Earth-observation satellites in orbit now, at true altitude · orbital data CelesTrak
Timeline
How We Learned
We Live on a Planet
Not the history of a movement. The history of a realisation — that we live on a finite world we are transforming, and that its habitability is ours to lose. It is older than environmentalism, it has been reached and forgotten many times, and it is still incomplete.
Loading…The band
The coloured band is the time axis, divided into periods. Choose the periodisation under Bands; select a period to zoom to it.
The axis is stretched, not proportional: recent decades get far more room than early millennia, so equal distances are not equal spans of time.
Above and below
Each event is coded as a promise or a reckoning, and as proaction or reaction. Split sets which of these separates the events above the band from those below.
Shape and colour
Shape always gives the category. Colour follows the lens chosen under Colour; with Category, colour and shape agree.
Size
Size gives the event's significance within the record.
The strip
The strip above the timeline shows the whole span. Its bars count the events on each stretch of the axis, above and below; the lit window is what the timeline shows.
What the coding is
Category, framing, scale, mode, stance and region are coded per event for this curated set of milestones. They describe this corpus, not the cultural record. On the evidence
Moving around
Drag to pan, pinch or Ctrl-scroll to zoom. With an event open, the arrow keys step to the previous and next event. The List view shows the same events as a table.
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No events match. Clear the search or show all categories.
· GLOBAÏA, How We Learned We Live on a Planet
On the evidence
What the colours mean
Every event is coded against six relational framings — sacredness and kinship, beauty and wonder, threat, utility and mastery, care and responsibility, loss and vulnerability. These are framings, not sentiments. “The forest is disappearing and we must save it” uses negative language and expresses care; “we triumphantly cleared the wilderness” sounds positive and expresses mastery. A sentiment score would reverse both readings.
What this is not
The frame mix over time describes this corpus — a curated set of documented milestones — and nothing wider. It is not a sample of surviving literature, and it must not be read as a measure of what any culture thought at the time. A genuine measure of nature in the cultural record would require corpus sampling, human coders, and reported inter-rater reliability, per period and per language. That is a research programme, and it is not what you are looking at.
Uneven by construction
Coverage before 1500 depends on what institutions chose to copy: Greek drama and philosophy survived because they were copied, Roman agricultural writing because it was useful, the medieval record because monasteries kept it. The corpus below 1800 leans Mediterranean and European, which is a fact about the surviving record and about who has so far assembled it, not about where people noticed. Region is recorded on every event so the imbalance stays visible — colour by Region to see it directly.
Sources
Every event carries at least one primary or authoritative reference — a UN document, a DOI, or an archival text — reachable from its panel. Where a date is conventional rather than exact, the panel says so.