Chapter 1 From Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age

8/21/2019 Chapter 1 From Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age

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1 CAPACITY: ENVIRONMENT IN A CENTURY

OF SPACE

Et Si Le Vrai Luxe, Ctait LEspace?

In December 2002 the automobile manuacturer Renault launched a televisionand print campaign to advertise its new generation o large-capacity limousine,the Espace. Te image series La foule(the crowd) showed pedestrians movingin metropolitan streets through thick human swarms. All along, however, the

pedestrians remain exceptional, surrounded and protected by a comortableclear space that assumes the orm o an Espace. Afer the camera has ollowedthem on their way, the pedestrians nally climb into their actual Espace anddrive out o the rame. Te subsequent slogan suggestively asks:Et si le vrai luxe,ctait lespace?Te pun translates only loosely into the English phrase What ithe true luxury were space? Te new Renault Espace.

In advertising automobiles, speed, reedom, independence and overall indi-vidual mobility have been replaced more and more with the saety and silence,comort and cleanliness o their passenger compartments. In this regard the mes-sage o the advert is amiliar. More intriguing is Renaults storyline that statesthat in the midst o growing modern urban populations and ensuing spatialconstraints personal breathing and moving space have become luxury goods.Renaults commercial promises that the extravagance o perect privacy and pro-tection can be regained and consummated by means o a modern vehicle, themonospace, a technologically controlled and optimized personal environment.Novel in Renaults advertisement is the topic o space itsel.

I suggest that the spot promoting the Espace, when released at the outset othe new millennium, underlined a historical process o spatial connement andcontrol that was driven by the permeation, demarcation and distribution ogeo-

spacein the twentieth century. At the end o the nineteenth century, a seeminglyendless process o global expansion came to a close. In the twentieth century theearth came into view in novel ways, and the notion o living within close natu-ral and political limits took on a new quality and urgency. Concerns about the

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2 Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 19601990

world were supplemented by a ocus on the planet earth as a whole. At the peako the Cold War, the dynamics o global expansion were halted in a strangelystable state that resulted rom the strategic parity between the two superpow-ers, rom their technologies or close mutual observation and rom a constantthreat o mutual destruction. As the globe no longer seemed to tolerate remote-ness, the technological rivalry o expansion into outer space began. In turn, it

was extraterrestrial photography that supplied pictures o the Blue Marble inthe 1960s and or the rst time presented planet earth in its entirety. Te pho-tographs rom space zoomed in on lies undamental conditions, which werebelieved to be unique within the universe. Reaching their climax in the early1970s, concerns about rising pressures on the environment arose in combination

with warnings o the limitations o resource-intensive industrial production ando worldwide population increase. In 1972, the Club o Romes studyTe Limitsto Growthwarned against the predicament o mankind, which was economi-cal growth and ecological destitution. In the same year, the UN Conerence onthe Human Environment in Stockholm, the rst in a series o so-called earthsummits, placed the rising awareness o environmental pollution and resourcedepletion on the international agenda as a problem o global development. Te

very word environment became a synonym o crisis and urgency.1What i the true luxury were space? Renaults bold suggestion seems to

reconrm an argument that the French historian and philosopher Michel Fou-cault had brought orth in 1967 when speaking o the twentieth century as the

epoch o space.2

Foucault reerred to the ways contemporaries conceptualizedlimitedgeospaceas well as increasingly limited global biospaceto enclose, displayand ultimately manage what was considered ever more unique and ragile onearth: inhabitable environment, lie and living conditions. It may be no coinci-dence that at the same time a gure o speech gained currency that combinedthe notions o global geospaceand biospace: Spaceship Earth. Spaceship Earthbecame undamental in articulating spatial limitations at the beginning o whatis sometimes termed the Environmental Revolution. On the one hand, this dis-cursive gure expressed the threat o absolute earthly limits and o a questionableuture o planet earth and its inhabitants. On the other hand, Spaceship Earthramed the planet in technoscientic terms and recreated the planet as a newhybrid entity. Te gure discursively linked the notion o an ultimately nite

living space to the technoscientic solutions and visions o space ight. Fromthe time o its invention and diffusion in the 1960s to its demise in the 1980s,Spaceship Earth combined the ear o limited possibilities o expansion with theanticipated possibilities o modern unctional spaces that would be scienticallyand technologically maintained.

Tis book argues that Spaceship Earth not only illustrated but also createda undamental shif in the conception o lie and living space on the earth that



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brought about new regimes and visions o effi ciency. Spaceship Earth signiedthe threat to earth as a natural human habitat, but it also created expectationsor science and technology to provide a blueprint or survival,3 substitutingthe biosphere o the earth with possible surrogate spaces elsewhere. Te bookocuses on the singular historical constellation around the year 1970 that maybe characterized by the intersection o the aspirations o space ight, an overallobsession with the uture, rising environmental concerns, Cold War conicts,the consciousness o a new global interdependence, and last but not least thehitherto unprecedented potential or intervention and destruction by sci-entic and technological means. Te conditions o possibility or this historicalsituation to emerge were met during the Second World War and in the post-war

period; however, in several aspects, this situation was prepared by developmentsin the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New in the 1960s were notthe environmental concerns but the optimistic ideas o being able to turn thedismal ate o the planet into a bright uture planned by scientists and engineers.During its lietime up to the late 1980s when globalization and sustainabilityreplaced planetary maintenance, Spaceship Earth did not simply serve as a meta-

phor to express the ragility o the planet; rather, Spaceship Earth congured arange o aspects associated with the constraint and crowdedness o earth. Space-ship Earth became the central part o a mythology to present the problems o

planetary closure meaningully and to propose strategies and solutions o escape.

Te Age o CapacityFoucaults insistence to take seriously not only the historical meanings o space,but also spatiality itsel as a historical problem was brought orward in a sin-gular historical situation that can neither be captured by terms like the Cold

War period, the Space Age or the environmental movement alone, nor by whathas come to be called globalization. Rather, the historical situation in question

points to a new awareness and signicance o the global, o globality around1970 to which every one o the mentioned singularities contributed, pointing tothe new dimensions o humankinds impact on the earth.4

Tese dimensions were literally spatial. In order to assess the meaning oglobality adequately we need to explore how the emerging notions o a globalcommunity and the projects to inventory and allot the global commons, cor-related with the reorganization o global spatial relations.5Foucault argued or ahistoriography considering spaces not as xed and stable, as preormed contain-ers to be lled with cultural meaning, but as products o historically specicmaterial-semiotic representations. Foucault understood space not as homo-geneous, metric and isotropic, but rather as an arrangement o positions andrelations; he proposed to comprehend spaces and places as changeable and rela-



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tional structures, as contingent patterns or textures o dynamically combiningand recombining sites and positions. Foucault was one o the early proponentso the spatial turn which in the 1990s opened up a whole range o culturalapproaches to explore the spatial characteristics o social and cultural relations.6

Foucault propagated a concept o space that dismissed uniorm Euclid-ian space. Moreover, he linked this concept specically to the major themeso the twentieth century. He pointed to the interaction o places, the shifingneighbourhoods and the congurations o simultaneity ollowing rom theredistributions o proximity and distance that modern technologies o accel-eration, o mobilization, and o international communication, transport andstandardization had brought orward. Furthermore, he was concerned with thespecic social and cultural conicts, which became virulent in the late nine-teenth century when the globe was rst experienced as noticeably conned. Tisbook develops Foucaults observation that the anxiety o our era has to do un-damentally with space.7I examine and elaborate the tentative line o reasoningthat the uture o humankind would increasingly be linked with knowledges ospatial order and that questions o location, situation and mutual spatial rela-tions would become the quandary o the twentieth century.

