“Environing Technology” captures the understanding that environments are not given but made. Historically, environments have been increasingly made with the help of technologies. Closed spatial arrangements like botanical gardens, polar stations, clean rooms, air raid shelters or space colonies provide certain living conditions that are shaped and maintained by technology. Large technical systems of settlement, sewage and transport, farming and mining, waste management and warfare transform vast regions. Infrastructures of environmental monitoring, observation and regulation encompass entire planets. Over the course of the 20th century and up to the present, technoscientific environmental interventions and their consequences have become ever more vast and more persistent and have colonized ever larger spaces and timeframes. There are also technologies that work with our understanding of the environment. A compelling recent example is remote sensing imagery, but similar work was done in earlier historical eras by landscape painting and photography. Likewise temperature measurements, rules on how to appropriate a commons or manage a national park, economic theory or statistics work with our understanding of the environment. Thus environing technologies can be understood as those technologies that on the one hand directly reshape nature into environment in some form, and on the other hand show us nature in a specific way and thereby limit or expand our idea of what we can achieve with and in nature. The Environing Technology seminar of the Anthropocene Campus applies this concept to various cases of environment-technology interaction and co-creation.

Lectures

Terraforming
Sabine Höhler

Experiments with nature enclosed and cultivated to resemble Earth have made humans into global gardeners. What does it mean to create environments with earth-like qualities on Earth and beyond? Studying the different functions they need to fulfil, which kinds of environments are created, and for whom? And how do these environments reflect back on the largest technogarden, Earth itself?

Satellite sublime
Nina Wormbs

Climate change is hard to fathom. Graphs can sometimes condensate global numbers and pictures of climate events are often used. Satellite mosaics lie inbetween these two types of climate change communication. With their distance, perspective and scale these images can be sorted under the sublime. Satellite imagery is a environing technology and in this talk we explore a few examples.

Satellite sensing and environmental management
Johan Gärdebo

Satellites environ the earth in two ways: first by encircling it with orbits and second by continuously sensing its surface. This makes it practicable for users of satellites to speak about environments globally. Satellite sensing is thus part of the history of the global environment as understood in its particularities: the practices, places, and projects that environ the Earth. This talk focuses on how Swedish consultancy firms, aid organizations, and technology companies sought to promote satellite sensing to developing countries as a tool for environmental management.

Nuclear environments
Karena Kalmbach

The application of nuclear technologies has altered and will alter environments around the globe: weapons test sites, polluted plant facilities, irradiated landscapes caused by accidents, and waste storage sites have created nuclear environments which are governed by sensing, measuring and restricting. The technical control of these places, made necessary by technology use, is at the same time counteracted by environmental realities: birds and fishes do not obey the demarcation lines of restricted zones, neither do winds and water currents that carry radioactive particles. Thus the human utopia of being able to control the technological realities is largely based on ignorance of environment-technology interaction.

Fieldwork at a distance
Etienne Benson

Environmental scientists increasingly use technologies of remote sensing and telecommunications to study the natural world at a distance. A range of environments are re-fashioned and re-imagined through such practices, including the environment of the office or laboratory where the scientist receives and interprets data, the environment of the sensor or satellite infrastructure that gathers and transmits the data, and the environment(s) to which the data. With examples drawn from the history of ecology and geology, this lecture explores environmental scientists’ changing relationships to the field and fieldwork in light of these envirotechnical possibilities.