ENVIRONING TECHNOLOGY
Swedish Satellite Remote Sensing in the Making of Environment 1969–2001
ENVIR ONING TECHNOLOGY
Swedish Satellite Remote Sensing in the Making of Environment 1969–2001The cover is based on remote sensing data gathered above northern Ukraine by the French satellite SPOT-1 during its orbit around the Earth on May 1, 1986.
JOHAN GÄRDEBO
JOHANGÄRDEBO
Johan Gärdebo is a historian at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Environing Technology is his doctoral thesis.
Johan Gärdebo
Environing Technology
Swedish Satellite Remote Sensing in the Making of Environment
1969–2001
Stockholm Papers in the History and Philosophy of Technology TRITA-ABE-DLT-195
Environing Technology
Swedish Satellite Remote Sensing in the Making of Environment 1969–2001
Defended April 5th, 2019, at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Main Campus, F3-Lecture Hall, kl. 13.00
Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment Department of Philosophy and History
School of Architecture and the Built Environment KTH Royal Institute of Technology
100 44 Stockholm, Sweden
ISSN: 0349-2842
ISBN: 978-91-7873-126-8
© Johan Gärdebo, 2019
Printed by US-AB, Stockholm 2019
Environing Technology: Swedish Satellite Remote Sensing in the Making of Environment 1969–2001
Abstract
The state-owned Swedish Space Corporation established a satellite remote sensing infrastructure and defined uses for the technology both within and beyond Sweden during the latter part of the twentieth century. This thesis studies Swedish satellite remote sensing as an environing technology – a technology that environs, that produces environments and our perceptions of the environment. This perspective is important in historicising Sweden’s role in developing a technology that now is used both to manage environments on a global scale and to provide an understanding of what the environment is. It is also important to understand these environing activities as motivated by and related to other aims, for example Swedish non-alignment, development aid, and the export of expertise to new markets. I ask two questions. Firstly, how did Swedish satellite remote sensing activities contribute to the making of environment? Secondly, why did the Swedish satellite remote sensing experts conduct these activities?
Studying environing technologies requires combining the theoretical understandings of history of technology and environmental history and treats technology and environment as outcomes of environing activities. Methodologically, the thesis studies written and oral sources to find activities related to satellite remote sensing that take part in sensing, writing about, or shaping environments. From these activities, new understandings of technology and environment emerge over time.
The thesis is structured around five empirical chapters: 1) the institutionalisation of remote sensing as part of environmental diplomacy in Sweden, 1969–1978; 2) the establishment and expansion of a French-Swedish remote sensing infrastructure, showcased by sensing the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986; 3) the export of Swedish technoscientific expertise as a form of development aid, 1983–1994; 4) the promotion of satellites as a tool for sustainable development, 1987–1992; and 5) the establishment of an environmental data centre to monitor the European environment as part of managing the expansion of the European Union, 1991–1999.
Swedish satellite remote sensing experts contributed to numerous international demonstrations that emphasised the technology as a tool for sustainable development of environments on a global scale. These activities beyond Sweden, often through transnational collaborations, were undertaken to establish satellite remote sensing within Sweden. The lack of a long-term strategy for the Swedish government’s space activities forced the technoscientific experts to find ad hoc uses for their technology, of which environmental applications were the most significant.
Keywords: COPUOS, environing, environmental diplomacy, infrastructure, satellite remote sensing, SPOT, Spot Image, sustainable development, Sweden, Swedish Space Corporation.
Author’s address: Johan Gärdebo, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden.
E-mail: gardebo@kth.se
Till Elsa
Acknowledgments
According to my daughter Elsa, I have “tagit år på mig att skriva en väldigt lång läxa om sånt som hände förut [taken years writing a very long homework assignment about stuff happening in the past]”. She is right, of course, but I feel compelled to acknowledge how I did not do it all by myself.
The thesis emerged as part of the research project “Views from a Distance:
Remote Sensing Technologies and the Perception of the Earth”, initiated by my supervisors Nina Wormbs and Sabine Höhler and with funding from the Swedish Research Council. It also benefitted from Nina’s oral history project “50 Years in Space: A Documentation Project on Swedish Space Activities”, with funding mainly from Vinnova. The KTH Royal Institute of Technology granted me a stipend from
“Gösta Milton’s donation fund” as part of a research exchange at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that allowed me to visit a number of American archives. These projects have defined the thesis’ research problems within the fields of history of science, technology, and environment. With this said, however, I have enjoyed the freedom to pursue my own set of questions about Swedish satellite remote sensing. For this, I am immensely grateful.
For source material, I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to the archivists whom I met at various places around Stockholm, Uppsala, Kiruna, Paris, Florence, Enschede, Boston, and Washington, DC. The archives of the Swedish Space Corporation and of the Swedish National Space Agency have been of particular importance to my work. I thank their staff, past and present, for making these available for research. Alongside my visits to public and professional archives, I have met with and interviewed numerous people who received my questions with curiosity and candour. Their comments have all contributed to and shaped the thesis. Many provided sources from private collections that otherwise might have been lost to time.
Some passed away before seeing the completion of this thesis.
For my doctoral training, from start to finish, my primary acknowledgement goes to my main supervisor – Nina. Nina expected the best of me but also cautioned when perfect became the enemy of the possible. She threw lots of books at me, taught me when to put them aside to venture into archives, and reigned me back in with enough time to write things up. My debts to her are legion. My second supervisor
Sabine has always, it seems, kept an open door for me. Sabine has patiently listened to my thinking out loud until it started to make sense. She has also told me (shouting if necessary) when my writing did not. I have often blamed myself for not being an easier doctoral student for these two eminent scholars who taught me to think critically about, and to feel kindly with, the knowledge with which we remake our world – I hope they consider their tutoring to have been worthwhile.
