Into the Extreme: US Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Earth by Valerie Olson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Into the Extreme: US Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Earth by Valerie Olson Blair Bainbridge Valerie Olson, Into the Extreme: US Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Earth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 280 pp. Since its launch in 2006, New Horizons’ journey through the solar system has been filled with historical firsts. After zooming past the outer planets in record time, this NASA space probe successfully captured the first ever up-close images of Pluto and its moons in 2015. Now, after a short slumber in the distant Kuiper Belt region of the solar system, it is back online, preparing to make history once more. In January 2019, New Horizons will fly by what a recent press release has called the “most primitive world ever observed by spacecraft” (Wall 2018). Originally called 2014 MU69, this Kuiper Belt object was the subject of a recent re-naming competition. The name settled on: Ultima Thule, (meaning, “beyond Thule”), a term used in medieval literature to refer to “the extreme limit of travel and discovery”1 and places “beyond the known world” (Wall 2018). The name was praised by New Horizons’ primary investigator, Alan Stern, who found its symbolism apposite beyond its spatial connotations. Not only would reaching this new world be an “ultimate” achievement for NASA’s space exploration program, Stern claimed; MU69 would also serve as “humanity’s next Ultima Thule” (Wall 2018). Stern’s comparison of New Horizons’ space exploration to the opening of new spatial and conceptual frontiers for humanity writ large is what anthropologist Valerie Olson would describe as a kind of “systems work” (6), and is the main subject of her new monograph, Into the Extreme. Olson defines systems work as a set of processes and techniques that “conceptually and physically formalize social, material, and spatial connections and separations, often in terms of a system–environment relationship” (6). Taking on systems as an ethnographic object rather than [End Page 1417] as an analytical tool, Olson seeks to understand how systems interlink disparate things into integrated wholes, and to what sociopolitical ends. The crux of this book lies in Olson’s argument that systems are “relational technologies” (5); in the most basic sense, its five themed chapters can be seen as ethnographic manifestations of this claim across multiple scales, sites, and objects of analysis. Moving across a wide range of speculative scientific projects, from haptic spacesuits to underwater human habitats, Olson puts forth NASA spaceflight programs as central loci of systems thinking and practice, that is, systems work, in the US from the postwar era to the present. In doing so, she reveals the integral contributions of outer space systems work to contemporary American technoscientific visions and aspirations for the future, shaped out of deep-seated settler colonial ideologies but irreducible to them. Into the Extreme investigates the unfolding of a pervasive contemporary relational imagination, an imagination which the discipline of anthropology has routinely embraced. As such, anthropologists of all stripes will want to pay attention to this book. Into the Extreme draws on Olson’s seven years of fieldwork (2005–2012) at four NASA centers, five medical centers in the US and Canada, as well as aerospace companies, conferences, and field testing sites. Olson follows projects that came about during NASA’s “Constellation” era, an initiative begun by George W. Bush in 2006 to go “back to the moon and Mars and ‘beyond’” (7), with a $230 billion USD budget to boot. These projects include NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations’ (NEEMO) Aquarius habitat, an underwater space analog research station off the coast of South Florida (Chapter 1); biomedical research on astronaut veterans, candidates, and hopefuls, whose ecologically integrated bodies come to exemplify the human as system (Chapter 2); speculative design projects for comfortable dwelling in the extreme, including sensitive, skintight space suits and transitional and transportable habitats (Chapters 3 and 4); and near-earth object (NEO) research and political activism, involving advocacy for new off-world mining opportunities as well as new transnational disaster-preparedness strategies (Chapter 5). Olson provides an important genealogy of the systems concept in the Introduction, which is a key part of what makes Into the Extreme a worthwhile...