrise-Earth Day history is to provide context for an exploration of the ways in which the awe of Earthrise-and the contemporary science of creativity and studies of utopian thinking-might reinvigorate imagination within the larger planetary health network. As NASA’s Director of Photography for the Apollo Program would say three decades after the photo was taken, “ it all ended up that nineteen cents worth of film became the most important part of a multi-billion dollar project”. At first glance the relationship between a highly technical “hard” science enterprise like the Apollo program and so-called “fuzzy” science of nature relatedness, positive emotions and holism in health might seem bizarre, but the singular NASA “Earthrise” photograph provides the link ( Figure 1). As explored below, historians and scholars have often concluded that NASA’s multi-billion-dollar Apollo Program was at least one major catalyst for the acceleration and coalescing of these movements-a project that was itself based on human imagination. Indeed, the early origins of the contemporary planetary health concept actually encompassed these philosophies and can be traced to distinct, but overlapping movements-environmentalism, holistic/lifestyle medicine and public health with the planet in mind. This is a question of imagination: What kind of world we want to live in? We revisit the fundamental challenge offered by Pulitzer-Prize-winning microbiologist Rene Dubos and others in the afterglow of the Earthrise photo, and the inaugural Earth Day. We explore the ways in which the awe of Earthrise-and the contemporary science of creativity and studies of utopian thinking-might reinvigorate imagination, kindness and mutualism. They and their primary speakers were as concerned about value systems as they were about pollution-that we cannot hope to solve our problems without addressing the attitudes that created them in the first place. Through the inaugural Earth Day that followed, we are reminded that its early organizers were not constrained in how they defined the “environment”. We revisit the power of inspiration with the profound example of the Apollo 8 Earthrise photo which galvanized a fledgling planetary health movement over 50 years ago.

Here, we call to normalize more creative, mutualistic approaches-including the perspectives of traditional and indigenous cultures-to positively influence normative value systems. Too often, the dominant focus is on the “worst of human nature”, and devalues or neglects the importance of empathy, kindness, hope, love, creativity and mutual respect-the deeper values that unite, empower and refocus priorities of individuals and groups. However, solutions rarely confront the underlying value systems that created these interconnected problems, or the attitudes that perpetuate them. Our grandest challenges in the Anthropocene ultimately stem from human attitudes to each other and to our environment. At the same time, it emphasizes the integration of biological, psychological, social and cultural aspects of health in the modern environment. The concept of planetary health blurs the artificial lines between health at scales of person, place and planet.

Unite here health