A benchmark for the environment: big science and ‘artificial’ geophysics in the global 1950s

Goossen, Benjamin W.

doi:10.1017/s1740022819000378

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 73 publications

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“…Arendt wrote The Human Condition as preparations were under way for the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958), and she opened the book ‘with a critique of Sputnik, the best-known IGY project’ ( Goossen, 2020 : 157). Throughout the 1950s, ‘big science’ took shape through geophysical techniques that termed what we now call ‘anthropogenic’ forces as ‘artificial’ phenomena, such as the ‘artificial radiation’ of atomic bombs, the ‘artificial burning’ that pumped CO 2 into the atmosphere, and Sputnik, the ‘artificial satellite’ in Earth’s orbit ( Goossen, 2020 ). To get political traction on how ‘artificial’ phenomena simultaneously transformed nature and the human condition, Arendt distinguished the modern age from the modern world.…”

Section: Anthropocene Conditions and The Politicalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Being earthbound: Arendt, process and alienation in the Anthropocene

Belcher

Schmidt

2020

Environ Plan D

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Hannah Arendt developed a twofold account of ‘being earthbound’ directly relevant to Anthropocene debates regarding the political. For Arendt, both senses of ‘being earthbound’ arose as humans began to act into nature, not merely upon it. The first sense is oriented to a political ontology of process, which arose as human actions – political, technological, scientific – nullified modernist conceits separating humans from nature. The second sense is one of earth alienation, which is referenced specifically to a scientific praxis coincident with advances in science and technology that alienates common sense experiences in politics. Though not unqualified, these two senses of being earthbound anchor our argument that Arendt offered prescient resources for understanding the political in the Anthropocene at the intersection of science, capital and world. The article ends by contrasting Arendt’s account of being earthbound with Bruno Latour’s recent interventions on the politics of Gaia.

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Section: Anthropocene Conditions and The Politicalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Being earthbound: Arendt, process and alienation in the Anthropocene

Belcher

Schmidt

2020

Environ Plan D

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Europe without Borders: Environmental and Global History in a World after Continents

Johnson

2021

Contemporary European History

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In 2012 the historian Julia Adeney Thomas restrained her temper but unleashed a warning. The occasion was a forum in the American Historical Review on ‘historiographic “turns” in critical perspective’. The perspectives offered were critical enough, Thomas wrote in praise of the other authors, but the forum had a blind spot: ‘alongside the turns analyzed here, a world-altering force has been emerging, one larger, more devastating, and more definitive even than “contemporary flexible forms of capitalism”: I speak of climate change – or climate collapse – and all of its related global transformations’. Since then, some intersectional scholars have gone beyond that to argue that climate collapse and racial capitalism are not separate topics at all, but are bound together by white supremacy and lingering forms of European imperialism. Over the past decade some environmental historians have grappled with these connections and deployed new frameworks for thinking about scale, the interdependence of the local and the global, the implications of a Euro-centric analytical framework for our understanding of the world and the relationship between economic systems and environmental change. Although they have developed separately, both environmental history and global history have called upon historians of Europe to rethink boundary making in their methodologies and in their categories of analysis. In an era of global climate catastrophe, global pandemic and global economic crisis, where does the ‘European’ environment end?

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Europe's Final Frontier: Astroculture and Planetary Power since 1945

Goossen

2022

Contemporary European History

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The main landmass of Europe does not appear in the iconic Blue Marble photograph of earth, taken from space on the final Apollo mission to the moon in December 1972. Europe as a continent remains out of frame, hidden north beyond the curvature of the planet. Viewers instead see swirling clouds, vast expanses of the world ocean and the partially obscured forms of Africa, Antarctica and the Arabian Peninsula. Decentring the Global North was crucial to the charisma of this image, which for half a century has been a symbol of human unity and a staple of appeals to protect the only planet we have ever inhabited. The universality of the photograph contrasted with the frictions of the Cold War and decolonisation that peaked in the 1960s. Blue Marble is nonetheless deeply ambivalent. Its extraterrestrial vantage was possible thanks to the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. And the implicit message of the photograph – that the benefits of spaceflight and other advanced technologies would be shared with all peoples as a contribution to global economic development – simultaneously invoked legacies of inequality from the epoch of formal imperialism, itself not yet at an end. Regions visible in Blue Marble, in fact, included territory still administered at the time by Britain, France, Norway, Portugal and Spain.1

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A benchmark for the environment: big science and ‘artificial’ geophysics in the global 1950s

Cited by 6 publications

References 73 publications

Being earthbound: Arendt, process and alienation in the Anthropocene

Being earthbound: Arendt, process and alienation in the Anthropocene

Europe without Borders: Environmental and Global History in a World after Continents

Europe's Final Frontier: Astroculture and Planetary Power since 1945

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