Introduction

The eighteenth-century Irish British philosopher George Berkeley is credited with posing the question: If a tree falls and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Berkeley’s argument is that “to be is to be perceived,” thereby suggesting that observation was a premise for asking such questions to begin with. In the eighteenth century, this was primarily a theological argument, in the sense that the world is made and exists because it is observed by God.11George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. 1734, sections 23 and 45: https://librivox.org/berkeleys-treatise/ While the question of the falling tree has remained relevant in philosophy,22John Campbell and Quassim Cassam. Berkeley’s Puzzle: What Does Experience Teach Us? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. it has also shifted so that, by the late twentieth century, it was no longer a theological but a technological argument.

God, or God’s eye at least, became replaced by satellites, whose movements have come to enshroud Earth’s extraterrestrial environment—also referred to as the orbital technosphere.33Johan Gärdebo, Agata Marzecova, and Scott Gabriel Knowles, “The Orbital Technosphere: The Provision of Meaning and Matter by Satellites,” Anthropocene Review, vol. 4, no. 1 (2017): pp. 44–52. This crowded civil satellite traffic from the 1980s onward corresponds to a thickening layer of data (public and private), in which fewer and fewer things are able to escape the gathering lenses of satellite sensors. The satellite data have in turn given rise to a digital environment that overlaps and influences the physical environment it represents. This realization was articulated in the 1980s by contemporary thinkers and artists, such as Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser regarding photography and Canadian singer and environmentalist Bruce Cockburn, who depicted satellite monitoring as a means for seeing and stopping the deforestation of rainforests in his song “If a Tree Falls.”44Anke Finger, Rainer Guldin, and Gustavo Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction. Minneaopolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011; Bruce Cockburn, “If a Tree Falls,” Big Circumstance, True North Records, 1988; Vilém Flusser, “The Photograph as Post-industrial Object: An Essay on the Ontological Standing of Photographs,” Leonardo, vol. 19, no. 4 (1986): pp. 329–32.

We will here revisit one of the first large-scale projects from the 1980s in which satellites saw trees fall in forests—in particular, Swedish-developed satellite remote sensing used for forest monitoring in the Philippines. The examples we will become acquainted with in this text concern the technical infrastructure and economic practices that underpinned and informed the production of a digital environment that continues to influence human environing and is thus illustrative of the anthropocenic condition.

Global environmental commons

Before going into the historical context of the 1980s, we should take note of a recent UN report—The Future Is Now, published in 201955United Nations, Global Sustainable Development Report 2019: The Future Is Now: Science for Achieving Sustainable Development, 2019.—describing how environmental data made possible understandings of the “global environmental commons.” Examples of this commons range from a clean atmosphere to land and oceans rich in biodiversity. Similar to other commons, such as Antarctica, the seafloor, and outer space, it would be for all humanity to share. But what distinguishes the global environmental commons is that it is represented not by geographical demarcations (separating one space from another) but through statistical compilations (enumerating trees to see a forest, the number of species to see biodiversity, the amount of carbon dioxide to see warming weather).

The status of this data as making environmental commons indicates three things: firstly, data about the environment can, for policy purposes, be treated as synonymous with the environment. Secondly, data is a gift to which all humans should have access—like the environmental commons that data springs from, data itself constitutes a part of a commons. Thirdly, the sustainable development of the environment is made possible by and relies on the continued production of a digital environment. In brief, any international decision-making body needs to refer back to a past digital environment when seeking to influence a future physical one.

Theoretically, one can understand this usage of satellite data as a case of environing technology. Of concern here is the making of environments, both physically and conceptually. “Making” refers both to the various ways by which environments were named, framed, and fought over, in addition to how such activities have influenced the subsequent remaking of specific material environments.66Johan Gärdebo, “Environing Technology: Swedish Satellite Remote Sensing in the Making of Environment 1969–2001” (PhD diss., KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, 2019), p. 195.

Questions

The proverbial tree must be seen to have fallen in order for policy-makers to act upon it. But how did this relationship between a digital environment and the actual environment come about? Can it be historically articulated? And can we understand why it seemed important to people at the time?

Under review here is how the Swedish Space Corporation, a state-owned company working with satellite remote sensing, gathered data of forests in the Philippines to compile maps that subsequently informed conservation policies for, and physical changes of, these forests. These data were provided as part of Swedish technical aid to the Philippines in the mid-1980s. More specifically, that aid involved the gathering of data from satellites in orbit around the Earth, processing the data in Kiruna, in northern Sweden, on magnetic tapes, and then shipping these tapes to the US for security checks before finally delivering them to Manila for use as maps until today.

What is particularly relevant to understand here is not only how the Swedish Space Corporation produced digital maps of the Filipino forest but how these activities were conceptualized as “sustainable development” of the environment. The question and argument to be addressed, in brief, is how Swedish satellite remote sensing pioneered a digital relationship with the environment and contributed to a definition of sustainable development that gives precedence to technical rather than political solutions to environmental problems.

