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ABSTRACT
The central proposal of this article is that environing technologies shape and structure the way in which nature becomes environment, and as such used, perceived and understood. The argument builds on the understanding that environment is the result of human intervention. Technology is here understood broadly as a terraforming practise, materially and conceptually. We suggest that the compound environing technologies enable us to see environmental change on multiple scales and in new registers. That technologies alter the physical world is not new; our contribution focuses on the conceptual, epistemological, economic and emotional appreciation of systems and aggregates of technologies that is part and parcel of material change. The environing technologies that enable such articulation and comprehension hold potential in the future transformation that our societies need to undergo to overcome the crisis of environment and climate.
Acknowledgements
As authors we would like to thank History and Technology editors Tiago Saraiva and Amy Slayton for insightful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. We would also like to acknowledge conversations and collaborations over the years that have proved valuable for the ideas and arguments made here, in particular with Paul Warde, Sabine Höhler, Henrik Ernstson, and Johan Gärdebo.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Worster, “Appendix: Doing Environmental History,” esp. 292–93.
2. Braudel, La Méditerranée.
3. Bennett, Vibrant Matter; and Alaimo, Bodily Natures.
4. Jørgensen, Jørgensen and Pritchard, New Natures; and Purdy, After Nature.
5. Good examples of scientists as narrators of the new Weltanschauung are Flannery, The Future Eaters; Zalasiewicz, The Earth After Us; Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere; and Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction.
6. Marsh, Man and Nature, ch. 3 “The Woods,” 419–21 (sand dunes); Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country; and Lowenthal, Quest for the Unity of Knowledge.
7. There is however, at the very end of Marsh’s book, a passage where he opens the possibility of accumulating effects that might indeed impact not just on the Earth as a whole but even on the planetary scale and on other celestial bodies. It is prophetic, but also hypothetical and far from ‘systemic’, Marsh, 465.
8. Mooney, “Evolution of Natural and Social Science Interactions.”
9. Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity” including the “Planetary Boundaries Diagram” with its striking visual representation of the idea; Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries”; and Morseletto, “Analysing the influence of visualisations,” 44–45.
10. See however Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History” for an attempt to address some of these dimensions.
11. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore.
12. Warde and Sörlin, “Expertise for the Future”; and Warde, Robin, and Sörlin, The Environment.
13. Sörlin, “Environment.”
14. Nardizzi, “Environ,” 185–89; Warde, “The Environmental History”; and Warde, “The Environment.”
15. Sörlin and Warde, “Making the Environment Historical,” 8.
16. Porter, Trust in Numbers; and Warde, Robin, and Sörlin, The Environment.
17. From the vast literature, e.g. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory; Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore; Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature; Callicott, “The Land Aesthetic ”; Soper, What Is Nature?; and Casey, The Fate of Place.
18. Schatzberg, “Technik,” 490–91.
19. Marx, “Technology”; Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine.
20. See note 18 above.
21. Marx, “Technology,” 564.
22. Schatzberg, “Technik,” 488.
23. Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene.”
24. Pritchard, “Toward an Environmental History,” 229.
25. White, “The Nationalization of Nature”; and Aslanian et al., “How Size Matters.”
26. Vernadsky, Biosfera; Dobrowolski, Historia naturalna lodu; Barry, “A. B. Dobrowolski”; Cole, “The Ecosphere”; and Höhler, “Ecospheres.”
27. For example, Raymond Lindeman’s Cedar Bog Lake in Minnesota in the 1930s. Lindeman, “Experimental Simulation of Winter.”
28. Coen, “Big Is a Thing of the Past,” 312.
29. Hughes, Networks of Power.
30. We draw on a typology that has its roots in a research agenda that Sörlin crafted when we together founded the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in 2011. https://www.kth.se/en/abe/inst/philhist/historia/ehl/about-the-ehl/research. The work to find and shape the KTH EHL over its first couple of years of existence also involved several of our then colleagues in the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH. The concept, environing technologies, has been applied in research at the Division, but this is the first time we make an effort to elaborate it theoretically.
31. See the contributions in Roberts, Shaffer, and Dear, The Mindful Hand.
32. Warde, “The Environmental History.”
33. This whole shaping function of technology is a central theme of Lewis Mumford’s influential Technics and Civilization, although Mumford talks about this process as a “conquest of the environment”, using “environment” in the old style as a neutral holder of space, underscoring the separation of technology from environment rather than its role in the creation of environment. Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 154.