But is there anything about the 1970s as opposed, say, to the 1920s or1870s that should make this the decade in which limits to growth becomeapparent?8 Te essentialist answer to this question brought orth by physicist

John Holdren and biologist and human ecologist Paul Ehrlich in 1974 would

involve the amiliar and accepted catastrophes o the so-called environmentaldecade, population growth, industrialization, dwindling resources and unprec-edented pollution. I we try to resist this answer then the question directs ustowards a more undamental conceptual transition: Up to the mid-twentiethcentury, limits, boundaries and spaces had been territoriallydened. In the ormo territories, spaces and places became the objects o national and internationalstruggles and related to ambitions o world power. Countless studies especiallyon, say, the 1920s or 1870s have explored the territorial endeavours o the Impe-rial Age and its colonial projects, and abundant work has ocused on technologiesas part o imperial projects and on the scientic bodies o accumulated data that

were transormed into tables, graphs and maps and acquired territorial shape.9Historian Charles Maier has convincingly argued or discerning the era o high

imperialism between roughly 1860 and 1970 as the Age o erritoriality.10

Holdrens and Ehrlichs question points to a curious circumstance: Teobsession with territory in history and historiography does not carry all the waythrough when trying to assess the state o the world around 1970. Undeniably,the national and transnational exploration and occupation o the world by themajor imperial powers involved massive territorial boundary work to cause thewhite spots to gradually disappear rom the world map. Te Arican continent,



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the American West, the earths poles, the oceans, the atmosphere: having longbeen terrae incognitae, these spaces were mapped, distributed and colonized to alarge extent by the First World War. In the same course, the long lost horizon11o expansionist projects approached, and the World Frontier12came to a close.Te very cage o the inhabited earth had been gauged, as the French geogra-

pher Jean Brunhes memorably noted on the occasion o his inaugural lecture in1911.13It seems, however, that the limitedness o the earth came into clear ocusonly afer the Second World War when the division o the world into two politi-cally opposed hemispheres intersected with the long-standing separation o theglobe into two hemispheres o unequal development and prosperity. I argue thatthe 1970s are known as the decade in which limits to growth became appar-ent not so much because o the struggle over political and territorial boundariesas because o a discourse o global limits. I suggest discussing the transition toglobal awareness around 1970 as a problem o capacity.

By the term Age o Capacity I indicate the shif o perspective towards lim-ited global space and global environment around 1970 and, consequently, theocal shif towards the world as a community sharing a common destiny. Tismove rom national territory to global capacity went along with new conceptso living space positioned at the intersection o biopolitical and scientic-technological spatial regimes. Te discourse on living space needs to be careullydistinguished rom earlier political philosophies and economies o living spacerelated to territory. Te debate on living space around 1970 sprang rom the

rising environmental discourse; living space reerred to the rediscovery o thebiosphere as a limited spherical container sustaining all lie on earth. Moreover,the ecological sciences reramed the biosphere in terms o a closed and complexecosystem. It is this new and specic meaning o a global living space that I aimto capture when reerring to the ecological term o a human habitat.14

Tis work sets out to explore the regimes o effi ciency that developed withinthe broader discourse o Spaceship Earth. I project my topic primarily rom ahistorical science studies perspective, using material rom three elds o twen-tieth-century science: rst, systems ecology and its reinvention o nature andenvironment as a lie support system; second, human ecology and its allocationo human beings to available earthly space that became maniest in the concepto an ecological limit o the earth system, the earths carrying capacity; and

third, the intersections o ecology and the science and technology o space ightin the visions to overcome earthly limits by eventually constructing biospheresurrogates and recovering living space elsewhere.

Notwithstanding my approach rom the perspective o science and tech-nology studies, the gure o Spaceship Earth emerged and travelled in Westernculture in a broad sense, o which the environmental sciences ormed only a part,albeit an important one. Te discourse o Spaceship Earth proted rom several



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characteristics o the time in question: the booming optimism o the period aferthe Second World War, with its hope or scientic and technological progress;the perception o growing global interdependencies during the Cold War; andthe debate about environmental pollution, resource depletion and populationgrowth that ormed part o the rising environmental movement.

A Shrinking Globe

Political interdependence and technoscientic intervention set within anenclosed and nite space are the key eatures o Spaceship Earth. I would liketo discuss these key eatures as they were expressed in a striking emblem o the

1960s: Unisphere, the largest model o the globe ever built, was the centrepieceand offi cial symbol o the Worlds Fair that took place in New York in 1964 and1965 (see Figure 1.1). Unisphere was located on the US Federal and State Areaat the Fountain o the Continents and was presented to the world as the symbolo Mans Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe.15

Unisphere echoed some o the most discussed and ofen controversial top-ics o its time. For one, the gigantic steel construction radiated the optimism othe Western world in the prevalent scientic and technological achievementsduring the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the same way as the uturistic designand architecture o the entire exhibition did. Modernist visions, ashions andarchitectures as well as the celebration o conveniences and the comortableliestyle they promised eatured strongly at the New York Worlds Fair. By exhib-

iting scientic competence and technological skill, the air reiterated the highhopes and expectations o the post-war period that scientic and technologicaladvancement would arrive at the answers to some o the most pressing issues inthe world. Accordingly, one o the major themes o the New York Fair was AMillennium o Progress, a motto that had similarly dened the Worlds Fair inChicago in 1933 and was revived afer the Second World War.16

Second, Unisphere represented the Space Age, the dynamic and expectantdecade o space exploration in the 1960s. Centred in a large, circular reect-ing pool and surrounded by a series o water-jet ountains designed to obscureits tripod pedestal, Unisphere appeared to the visitors like the earth oating indeep space. Te model was constructed to the dimensions at which an astro-naut would view the earth rom a distance o 6,000 miles in space. Te threerings surrounding the model symbolized the orbits o Yuri Gagarin, the Russiancosmonaut and rst human in space in 1961, o John Glenn, the rst Americanastronaut who ully circled the earth in 1962, and o elstar, the rst man-madecommunications satellite that was launched in 1962 by the American telecom-munications company A&.



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Figure 1.1: Unisphere.New York Worlds Fair 1964/1965. Offi cial Guide, bythe editors of ime-Life Books(New York: Time Inc., 1964), p. 178.

