Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960–1990

Sabine Höhler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848935099
• eBook ISBN: 9781317317524
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The idea of the earth as a vessel in space came of age in an era shaped by space travel and the Cold War. Höhler's study brings together technology, science and ecology to explore the way this latter-day ark was invoked by politicians, environmentalists, cultural historians, writers of science fiction and many others across three decades.

1 CAPACITY: ENVIRONMENT IN A CENTURY OF SPACE

Et Si Le Vrai Luxe, C’Était L’Espace?

In December 2002 the automobile manufacturer Renault launched a television and print campaign to advertise its new generation of large-capacity limousine, the Espace. The image series La foule (the crowd) showed pedestrians moving in metropolitan streets through thick human swarms. All along, however, the pedestrians remain exceptional, surrounded and protected by a comfortable clear space that assumes the form of an Espace. After the camera has followed them on their way, the pedestrians finally climb into their actual Espace and drive out of the frame. The subsequent slogan suggestively asks: Et si le vrai luxe, c’était l’espace? The pun translates only loosely into the English phrase ‘What if the true luxury were space? The new Renault Espace’.

In advertising automobiles, speed, freedom, independence and overall individual mobility have been replaced more and more with the safety and silence, comfort and cleanliness of their passenger compartments. In this regard the message of the advert is familiar. More intriguing is Renault’s storyline that states that in the midst of growing modern urban populations and ensuing spatial constraints personal breathing and moving space have become luxury goods. Renault’s commercial promises that the extravagance of perfect privacy and protection can be regained and consummated by means of a modern vehicle, the ‘monospace’, a technologically controlled and optimized personal environment. Novel in Renault’s advertisement is the topic of space itself.

I suggest that the spot promoting the Espace, when released at the outset of the new millennium, underlined a historical process of spatial confinement and control that was driven by the permeation, demarcation and distribution of geospace in the twentieth century. At the end of the nineteenth century, a seemingly endless process of global expansion came to a close. In the twentieth century the earth came into view in novel ways, and the notion of living within close natural and political limits took on a new quality and urgency. Concerns about the world were supplemented by a focus on the planet earth as a whole. At the peak of the Cold War, the dynamics of global expansion were halted in a strangely stable state that resulted from the strategic parity between the two superpowers, from their technologies for close mutual observation and from a constant threat of mutual destruction. As the globe no longer seemed to tolerate remoteness, the technological rivalry of expansion into outer space began. In turn, it was extraterrestrial photography that supplied pictures of the ‘Blue Marble’ in the 1960s and for the first time presented planet earth in its entirety. The photographs from space zoomed in on life’s fundamental conditions, which were believed to be unique within the universe, Reaching their climax in the early 1970s, concerns about rising pressures on the environment arose in combination with warnings of the limitations of resource-intensive industrial production and of worldwide population increase. In 1972, the Club of Rome’s study The Limits to Growth warned against ‘the predicament of mankind’, which was economical growth and ecological destitution. In the same year, the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the first in a series of so-called earth summits, placed the rising awareness of environmental pollution and resource depletion on the international agenda as a problem of global development. The very word ‘environment’ became a synonym of crisis and urgency.¹

‘What if the true luxury were space?’ Renault’s bold suggestion seems to reconfirm an argument that the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault had brought forth in 1967 when speaking of the twentieth century as the ‘epoch of space’.² Foucault referred to the ways contemporaries conceptualized limited geospace as well as increasingly limited global biospace to enclose, display and ultimately manage what was considered ever more unique and fragile on earth: inhabitable environment, life and living conditions. It may be no coincidence that at the same time a figure of speech gained currency that combined the notions of global geospace and biospace: ‘Spaceship Earth’. Spaceship Earth became fundamental in articulating spatial limitations at the beginning of what is sometimes termed the Environmental Revolution. On the one hand, this discursive figure expressed the threat of absolute earthly limits and of a questionable future of planet earth and its inhabitants. On the other hand, Spaceship Earth framed the planet in technoscientific terms and recreated the planet as a new hybrid entity. The figure discursively linked the notion of an ultimately finite living space to the technoscientific solutions and visions of space flight. From the time of its invention and diffusion in the 1960s to its demise in the 1980s, Spaceship Earth combined the fear of limited possibilities of expansion with the anticipated possibilities of modern functional spaces that would be scientifically and technologically maintained.