Selling Swedish satellite data abroad

A compilation of international projects conducted by the Swedish Space Corporation suggests that these increased in number around the mid-1980s. This corresponds to the launch of SPOT 1, a French satellite with Swedish co-ownership that, from 1986 until the turn of the millennium, provided the world’s most advanced remote-sensing system for civil use.

But to begin with, one may ask why the Swedish Space Corporation sought to sell satellite data to developing countries. While the initial plan from the late 1970s had been to sell data to Nordic users, strong regional institutional proponents of aerial imagery managed to thwart a shift to new technological alternatives, like satellite imagery. And so, the Swedish Space Corporation went abroad to find markets for its technology. In this respect, satellite data was a solution looking for a problem.

Sweden’s venture abroad from 1986 onward was not unique but corresponded to a growing interest among Western countries since the late 1970s in exporting expertise (as opposed to manufactured goods). In particular, numerous Swedish governmental inquiries had developed and promoted the concept of “expertise export” (tjänsteexport, in Swedish).

These expertise exports relied on governmental agencies, industries, and municipalities setting up subsidiary companies to sell abroad and to have aid organizations that could finance the operations, in addition to development consultants whose task was to serve as bridge builders between sellers and buyers—that is, receivers—of the expertise.

Consultants and the aid triangle

The Swedish government’s inquiries elaborated on the role of “development consultants.” As bridge builders between Swedish sellers and foreign buyers, these consultants served to overcome cultural divides and translate expectations, expertise, and economic needs. In brief, a consultant’s job was to know everyone: from experts not finding problems for their services to solve within their home countries, to aid organizations in need of finding countries in which to place their projects and financial investments, to the institutional decision-makers in the target countries.

The resulting setup can be understood as an aid triangle: a setup where spokespeople for technical knowledge, money, and policy were traded between Swedish exporters, developing countries, and aid organizations. The consultants’ roles existed in relationships dictated by aid priorities and technical developments, of which satellite remote sensing was one.

There were three primary outcomes of this aid triangle. First, it served as a money-laundering mechanism whereby Sweden could transfer tax money to its state-owned companies not as state support but as company revenue, using countries receiving aid as intermediaries. Secondly, Sweden gained influence over international development policy. And thirdly, Sweden produced environmental knowledge and associated terminology, like “sustainable development,” that promoted a technological relationship between monitoring and managing the environment.

The main organizations involved in establishing an aid triangle around Swedish satellite data were the Swedish Space Corporation, which employed development consultants, who in turn hired subsidiary companies (like Swedish Projects Inc., based in Washington, DC) whose job it was to know all aid financiers (such as the World Bank) and to formulate projects directly with spokespeople for the Philippines Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Underpinning this Swedish-Filipino collaboration was of course Sweden’s co-ownership of the French satellite system SPOT, which ensured regular access to data.

While each of these actors and interactions could be described at length, the main point here is that expertise export was not about a buyer finding a seller. Rather, it was about the seller defining a project, which was then placed in a country that the financier was willing to support.

Choosing a suitable canvas

So why the Philippines? And why 1986? The Philippines was not among the countries that Sweden, in the 1980s, was willing to give aid to. But it was a potential trading partner that both Sweden and the World Bank had interest in establishing new relations with.

The year 1986 was indeed the start of something new. The Filipino people had ousted the Marcos regime, and power had transferred to a provisional government under Corazon Aquino, who promised to end colonial dependence on the US and redistribute wealth from landowners to the landless through an ambitious land reform.

In this context, the Swedish Space Corporation could, through its position as a consultant, frame a project that produced a satellite map to support this land reform in the Philippines. The World Bank, together with the Swedish consultants, then courted the country’s new political leadership (including luncheons with Aquino herself), for whom the international project served as political legitimation. Both the Philippines and the World Bank then announced the project, which the Swedish Space Corporation applied for and was subsequently awarded. The project had sound geopolitical optics: a French satellite wielded by non-aligned Swedes to help Filipinos in severing their colonial ties with the US using the help of satellites. The fact that money and satellite data first had to pass through Washington, DC—allowing the US to erase geographically sensitive data (like military bases)—was less talked about.

The project plan was to use satellite data from SPOT 1 to map the entire country in less than a year. The purpose of this mapping was to put it to use for Aquino’s land reform, which was being developed at the same time. Filipino land surveyors were to support the Swedes with equipment, travel, and personnel on the ground. They in turn would receive training in using the remote-sensing technology. So, as SPOT gathered data in Kiruna, Sweden, the Swedish remote-sensing experts and the Filipino land surveyors planned their fieldwork.

