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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

How the story of Noah's Flood was central to the development of a global environmental consciousness in early modern Europe. Winner, Morris D. Forkosch Prize, Journal of the History of Ideas Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of being changed by them. In After the Flood, Lydia Barnett traces the history of this idea back to the early modern period, when the Scientific Revolution, the Reformations, the Little Ice Age, and the overseas expansion of European empire, religion, and commerce gave rise to new ideas about nature, humanity, and their intersecting histories. Recovering a forgotten episode in the history of environmental thought, Barnett brings to light the crucial role of religious faith and conflict in the emergence of a global environmental consciousness. Following Noah's Flood as a popular topic of debate through long-distance networks of knowledge from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, Barnett reveals how early modern earth and environmental sciences were shaped by gender, evangelism, empire, race, and nation.

Another End of the World is Possible

Another End of the World is Possible
Author: Pablo Servigne
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2020-11-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1509544674

The critical situation in which our planet finds itself is no longer in doubt. Some things are already collapsing while others are beginning to do so, increasing the possibility of a global catastrophe that would mean the end of the world as we know it. As individuals, we are faced with a daily deluge of bad news about the worsening situation, preparing ourselves to live with years of deep uncertainty about the future of the planet and the species that inhabit it, including our own. How can we cope? How can we project ourselves beyond the present, think bigger and find ways not just to survive the collapse but to live it? In this book, the sequel to How Everything Can Collapse, the authors show that a change of course necessarily requires an inner journey and a radical rethinking of our vision of the world. Together these might enable us to remain standing during the coming storm, to develop a new awareness of ourselves and of the world and to imagine new ways of living in it. Perhaps then it will be possible to regenerate life from the ruins, creating new alliances in differing directions – with ourselves and our inner nature, between humans, with other living beings and with the earth on which we dwell.

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.