This book argues that Spaceship Earth not only illustrated but also created a fundamental shift in the conception of life and living space on the earth that brought about new regimes and visions of efficiency. Spaceship Earth signified the threat to earth as a natural human habitat, but it also created expectations for science and technology to provide a ‘blueprint for survival’,³ substituting the biosphere of the earth with possible surrogate spaces elsewhere. The book focuses on the singular historical constellation around the year 1970 that may be characterized by the intersection of the aspirations of space flight, an overall obsession with the future, rising environmental concerns, Cold War conflicts, the consciousness of a new global interdependence, and last but not least the hitherto unprecedented potential for intervention – and destruction – by scientific and technological means. The conditions of possibility for this historical situation to emerge were met during the Second World War and in the post-war period; however, in several aspects, this situation was prepared by developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New in the 1960s were not the environmental concerns but the optimistic ideas of being able to turn the dismal fate of the planet into a bright future planned by scientists and engineers. During its lifetime up to the late 1980s when globalization and sustainability replaced planetary maintenance, Spaceship Earth did not simply serve as a metaphor to express the fragility of the planet; rather, Spaceship Earth configured a range of aspects associated with the constraint and crowdedness of earth. Spaceship Earth became the central part of a mythology to present the problems of planetary closure meaningfully and to propose strategies and solutions of escape.

The Age of Capacity

Foucault’s insistence to take seriously not only the historical meanings of space, but also spatiality itself as a historical problem was brought forward in a singular historical situation that can neither be captured by terms like the Cold War period, the Space Age or the environmental movement alone, nor by what has come to be called globalization. Rather, the historical situation in question points to a new awareness and significance of the global, of ‘globality’ around 1970 to which every one of the mentioned singularities contributed, pointing to the new dimensions of humankind’s impact on the earth.⁴

These dimensions were literally spatial. In order to assess the meaning of globality adequately we need to explore how the emerging notions of a global community and the projects to inventory and allot the global commons, correlated with the reorganization of global spatial relations.⁵ Foucault argued for a historiography considering spaces not as fixed and stable, as preformed containers to be filled with cultural meaning, but as products of historically specific material-semiotic representations. Foucault understood space not as homogeneous, metric and isotropic, but rather as an arrangement of positions and relations; he proposed to comprehend spaces and places as changeable and relational structures, as contingent patterns or textures of dynamically combining and recombining sites and positions. Foucault was one of the early proponents of the ‘spatial turn’ which in the 1990s opened up a whole range of cultural approaches to explore the spatial characteristics of social and cultural relations.⁶

Foucault propagated a concept of space that dismissed uniform Euclidian space. Moreover, he linked this concept specifically to the major themes of the twentieth century. He pointed to the interaction of places, the shifting neighbourhoods and the configurations of simultaneity following from the redistributions of proximity and distance that modern technologies of acceleration, of mobilization, and of international communication, transport and standardization had brought forward. Furthermore, he was concerned with the specific social and cultural conflicts, which became virulent in the late nineteenth century when the globe was first experienced as noticeably confined. This book develops Foucault’s observation ‘that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space’.⁷ I examine and elaborate the tentative line of reasoning that the future of humankind would increasingly be linked with knowledges of spatial order and that questions of location, situation and mutual spatial relations would become the quandary of the twentieth century.

‘But is there anything about the 1970s – as opposed, say, to the 1920s or 1870s – that should make this the decade in which limits to growth become apparent?’⁸ The essentialist answer to this question brought forth by physicist John Holdren and biologist and human ecologist Paul Ehrlich in 1974 would involve the familiar and accepted catastrophes of the so-called environmental decade, population growth, industrialization, dwindling resources and unprecedented pollution. If we try to resist this answer then the question directs us towards a more fundamental conceptual transition: Up to the mid-twentieth century, limits, boundaries and spaces had been territorially defined. In the form of territories, spaces and places became the objects of national and international struggles and related to ambitions of world power. Countless studies – especially on, say, the 1920s or 1870s – have explored the territorial endeavours of the Imperial Age and its colonial projects, and abundant work has focused on technologies as part of imperial projects and on the scientific bodies of accumulated data that were transformed into tables, graphs and maps and acquired territorial shape.⁹ Historian Charles Maier has convincingly argued for discerning the era of high imperialism between roughly 1860 and 1970 as the ‘Age of Territoriality’.¹⁰

