What is it about?
This article explores the past-- and the future-- of space mining as a cultural phenomenon. It explores how and why environmental thinking ought to begin reflecting on astroculture, treating space expansionism as more real, and more relevant, than it might ordinarily appear. It also sketches a re-orientation of environmental ethics aimed at opening the horizons of eco-critical attention beyond the planet while simultaneously keeping the Earth in mind.
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Why is it important?
The article is important because it is one of the first attempts to think about environmental criticism that is not geocentric. As such, it anticipates and adresses challenges to the dominant dogmas animating the environmental movement that have been developed by space futurists since the 1960's but which are just now being presented as solutions to the crises of the Earth by business leaders such as Musk and Bezos. Without taking into account the ways in which space, with its open horizons, challenge the logic of limits, environmental thinkers can very well find themselves offering justifications for off world expansionist projects such as those currently being pursued by space capitalists. By anticipating these visions of cosmic expansionism and integrating responses to them into the rhetoric of environmentalism we can better respond to what may seem like technology driven solutions to social and environmental problems.
Perspectives
I think that we have not yet truly grasped the historical significance of the space age, and that the dominant understandings of it-- either that it never actually came to pass, or that it is just now happening as we always imagined-- are wrong. The emergent reality seems to be that space has been more significant for the Earth than we typically imagine, but also that the reality that is emergent from space is utterly different from the one imagined in science fiction. This paper is a first of a series of works in which I attempt to re-situate environmental thinking by extending the extent of what we acknowledge to be the environment out beyond the limits of the planet to encompass not all of space, but all of the reality in which we are in contact, and this includes much of the solar system. One way of stating this is to say that if we are, as much environmental thinking has assumed, Earthlings, we really only know what this means when we take seriously the task of understanding the alien and the allure of alienation, in other words, not just terrestrial ecology, but extra-planetary ecology as well.
Brad Tabas
ENSTA bretagne
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: On Earthlings and Aliens: Space Mining and the Challenge of Post-Planetary Ecocriticism, Resilience A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, September 2022, Project Muse,
DOI: 10.1353/res.2022.0009.
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