34. Parson, Protecting the Ozone Layer.
35. De Young, “Environmental Psychology Overview”; and Lang and Kull, Estonian Approaches to Culture Theory.
36. Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, 194; Warde, “The Environment”; and Warde, Robin, and Sörlin, The Environment, 30.
37. UNITED NATIONS. “UN Treaty on Principles.”
38. Grevsmühl, “Serendipitous Outcomes in Space History.”
39. Mack, Viewing the Earth; and Wormbs and Källstrand, A Short History of Swedish Space Activities.
40. Jasanoff, “Image and Imagination;” Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions;” Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye; and Poole, Earthrise.
41. Gärdebo, ongoing dissertation work.
42. Wormbs, “Eyes on the Ice”; Daston and Galison, Objectivity.
43. Wormbs, “Sublime Satellite Imagery.”
44. Cf closing conference on the Marie Curie ITN on Environmental Humanities, (Um)Weltschmerz, Munich, October 2018 (http://enhanceitn.eu/umweltschmerz-announcing-final-enhance-event/).
45. Cf James Balog and his film “Chasing Ice.”
46. Ghosh, The Great Derangement.
47. Brooks, “Geological and Historical Aspects,” 1016.
48. Callendar, “Air Temperature;” Callendar, “Can CO2 Influence Climate?;” Callendar, “The Artificial Production;” Callendar, “The Composition of the Atmosphere;” Fleming, The Callendar Effect; and Sörlin, “The Global Warming that Did Not Happen.”
49. Harper, Weather by the Numbers.
50. Persson, “Early Operational Numerical Weather prediction.”
51. Bohn, “Carl-Gustaf Rossby’s Collection”; Bohn, “Concentrating on CO2”; and Fleming, Inventing Atmospheric Science.
52. Edwards, A Vast Machine.
53. Bolin, A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change.
54. Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts.
55. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse”; and Willis, “The Ecosystem.”
56. Westman, “How Much Are Nature’s Services Worth?”.
57. Norgaard, “Ecosystem Services.”
58. Daily, Nature’s Services.
59. TEEB, Manual for Cities; TEEB, The Economics of Ecosystems.
60. Ring, “Challenges in Framing.”
61. See note 58 above.
62. Bolund and Hunhammar, “Ecosystem Services in Urban.”
63. de Wit et al., “Investing in Natural Assets.”
64. Costanza et al., “The Value.”
65. Ernstson and Sörlin, “Ecosystem Services.”
66. See Mitchell, Carbon Democracy for a similar argument. See also Mackenzie on how models and metaphors work performatively to shape and not just portray the economy, e.g. MacKenzie, Material Markets.
67. Oppenheimer, The Practices of Scientific Assessment.
68. Mitchell et al., Global Environmental Assessments.
69. Nilsson, A Changing Arctic Climate; Krupnik, SIKU: Knowing Our Ice; and Hastrup, “The Icy Breath.”
70. Wormbs and Sörlin, “Arctic Futures.”
71. Schneider and Nocke, Image Politics of Climate Change; and Jenkins, Convergence Culture.
72. Wormbs, “The Assessed Arctic.”
73. See note 70 above.
74. Whitney and Kiechle, “Introduction.”
75. We will only mention two here. First, William Cronon’s concept ‘second nature’, referring to man-made nature which in his analysis of Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, 1991, was melded together with ‘first nature’ largely via the workings of the capitalist market. Second, we would like to mention Stephen Pyne’s for us very inspirational, constructively constructivist, How the Canyon became Grand, 1998, in which Pyne brings out the wide range of cultural, scientific and political practices that led, first, to the conceptualization of the Grand Canyon, second to its elevation as a national park and monument and ultimately to a global phenomenon and attraction.
76. A few examples: Fiege, Irrigated Eden; Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean; Pritchard, Confluence; Benson, Wired Wilderness; Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome. An excellent overview of these trends in recent environmental history is Pritchard, “Toward an Environmental History of Technology,” 244.
77. Foucault, “Governmentality.”
78. Schot, “Confronting the Second Deep Transition”; and Schot and Kanger, “Deep Transitions.”
79. Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
80. Stirling, “Direction, Distribution, Diversity!”; and Scoones, Leach and Newell, Politics of Green Transformations.
81. See e.g. Christian, Maps of Time; Höhler, Spaceship Earth; Höhler, “Local Disruption or Global Condition?”; Jasanoff, “Image and Imagination”; Thomas, “History and Biology in the Anthropocene”; Sörlin and Warde, “Making the Environment Historical”; Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene; Sörlin and Lane, “Historicizing Climate Change”; and Warde, Robin, and Sörlin, The Environment.