Images, imagination and the global environment: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on global environmental images

Abstract

Global environmental images have become part of our everyday life experience. We encounter them in news reports, scientific articles and artistic interventions. Yet so far, only the most iconic of these images have received close critical attention from scholars coming mostly from two related fields, science studies and cultural geography. Some of those studies, as for instance research carried out on the famous Apollo photographs, have revealed that the icons of our environmental age do not provide simple readings, that they carry multiple, often contradicting messages, and that they can be vectors of highly ambiguous and even conflicting political beliefs. However, historically informed interdisciplinary research on visual cultures from an environmental perspective is still at its beginning. This essay thus calls for a systematic exploration of the crucial role the visual plays in the creation, circulation, interpretation and adaptation of global environmental knowledge. It is argued that this inquiry cannot be left solely to historians or geographers but calls for a truly interdisciplinary engagement. One central claim is that we need to better understand the constitutive role the visual and associated knowledge practices, conventions and infrastructures play in mediating global environmental phenomena. One possibility, it is argued, is to develop a broader historical framework for understanding how the visual actively shaped scientific and environmental discourse, and how it stimulated the rise of holistic and dynamic understandings of the environment from the nineteenth century onwards. A second important research area that is suggested concerns the crucial role global environmental images play at the interface of science discourse and environmental policy and governance. The essay concludes by suggesting three basic theses which seem particularly promising for future interdisciplinary inquiries into global environmental images.

The emergence and evolution of Earth System Science

“…Remote-sensing systems now monitor a wide range of processes and indicators, including climatic variables, land-cover change, atmospheric composition, the surface ocean and urban development [60][61][62] . These 'top-down' approaches -along with the ability to rapidly process, analyse and visualize large amounts of data -build a compelling, globally coherent picture of the rate and magnitude of changes in the structure and functioning of the Earth System at the planetary level 28 .…”

“…Driving this increased awareness were the publication of R. Carson's Silent Spring 22 , the 'Only One Earth' discourse at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, the first alerts on ozone depletion and climatic change 23,24 and the Club of Rome's publication of the Limits to Growth report 25 , the latter warning of the finitude of economic growth due to resource depletion and pollution 26 . Visual images of the Earth, in particular 'The Blue Marble' image taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft on 7 December 1972, sharpened the research focus on the planet as a whole and highlighted its vulnerability to the general public [27][28][29] .…”

Visualising Climate and Climate Change: A Longue Durée Perspective

“…There is of course no simple answer to this dilemma, nor is there a single explanation that could account for the past failures (but see Grevsmühl 2017). However, as I have argued elsewhere, some of these issues are at least partly due to the fact that most global environmental icons struggle to become meaningful in everyday living (Grevsmühl 2016). They remain 'psychologically sterile' because they promote a very specific worldview that is clearly not shared by everyone, or to put it in other words: the 'view from everywhere' (Hulme 2010) rarely coincides with the 'view from everyone'.…”

Visualising the global environmental: new research directions

“…Both papers also show that the emergence of holistic conceptions of the environment reveal complex and diverse temporalities, depending on which environmental objects and geographies are taken into consideration. For instance, Regnauld and Limido trace firm links between the ocean and climate science back to the early nineteenth century, showing that Humboldt popularised the idea of a ‘global ocean’ with the help of innovative visual tools, an idea also picked up by Grevsmühl (, see also Grevsmühl ). Coastlines, however, were incorporated into global views only relatively late, as the rise of tourism called for promoting and managing site‐specific, local features of the coast.…”

“…One suggestion made by Grevsmühl (, 7) is to chart political spaces of global environmental images ‘through analysing the evolution and the changing perceptions of the actual physical sites on which they rely throughout their production process, and of the diverse technologies involved in shaping global environmental knowledge’. In so doing, one may raise important questions, for instance what it means to increasingly quantify and rationalise the global environment, or to ask who has the right to control global knowledge and speak for the global environment.…”