“Emptiness,” she says quietly, falling back into the moments ten years ago when she was weightless in front of the forward deck windows that gaped into space. “There’s no end to it.”
It’s a lush July day outside the living room bay window where former astronaut Roberta Bondar sits in her Toronto studio-home. It’s also a far cry from where she will be hiking in a few days, up in the high arctic on Banks Island, in Aulavik National Park, once again shouldering her camera.
Her first trip to remote Aulavik was part of her Passionate Vision, a photographic odyssey in which she criss-crossed Canada a few years ago capturing landscape images from all 42 national parks. Juxtaposed with photographs of the parks that she had taken from space, the images were framed into a successful book and a still-touring exhibition of the same name. It announced her long-mused side step away from medical research. And though she says she’s still content doing medical research, it is an awakening environmental consciousness that she now devotes herself to. At the moment she is making plans to haul her camera equipment to North Africa.
“Photography is in the frame,” famous American nature photographer Ansel Adams once declared, “—the one that’s not in the camera.”
For Bondar, how much of that frame is the blackness of space she once saw and which she says brought her an immense sense of humility?
How does a woman whose duty was to take over 5000 photographs of Earth from orbit now see the world behind her camera?
“Not all astronauts by any means share what I feel,” she says matter-of-factly, leaning back into the couch.
“My belief is when people go into space they take up their Earth values with them, and they can range from agnostic-atheist to right-wing conservative Baptist—whatever—and people can go into space and they can make it a religious experience, a spiritual experience, an environmental experience, a jet-jockey experience. Whoever they are, they go see the Earth and it is a very personal experience. So it’s influenced by all these other things that go on in a person’s life, and what they do with it when they come back, to me, speaks volumes about how it did affect them.”
Amidst the celebratory fanfare of her return from the Discovery space shuttle mission in 1992, Bondar left the Canadian Space Agency and her astronautical career behind.
The eight days she had spent aboard the space shuttle, in constant presence of a window, whether it was waking up, eating lunch, or running experiments, changed her.
“… This is reality. It’s a huge reality check,” she says about the maw of emptiness she saw out those windows.
“People who come back from space and don’t have this reality check are either ignoring life or they’re caught up in a very professional characteristic that astronauts have, and that is ‘let’s get the job done and move on to the next shuttle flight.’ There’s no time to do the philosophical spin.”
Witnessing Earth’s soft blue curve against a vacuum so deep and dwarfing, as she describes it, terrified her. The scale encountered dismissed her sense of self and importance. And within this stark emptiness, she explains, there rotated the Earth below, alone, with a history of life that she was only a sliver of.
“But also, if anything created this,” says Bondar, gesturing outside the living room window, “we have no idea—none. And it was that part…that made me more aware of life in general and people respecting other life forms and other things.
Because who knows if they exist elsewhere, but they do exist on the planet. And we have such an egocentric way of conducting our lives as human beings and it was something I wanted to distance myself from a little bit, and I can do that in my photography. That’s where I can deal with my life.”
She points to one of her photographs on the wall: a torrent of the Nahanni River crashing down into a pinnacle of granite amongst early autumn colours. Hiking through these landscapes of gravity, whether in the Northwest Territories or around a restless, flat bog along New Brunswick’s central eastern shore, Bondar feels a deep sense of spiritual communion.
Such places give her a reference point in life and personal space to question what is important to her. Juxtaposing this on-foot view with the planetary, gestalt patterns of life she saw from orbit broadens that space.
“It [nature] tells me that I am but a passing organism in this life, and it’s actually frightening. It’s like being in space,” she says uneasily.
But along with such an expanded perspective of life upon returning to Earth, Canada’s first woman in space had deep off-camera frustrations and questions about what she returned to.
She quietly agrees with what a cosmonaut once said about what it felt like in his first few weeks touching ground again after his six-month mission aboard space station Mir—people walked about as if unaware of their behaviour. It was as if human civilization were collectively unconscious, like a colony of ants, he explained, driven by instinct to constantly tunnel around.
Bondar was also seriously thinking whether our civilization was like a passing organism itself, simply a blip in the long history of “Earth.”
