Mother, How Do We Atone for Our Arrogance, Stupidity, and Hubris?
A love letter to Mother Earth, yet we humans continue to choose chaos.
Set aboard the International Space Station, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital masterfully captures both the vastness and the intimacy of our world. It’s a heartfelt love letter to Mother Earth and a deeply political book—if you’re willing to perceive and experience it. The novel embodies meditation; reading it is an absolute meditation. You float and orbit alongside the crew as you immerse yourself in its pages. Achieving all these dimensions simultaneously within its concise form—well, that’s simply remarkable.
“Without the earth, we are all finished. We couldn’t survive a second without its grace; we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark, unswimmable sea.”
Indeed, that’s precisely what we are—finished, without the Mother. Because, guess what? We don’t know if we’ll have another parent planet.
Harvey weaves two iconic artworks into her poetic novel: Diego Velázquez’s enduring 1656 masterpiece, Las Meninas, and a 1969 photograph taken by astronaut Michael Collins of the lunar module Eagle, carrying Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong back from the moon, with Earth suspended in the background. In Collins’s photo, he is the only person not included, the sole human outside its frame.
The stark contrast between painting and photography is evident. Velázquez’s Las Meninas subverts the traditional focus on the monarch, shifting it to the ladies-in-waiting, the court dog, and even the artist himself. Infused with life, it presents a puzzle of perspective and endless possibilities, depending on the chosen viewpoint. In contrast, Collins’s photograph presents a stark and impersonal image, encompassing every soul on Earth while simultaneously highlighting none. It captures the isolating vastness of space.
Set 250 miles above Earth aboard the space station as it orbits the planet at 17,500 miles per hour, Orbital centers on a crew of six—four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two cosmonauts (both Russian)—who traverse the Earth in a tin can, witnessing its beauty and fragility.
Into the Astronauts’ Minds
Harvey takes us inside the minds of the astronauts, delving into their thoughts during the ironically mundane tasks of life aboard the station. Their reflections often manifest as lists of random musings—brilliant, spot-on fragments of insight that could only emerge when far removed from Earth:
Irritating things:
Tailgaters
Tired children
Wanting to go for a run
Lumpy pillows
Peeing in space when in a hurry
Stuck zips
Whispering people
The Kennedys
Reassuring things:
The Earth below
Mugs with sturdy handles
Trees
Wide stairways
Home-knits
Strong knees
Pumpkins
Maddening things:
Forgetfulness
Questions
Church bells that ring every quarter-hour
Non-opening windows
Lying awake
Blocked noses
Hair in ducts and filters
Fire alarm tests
Powerlessness
A fly in the eye
These lists are a poetic encapsulation of life: the ordinary and extraordinary blended together, heightened by their surreal vantage point.
Endless Politics of Desire
From time to time, the astronauts question their presence in this “tin can in a vacuum,” pondering the absurdity of existing four inches of titanium away from obliteration.
“Why live where you can never thrive? Why go where the universe doesn’t want you, when there’s a perfectly good Earth that does?”
Harvey examines humanity’s hubris through their musings:
“Who can look at man’s neurotic assault on the planet and find it beautiful? Man’s hubris. A hubris so almighty it’s matched only by his stupidity. And these phallic ships thrust into space are surely the most hubristic of them all, the totems of a species gone mad with self-love.”
The astronauts come to see the planet as a monument to the politics of human want—the relentless force that has reshaped forests, poles, reservoirs, glaciers, rivers, seas, mountains, coastlines, and skies. From their vantage point, the Earth’s wounds are painfully visible:
“Every retreating or retreated glacier, every granite shoulder of every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted, every blazing forest or bush, every shrinking ice sheet, every burning oil spill… the altered contours of coastlines, where sea reclaims land from humans or humans reclaim land from the sea… the hundreds of acres of greenhouses making Spain’s southern tip reflective in the sun.”
The astronauts begin to understand the “hand of politics,” visible in every inch of Earth’s surface. They see how human decisions—driven by the endless politics of want—have sculpted the planet as tangibly as gravity itself.
A Planetary Flag—What We Lacked on Earth That Might Have Saved Us
Through her astronauts, Harvey poses a haunting question: Are we destined to follow the fate of the dinosaurs, wiping ourselves out through our own excesses? Or can we beat the odds, migrate to Mars, and build a wiser, gentler society—one that values preservation over destruction?
Perhaps, she muses, we’ll create a planetary flag—something we lacked on Earth that might have saved us. Maybe, from the red plains of Mars, we’ll gaze back at our fragile blue dot and ask, Do you remember?
The idea of a planetary flag captivated me. In an era where people proudly flaunt national flags, often under the guise of ultranationalism, I’ve always found such symbols unsettling. Flags come with an unspoken message: You belong or You don’t get to belong. This exclusionary mindset fosters indifference—if not hostility—toward people, places, and ecosystems that fall outside the lines of our chosen borders.
I’ve often pondered: What if we were ultranationalistic toward the Earth rather than individual countries? What if we redirected all the energy we invest in drawing borders and claiming ownership into something unifying instead? Imagine having a single flag for the entire planet. Would we still readily resort to conflict and chaos?
It’s a thought that lingers every time my mother hangs a Turkish flag in our home. Most of the time, I catch myself wondering: What does that even mean? It’s not the flag itself, but the mentality it represents—divisions drawn on a planet that, from space, looks whole and indivisible.
Perhaps Harvey is onto something. Maybe we are the new dinosaurs, and unless we shift our perspective, we too might face extinction. But maybe—against all odds—we’ll migrate to Mars and form a colony of preservers, people who cherish what they’ve been given. Maybe we’ll devise a planetary flag, a symbol of our shared existence, because we’ll realize how much its absence cost us on Earth.
From Mars, we’ll look back at the faint blue dot of our convalescing home and whisper: Do you remember? Have you heard the stories? Perhaps Earth will be our mother, Mars our father, and we’ll discover we were never such orphans-in-waiting after all.
Harvey’s Orbital reminds us of our fragile place in the cosmos—and of our responsibility to care for the only home we have, at least for now.
“They exchange understatements, as astronauts do. A little bumpy on the way up, but now she’s sailing clean. Sure is a pretty sight out there.” 👌🏾
Harvey’s observations and writing are simply brilliant.