I am particularly grateful to my opponents at the mid-term and final seminar, Mats Fridlund and Finn-Arne Jørgensen, who provided substantial and constructive critique at critical points of my doctoral studies. Per Högselius evaluated the entire thesis draft and shared insights on how to develop the argument in its entirety.
Colleagues at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment have been generous with discussions and comments at seminars, luncheons and fika breaks with the result that very different analytical angles fed into my writing. I am particularly thankful to Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, Miya Christensen, Jacob von Heland, Kim Tae Hoon, Arne Kaijser, Kati Lindström, Peder Roberts, Linus Salö, and Anna Storm for thoroughly discussing the empirical work. Sverker Sörlin pushed me to be both specific and speculative regarding the environment. David Nilsson urged me to pose the big questions, “So what?”. And numerous are the times that Sofia Jonsson defended my sanity in the face of Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
I am thankful for the diversity of the Division’s PhD cohort with whom I shared laughs as well as tears: Anna, Hanna, and Isabel helped procrastinate writing by decorating our offices with flowers, philosophy, and acrobatics, as well as co- authoring some stuff; Anne, Irma, and Jesse made the Environmental Humanities Laboratory revolutionary; Corinna continued the good fight for PhD rights; Daniele and Ilenia built a commune where my children learned their first Italian. In my Nordic PhD cohort, I count Karl Bruno at SLU, Malin Nordvall at Chalmers, and Peter Bennesved at Umeå University. The Treaty of Trondheim, signed with Saara Matala at Aalto University, Espoo, and with Tirza Meyer at NTNU, Trondheim, will hopefully be a code of academic conduct for us as well as for others in the coming years.
A number of migratory birds have seasonally frequented the Division – Bill Adams, Anna Åberg, Jim Fleming, Sebastian Grevsmühl, Paul Josephson, Anna Kaijser, Arn Keeling, Teasel Muir-Harmony, Libby Robin, Helmut Trischler, and Paul Warde. I am indebted to them for encouragement and acknowledge how their advice guided my work in new directions. I also wish to recognise Maths Isacson and
Aristotle Tympas for supporting my first attempts, before doctoral studies, at combining history, technology, and environment.
Several friends have laid their healing hands on the language of the thesis – special recognition here to Paulina Essunger – with the hope of making it a more enjoyable read. All remaining flaws are mine.
In travels, I have been warmly welcomed by numerous departments abroad.
Håkan With Andersen and Thomas Brandt provided means to stay at NTNU, as did Frank Schipper who hosted me at Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, for seminars organised by him and Erik van der Vleuten. Frank and Anna Åberg also made me feel welcome in the Tensions of Europe network and summer schools. I am grateful for sessions organised with Gemma Cirac Claveras, Roger Launius, and Erik Conway at SHOT and for comments by Tiago Saraiva, Dick van Lente, and Suzanne Moon at ICOHTEC. The Anthropocene Campus in Berlin, among other courses abroad, turned out to be a total experience. I am particularly thankful to Jürgen Renn for organising the follow-up writing session at the Max Planck Institute and to Paul Edwards for reviewing my contribution to their special issue, as well as to Scott Knowles for providing opportunities to host sessions at the Anthropocene Campus in Philadelphia with Etienne Benson, Karena Kalmbach, and Ellan Spero.
In 2016, I profited from the long-standing MIT-KTH exchange programme with HASTS (History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society) for what would be an intense semester – for me personally and for America politically. Roz Williams served as mentor, fixed me a bike, and more than one dinner. Her sharp questions about environing, together with comments by Deborah Fitzgerald on my chapters, gave me courage to retool the entire thesis. I am thankful to David Mindell and Peter Galison for taking me onboard for two exceptional courses. I greatly appreciated having my work challenged at seminars hosted by Sonja Schmid at Virginia Tech, Jim Fleming at Colby College, and Scott Knowles and Amy Slaton at Drexel University who both extended their family hospitality, seemingly, into perpetuity. My special thanks go to Teasel at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum for hosting me and making possible numerous archival trips to Washington, DC, as well as introducing me to colleagues whose writings have influenced me since.
HASTS’ PhD basement, with leaky pipes, friendly mice, and a ceiling window for rain to drum on, provided fitting scenery for post-election camaraderie among
students from very different walks of life. And when my entire housing block in Cambridge caught fire, it was they who offered me shelter. In particular, I am glad to have been in Cambridge at the same time as Moran Levi, Helge Peters, and Kasper Schiølin. A special acknowledgement is due to Saara with whom I shared most of the wonders and who helped me endure the woes.
After uprooting from my student collective in Uppsala to embark on doctoral studies in Stockholm, friends and family have remained a source of support: my friends, within and beyond Sweden, who put up with my metaphorical way of thinking; my brothers Viktor and Arvid, who are braver and brighter than myself; my parents Carin and Ulf, who with patience and love nurtured my inquisitiveness. In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy states “all happy families are alike”. The Östmans, my partner’s family, is an exception to this rule. I am thankful for the support that each of them has given me during these doctoral studies, and I look forward to seeing Dante grow older with people more sensible than myself.
Kikki – to whom I have promised honesty, curiosity, and adventure – this thesis is a meagre harvest for all your encouragement, co-parenting, and editorship. Words fail me, and so this is where I stop for now.