Though she says she was awed by what we had achieved as a species when we do work together with deliberate awareness of ourselves, she also privately felt a sense of terrible futility.
That potential to network our minds—our greatest evolutionary advantage, she adds-—was being wasted in our natural tendency to be too enamoured with our own culture. The ever-chattering discussion of what she saw as frivolous cultural issues was acutely audible. Humanity was stick-poking its image in the mirror too much.
“That, I think, is the thing more than anything when I came back,” she says, “the total thing: that people were wasting themselves and wasting the lives of other people.”
Despite environmental voices, in her view, not enough attention was being paid to issues of soil depletion, water quality, natural resource equity and population.
When Neil Armstrong first saw Earth from its moon, he commented on being able to see 3 billion people at once. Now, within 33 harvest seasons of rice, with 6.1 billion people competing for natural resources and the explosive Third World wanting First World things, Bondar sees, hedging her words, “problems in the long run.”
“There is still room on Earth for us, but at what cost?” she asks, plainly aware of how tiring it sounds.
What’s needed, says Bondar, is vision—a realization that there is a long run. People will still be living on this planet in 100 years, in 500 years—perhaps even in 10,000 years—and other forms of life will too. “How do we want these people to live? How do we see that those people are, in a way, us?” she asks.
“But we have so many things that challenge us on a day-to-day basis that’s it’s very hard to have this long-term vision that is required to uplift people .… We’re too busy plugging the dyke to think what structure other than a dyke might be available to fill the same kind of need.”
Wary of the recent US negotiations to drill more oil near the Canadian arctic, pipe in water from Canada, and buy more electricity at reduced rates, she questions such strong emphasis on economic growth in an already affluent country. Canada would likely benefit from it economically in the short-term, but at the risk of integrating ourselves further into an economic cycle that controls us culturally more than we may realize.
“I think the Canadian people need to understand what we have with respect to the rest of the world and what it means to have these resources,” she states emphatically.
The environment within Canada’s borders may well be the defining example for Earth, believes Bondar, because of its ecological diversity, most of it in a comparatively pristine state.
“That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to do this project—to show people some diversity and celebrate the kinds of things we have protected by our highest laws…We need to recognize and take stock of what it is we have and not allow industry or political things to corrupt that inventory.”
Bondar realizes the anthropocentrism of “taking stock” and “corrupting inventory,” but acknowledges that environmental management is a political reality.
What is the value of wilderness, then? David Suzuki once said that the fundamental reason for finding value in wilderness is not materialistic but spiritual. Medicines from rainforests aside, wilderness has always whispered a sense of “otherness” that checks our innate egoism, for better or for worse, says Bondar.
“It is troubling to know that this planet has existed in the past in a way that I have no understanding of…to think that all these things exist without us, without any human presence, is an awesome thing.”
For her, the value of this otherness is in its wonder and rooted history. She believes the earth is in some deep evolutionary way a reflection of all of us. Knowing that all life stems from the same genetic trunk and is continuously branching out to survive the harshest conditions, she marvels at even a spot of lichen. This trunk—as an anonymous poet once penned—has creeped and crawled, drifted and sprawled, across silenced deserts to ocean abysses; changing flagella to fins, membranes to skins, and heads of all sorts that sleep out of sight, turning away from the cold stellar night.
Bondar, against the window, smiling, adds “and eyes to see ourselves from orbit.”
Bondar Facts
Bondar received a MSc from the University of Western Ontario in experimental pathology.
Completed her doctorate in neurobiology at the University of Toronto
Went on to study medicine and obtained a MD at McMaster University.
Did her post-doctoral work at Tufts New England Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts in neurophthalmology
Was selected as an international payload specialist on the space shuttle Discovery in January, 1992
With her unique perspective as both an astronaut and a scientist, Dr. Bondar began to consider recording Canada’s natural heritage with an exhibition of photography focusing on the country’s national parks
Passionate Vision: Discovering Canada’s National Parks was accepted by the Canadian Museum of Nature as its showcase exhibition for summer 2000. The Canadian Museum of Nature will tour it to several cities across Canada.
(Information collected from www.passionatevision.com)
