Abstract
Jennifer Gabrys has created a foundational text for the study of the ‘becoming environmental of computation’ (p. 25), delivering a series of critical interventions with a long shelf-life – beyond the hype and imagery of the space-times of sensor and policy prescriptions. Program Earth is not a list of instructions nor a user’s manual, but a statement on the present moment. Key to these interventions is a re-framing of the post–Cold War imaginary, borne of Earthrise in 1968 – that the planet is not a single system of ecological relations, but multiple worlds borne of a dense mesh of sensors, differentially invoked. The sensing of an environment is more than a relationship based on observation and description. Instead, Gabrys contemplates the ways in which ‘the experiment is generative of modes of experience’ (p. 41). From the selection of entities to observe and measure to the calibration and registers of instrumentation itself, sensors produce the experiences of the environment. Here, environmental concern is far from based only on ‘facts’ but is actively produced and stabilized through the ‘tuning’ (p. 33) of sensor networks, to include observation of nesting practices, soil moisture, CO2 respiration rates, and light levels. Indeed, the availability of web cams in a variety of environments has enabled the proliferation of situated encounters by a host of citizen scientists and activists. In brilliant passages, she describes the viewpoint of the web-cam fixed on a granite boulder or in a barn owl box – dung, feathers, speckles of brown amid lush green moss. The point, she suggests, is not that these sensors develop independently of human relation, but quite the opposite: that these moments are bodied as zones of interaction. Furthermore, the environments that result are ‘the conditions in which facts and entities take hold, have relevance, and endure’ (p. 151). Her account draws from a wide range of environmental science, political ecology, posthumanist and feminist theory, as well as science and technology studies, including Whitehead, Haraway, Hayles, Turing, Stengers, and Simondon. Gabrys conceptualizes the concrescence of organisms in these sensor relationships. Here, organisms are not digitized or turned into digital objects; rather, in the becoming environmental of computation, organisms ‘would not exist without’ (p. 78) these environments. In this theorization, they become – they are individuated – from within these sensorial relationships. And our abilities to provide measure are only ever relational: ‘Measurements are articulations of relevance’ (p. 124). The book is structured around three parts – the sensing of wilds, the sensing of pollution, and the sensing of the urban – as she fashions her critique from discussions around the computational processing that delivers us the forest and the trees to the resolutions and speculations on ocean garbage patches to the development of participatory and urban environmentalities within so-called smart cities. Throughout, Program Earth presents us with a different Earthrise, wherein incredible technological developments are not merely providing us with yet-unseen perspectives on the changing planet but are enrolling us in more-than-human makings of planetary survival. Whether political ecologist, critical technology scholar, environmental activist, or a champion of technological address to socionatural concerns, readers will revel in extensively written case studies as well as the contemplative opportunity to challenge, with renewed conceptual tools, the urgent notion of the environment.