New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies

13. NEOecology: The Solar System’s Emerging Environmental History and Politics

195 NEOecology The Solar System’s Emerging Environmental History and Politics Valerie A. Olson For two decades, scholars concerned with perceptions of the global environment have examined how remote sensing technologies serve as social tools. They call attention to the scientific and political uses of satellite and astronautical views of Earth from orbit, asking how these downward views open up new ways to spatialize forms of governance,1 legitimize forms of environmental knowledge of the Earth,2 and, as anthropologist Tim Ingold asserts, promote a flat topology of global surfaces that obscures experiences of living within a three-dimensional environment.3 These analyses overlook an equally interesting question: How do space technologies make it possible to perceive outer space as connected to the Earthly human environment— and to what ends? For over a century, astronomers, biologists, geologists, and human spaceflight proponents have been acting as if the human environment that matters, both scientifically and politically, is greater than the terrestrial globe. By extending senses, technologies, and even people outward from planet Earth, they redefine the features and boundaries of a broadly spherical human environment. This chapter traces how solar system objects, namely asteroids and comets , have become environmental as well as astronomical objects, in both Chapter 13 196 Valerie A. Olson technical and political terms. In doing so, it addresses what environmental history gains by investigating this shift. I argue that environmental history obtains a broader view of the multiple and contingent understandings of environmental wholes that are emerging across disciplinary and social boundaries over time. To make this argument I demonstrate how space science, technology, and policy activism generate new ways to perceive the Earthly environment and the human ecosphere, despite the general exclusion of these topics from environmental history. These changes in perception result from redefinitions of scientific disciplinary as well as political boundaries; they are precipitated, in part, by intensifying interdisciplinary attention to what it means to live on a planet. In what follows, I trace scientific, technical, and political articulations of a life-and-death environmental relationship between Earth and a group of comets and asteroids with Earth-crossing orbits now known as Near Earth Objects (NEOs). While the history of a human relationship with outer space has been largely the province of geography, technology history, policy, and ethics scholars, the contemporary human relationship to NEOs reveals a distinctly environmental history. This history is an example of what Steven Pyne calls an “extreme history” of uninhabited and out-of-bounds spaces that people nonetheless actively perceive and engage, like the deep sea, Antarctica , and the solar system.4 Such an extreme history is recognizable as environmental history when, as in this case, we can follow how asteroids and comets were first categorized as erratic space debris then recast as defining elements of Earth’s history and then how they have become the subjects of national policy making and policy activism. The space that matters in this extreme environmental history and activism is not a sedate solar system but instead, as scientists informed me during my ethnographic fieldwork at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a dynamic “heliosphere ” of interactive matter and energy. This heliosphere is starkly natural but now also contains social topologies made by decades of remote sensing scans and spacecraft missions to its far edges. According to these scientists and policy activists, the heliosphere is the macroenvironmental context for terrestrial, and by extension human, history. This extreme environmental history begins with the detection and eventual classification of asteroids and comets as environmental objects, a process that brings into view the underinvestigated astronomical dimension of environmental history. Two Western master narratives involved in making the solar system a social and political space have shaped this history. The first is a continuing narrative about outer space as discovered territory; the second and less-investigated narrative that I attend to here is an emerging tale of cosmos as ecology. I outline how telescopic technologies, like the microscopic technologies that science and technology studies (STS) schol- NEOecology 197 ars have examined more thoroughly, play a role in what Ingold terms the “topology of environmentalism” by remaking what count as the scales and boundaries of human political ecologies.5 I make this case by deploying STS conceptual frameworks that consider the role of technically defined objects in the remaking of disciplinary and institutional boundaries. As Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer’s well-known theorization of...