La Terre vue d'en haut. L'Invention de l'environnement global

La Terre vue d'en haut. L'Invention de l'environnement global
Author: Sebastian Vincent Grevsmühl
Publisher: Média Diffusion
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2015-02-25T00:00:00+01:00
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 2021112403

Des images d'Apollo à celles du réchauffement climatique en passant par les photographies de Yann Arthus-Bertrand, la Terre est devenue objet de surveillance et de savoir global, de contemplation esthétique autant qu'une icône pop de l'écologie. Héritière d'une technologie et d'un regard militaire, cette vision de la Terre vue du ciel est ambivalente : finitude et fragilité, mais aussi hybris de contrôle. Ainsi la reconnaissance du caractère fini de la planète, élément clé de la prise de conscience écologique mondiale, s'est-elle accompagnée d'une vision de la Terre comme un " vaisseau spatial " et de rêves – douteux – de domination technoscientifique de l'ensemble de la planète. Le livre raconte cette invention occidentale de l'environnement global depuis le XIXe siècle. À l'heure de dérèglements écologiques majeurs, nous avons beaucoup à apprendre de cette tension récurrente entre finitude et domination. Sebastian Vincent Grevsmühl est spécialiste en histoire de l'environnement et en " visual studies ". Chercheur à l'université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris 6, au sein du groupe de recherche TEUS (The Earth Under Surveillance : Geophysics Climate Change and the Cold War Legacy), il est l'auteur de nombreux articles sur l'histoire des sciences géophysiques, l'histoire environnementale, l'histoire des explorations, ainsi que sur la culture visuelle et le rôle des images en sciences.

Global Forest Visualization

Global Forest Visualization
Author: Lynda Olman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2024-02-20
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1040013341

This book project examines global forest monitoring as a means to understand the promises and problems of global visualization for climate management. Specifically, the book focuses on Global Forest Watch, the most developed and widely available forest-monitoring platform, created in 1997 by the World Resource Institute. Forest maps are always political as they visualize power relations and form the grid within which forests become commodities. This dislocation of the idea of the forest from its literal roots in the ground has generated problems for forest visualization efforts designed to empower local communities. This book takes a critical humanistic approach to this problem, combining methods from the fields of rhetoric and media studies to suggest solutions to these problems for designers and users of platforms like the Global Forest Watch. To explain why global views of forests can be disempowering, the book relies on biopolitical and rhetorical theories of panopticism and how these views unfold a different violence on different regions of the Earth in relation to colonial history. Using this theoretical framework, the book explains the historical process by which forests came to be classified, quantified, and mapped on a global scale. Interviews with end-users of global forest visualization platforms reveal if and how these platforms support local action. Lastly, the book provides rhetorical solutions to articulate global and local views of forests without reducing one view to the other. These solutions involve looking to forests themselves for clues about how to generate more broadly effective and resilient visualizations. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of forest studies, climate change, science communication, visualization studies, environmental communication, and environmental conservation.

The Shock of the Anthropocene

The Shock of the Anthropocene
Author: Christophe Bonneuil
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2016-01-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1784780820

The Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. What we are facing is not only an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. In two centuries, our planet has tipped into a state unknown for millions of years. How did we get to this point? Refuting the convenient view of a "human species" that upset the Earth system, unaware of what it was doing, this book proposes the first critical history of the Anthropocene, shaking up many accepted ideas: about our supposedly recent "environmental awareness," about previous challenges to industrialism, about the manufacture of ignorance and consumerism, about so-called energy transitions, as well as about the role of the military in environmental destruction. In a dialogue between science and history, The Shock of the Anthropocene dissects a new theoretical buzzword and explores paths for living and acting politically in this rapidly developing geological epoch

The Surveillance Imperative

The Surveillance Imperative
Author: S. Turchetti
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2014-09-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137438746

Surveillance is a key notion for understanding power and control in the modern world, but it has been curiously neglected by historians of science and technology. Using the overarching concept of the "surveillance imperative," this collection of essays offers a new window on the evolution of the environmental sciences during and after the Cold War.