Stockholm, 8 March 2019
CONTENTS
Introduction 13
Motivations and Aims 15
Research Questions 19
Earlier Research – Technology and Environment 20
Theoretical Framework: Environing Technology 38
Method: Emphasis on Activities 43
Use and Critique of Sources 47
Thesis Disposition 52
Delimitations 55
From Sensed to Sensing State, 1969–1978 61
Defining and Using Outer Space in the UN, 1958–1970 64 Establishing a Swedish Space Programme and Foreign Policy, 1970–1972 79 Combining National and International Concerns, 1972–1974 84
Principles and Practice of Remote Sensing, 1975 95
Defining the Nature of Data, 1976 102
Sweden Shifts from Sensed to Sensing State, 1977 104
Asserting Sweden’s Role as an Environmental Sensing State, 1978 108
Summary 112
Causes and Consequences of Sensing the Chernobyl Meltdown, 1976–1991 117
Establishing the French-Swedish Satellite Remote Sensing Infrastructure, 1976–1986 120
Sensing Chernobyl in April and May, 1986 128
Writing about Chernobyl and the Access to Satellite Remote Sensing, 1986–1991 142
Summary 155
Satellites as Aid, 1983–1994 159
164 168 183 193 201 Swedish Satellite Remote Sensing as Part of Swedish Exports of Expertise, 1978–
1983
Consultants Find, Define, and Fund SSC’s Development Projects, 1983–1987 Sensing the Philippines, 1987–1988
Writing and Shaping the Philippines, 1987–1991
SSC Seeks a Permanent Position in Southeast Asia, 1990–1994
Summary 211
Swedish Environmental Diplomacy via Satellite, 1987–1992 215
Preparing Swedish Space Activities for ISY-92, 1988–1991 219 Environmental Concerns in the Baltic Region, 1988–1991 229 The Swedish Environmental Agenda and the Rio Conference, 1990–1992 239 After the Rio Conference – SSC Announces the Environmental Data Centre in
Kiruna, 1992 251
Summary 254
A Centre for Environing Europe, 1991–1999 257
Environmental Centre in Space Town Kiruna, 1991–1993 258 Swedish Monitoring in the Baltic Region, 1991–1995 263 Establishing the Environmental Data Centre, 1991–1996 270 Operating the Environmental Data Centre, 1996–1998 279 SSC Reorganises the Earth Observation Division, 1998–1999 290
Summary 296
Conclusions 299
300 303 307 How did Swedish satellite remote sensing activities contribute to the making of
environment?
Why did the Swedish satellite remote sensing experts conduct these activities?
To Study Both Technology and Environment
Epilogue – A Swedish Space Odyssey, 2001 311
Sammanfattning 315
Sources and Literature 323
Appendix A: List of Organisations 371
Appendix B: List of Key Actors 377
Index 383
Acronyms
Here are listed central acronyms of the thesis, which include organisations, collaborations, and satellites. For a full list of the organisations, see Appendix A.
CNES COPUOS CORINE DENR EEA ESA IGBP ISY-92 Mistra RESE SBSA SNSB SPOT SSC Swedish EPA UN
Centre National d’Études Spatiales
Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space Coordination of Information on the Environment Philippine’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources
European Environmental Agency European Space Agency
International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme International Space Year 1992
Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research
Remote Sensing for the Environment Swedish Board for Space Activities Swedish National Space Board
Système Probatoire d’Observation de la Terre Swedish Space Corporation
Swedish Environmental Protection Agency United Nations
Introduction
Technology contributes to producing new environments and to our perceptions of what the environment is. Remote sensing performed from satellites orbiting above the Earth’s surface illustrates how this relationship between producing and perceiving the environment expanded to the global level during the second half of the twentieth century. This dissertation examines how Swedish remote sensing experts have sensed, written about, and shaped environments.
I use ‘environment’ as an analytical concept to historicise how its meanings have altered over time.1 In this thesis, the environment is the historical outcome of an activity – that of environing. The term ‘environment’ is not a stable reference to something out there. Environing includes the practices, productions, and perceptions of how people relate to their environment. As technologies are often used to environ, I define satellite remote sensing as an environing technology and group its various activities into the sensing, writing, and shaping of environment.2
According to a commonly used definition, ‘remote sensing’ refers to “a practice of gathering data about phenomena without coming into direct contact with these”.3 This definition primarily pertains to satellites orbiting at an altitude of 700 to 900 kilometres above the Earth’s surface. Orbiting pole to pole, a single satellite passes above every part of the Earth, gathering heat or light emitted back into outer space
1 For example, see Paul Warde, Libby Robin and Sverker Sörlin, The Environment. A History of the Idea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).
2 Environing technology developed from research tracks of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory. See Sverker Sörlin and Nina Wormbs, “Environing Technologies: A Theory of Making Environment,” History and Technology 34, no. 2 (2018): 101–25. For earlier reflections on research tracks of the environmental humanities, see Johan Gärdebo, Daniel Helsing, Anna Svensson and Adam Brenthel, “We Don’t Need No Education: A Case Study for Situating the Environmental Humanities,”
in Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 1, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 179–204. For an earlier version of remote sensing as an environing technology, see Sabine Höhler and Nina Wormbs, “Remote Sensing. Digital data at a distance,” in Methodological Challenges in Nature–Culture and Environmental History Research, ed. Jocelyn Thorpe, Stephanie Rutherford and Anders Sandberg (London & New York:
Routledge, 2017), 272–83.