Te orbital rings paid tribute to mans quest to enter space and open up new andunoreseen worlds. Tey represented the ability to assess the earth as a whole bymeans o space exploration. Moreover, they symbolized the novelty o globaltelecommunication through the coupling o radio and television broadcastingand satellite technology.17

Tirdly, Unisphere stood or the growing global interdependency that theworld experienced in the second hal o the twentieth century. Te model dis-played a novel unity, which despite, and because o, the ongoing internationalconicts emphasized a global community slowly gaining contours. Resonating

with the vivid memory o the atomic bombs o 1945 and the imminent threato a nuclear war that was eared to be global in scope and total in its destructive

power, the theme o universality again addressed the demonstrated potential otwentieth-century science and technology to change the worlds course, or bet-ter or or worse. Corresponding to these ideas, the second theme o the NewYork Worlds Fair was chosen to be Peace through Understanding. At the peako the Cold War the motto called or comprehension and appreciation, or a



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mutual advance and accommodation o the different parts o the world. Uni-sphere presented the world as a closed sphere, almost a cage in Brunhess sense,

which was to contain everything and everybody, and which did not hold anyoutside apart rom the tentative triumphs o space travel to elude gravity. Uni-sphere conveyed the message that on the newly discovered planet earth, nothing

would be lef to put aside, to save or to conquer. Unisphere anticipated the ideao a global commons, o shared common resources and o the need to interna-tionally institutionalize the modes o their management. In relating the delicate

wealth o the small earthly world to the vastness o planetary space, Unisphereclearly outlined a shrinking globe.

Unisphere can be seen as a symbol o rising global consciousness in the post-war era. As its name indicated, its visual clarity o construction displayed theunity and singularity o whole earth at one glance. At the same time, the modelemblematized globality as a structure, as a construction made rom numeroussingle parts whose origins and place o montage were anything but universal.Unisphere was a local model that illuminates how global structures are assem-bled rom individual components whose origins o composition are ofenconcealed. Unisphere, at the beginning o the 1960s the worlds largest stainlesssteel structure, was sponsored, designed and built by the corporation UnitedStates Steel (USS). Unispheres location, New York City, and the context o itscreation, the Worlds Fair o 19645, demonstrate that the model presented aspecic historical and geographical version o universality.

With regard to its location, Unisphere may also be understood as an alle-gory o the transition rom the Eurocentric worldview o the Imperial Age o thenineteenth century to a world centring on an American perspective during thecourse o the twentieth century. While until the First World War universalityhad mostly been synonymous with a European view, universalistic ideas in theinterwar period and in the Second World War, and to some extent also in theCold War , would be equated with an American view o the world, which devel-oped into the general view o the wealthy industrial countries in the Westernand the Northern Hemispheres and assured that the only conceivable utureo the world seemed to consist in its progressive Westernization. 18Te expan-sion o Western development concepts over the world and the political practiceso technology transer rom the centres into the peripheries, into the so-called

underdeveloped countries, renewed ormer colonial relationships.19

Te UScould claim to be universal in the assertion o attending to a common good,

while striving or world leadership.Te affable uniying expressions o universality and globality are highly

suspicious with regard to the intricate power relations they involve and thepolitical tensions they habitually conceal. Processes o globalization need to beaddressed as messy bricolage saturated with power. Again, Unisphere orms the



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perect analog y. Te model o a unied earth was composed o more than 500structural elements, assembled into meridians and then covered by steel platesrepresenting the continents. Te capital cities o the most prominent nations othe world were illuminated. 470 tons o steel were used to build this construc-tion. Unisphere reached a height o 140 eet, corresponding to twelve stories,and a diameter o 120 eet. Te model represented the new and strong alliance oscience and technology, industry and national government in the second hal othe twentieth century, which has been termed big science.20Unisphere paradig-matically demonstrates how science and technology increasingly engaged in theglobal transormation and conguration o the world and the earth afer the Sec-ond World War. It also stands or the ways in which inequalities were preerablydealt with at the time: Since the Continental planes and rock masses were notevenly distributed across the terrestrial globe, enormous tractive and compres-sive orces developed on the structure during its creation. Tese global tensions

were resolved numerically by using the latest high-speed computer technolog y.Computers processed the large numbers o mathematical equations that hadto be simultaneously solved to control the design. A single one o these math-ematical problems required the use o 670 equations processed simultaneously.United States Steel stated:

From beginning to end, Unisphere demanded entirely new techniques to solveentirely new problems. At no point could U.S. Steel engineers go to the book or theiranswers. Tere wasnt any book. But when the time came to put the pieces together,

they t. Tey t each other, they t the theme o the New York Worlds Fair, and theyt the modern notion that no structural design problem is too tough to solve, giventhe right technical know-how, and the right acilities, and the right steels.21

In the 1960s, globality, the perception o the structure o world-encompassingissues and problems and their comprehensive solutions, was mainly conceived oas a scientic and an engineering challenge. Robert Moses, New York City ParkCommissioner and chie architect o the New York Fair, reerred to the musical

version o Jules Vernes novel Around the World in Eighty Days, shown in thesummer programme o the air, as a romantic reminder, underlining that it wasonly 90 years ago Phileas Fogg captured the popular ancy with a bet that he andhis valet, Passepartout, could circle the globe in 80 days by boldly and ingen-iously catching every available orm o transportation and won.22Te progresso humankind since the 1870s could, according to Moses, be assessed by takingin the acceleration in orbiting the globe: Te big commercial jets now make theround trip in eight days and the astronauts in 80 minutes. 23



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A ime o Revolutions: Te Environmental urn

Te astronauts o the US Apollo missions o the 1960s and early 1970s, revolvingaround the earth within mere hours, were the rst to take photographs o earth asa whole. A photograph o Earth Rising, taken during the ight o Apollo 8 romthe dark side o the moon in 1968, supplemented satellite exposures rom the

year 1967. Te manned landing on the moon by Apollo 11 in 1969 transmittedimages o the earth live to the world. Finally, the amous image o Full Earth asrst seen by the crew o Apollo 17 spread across the world in 1972. Blue Planetturned into an icon o the earths new exposure to risk and loss in the second halo the twentieth century.24Te pictures displayed the earth in the dynamic green

and blue colours attributed to three billion years o transorming sunlight intothe processes o lie. James Lovelock would later state that it was this kind oevidence rom space research that led me to postulate the Gaia hypothesis, 25hisholistic view o the earth as one single organic whole. It is not without irony thatit was this distant vision o the earth that ocused attention on earthlie and itsundamental conditions, believed to be unique within the universe.In environmental studies scholarship, this change o perspective is sometimescalled the Second Copernican Revolution.26With regard to the CopernicanRevolution o the sixteenth century, having displaced the earth rom its centre inthe solar system to a more peripheral existence among a number o other, similar

planets, this second revolution is said to have brought the earth back to the coreo human attention. Both revolutions overthrew the prevalent views o their

times. While the rst weakened the supremacy o the earth and o humankind ina larger cosmology, the second revolution, in a holistic sweep, was again partialto earthly lie and living conditions it brought the earth back into the centreo the human universe. Unisphere is but one example o the new meaning owhole earth and the ways in which the new view on the earth became maniestin the 1960s.