Fieldwork for finding forests

Why was fieldwork important when using satellite data? Fieldwork made possible “groundtruthing”—that is, where you visit a site to see if what you see on the ground corresponds to what has been sensed from above. Some reflections on this process, not covered in project reports, were documented on postcards and sent back to family members in Sweden:

This is what it looks like in the mountains. The terraced rice fields stretch out across all eternity. […] We “classify” the different types of vegetation in the image, i.e. agriculture (= rice), grass, bush vegetation, forest, and erosion.

What’s important to note is how, during fieldwork, the Filipino land surveyors reacted against the initial project classification that the Swedes and the World Bank had agreed upon. For example, the Filipino surveyors argued that there was no such thing as “virgin forest” in the Philippines and that all forests had in some way been subject to human cultivation. While this may seem like an argument of semantics, these reflections during fieldwork led to a revised and more detailed classification of the Filipino forests.

From land reform for farmers to sustainable development for forests

The political unrest that toppled the previous government continued to worsen in the Philippines. It spilled over into political kidnappings and assassinations of American and other foreign officials, which also made it difficult for the Swedes to conduct mapping and fieldwork. To retain control of the state apparatus, the Aquino government looked for a way to abort its land reform without losing face. All of this is important context, since by the spring of 1988, when Swedish mapping of the Philippines had been completed, the rationale of the project had changed.

Instead of supporting a failing land reform, the Swedish Space Corporation shifted emphasis to saving the environment itself. The mapping of the Philippines would serve the “sustainable development” of the country’s forests. Technically, this was made possible due to the Filipino revisions made to the map legend, as further detail was added to differentiate between various sorts of trees and forest types. The term “sustainable development” itself originated from the consultancy world and had begun to enter the political realm during the mid-1980s through its promotion by the UN’s contemporaneous Brundtland Commission and its report Our Common Future.77World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission), Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Shortly after the project finished in 1988, and the Swedish government handed over the satellite map of the Philippines to the Aquino administration, the data were used to support a new forestation policy. In particular, the final map included an inventory of rainforest resources that visualized where significantly less rainforest existed than was previously believed, so as to guide policies for forest preservation and reforestation. The digital data, in subsequent years, also came to be used to produce hundreds of smaller maps, enabling closer monitoring of regions to police against deforestation. The satellite data was around to see the tree fall, so to speak.

In subsequent years, the governments of Sweden, the Philippines, and various other developing countries, in addition to newspapers and even competing remote-sensing companies in France and the US, referred to the mapping of the Philippines as an example of how satellite data served as a tool for achieving sustainable development.

When Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt spoke at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the association between satellite data and the term “sustainable development” reached a new peak. In brief, Swedish satellite mapping had demonstrated how not only superpowers but also small nations (like Sweden) and developing countries (like the Philippines) could use advanced satellites to sense and save forests. Paraphrasing the Our Common Future report, Bildt argued that space had become key to a new kind of planetary management based on technology and knowledge (satellite data) rather than on political regulations. Satellites and sustainable development were tools and concepts with which to shape a new world order, now that the Cold War had finally ended.

Conclusion and coda: On data as a global environmental commons

How did our present-day relationship between data and the environment come about? When was this relationship articulated? And why was it important to people at the time? The Swedish mapping of the Philippines illustrates the importance of satellite mapping for the emergence and meaning of the term “sustainable development.”

Unlike all previous uses of satellite technology, which had been dominated by the superpowers of the Soviet Union and the US, the mapping of the Philippines relied on Swedish experts and a French satellite. The relative non-alignment of these countries added credibility to the claims that it served aims other than military intelligence or geopolitical positioning. It was also the boldest mapping project to date, both in terms of scope of mapped landmass and in terms of timeline, finishing within a year. This approach served as a model both for governments and aid organizations in providing maps to other developing countries and for financiers who claimed they wanted to monitor and manage the environment.

The mapping of the Philippines was also one of the first projects in which the idea of “sustainable development” was used as a rationale. This term’s emphasis on the environment only developed gradually, as other political aims, like the Filipino land reform, faltered. It was only then that the Filipino government chose to instead promote the Swedish-led mapping as part of an initiative to preserve the country’s forests. This narrative was not isolated to the Philippines and Sweden, but was also later promoted by other countries and in other contexts. In addition, the connection between satellite data and sustainable development was codified at the 1992 UN Earth Summit, thereby strengthening its position as a guiding principle for the era of international politics beyond the Cold War.

Satellite data became not only a means for seeing that the tree had fallen, but also a precondition for policy-making regarding the existence of trees to begin with. Despite continued promotion of satellite data as a tool for managing a global environment, both by producers (like the Swedish Space Corporation) and by policy-makers (like the UN), issues of ownership and access have remained a concern for both users and producers: those who fear becoming dependent on others to get data, and those gathering and hoping to sell that data. In this sense, all environmental data are a global environmental commons that its users have yet to agree on how to share.