3 This definition has been used since the first major historical study on satellite remote sensing, see Pamela E. Mack, Viewing the Earth: The Social Construction of the Landsat Satellite System (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 53. For later uses, see Megan Black, The Global Interior. Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018), 185 n4, 191. See also Gemma Cirac Claveras, “Factories of Satellite Data. Remote Sensing and Physical Earth Sciences in France,”
in ICON: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology 21 (2015): 24–50, especially 27;
Angelina Long Callahan, Satellite Meteorology in the Cold War Era: Scientific Coalitions and International Leadership 1946–1964, dissertation (Atlanta: Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013), 7.
as data of phenomena on the Earth’s surface.4 The experts defined remote sensing with reference to the distance between the satellite in orbit and the phenomena sensed on the Earth’s surface.5 Rather than offering a precise definition of remote sensing based on present-day knowledge, the contribution of this thesis is to demonstrate how the use of the technology by experts involved in sensing, writing about, and shaping environments changed descriptions of the technology.
I have focused on the Swedish satellite remote sensing activities as these developed during the second half of the twentieth century. Between 1969 and 2001, the Swedish government reformed previous space initiatives into the Swedish Remote Sensing Committee (Fjärranalyskommittén), the Swedish Space Corporation (Svenska rymdaktiebolaget, hereafter SSC), and the Swedish Board for Space Activities (Delegationen för rymdverksamhet, hereafter SBSA). During this period, these expert organisations secured the money and mandate to lead Swedish satellite remote sensing activities, nationally and internationally.6
The Swedish experts who were active during this period contributed to establishing satellite remote sensing as the prime technology for sensing and monitoring the environment. Satellite imagery provided a visual backdrop against which other environmental studies, like surveys of flora and biodiversity, phytoplankton, and ice cores, were argued to be part of a systemic Earth environment that was also undergoing change on a global scale.7 Both satellite remote sensing and the global environment became natural categories for future policymaking.
4 Nina Wormbs and Gustav Källstrand, A Short History of Swedish Space Activities (Noordwijk: European Space Agency, 2007), 18.
5 For previous historicising of remote sensing and objectivity, see Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” Social Studies of Science 22, no. 4 (1992): 597–618; Charles Goodwin,
“Seeing in Depth,” Social Studies of Science 25, no. 2 (1995): 237–74. On the importance of aerial photography for asserting objective perspectives of relevance also for subsequent uses of satellite imagery, see Jeanne Haffner, The View from Above: The Science of Social Space (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2013), 4–5.
6 A Swedish space committee had already in 1963 aimed to secure support from the Swedish Government. I will return to these earlier Swedish space activities in the next chapter and demonstrate their relationship to remote sensing. For more on the first plans for observation by satellite, see SOU 1963:61, Organisatoriska åtgärder för rymdverksamhetens främjande, 63.
7 A number of senior European officials recently argued that “in just a few decades, space-based Earth observation has become an indispensable tool for understanding and protecting our planet, and how Europe has played an ever-growing part in this success”. See Institut Francais d´Histoire de l’Espace, Earth Observation from Space. Optical and Radar Imagery: A European Success 1960–2010 (Paris: Tessier and Ashpool Editions, 2018), 10. For similar arguments from the US, see National Research Council of the National Academies, Earth Science and Applications from Space. National Imperatives for the next decade and beyond (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007); Diana Liverman, Emilio F. Moran, Ronald R. Rindfuss, and Paul C. Stern, People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science (Washington, DC: Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, National Academies Press, 1998), vii; C. B. Pease, Satellite Imaging Instruments: Principles, Technologies and Operational Systems
The global imagery produced with satellites has informed numerous universal claims about what the environmental predicament is as well as what is to be done about it. The more influential of these include arguments for “limits to growth”
(1972), the “sustainable development” of society (1987), and “planetary boundaries”
(2009). In his 2015 encyclical, Pope Francis made reference to these ideas as part of staking out how humans should live on the Earth – a fragile planet surrounded by dead space.8
By now, then, sacred as well as secular communities may take for granted that sensing the Earth’s environment is essential to saving it. This was not always the case and instead demonstrates a recent and unprecedented role for technology during the twentieth century. Swedish satellite remote sensing experts contributed to activities that gave satellite remote sensing this importance. The purpose of this study is to illustrate how and why this happened.
Motivations and Aims
There are two main motivations for this study of Swedish satellite remote sensing.
The first concerns the environment; the second is about Sweden. With respect to the environment, this study addresses a growing interest among historians in understanding relationships between technology and the making of environment. I use
(New York: Ellis Horwood, 1991). This perspective has also influenced history-writing about space technology, see Brian Michael Jirout, One Satellite for the World: The American Landsat Earth Observation Satellite in Use, 1953–2008, dissertation (Atlanta, Georgia US: Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017);
Kenneth P. A. Thompson, A Political History of U.S. Commercial Remote Sensing, 1984–2007: Conflict, Collaboration, and the Role of Knowledge in the High-Tech World of Earth Observation Satellites, dissertation (Virginia Polytechnic and State University, 2007), 11, 30.