Te 1960s and 1970s have been ramed as a time o revolution in severalregards. In the US, such protest movements as the black civil rights movement,the womens movement, the youth and students movements or the New Lef,have been described as revolutionary transormations.27 Recently, scholars ocontemporary history have begun to address the the long seventies as a timeo transition. Tey emphasize the undamental structural societal changes atthe end o the Golden Age, which characterized the classical period o highindustrialization in the immediate post-war time rom the mid-1950s to themid-1970s. Some historians have identied major ruptures not only in 1968,but also in 1974, when the rst dramatic economic crisis o the afer-war periodled to a move to a post-industrial, service-based economy.28Above and beyond,the 1970s are distinguished by the end o the Vietnam War, by the onset o a



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politics o dtente, and by a gradual decline o the strictly bipolar world order characteristics which support Maiers analysis o the time as orming the end oterritoriality as a structural concept.

Environmental historians have conceived o the time around 1970 as thethreshold period o environmentalism, stressing the sense o urgency that reso-nated in the demands o contemporaries or immediate action to secure the planetssurvival.29Te late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence o an environmentalmovement in the Western world that called or an immediate and radical assess-ment and immediate cutback o the hitherto industrial and economical modeo the so-called developed world.30 Environmental activists and scientists alikeaddressed air and water pollution, nuclear power and atomic waste, chemical

poisoning, heavy ertilization and the use o pesticides; they placed topics suchas resource depletion, the overuse o ossil uels, the overshing o the oceans,the loss o species diversity, the greenhouse effect and the melting o polar ice-caps on the international agenda o industrial nations. Questioning post-wareconomic growth and a technological development that had relied extensivelyon science-based innovations and had promoted a rather unproblematic view onscience and technology, the newly orming environmental discourse was highly

politicized and also extremely polarized as to the origins and the possible solu-tions o perceived problems. Alarmist, in parts apocalyptic proclamations o crisisby the Survivalists o the so-called Counterculture31opposed the technocraticoptimism o the Prometheans or space age Cargoists.32

Te years o decision around 1970 have been portrayed as a historical turn-ing point, an environmental revolution.33Depending on geographical locationand problem perception, the 1970s diagnosis34 highlights certain years andevents as signicant. Nineteen seventy-two was the year in which the UN Con-erence on the Human Environment in Stockholm took place and in whichupsetting studies such as Te Limits to Growthand the Blueprint for Survival

were published. Nineteen seventy-our was claimed as the rst UN WorldPopulation Year; it also marked the beginning o the demographic transitionin the Northwestern world. Te years 1973 and 1974 are ofen underlined orthe oil price shock, which is said to have put an end to the age o ecologicalinnocence.35Pressures were perceived as imminent, and uture effects were heldto be long and lasting. Decisions made at this point, according to the general

opinion o the time, would determine the ate o the earth and o human lie onthe planet or decades and even centuries to come.

An obsession with the uture and with uture management took hold, mir-rored in the new eld o uture studies or uturology.36What would eventuallybe subsumed under New Age Environmentalism was not as remote as it mayseem rom the hopes or deliberate planning and intervention into the planetsate.37 While environmentalists like Lovelock regarded the earth as a living



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organism and promoted the teleology o a planetary homeostasis, proponentso the latter route ounded their position on traditional ideas o modernizationand growth, and on a strong belie in political and technological regimes o con-trol. Both sides relied on bold long-term prophecies and predictions on resourcesupplies, environmental contamination and population development.

Environmental historians have suggested the term Environmental Age toexpress the view o the 1960s and 1970s as the rise and peak and eventualdecline o environmental concerns and warnings about the uture o the earth.38I use the term Environmental Age not only to give meaning to a key period othe twentieth century that provides the timerame or the account presented inthis work but also to capture the diverging trajectories, the options and copingstrategies as well as the undamental controversies about what constituted anenvironment and an environmental problem in the rst place. When the envi-ronment became a discursive object in the decades afer the Second World War,also spaces and places became environments, which crucially differed rom thenature encountered in earlier nature conservation movements.39

Ecological or Epistemological Crisis? Challenges rom Science andechnology Studies

Science and technology studies have targeted the troublesome nature o thenature that the natural sciences and technologies create or affect. Science stud-ies scholars tend to be particularly wary o the ways nature as a historically shapedentity tends to be treated as a given and sel-evident category. Teir work dem-onstrates that concepts and images o nature depend on the specic historicalsituations and locations in which they are addressed and developed. Nature hasnever been a pure material oundation to culture but has been also the effect ocultural constructions o meaning. On a similar basis, the environment has beenquestioned as an unproblematic common ground; ollowing the environmentalhistorian William Cronon, both nature and environment are literally uncom-mon ground.40 Cronons seminal work on the construction o wilderness asone o the undamental and unquestioned categories o North American histo-riography constituted a shif in environmental history writing; environmentalhistorians argued or a diversication o environments, agreeing that there is no

original nature to all back on.41

Although a universalistic historiography o theenvironment in the singular still dominates public perception, recent workhas shown that environments are historically variable and are constituted in theinterplay o human and material actors. Like nature, environment is the objectand effect o specic architectures o power and governance.42

Tis book makes an effort to look into the uncommon ground o the envi-ronment in the Environmental Age. In so doing it will ollow science studies



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scholar Donna Haraways reminder that to be made is not to be made upand that constructions are about contingency and specicity but not epistemo-logical relativism.43It is important to note that the environment envisioned bythe gure o Spaceship Earth was not simply a discursive invention that couldbe altered at will, but rather a material-semiotic intervention, an unprecedentedrealization. Relics o the traditional pristine nature to be preserved survived intothe times o the environment o the spaceship that this book explores. In the latenineteenth century, nature sanctuaries and reserves deended a nature set asiderom humans and or humans, and at the same time protected and patronizedunder human stewardship.44Te conservative attitude o nurture and protec-tion towards a nature wild, pure, pastoral, sublime and even divine, kept withindistinct boundaries, ollowed national, territorial and ofen utilitarian ideals. Ahundred years later, nature was conceived o not in immediate national and rec-reational terms but in the unctional terms o a global ecosystem rom whichhumankind proted in the mediated ways o systems dynamics. Te biospherereserves o the early 1970s emerged out o global initiative; they were based oninternational networks and on different epistemological rameworks: althoughas exclusionary as a park or reserve, they expressed a new orm o nature preser-

vation on a scientic basis, in which selected areas were protected according totheir representative ecosystem unctions.45