Nature's Diplomats

Nature's Diplomats
Author: Raf De Bont
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822988062

Nature’s Diplomats explores the development of science-based and internationally conceived nature protection in its foundational years before the 1960s, the decade when it launched from obscurity onto the global stage. Raf De Bont studies a movement while it was still in the making and its groups were still rather small, revealing the geographies of the early international preservationist groups, their social composition, self-perception, ethos, and predilections, their ideals and strategies, and the natures they sought to preserve. By examining international efforts to protect migratory birds, the threatened European bison, and the mountain gorilla in the interior of the Belgian Congo, Nature’s Diplomats sheds new light on the launch of major international organizations for nature protection in the aftermath of World War II. Additionally, it covers how the rise of ecological science, the advent of the Cold War, and looming decolonization forced a rethinking of approach and rhetoric; and how old ideas and practices lingered on. It provides much-needed historical context for present-day convictions about and approaches to the preservation of species and the conservation of natural resources, the involvement of local communities in conservation projects, the fate of extinct species and vanished habitats, and the management of global nature.

The Contamination of the Earth

The Contamination of the Earth
Author: Francois Jarrige
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2021-11-16
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0262542730

The trajectories of pollution in global capitalism, from the toxic waste of early tanneries to the poisonous effects of pesticides in the twentieth century. Through the centuries, the march of economic progress has been accompanied by the spread of industrial pollution. As our capacities for production and our aptitude for consumption have increased, so have their byproducts--chemical contamination from fertilizers and pesticides, diesel emissions, oil spills, a vast "plastic continent" found floating in the ocean. The Contamination of the Earth offers a social and political history of industrial pollution, mapping its trajectories over three centuries, from the toxic wastes of early tanneries to the fossil fuel energy regime of the twentieth century.

After the Flood

After the Flood
Author: Lydia Barnett
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2019-07-02
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1421429519

After the Flood illuminates the hidden role and complicated legacy of religion in the emergence of a global environmental consciousness.

Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences

Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences
Author: Oren Harman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2018-07-20
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022656990X

What are the conditions that foster true novelty and allow visionaries to set their eyes on unknown horizons? What have been the challenges that have spawned new innovations, and how have they shaped modern biology? In Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences, editors Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich explore these questions through the lives of eighteen exemplary biologists who had grand and often radical ideas that went far beyond the run-of-the-mill science of their peers. From the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who coined the word “biology” in the early nineteenth century, to the American James Lovelock, for whom the Earth is a living, breathing organism, these dreamers innovated in ways that forced their contemporaries to reexamine comfortable truths. With this collection readers will follow Jane Goodall into the hidden world of apes in African jungles and Francis Crick as he attacks the problem of consciousness. Join Mary Lasker on her campaign to conquer cancer and follow geneticist George Church as he dreams of bringing back woolly mammoths and Neanderthals. In these lives and the many others featured in these pages, we discover visions that were sometimes fantastical, quixotic, and even threatening and destabilizing, but always a challenge to the status quo.

We are Forests

We are Forests
Author: Jean-Baptiste Vidalou
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2023-06-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509556532

From the Sivens forest in France to the Hambach forest in Germany, from the Broadback forest in Canada to the rainforests of Borneo, something has shifted in these wild spaces over the last decade or two. People have begun to inhabit the forests, oppose the loggers and use their bodies as shields, motivated by the determination to resist the lethal ecosystem of commercial exploitation. Forests have become a battleground in the struggle between groups with fundamentally divergent aims and objectives. Forests are made up of insurgents. Jean-Baptiste Vidalou went to see some of these forests and meet those who are defending them: he discovered a completely different way of understanding the world, sharply opposed to the mentality of planners who see forests as just one more territory to be managed. Here he recounts this encounter, relays what these forest peoples and struggles convey, not to offer any recipes or ready-made solutions to the crises of our times but to be the forest, like a force that grows, stem by stem, leaf by leaf, slowly becoming ungovernable.

Living in a Nuclear World

Living in a Nuclear World
Author: Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2022-03-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 100054155X

The Fukushima disaster invites us to look back and probe how nuclear technology has shaped the world we live in, and how we have come to live with it. Since the first nuclear detonation (Trinity test) and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all in 1945, nuclear technology has profoundly affected world history and geopolitics, as well as our daily life and natural world. It has always been an instrument for national security, a marker of national sovereignty, a site of technological innovation and a promise of energy abundance. It has also introduced permanent pollution and the age of the Anthropocene. This volume presents a new perspective on nuclear history and politics by focusing on four interconnected themes–violence and survival; control and containment; normalizing through denial and presumptions; memories and futures–and exploring their relationships and consequences. It proposes an original reflection on nuclear technology from a long-term, comparative and transnational perspective. It brings together contributions from researchers from different disciplines (anthropology, history, STS) and countries (US, France, Japan) on a variety of local, national and transnational subjects. Finally, this book offers an important and valuable insight into other global and Anthropocene challenges such as climate change.