8 For specific descriptions of viewing the Earth as a system, see Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Potomac Associates, Universe Books, 1972), 11, 23, 45, 183, 185–92. See also Club of Rome, Predicament of Mankind (New York: Potomac Associates, Universe Books, 1970), 11, 24. For references to space technology, see World Commission on Environment and Development (hereafter cited as WCED),
“Chapter 10: Managing the Commons. II. Space: A Key to Planetary Management. Statement 56–62,”
Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). On monitoring changes in land use or land cover, see Johan Rockström et al, “Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity,” Ecology and Society 14(2), no. 32 (2009). On the importance of limits, sustainability, boundaries, and technology for global political imperatives, see Francis, Encyclical letter ‘Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home (Rome: Vatican Press, 2015), 39, 78, 84–85, 101, 123–29. See also Pontifical Academy of Sciences, “The Impact of Space Exploration on Mankind, October 1–5, 1984,” Pontificiae Academiae Scientiarvm Docvmenta, no. 13 (Rome: Vatican Press, 1984). For more on the importance of visualisations to global environmental politics, see Piero Morseletto, “Analysing the influence of visualisations in global environmental governance,” Environmental Science & Policy 78 (December 2017):
40–49.
the word ‘making’ since technologies are involved in both our perceptions about the environment and in the practices that shape it.9
Historical research has demonstrated how technology functions as a system that has contributed to environmental knowledge. From this perspective, remote sensing is a technology systemically connected to many people, practices, and places that together produce a new sense of the environment.10 Other systemic studies illustrate how what was once conceived of as technology over time became part of and informed notions about the environment. This process is often an aggregated, hence unintentional, result of how we use technology to make environments. The important point here is an understanding of ‘technology’ and ‘environment’ as relational concepts that inform each other.11
Humanistic research on remote sensing demonstrates how technology is also part of making the environments that it senses. For example, monitoring global environmental change has in turn influenced how people interact with environments globally, to shape that change in ways considered desirable.12 This suggests that referring to something as ‘environment’, or ‘nature’, is not a means of shutting down the subject from further debate, but rather of opening up new political domains.13
9 Sara Pritchard, “Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies: Promises, Challenges and Contributions,” in New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies, ed. Dolly Jørgensen and Finn Arne Jørgensen (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); 1–17, especially 13–14.
10 Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010).
11 Sara Pritchard, Confluence. The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2011). More recently, see also Jon Agar, “Technology, environment and modern Britain: historiography and intersections,” in Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain, ed. Jon Agar and Jacob Ward (London: UCL Press, 2018), 14–15; Matthew Kelly, “The Thames Barrier: climate change, shipping and the transition to a new envirotechnical regime,” in Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain, ed. Jon Agar and Jacob Ward (London: UCL Press, 2018), 206–8, 226.
12 William Rankin, After the Map. Cartography, Navigation and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). For contemporary studies, see Jennifer Gabrys,
“Sensing Lichens: From Ecological Microcosms to Environmental Subjects,” Third Text 32, no. 2–3 (2018): 350–67; Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). See also Peter Taylor, “How Do We Know We Have Global Environmental Problems? Undifferentiated Science-Politics and its Potential Reconstruction,” in Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities, ed. Peter Taylor, Saul E. Halfon and Paul N. Edwards (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 149–74.
13 Kristin Asdal’s work describes it as, “‘Nature’ has, in an environmental political context, seldom meant having the last word, to end a debate. Rather, it has been a means to open up political discussions.
To refer to nature, or effects in nature, has therefore contributed to starting debates, to politicise a politics that appeared to be settled” (Authors translation: “Naturen” har, i miljøpolitisk sammenheng, sjelden betydd å få det siste ordet, å stenge for debatt. I steder har det vært en måte å åpne for politikk og diskisjon på. Å henvise till natur, eller effekter i naturen, har dermed heller bidratt til å starte debatt, å politisere en politikk som framsto som fastlagt). See Kristin Asdal, Politikkens natur – Naturens politik [The nature of politics – the politics of nature] (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2011), 16–17.
In this thesis, I use historical examples to illustrate how the environment is not a thing existing remotely out there, as if it were something that could be sensed provided one simply had the right tool. Instead, the environment is the aggregate outcome of activities that involve technologies. Over time, this making of the environment – this environing – ends up informing our perceptions about what the environment is, based on practices of sensing and shaping it in the past and preferences for how to sustain it for the future. In brief, the environment is an outcome of environing. Instead of asserting a definition of what the environment is, my aim is to open up questions about why environing happened the way it did. A study of environing, such as this, provides insight into possibilities for, and limitations to, our historical understanding of the environment. This insight is of use in addressing present-day questions about how we make sense of an environment that we ourselves have been part of making.
My second motivation concerns history that involves Sweden. History of space technology has tended to focus on achievements, affinities, and animosities during the space race between the Cold War’s two vying superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union.14 Recent transnational research has begun to revise these narratives by demonstrating how histories previously perceived to be peripheral played a significant role for the centres of space power. This research has also brought outer- space activities into closer dialogue with, and holds explanatory value for, other topics in history, such as postcolonial struggles, international technoscientific networks, and the emergence of global environmental politics.15
For influential Swedish literature arguing that environmental knowledge has been used to close down political debates, see Johan Hedrén, Miljöpolitikens natur [The nature of environmental politics], dissertation (Linköping: Linköping Studies in Arts and Science, 1994), 211–19, 275–78. For arguments that the concept of nature close down political debates by blurring “is” and “ought”, see Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds, The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), especially 1–2 and 14–15.
14 Pamela E. Mack and Ray A. Williamson, “Observing the Earth from Space,” in Exploring the Unknown, Volume III: Using Space, ed. John M. Logsdon, Roger D. Launius, David H. Onkst and Stephen J. Garber (Washington, DC: NASA, 1998), 155–77; Roger Launius, “United States Space Cooperation and Competition: Historical Reflections,” Astropolitics, no. 7 (2009): 89–100. In some respects, this also applies to new initiatives, see John Krige, Angelina Long Callahan, and Ashok Maharaj, NASA in the World: Fifty Years of International Collaboration in Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
15 Asif A. Siddiqi, “Competing Technologies, National(ist) Narratives, and Universal Claims: Toward a Global History of Space Exploration.” Technology and Culture 51, no. 2 (April 2010): 425–43; Teasel Muir-Harmony, Project Apollo, Cold War Diplomacy and the American Framing of Global Interdependence, dissertation (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014); Gemma Cirac Claveras, POLDER and the Age of Space Earth Sciences. A Study of Technological Satellite Data Practices, dissertation (Paris: Ecoles des hautes etudes en sciences sociales 2014); Sebastian Grevsmühl, A la recherche de l’environnement global: De l’Antarctique à l’Espace et retour, dissertation (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2012), 240–43.