In 1968 Paul Ehrlich explicitly avoided associating himsel with the conser-vationists, the nature saviours who would cling to redwood trees to protect them

rom the mills o the big lumber companies.46

Te reason he offered was prag-matic: the conservation battle is presently being lost.47It was o no use to shedtears on a species on the verge o going extinct. Americans clearly dont give adamn.48Ehrlich did not expect his ellow citizens to stand up or species diversityout o mercy or or beauty; in a cultural setting dominated primarily by economic

principles, environmental advocacy relied on the unambiguous indication o itsutility, unction or benet. Te pragmatism he exhibits is exemplary o a ten-dency many scientists o the late 1960s and early 1970s displayed, taking effortsin pointing out and predicting environmental deterioration, albeit cynicallyaware o their limited abilities to effect radical changes in the liestyles o theircontemporaries. Te emerging global environment became a practical problemo national and international politics, an arena o diverse interests and conicting

priorities, and a number o sober action plans that suited various stances.Te Stockholm conerence in 1972 outlined an environment that was no

longer a pristine nature to be conserved; rather, the environment was a juridi-cal and scientic object to be internationally negotiated, administrated andallocated. Tis new environment was tailored or research and technologicallymonitored and managed; it was deeply political in its constitution and closelyconnected to questions o development. Te peculiar term human environ-



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ment that set the agenda or the conerence illustrates how nature as detachedand apolitical dissolved in the global political eld o environment and devel-opment. On the one hand, the human environment portrayed humans not asmasters over nature but as an intricate part o their surroundings, affected byevery one o their acts on nature. On the other hand, the term exhibited a dis-tinctive anthropocentrism; human environment took into account a nature thatserved as milieu to humans, a human habitat; ultimately, it considered environ-ment as controlled or created at will by human action.

Both in the Eastern and in the Western world a greater part o the environmentwas regarded as nature to be taylored. Reaching back to early twentieth-centuryideas and rationales o scientic management, aylorist (rationalized) and Ford-ist (industrialized) environments emerged that were administered according tothe principles o effi cient (human) organization. Environments had been condi-tioned on smaller scales. US engineers had experimented with articial indoorclimates in the 1920s and 1930s and with closed laboratory environments in warand post-war times.49Te new large-scale planning approaches to nature mergedolder ideas o social hygiene and public health with new orms o environmentaland economic health. Instead o nature in the traditional conservationist sense,these environments were second natures or technonatures; they constitutedarticial surroundings considered more unctional, economic, effi cient and thusmore perect than nature out there and ofen more sanitary and clean.50

But environments not only responded to, they also acted upon humans.

Environmental activists have been particularly susceptible to this position,arguing against destructive modes o human intervention and or a restorativeapproach to wilderness. Notably, scholars have long argued or a shif in perspec-tive to natures materiality and memory, and many examples can be ound thatoil the notion o human superiority over nature. Te cases o nuclear weaponstesting and o biological and radiological warare during the Cold War era havegiven ample insight into the uncanny orces unleashed in a nature that resistshuman desire, changes unexpectedly and constantly challenges human ideas ostewardship or mastery. An environment bestowed with the power to contami-nate human lie or years to come can hardly be described as merely exposed tohuman will and skill; rather, it might be more suitable to say that in the twenti-eth century, new and unprecedented environments exposed humans to new risks

and environmental hazards.51

Tese environments were more or less thriving realizations o the Envi-ronmental Age, redistributing power between human and natural actors. Anenvironmental historiography accepting aylorist and Fordist environmentsas mere projections o human engineering expertise tends to reaffi rm the notiono powerul technological advance. In turn, a historiography that takes at ace

value the idea o nature deantly ghting back is prone to turn nature into an



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Capacity 15

ally by speaking in its name i not taking the position o a military strategistviewing nature as a hostile challenge or target. A nature given power in this waywill always be ought or exploited to settle human conicts. Te active environ-ment is conceptually not ar away rom the sublime, alien and inhumane nature,as the animated nature is closely related to the nature that humans war against.All o these natures and environments are deeply anthropocentric, and episte-mologically they would be hard to conceive o differently.

Te question remains how environmental historiography can proceed with-out taking sides in the ongoing conict o contradicting environments and their

protagonists. Sociologists o science, at the oreront Bruno Latour, have provoc-atively and programmatically demanded the end o nature in politics and thusasked to set up an entirely new constitution to conceptualize the interaction ohuman and non-human actors.52Following Latour that is, seriously challeng-ing the modern constitution, the two separate houses o nature and societythat constitue the modern world requires one to take nature (in the singularcase) out o the hands o science (in the singular case), since a nature subordi-nating culture and politics the acts rst, the ctions, values and intentionssecond suspends a truly political discussion.53Latours audacious suggestioncomes as one more revolution in the ace o one more crisis : the epistemologi-cal crisis. Latour maintains that the ecological crisis did not maniest itsel as acrisis o nature or environment, but rather as a crisis o objectivity,54as a crisis othe irreutable, the undeniable, the unquestionable the natural. Environmental

crises and environmental catastrophes point us to the ssures and shortcomingso the modern world and its technoscience.55Te gaps and inadequacies o pro-cessing and possessing the modern objects are not reected, and consequentlythey erupt as political conicts about the societal relations towards what is con-sidered the environment.

Latours approach is appealing in that it offers to reormulate the questionabout a real and original nature and environment as a question about the pro-cesses o modern scientic and technological constructions o evidence andcertainty. Addressing the problem o legitimacy o the modern sciences and omodernity does not end in postmodern arbitrariness and relativism, but yields

very productive effects. Te humanities and cultural studies are more than evercalled upon and are able to contest the monopoly on nature that the natural

and engineering sciences have successully claimed or so long. Te humanitiesare capable o questioning how technoscientic knowledge and practices areconstructed to appear universal and true; they inquire how modern techno-sciences authorize their assertion to speak in the name o a nature, which in thesame breath they organize and adjust. Moreover, the humanities explore howthe environment and environmental problems can be conceived o as historicallyand culturally constructed and yet provoke real material consequences under



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real material conditions. Let Haraway remind us again that constructions areabout contingency and specicity, not about epistemological relativism. Tis

perspective, she observes, is conditional or the strong political claim that not allviews and knowledges are somehow equal, but quite the opposite.56Some envi-ronmental histories can be more problematic in their consequences than others.

Spaceship Earth: Environmental History Beyond Suffi ciency andEffi ciency

In this book I explore the discursive power o Spaceship Earth in the Envi-ronmental Age o the 1960s and 1970s and until the early 1990s. Adopting

perspectives o historical science and technolog y studies, I raise the question ohow the gure o Spaceship Earth ramed and structured the terms, the possi-bilities and the conditions o environmental discourse. Trough this approachI mean to contribute to an environmental historiography that avoids the allacyo simply taking sides in the ongoing debate between Survivalists and Cargoists,between environmentalists and technological optimists, between supporters osuffi ciency and advocates o effi ciency. Neither can it be my aim to resolve thesedebates. I would like to tackle a more undamental problem by questioning the

prevailing idea that earthly connement can be conronted technologically andsolved by creating controlled environments as living spaces. Spaceship Earthis the perect expression o the observation that a nature violent and sublimeand an environment conditioned by engineering skills are two aces o the samemodernist coin. Outlining the narrative qualities o Spaceship Earth as a myth

will serve me to point out the double strategies involved in raming the earth asa spaceship: Spaceship Earth presented the planet not only as a singular site inthe universe, but it also signied a growing scientic ascination with natural-technological environments on earth and beyond.

