Monitoring materialities: Anthropocene landscapes of environing technologies in the High North

Abstract

An increased interest in Arctic regions as places of data generation to inform climate models, reports, and policies on environmental change has created a distinct kind of landscape, transformed by the material legacy of short and long-term monitoring and other scientific activities. Drawing from fieldwork in four key areas for environmental monitoring in the High North of Norway, Sweden, and Greenland, we investigate the intentional and unintentional materialities of environing technologies and other anthropogenic impacts that form a particular kind of Anthropocene landscape related to knowing global environmental change. We conclude that such distinctive monitoring landscapes contribute to work investigating shifting conceptualisations of heritage and the emergence of unintentional landscapes in the Anthropocene, and suggest that as co-creators of the global environment, they provide an interesting insight into the material legacies of natural scientific knowledge production.