By focusing on Swedish satellite remote sensing, I demonstrate how and why a relatively small country made significant contributions to the use of this technology.16 These contributions include formulating international definitions for satellite remote sensing and for what was being sensed, challenging secrecies of the Cold War superpowers by disseminating satellite imagery of nuclear disasters, writing policies for sustainable development to motivate the mapping of entire countries, and shaping the environmental boundaries of Europe by repeatedly sensing the Baltic Sea following the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Each initiative beyond Sweden was influenced by, arose with, and responded to needs existing within Sweden. SSC, SBSA, and the Swedish Remote Sensing Committee intended to use remote sensing to expand Swedish space activities and to increase their own technoscientific expertise. When challenged by other national organisations that also provided sensing technology for Nordic users, these Swedish satellite remote sensing experts instead sought money and mandates through transnational collaborations, international negotiations, and multilateral financiers.
The need to find rationales for remote sensing led to new uses of the technology, ad hoc or accidental‚ that in time significantly influenced Swedish diplomacy, non-aligned surveillance, and development aid.
This is a history about Sweden, but it is not a Swedish history. My aim is to write transnational history. I focus on Swedish satellite remote sensing as an activity, rather than a group of actors, seeking to follow this activity to wherever it leads. Due to the numerous practices involved in sensing by satellite, writing about the data, or using it to reshape environments, it would be incorrect to speak of one particular group of experts responsible for the history of Swedish satellite remote sensing. The Swedish satellite remote sensing experts often collaborated and competed with other industries, consultancy firms, subsidiary companies, additional governmental agencies, ministries, university groups, and research associations, nationally as well as internationally. In brief, many Swedish satellite remote sensing activities did not take place within Sweden, nor were they necessarily conducted by Swedes.
As part of writing a transnational history about space technology, I provide background on the Swedish context to make it accessible to an international reader.
16 I use the term “relatively small” in recognition that the role of Swedish satellite remote sensing differed with respect to who the experts collaborated with or competed against. Where relevant, I describe these relations and particularities in the chapters.
For the same reason, I also illustrate how international events influenced Swedish space activities. In the coming sections I will return to discuss what this means in terms of historiographical foundation, theoretical framework, use and criticism of source material, as well as the delimitations of the thesis. The study is motivated, in sum, because it illustrates how the making of environment is part of many other, smaller, intentions, ambitions, and activities, including those conducted by Swedish satellite remote sensing experts.
Research Questions
There are two main questions that inform this study. Firstly, how did Swedish satellite remote sensing activities contribute to the making of environment? And how were these activities part of sensing, writing about, and shaping environments? Secondly, why did the Swedish satellite remote sensing experts conduct these activities?
These questions are relevant both to the history of technology and to environmental history. Since researchers in the US began promoting the term ‘remote sensing’ in the 1960s, the field has been acknowledged as an interdisciplinary effort, including engineers, scientists, and policy-makers, to make military technology available for civilian purposes, establish technological tools of relevance for society at large, and explore new phenomena in the environment. The relationships, collaborations, and conflicts that arose while establishing remote sensing have relevance for understanding the interplay between industry, government, and academia during the late twentieth century. They are also important for understanding how transnational informal networks bridged national constraints and shaped international competition.
In this dissertation, I analyse different intended uses for satellite remote sensing, unintended outcomes of these activities, and how the practices and perceptions changed with respect to both the environing technology and the environment. In the following five chapters, I analyse Swedish satellite remote sensing activities in a number of central projects conducted between 1969 and 2001. This period and these projects cover Swedish contributions to the technology during the Cold War and in its aftermath as well as major changes in the institutional organisation of Swedish space activities.
The central projects included drafting international principles for the use of remote sensing, monitoring facilities in the Soviet Union, mapping natural resources
in developing countries, defining the relationship between the technology and sustainable development, and expanding European political integration to the Baltic region at the end of the Cold War.
Each project illustrates an interplay between the remote sensing technology and new groups of experts. It also illustrates how satellite remote sensing was used to sense, write about, and inform the shaping of the environment. By empirically demonstrating how satellite remote sensing functioned as an environing technology, I contribute to the ongoing shift in the historical understanding of how humans are part of making the environment, which in turn informs the meaning of that environment.
Earlier Research – Technology and Environment
I position the thesis as a convergence between the history of technology and environmental history, drawing upon both fields for insights.17 I argue that this is absolutely necessary for understanding a technology such as satellite remote sensing.
I here describe previous studies of how technologies have produced environmental knowledge, why Swedish technoscientific expertises are relevant to a transnational history of space activities, and what can be considered to be driving these activities.
Central to any history of technology, according to historian of technology Thomas Hughes, is to think of technologies as part of a system – a large technological system. This means that an artefact, like a satellite in orbit or its sensors, is only one part among many other components required to make the technology work. The experts working with this technological system were used to defining these components. To the historian, they often become visible in written sources when
17 For previous synthesis and overviews on the convergence of history of technology and environmental history, see Sara Pritchard, “Toward an Environmental History of Technology.” in The Oxford Handbook of Evironmental History, ed. Andrew C. Isenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 227–58, in particular 228–29; Edmund Russell, James Allison, Thomas Finger, John K. Brown, Brian Balogh, and W. Bernard Carlson, “The Nature of Power: Synthesizing the History of Technology and Environmental History,” Technology and Culture 52, no. 2 (2011): 246–59; Hugh S.
