DOWN TO EARTH
Karen M’Closkey + Keith VanDerSys
Karen M’Closkey + Keith VanDerSys are founding partners of PEG office of landscape + architecture and faculty in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Their recent work explores advances in environmental modeling and simulation tools. They are guest editors of LA+ Simulation (2016) and authors of Dynamic Patterns: Visualizing Landscapes in a Digital Age (2017).
TECHNOLOGY, SPATIAL ANALYTICS, AESTHETICS
I
n 1957, Sputnik 1 was launched into orbit. On that day, according to media theorist Marshall McLuhan, “Nature ended and Ecology was born,” by which he meant that there was no longer any “outside” for the natural world, only an inside of which humans were a part.1 All did not share this optimistic interpretation of events. Philosopher Hannah Arendt was alarmed at the increasing distance between scientists and the objects of their study, made possible through a “veritable avalanche of fabulous instruments and ever more ingenious machinery.”2 Given the ability of computers to accomplish what the human brain alone could not, Arendt feared that “man can do… what he cannot comprehend.”3 For Arendt, space travel epitomized the quest for the Archimedean point – a supposedly objective position outside of Earth by which we could look down upon ourselves. From this vantage, Arendt argued, we risk reducing humans to nothing more than subjects with “overt behavior.”4 Just over a decade later, the first photograph of Earth from outer space—Earthrise—was captured by astronauts aboard Apollo 8. This view was, for some, evidence of our planet’s extraordinariness. It encapsulated the sense of an organic and interconnected whole Earth – a planet without borders, a planet that was more atmosphere than solid ground. For the astronauts, ecologists, and environmentalists, “Earthrise and its kin…turned the globe back into Earth.”5 If satellites enabled an all-encompassing image of the Earth, then molecular sensor technologies provided a more localized view. James Lovelock, scientist and originator of the “Gaia hypothesis,” developed the Electron Capture Detector (ECD) the same year Sputnik 1 was launched. This device was instrumental to the rise of the environmental movement of the 1960s and early ’70s. The information gleaned via ECDs revealed the deleterious effects of the widespread use of synthetic chemicals, providing irrefutable evidence for Rachel Carson’s seminal book, Silent Spring (1962).6 Later, data collected with ECDs showed the presence of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere, a discovery that led to research on ozone depletion and the eventual verification of the ozone hole through samples collected with NASA’s Nimbus satellite program.7 Thus, post-war environmentalism grew out of the combination of localized environmental sensing and global environmental change; these tools are what gave rise to the environmentalism that we take for granted today. The environmental narratives that arose with the development of sensing and sensor instruments—from satellites to ECDs—can be seen to support McLuhan’s claim that