This chapter explores the politics of scientific knowledge and visual representation of savanna environments in Bernhard and Michael Grzimek’s bestselling book and Academy Award–winning documentary film, Serengeti Shall Not Die (1959). It shows how the Grzimeks used their iconic airplane, nicknamed the “Flying Zebra,” to conduct ecological reconnaissance and employ aerial filmography. They depicted the Serengeti as an untouched ecosystem and a global heritage of mankind, despite its history of pastoralist land use and as a battleground between contending German and British imperial forces. Following international conventions established in London in 1933, the Grzimeks insisted that the Serengeti should encompass the entire habitat of migrating wildebeest—and not, as some officials in the Tanganyika Territory insisted, be divided to accommodate the local Maasai people’s customary cattle grazing. The Grzimeks failed to stop the redrawing of the park’s boundaries, partly because the airborne camera never expunged the Serengeti’s “ghosts of land use past.”
This essay offers a postcolonial critique of recent environmentalist literature and exhibitions that frame the Anthropocene using the NASA Apollo mission's Earthrise (1968) and Blue Marble (1972) photographs from space. Building on the work of Dennis Cosgrove and Donna Haraway, as well as historical evidence from the U.N. Environmental Summit in Stockholm in 1972, the essay explores how the attempt to depict Anthropos as a unitary geophysical agent resurrects the appeal to the Whole Earth environmentalism of the 1970s without attending to the U.S. imperialist and racist connotations of the disembodied “god trick” found in these extraterrestrial photographs. As evidenced already in the 1950s at the landmark Man and Nature conference at Princeton and in the wildlife documentaries of Bernhard and Michael Grzimek, moreover, the first decades of the Great Acceleration witnessed the growing use of aerial images to chart the “disappearance of the outside” and to advocate for wilderness areas in the Global South as a “cultural heritage of mankind.” The confluence of geophysical tipping points, universalist history, and political struggle over decolonization resulted in eco-images that subsumed all parts of the globe—most especially Africa—into a doomsday narrative of human profligacy that lost sight of a kaleidoscopic patchwork of cultural landscapes. Fractal topographies, by contrast, serve as more effective indices of the recursive layering found in digital representations such as Google Earth and help us to stretch our historical imagination and cultural criticism into scale-dependent and multi-agentic realms that lie beyond the Apollonian visions of the late Holocene.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.