Gorman and Betsy Mendelsohn, “Where Does Nature End and Culture Begin? Converging Themes in the History of Technology and Environmental History,” in The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History, ed. Martin Reuss and Stephen Cutcliffe (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010); Jeffrey K. Stine and Joel A. Tarr, “At the Intersection of Histories: Technology and the Environment,” Technology and Culture 39, no. 4 (1998): 601–40. More recently, see also Alexander Elliott and James Cullis, “The Importance of the Humanities to the Climate Change Debate,” in Climate Change and the Humanities: Historical, Philosophical and Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Contemporary Environmental Crisis, ed. Alexander Elliott, James Cullis, and Vinita Damodaran (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 15–42.
something prevented the system from functioning as intended. As experts sort out or circumvent the problems of their system, they make visible to the historian many other activities involved in the technology.18
Researchers have added further demarcations to the theory of technological systems in order to expand or shift the analysis. Among these are the terms
‘sociotechnical’ to stress that technology also involved people,19 ‘technopolitical’ to argue that technology promoted or naturalised certain political preferences,20 and
‘envirotechnical’ to demonstrate that a system over time became part of the surrounding environment, like embankments of a river.21
Of particular relevance is historian Paul Edwards’ use of systems-thinking to explain the production of knowledge during the last two centuries about a globally changing environment. Edwards argues that the connection and convergence of several technological systems resulted in an infrastructure that enabled the demonstration, and knowledge, of global climate change.22 To understand collective perceptions of the environment, Edwards studies how builders of this knowledge infrastructure intended to use it to produce, interpret, and disseminate data. He does this by identifying where friction emerged when people sought to move data from local places into global models. This involves examining institutional and structural
18 Thomas Parke Hughes, Networks of Power. Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 14–17. For a study on the origins of system thinking, see David Mindell, “Automation’s Finest Hour: Radar and System Integration in World War II,” in Systems, Experts, and Computers. The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After, ed.
Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 27–56.
19 See Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, and Thomas P. Hughes, eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989); Wiebe Bijker and John Law, eds. Shaping Technology/Building Society. Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). For an important contribution to include gender in analysis of technical systems, see Judith A. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801–1885 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, I987). For subsequent analysis that stresses the importance of users in changing a technology, see Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997); David Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2006), 21, 33–47.
20 Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France. Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II, revised edition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). On “technopolitics of altitude” see Edwards (2010), 138.
21 Pritchard (2011). For earlier arguments to expand system analysis towards including the environment, see Eva Jakobsson, Industrialisering av älvar. Studier kring svensk vattenkraftutbyggnad 1900–
1918 [Industrialization of rivers. Studies in Swedish hydro power development 1900–1918], dissertation (Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet, 1996), 45.
22 Edwards (2010), 8–9, 17–23, especially n12. For earlier treatments of thinking about large technological systems as infrastructures, see Arne Kaijser, I fädrens spår: Den svenska infrastrukturens historiska utveckling och framtida utmaningar [In the footsteps of fathers: The Swedish infrastructure’s historical development and future challenges] (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1994); Pär Blomkvist and Arne Kaijser, eds. Den konstruerade världen: Tekniska system i historiskt perspektiv [The constructed world:
technical systems in a historical perspective] (Eslöv: Symposion, 1998), 21–25.
histories of national agencies, international collaborations, and other organisations working with monitoring systems, as well as influences from warfare, politics, economic development, and societal movements.23 The endurance of infrastructures contributes to the taken-for-grantedness of the technoscientific expertises involved, such as remote sensing, as well as the knowledge these provide. Together, Edwards argues that these conditions explained why, and how, people produced knowledge about the global environment.24
In another study of knowledge infrastructures, historian of science William Rankin argues that the emphasis has to shift from the intentions for building a system to a study of its use. In studying global mapping and navigation projects, he demonstrates how people became aware of, or paid attention to, new aspects in the environment as part of using the technology. Over time, this activity changed the user’s relationship to both the navigation technology and the mapped environment.25 Rankin’s argument is a relevant addition that shifts the focus toward how systems developed as an unintended outcome of changing attentions, or ideas, among its users.
Both Edwards and Rankin see the Cold War competition as a driver for these global infrastructures. They also argue for the importance of US initiatives for present-day uses. I want to understand how and why Swedish satellite remote sensing experts contributed to such infrastructures and focus on the activities of local, national, and transnational actors in building them. This history illustrates more diverse reasons for using knowledge infrastructures than previously known.26
23 Edwards (2010), xvi. For earlier versions of this argument, see Gabrielle Hecht and Paul N. Edwards, The Technopolitics of Cold War: Toward a Transregional Perspective (Washington, DC: The American Historical Association, 2007), 3–4. See also Paul N. Edwards, “The World in a Machine: Origins and Impacts of Early Computerized Global Systems Models,” in Systems, Experts, and Computers. The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After, ed. Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P.
Hughes (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 221–54. For other examples of knowledge infrastructures, see Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Sign, Storage, Transmission) (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2015), 15; Lisa Parks and James Schwoch, eds. Down to Earth. Satellite Technology, Industries and Cultures (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 2; David Mindell, Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy (Viking, 2015), 12.
24 “Technoscientific” is a term used to address how science involves technologies to practice and produce knowledge. See Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@ Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_
Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (NewYork: Routledge, 1997), 8, 35. For additional literature and quote, see Edwards (2010), 19.