Spaceship Earth became the core o a mythology. Myths are not ctitious sto-ries, and they do not stand in opposition to reality. Myths are culturally sharednarratives that describe collective human realities meaningully. Teir messagesmay be equivocal. Tis book claims that in a time concerned with limits as muchas with opportunities Spaceship Earth became popular precisely because thegure drew and proted rom antagonist positions and synthesized different

standpoints: Spaceship Earth represented crisis and progress at once, enablingenvironmentalists and technocrats, doomsayers and technological optimiststo argue seemingly opposite positions in the same terms. Spaceship Earth wasnot simply a metaphor o perceived environmental problems but also presented

possible environmental solutions by opening up new discursive trajectories oruture living spaces. Spaceship Earth imagined a global, sustainable, natural-sci-entic environment, closed and controlled like a space capsule.



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Capacity 17

In the high times o the Space Age the spaceship seemed appropriate to com-bine the notion o lies ragility on the one hand and o the triumph o scienceand technology on the other. Inside this discursive rame, it took only a smallstep to imagine the newly discovered planet earth as a spaceship. Te US ambas-sador to the United Nations, Adlai E. Stevenson, used the image o the spaceshipin his last speech beore the Economic and Social Council o the UN in Genevain 1965. In an appeal to the international community Stevenson reerred to theearth as a little spaceship on which humankind travelled together as passengers,dependent on its vulnerable supplies o air and soil.57In 1966, the English econ-omist and political scientist Barbara Ward chose the term to make a plea or anew balance o power between the continents, o wealth between North andSouth, and o understanding and tolerance in a world o economic interdepend-ence and potential nuclear destruction.58

Te true architects o Spaceship Earth, however, used the term not as ametaphor o vulnerability and community but to describe an innovative techno-logical modelo a natural environment yet to come. Te architect and designerRichard Buckminster Fuller allegedly used the term already in 1951 in a discus-sion about the US space rocket programme and presented a paper on SpaceshipEarth in 1963. In 1969 Fuller published his Operating Manual for Spaceship

Earth, summoning the engineering elite to take control o an environment inbad repair.59Te economist Kenneth E. Boulding in a programmatic lecture onTe Economics o the Coming Spaceship Earth held in the year 1966 dated the

global nature o the planet back to the post-war times and to space ight.60

Atpresent, he stated, mankind experienced a transition rom the open to the closedearth. Boulding chose the spaceship as the central image to promote the closedearth o the uture, suggesting to oreclose the wasteul cowboy economy o the

past or a rugal spaceman economy.61Bouldings vision contributed in a specic way to the discourse o the ragil-

ity and limitedness o planet earth on the one hand and o its uture managementand operation on the other. Te sel-suffi cient spaceship became his centralmodel to denote the economy o the uture earth. At the same time, his sugges-tions speak o his strong belie in systems ecology, in the prevalent sciences o histime and in their power o effi cient planetar y regulation. His image o the earthas a single global system, spatially and unctionally closed, combined ideas devel-

oped in ecosystems research, in economics and in cybernetics since the SecondWorld War. On the physical basis o biological processes an economic-ecologicalreasoning in terms o a circulatory system or earthly metabolism became con-ceivable and calculable. Tis system o stocks and ows o energy, inormationand matter contained older ecological concepts o a holistic nature , but devel-oped them into the environment as a sel-adjusting machine.



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Spaceship Earth offered the blueprint or an economy o circulation andor a technology o ows, o material exchange and renewal, or the earths liv-ing space. A hybrid o Gaian organism and planetary technoscience, SpaceshipEarth needs to be seen as a veritable cyborg metaphor, a gure that symbolicallyand materially dissolved political and social contradictions and conicts.62Forthe same reason I would like to hypothesize that Spaceship Earth disintegratedthe Latourian natureculture divide. On all accounts I put orward that Space-ship Earth presented an appealing possibility o conceptualizing a historicallyspecic version o the organic and the technological as a hybrid. Te gure oSpaceship Earth linked the concerns about the planet and about earthly conne-ment with the imaginations and technical solutions o planetary maintenanceand control.

A second central eature o Spaceship Earth as a cyborg gure concerned adegree o creative sel-organization and optimization based on the increasingautonomy o technological potential directed at the earthly environment. Tespaceship environment was a highly contested space, scientically experimental-ized, modelled and monitored; it was engineered, economized and politicized;and it was enrolled into military considerations. Its organic elements became envi-ronmental sites, unsettled, wasteul or disposed o. Spaceship Earth ormulated

prescriptions as to the passengers it would carry. Paul Ehrlich and Richard Har-riman organized their entire bookHow to be a Survivor: A Plan to Save Spaceship

Earthin 1971 around the metaphor o spaceship earth, rom the Size o the Crew

to a new culture o Spacemen needed.63

Te constitution o the environmentas a coherent and potentially controllable global system enabled the distinctionbetween the necessary and the disposable, between nature and its equally unc-tional and possibly more potent and innovative technoscientic substitutions.

Circulation Storage Classication: In Pursuit o EcologicalBlueprints

Spaceship Earth indicated a undamental change in the perception o the earthlyenvironment as nite, while serving as a model o a specic scientic-techno-logical management o lie and living space in its allegedly natural limits. Fromthe newly generated knowledge about the nite dimensions o planet earth

emerged new regimes o effi ciency. I explore technicity and unctionality, siteand selectivity in the cultural history o the ship and the spaceship. My ocus isthe economic accounting and balancing o nature, o lie, and o environmentin terms o spatial connes and resource scarcity in the sciences o ecology andhuman ecolog y. Following Foucaults concept o biopolitics, I analyse the ration-alizations and the operations in which debates about population growth andresource depletion intersected with ecosystems management and space technol-



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Capacity 19

ogy and condensed into new technoscientic simulations and substitutions ohuman living space. Tis work carries orward the current debates about a NewGlobal History, albeit rom a distinctive perspective, expanding the history oglobalization in the twentieth century to historical science and technologystudies and to the cultural history o the environment in the second hal o thetwentieth century. aking this perspective, I aim at contributing to an under-standing o environments as technoscientical constructions. I also seek to makea contribution to a contemporary historiography which has settled on caesurasaround 1970 and 1989/90 but is only just beginning to take the tremendous andunprecedented scientic and technological potentials in this period seriously.