Holdren’s and Ehrlich’s question points to a curious circumstance: The obsession with territory in history and historiography does not carry all the way through when trying to assess the state of the world around 1970. Undeniably, the national and transnational exploration and occupation of the world by the major imperial powers involved massive territorial boundary work to cause the ‘white spots’ to gradually disappear from the world map. The African continent, the American West, the earth’s poles, the oceans, the atmosphere: having long been terrae incognitae, these spaces were mapped, distributed and colonized to a large extent by the First World War. In the same course, the long ‘lost horizon’¹¹ of expansionist projects approached, and the ‘World Frontier’¹² came to a close. The very ‘cage’ of the inhabited earth had been gauged, as the French geographer Jean Brunhes memorably noted on the occasion of his inaugural lecture in 1911.¹³ It seems, however, that the limitedness of the earth came into clear focus only after the Second World War when the division of the world into two politically opposed hemispheres intersected with the long-standing separation of the globe into two hemispheres of unequal development and prosperity. I argue that the 1970s are known as the decade in which limits to growth became apparent not so much because of the struggle over political and territorial boundaries as because of a discourse of global limits. I suggest discussing the transition to global awareness around 1970 as a problem of capacity.

By the term ‘Age of Capacity’ I indicate the shift of perspective towards limited global space and global environment around 1970 and, consequently, the focal shift towards the world as a community sharing a common destiny, This move from national territory to global capacity went along with new concepts of ‘living space’ positioned at the intersection of biopolitical and scientific-technological spatial regimes. The discourse on living space needs to be carefully distinguished from earlier political philosophies and economies of living space related to territory. The debate on living space around 1970 sprang from the rising environmental discourse; living space referred to the rediscovery of the biosphere as a limited spherical container sustaining all life on earth. Moreover, the ecological sciences reframed the biosphere in terms of a closed and complex ecosystem. It is this new and specific meaning of a global living space that I aim to capture when referring to the ecological term of a human habitat.¹⁴

This work sets out to explore the regimes of efficiency that developed within the broader discourse of Spaceship Earth. I project my topic primarily from a historical science studies perspective, using material from three fields of twentieth-century science: first, systems ecology and its reinvention of nature and environment as a ‘life support system’; second, human ecology and its allocation of human beings to available earthly space that became manifest in the concept of an ecological limit of the earth system, the earth’s ‘carrying capacity’; and third, the intersections of ecology and the science and technology of space flight in the visions to overcome earthly limits by eventually constructing biosphere surrogates and recovering living space elsewhere.

Notwithstanding my approach from the perspective of science and technology studies, the figure of Spaceship Earth emerged and travelled in Western culture in a broad sense, of which the environmental sciences formed only a part, albeit an important one. The discourse of Spaceship Earth profited from several characteristics of the time in question: the booming optimism of the period after the Second World War, with its hope for scientific and technological progress; the perception of growing global interdependencies during the Cold War; and the debate about environmental pollution, resource depletion and population growth that formed part of the rising environmental movement.

A Shrinking Globe

Political interdependence and technoscientific intervention set within an enclosed and finite space are the key features of Spaceship Earth. I would like to discuss these key features as they were expressed in a striking emblem of the 1960s: Unisphere, the largest model of the globe ever built, was the centrepiece and official symbol of the World’s Fair that took place in New York in 1964 and 1965 (see Figure 1.1). Unisphere was located on the US Federal and State Area at the Fountain of the Continents and was presented to the world as the symbol of ‘Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe’.¹⁵

Unisphere echoed some of the most discussed and often controversial topics of its time. For one, the gigantic steel construction radiated the optimism of the Western world in the prevalent scientific and technological achievements during the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the same way as the futuristic design and architecture of the entire exhibition did. Modernist visions, fashions and architectures as well as the celebration of conveniences and the comfortable lifestyle they promised featured strongly at the New York World’s Fair. By exhibiting scientific competence and technological skill, the fair reiterated the high hopes and expectations of the post-war period that scientific and technological advancement would arrive at the answers to some of the most pressing issues in the world. Accordingly, one of the major themes of the New York Fair was ‘A Millennium of Progress’, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• 1 Capacity: Environment in a Century of Space
• 2 Containment: The Ship as a Figure of Enclosure and Expansion
• 3 Circulation: Ecological Life Support Systems
• 4 Storage: The Lifeboats of Human Ecology
• 5 Classification: Biosphere Reserves
• 6 Departure: The Habitats of Tomorrow
• Works Cited
• Filmography
• Notes
• Index