25 Rankin (2016), 29–32, 296. For a similar approach to map-making, see J. Nicholas Entrikin, “The Unhandselled Globe,” in High Places. Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice and Science, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora (New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2009), 216.
26 For other studies of models and data gathering, see Matthias Heymann, Gabriele Gramelsberger, and Martin Mahony, eds. Cultures of Prediction in Atmospheric and Climate Science: Epistemic and Cultural Shifts in Computer-based Modeling and Simulation (London: Routledge, 2017); Lisa Gitelman, ed. Raw Data is an Oxymoron (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012); Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Environmental history, by contrast, is full of stories about unintended effects as a result of human activities. In reaction to dichotomous descriptions that separate environment and humans, environmental historian Richard White has argued that nature is known through labour – “it is our work that ultimately links us”.27 Similarly, anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup argues that the environment is not a force outside of or set against humans. Both as individuals and as a society, “people have shaped the circumstances under which that outer pressure is supposed to work on them”.28 Environmental historian Joachim Radkau argues that by treating the environment as
“nature turned social”, one can also understand how human practices gave rise to new perceptions about the environment. He calls on historians to look for “the environmental” as something emerging at the margins of human intention. It is to be found in everyday, institutionalised, practices. Environmental history in this sense is a history of the obvious. It demands both source criticism and theory to be discernible for readers of history.29
Institutions that work with sensing, documenting, and describing the environment have historically been important for articulating contradictions in concepts like ‘labour’ and ‘nature’, ‘society’, and ‘environment’. The shifting definitions or demarcations illustrate that environmental ideas have several motives.
The love of nature is always a selective love. For this reason, environmental ideas can be found in numerous societal movements and be used to justify a host of political ends.30 Nationalism is in this respect also an expression of environmental ideas about
27 Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995), x. For further analysis of the term “environment” and related terms, like “wilderness” and “nature”, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1996), 69–90.
28 Kirsten Hastrup, “Destinies and Decisions: Taking the Life-World Seriously in Environmental History,” in Nature’s End. History and the Environment, ed. Sörlin and Warde (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 331–48. Landscape architect Anne Spirn offer similar perspectives in urban studies on how people shape land and over time the land changes the people in it, see Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (New York: BasicBooks, 1984). For more recent work, see Kenneth Olwig, “Landscape, place, and the state of progress,” in Progress: Geographical Essays, ed. Robert David Sack (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 22–59, especially 52–
53.
29 Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power. A global history of the environment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), xii, 35, 87.
30 Radkau’s perspective is here influenced by Max Weber who warns the scholar against making value judgments, especially regarding environmental history, see Radkau (2008), 227, 234–35, 239, 301, 307, 323–24. See also Mark Fiege, The Republic of Nature. An Environmental History of the United States (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2012), 283–302. For more recent work, see also Sverker Sörlin,
“Reconfiguring environmental expertise,” Environmental science & policy 28 (2013): 14–24, especially 16.
who has access to land or natural resources. National institutions are places where these ideas have been articulated to inform activities.31
Historian of technology Sara Pritchard has synthesised studies in both environmental history and history of technology to demonstrate how each field tends to “black box” either technology or environment.32 As a remedy, she proposes expanding the theory of technological systems to also include the environment – to write envirotechnical histories. Her study of French river management of the Rhône demonstrates how technologies changed breadth, width, and water course until the technological system became part of the river itself. According to Pritchard, this unsettles dichotomous thinking about technology being what nature is not. Pritchard therefore argues for history-writing that illustrates hybridity between what is considered environmental as opposed to societal.33
Inspired by William Cronon’s seminal study Nature’s Metropolis, envirotechnical historical studies have analytically approached technology as producing a second nature that takes the place of the previous, first, nature.34 Cultural scholar McKenzie Wark pushes this further by arguing that knowledge infrastructures have since the late nineteenth century established a third nature consisting of information where the aggregate outcomes include visualisations of environmental change on a global scale.35
31 See, for example, Jonas Anshelm, Det vilda, det vackra och det ekologiskt hållbara: om opinionsbildningen i Svenska naturskyddsföreningens tidskrift Sveriges natur 1943–2002 [The wild, the beautiful and the ecologically sustainable: on advocacy in the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation’s journal Sveriges natur 1943–2002] (Umeå: Umeå universitet, 2004), 100, 118, and 128 for example of shifts from national to international environmental concerns. See also Lars Lundgren, Staten och naturen.
Naturskyddspolitik i Sverige 1869–1935 Del 2: 1919–1935 [The state and the nature: Environmental protection policy in Sweden 1869–1935. Part 2: 1919–1935] (Brottby: Kassandra, 2011), 457–58.
32 Pritchard (2014), 227–58, in particular 228–29.
33 Pritchard consider terms like “network”, or “assemblages” as useful for describing the envirotechnical but still relies on the concept of “system” in recognition of its importance in the history of technology, see Pritchard (2011), 8–22. See also Richard White, “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History,” Historian 66 (2004): 557–64.
34 William Cronon. Nature’s Metropolis. Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton & Company, 1991), xvii–xviv, 19, 56, 62, 267. For earlier attempts, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). For later use with relevance for envirotechnical analysis, see Pritchard (2011), 22, 102, 184. See also Christopher F. Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 7–8.
35 McKenzie Wark, “Third nature,” Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (1994): 115–32, especially 120, 123, and 124; McKenzie Wark, “Antipodality,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2, no. 3 (1997): 17–27, especially 25–26; McKenzie Wark, Telesthesia: Communication, Culture & Class (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). For later work that incorporates Edwards’ term “knowledge infrastructure” into “third nature”, see McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2015), 316–19.