Proclaiming the epoch o space in 1967, Foucault seemed to have appre-hended the historical ocal shif towards the world as a community sharing acommon destiny on an absolutely limited planet. He introduced the example odemography to argue that living space he also called it the human site inthe twentieth century was not so much a question o retting over the particulatesecuring o territorial property as a question o a new rationality o global biopo-liticalsitingandplacement:

Tis problem o the human site or living space is not simply that o knowing whetherthere will be enough space or men in the world a problem that is certainly quiteimportant but also that o knowing what relations o propinquity, what type o stor-age, circulation, marking, and classication o human elements should be adopted ina given situation in order to achieve a given end.64

As a corollary o the problem o living space Foucault anticipated the disciplineo human topography rising to account or the siting and placement o humanelements according to a combination o mathematical, geographic, technoscien-tic and economic expertise.65I set up my story o Spaceship Earth according tothe principles and practices o circulation,storageand classicationthat Foucaultanticipated, and according to the modern disciplinary expertise he associated

with these principles. Spaceship Earth reormulated the theme o contestedliving space along the lines and divides o biological eligibility commensurateto the notion o limited global ecological capacity. I will associate Foucaults

perspective with specic cultural-technoscientic practices that created a newarchitecture or conceiving o the environment as a global interiorspace: Cir-

culation I will relate to the physical, technological and economical conceptsin ecology that transormed the earth into a closed metabolism and the earthsbiosphere into a sel-sustaining lie support system. Storage I will relate to thegeography and the mathematics applied in solving the global equations and eco-logical balances o human ecology acing the earths limited carrying capacity.Classication I will associate with the biotechnical selections and exclusions



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enorced and implemented by those spaceships that sustained lie support sys-tems elsewhere.

Closely adhering to the Foucauldian proposal I concentrate on scienticpractices and related technologies engaged in orms o ecological economics:systems ecology, human ecology and biospherics were concerned with account-ing or natural earthly limits. I narrow my story to an exploration o the settingin the United States, as the plot relies on American academic debates within thenatural sciences and on US space politics. Not only did Spaceship Earth emergein US environmental discourse, but the United States also became the discur-sive axis o Western environmentalism and environmental sciences. From USdiscourse Spaceship Earth propagated and became a amiliar term in different

Western languages.66I will examine material rom the elds o ecology, econom-ics, biology, physics and cybernetics between the 1960s and the 1980s and askhow within these elds the thematic triad o the era Population, Resources,Environment67 was ormed, and how it interconnected with larger culturaland political themes o living space and space ight.

Unquestionably this approach will only represent a small section o the erasenvironmentalist notions and politics, namely the segment o environmentaldiscourse that was concerned with ecological problems about absolute globallimits and expecting models and blueprints rom science and technology. Tisis not to say that no other dominant positions existed at the time in question,

positions which perhaps even claimed to offer strong culturalist alternatives

to the very scientist accounts o earthly problems and solutions I present here.Still, I hold that the gure o Spaceship Earth and its atmosphere o vulnerabil-ity, technology, hierarchy and temporality structured scientic disciplines andsocietal debates and assigned credibility to the interventionist claims o scienceand technology in environmental discourse. At a time when the exuberant and

procreative qualities o nature were in question Spaceship Earth and its concen-tration on the planetary revised and perhaps replaced much older images oa ertile and nurturing Mother Earth.68

Adopting an environmental history perspective and a science and technol-ogy studies approach I pay attention to the scientic practices and techniqueso calculation and visualization that produced sel-evident environments likethat o the spaceship. As a cultural historian, I am interested in the conviction

established by scientic representations, to the ways o communication betweenthe sciences and their broader cultural contexts, and to the cultural meaningsimplied in the new symbolic organization and order o nature. Next to the eco-logical sciences I draw on material rom contemporary culture and politics thatsheds light on the possible or desirable utures o the earth. I incorporate differ-ent images o the earth, contemporary projects on the architecture o earthlyliving space design, ctional literature and cartoons. I also discuss a number o



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Capacity 21

science ction works throughout the book that reect on the utopian and dys-topian aspects o the anticipated ecocide. I will not be concerned with generalspace science ction ocusing on lie in space and only alluding to a ar-awayearth. Te ctional works I study are mainly set on the earth; they allow meto identiy some o the persistent themes o ecological discourse growth andregression, capacity and balance, containment and conservation, selection andexclusion, extinction and survival, to name but a ew and to explore how thesethemes were culturally contested or corroborated in lmic stories.

Spaceship Earth was never depicted in one single image. Spaceship Earth waspresented textually and visually in very different ways. Among its expressionswas the global and universalistic idea and model o the Unisphere as well as thepicture o the vulnerable Blue Marble. It will be part o the cross-disciplinaryendeavour o this book to sort through some o the textual and visual ideas andimages that contributed to the success o the spaceship and the Spaceship Earthas a dispositiono its time. Te interdisciplinary effort deliberately cuts across theelds o the humanities on the one hand and the natural sciences and technolo-gies on the other. In addition, the material presented will not be unpacked in astrong chronological order; rather, it will be arranged synchronically with theidea to emphasize the similarities and equivalences in adjoining discourses thatorged meaningul environmental realities.

emporally, the discourse o Spaceship Earth spans a short time period othirty years between 1960 and 1990. When the Environmental Age came to its

end, Spaceship Earth was abandoned. Te gure more or less disappeared rompopular science and culture, surviving only in very special scientic discourseso the geoclimate and geospace sciences. Spaceship Earth was discarded withthe popularization o the concept o sustainability in the mid-1980s. Te new

programmatic vision strongly emphasized political participation, locality anddiversity over ideas o a universal planetary management. Nevertheless, the con-cept o sustainability, strongly accenting political participation and economicdevelopment and growth, continued much o the discourse o environmentalsustenance and technical maintenance that had been at the heart o SpaceshipEarth. Te 1990s witnessed the end o the Cold War and the rise o a discourseo globalization that depicted a shrinking globe as a result o growing intricatenetworks o communication and nancial transactions within a promising New

Economy. Te new visions o a sustainable development were grafed onto anecological reality that was rmly based on economical reasoning.



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Te Plot: Spheres, Systems and Reserves

Te ship is the recurring gure underlying the story o Spaceship Earth. oargue that the plots o ecosystems science, human ecology and biosphere tech-nology all centred on motis o the ship the ark, the lieboat, the spaceship I

will begin my account by highlighting the signicance o the ship in Westernculture to explore the ways in which protection and exposure merged in themotis o the ship and the ships voyage. Under the title Containment, I arguein Chapter 2 that the gure o the ship linked narratives o exposure, ragilityand transience on the one hand and expedition, exploration and expansion onthe other, and that these narratives were continued in stories o the spaceship,

which then became meaningul in environmental discourse. Spaceship Earth, somy argument runs, continued and expanded the gure o the biblical ark. At amoment when the earth was discovered as a paradise soon to be lost, the space-ship expressed the vision o a modern-day ark to preserve and extend earthly lieby new means.

Paradoxically, the ships containment also eatured as the crucial precondi-tion o expansionist moves. Spaceship Earth marked the earth as a temporaryenvironment and opened up the horizon or the survival o mankind elsewhere.Te chapter draws on the mythology o the rontier that is enclosed andrepeated in many ship and spaceship narratives. Te rontier mythology suggeststhat the heart and ate o a growing nation is to be ound at its edges, that a peo-

ple is dened by the territory it must conquer and cultivate. Te history o the

American Frontier can be understood as a narrative o national origin that wascrafed to explain why the people o the United States were destined to colonizea newly discovered continent. I am interested in how the concept o maniestdestiny, o a ate that ulls an ordained purpose, is mirrored in the gures othe spaceship and o Spaceship Earth. Tese considerations can only be out-lined roughly in the ollowing chapters, as they point towards more complicatedquestions that this book cannot explore in detail. Tese questions involve the

problem o whether and to what extent the cultural imagery and the mythologyo space ight in the twentieth century derives rom, reects or embodies the

Judeo-Christian religious tradition that shaped Western culture, and whetherand to what extent space ight is characterized by a teleological understandingo development and expansion, which or the earth and or humanity promiseseither salvation or doom.

Under the title Circulation, Chapter 3 discusses the gure o SpaceshipEarth as a model o cybernetic regulation and control o nature and lie in theemerging ecosystems sciences. Systems ecology turned the earth inside out toreveal its metabolic principles and material ows. I will discuss how a concept othe biosphere as a closed interior space could emerge, a complex sel-contained



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Capacity 23

metabolic sphere that ramed the earths environment as a lie support systemin analogy to spaceight. Te chapter opens with the work o Eduard Sue whorst introduced the biosphere as containing the whole o the living world aroundthe turn o the twentieth century. It briey sketches how Vladimir Vernadskyturned this sphere into a system in the 1920s. Te ocus o the chapter lies onthe rediscovery o the biosphere in the early 1970s and on the question how thisnew environmental concept balanced a sober eco-systems calculus against con-servational plans and programmes. Te notion o a global environmental system o a dened, effi cient and sustainable metabolism o energy, inormation andmaterial ows supplied a scientic basis or creating inventories and rationalschemes o optimal use o biosphere resources. Te chapter draws on the exampleo the new equivalences o economical, ecological and technological environ-ments with international programmes to study and preserve the biosphere as aglobal natural resource in preparation o and subsequent to the Stockholm con-erence in 1972. Te Man and the Biosphere programme designed biospherereserves in a coordinated world network representing ecological unctions inthe ecosystem o planet earth. I argue that the biosphere reserve not only setaside especially ragile and threatened parts o nature by demarcating restrictedand protected areas but also reconciled nature conservation with the utilizationand enhancement o nature.

Te ollowing two chapters will investigate how an economy o obsoleteand useul single parts o the environmental metabolism gained ground in

the discourse o the limited ecological carrying capacity o the earth. Underthe header o Storage Chapter 4 inquires how by applying metaphors o theship and the lieboat overpopulation became an evident and calculable prob-lem. I will address the conditions and implications o aggregating humans intopopulations through statistical means. Engaging with statistical constructionso world population and population growth in the twentieth century, I discussthe biological law o population growth, which corroborated predictions o apopulation explosion and demands or population control. Te biostatisticalmodel and curve were developed in experimental animal population biology todescribe the sel-limiting growth o sel-contained populations over time andinormed the human development studies o the 1960s and 1970s. Te chap-ter explores the economies inherent in the law o growth, arguing that the law

structured and insinuated a biopolitical system o classication and allocationo human lives according to a lieboat ethics. I analyse the scientic strategieso abstraction, reduction, ormalization and visualization effective in the growthlaw and trace its increasing power to account or growth phenomena in general.Trough these scientic methods population issues were assigned to the realmo the lie sciences, to the effect that sociopolitical approaches were overruled by



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bioeconomical ones: statistical accountability constructed populations as assess-able and either valuable or dispensable on a global scale.

Chapter 5, titled Classication, explores the project o Biosphere 2 thatwas launched in the Arizona desert in 1983 with the aim o constructing a sel-contained and sel-sustained ecosystem modelled on the earthly biosphere.Biosphere 2 was an ecological experiment o a new type and scale: On a siteo three acres, seven dened earth ecosystems or biomes were established andsealed under a glass dome. Based on an invisible technological inrastructure theliving laboratory was populated by nearly 4,000 animal and plant species as wellas eight humans in order to understand and, ultimately, to operate ecosystem

processes on planet earth and beyond. Te human-natural society was designedas a prototype o a space colony that would eventually enable its deteriorating

predecessor Biosphere 1 to create robust offspring. Evolving in a Darwinianashion, uture biospheres would allow small human settler societies to migrateto other planets.

Biosphere 2 merged the earthly biosphere with a veritable spaceship envi-ronment in the attempt to construct a high-tech surrogate earth operable atany terrestrial or extraterrestrial location, a truly luxurious articial space in thesense o the Renault Espace: sheltered, gleaming, cosy, air-conditioned and ullycontrollable. Biosphere 2 not only acted as a storage space where natural andhuman elements and technoscientic knowledge were assembled and combinedor the replication and substitution o earthly nature. Biosphere 2 also imple-

mented new conditions o admission and entitlement to lie within the enclosedminiature earth . Te model o sustainability employed in the second biosphereemphasized not completeness but (systemic) integrity. Access to the biosphere,once dened as the sphere that contained all lie on earth, was subject to strict

processes o selection to determine the most useul, collaborative species and torecruit a species best-designed representatives. Te chapter will discuss how alie support system based on ecological and technological effi ciency reshapeddemands on the natural and social environments inside and outside o Biosphere2s glass dome.

Te privately nanced project o Biosphere 2 has ofen been perceived as theeccentric endeavour o a handul o environmentalists. Notably, however, the

project also involved some o the pioneering systems ecologists and ecological

architects o its time. Patents were obtained and papers were published in peer-reviewed journals. Although it aspired to put into practice a radical alternativeto contemporary environmentalisms, the project was not opposed to but quitein line with ecosystems and cybernetic ideolog y, relying prooundly on materialsciences, on engineering expertise and on the latest technologies. Biosphere 2illustrates a paradoxical shif in the meaning o the biosphere reserve broughtabout by ideas o nature protection and perection. Te reserve not only reers



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Capacity 25

to nature set aside but also to the exclusiveness o the reservation, the claim,alleged right or title to make use o nature and environment under emergencyrule. Biosphere 2, conceived o as a modern-day ark, sheds light on some o theintricate and sometimes subtle relations o ecology and spaceight in the era oenvironmentalism as well as on the shifing relations o rst (pure) and second(technologically reproduced and substituted) natures in this historical processand the power relations involved in the interplay o modern natures and tech-nologies.

Te sixth and nal chapter, titled Departure, contends that the obsessionsand visions about the uture held in the realms o the Space Age and the Envi-ronmental Age ultimately collapsed in strategies o leaving the earth albeit,

perhaps, not in the spaceships that were designed or this purpose. Since the1990s a variety o novel ideas and images has taken the place o SpaceshipEarth. Although the problem o global space has not eased but rather increasedin the past two decades, Spaceship Earth and the idealized habitats it offeredhave turned out unable to carry the weight o the world and its present prob-lems. odays conditioned spaces no longer claim to contain and control, muchless move the entire planet. Te new sites are highly individualized and exclu-sive. Tey orm withdrawn and insulated sanctuaries amid increasingly wastedearthly environments.


Chapter 1 From Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age

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Transcript of Chapter 1 From Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age