The Nature of Data: Infrastructures, Environments, Politics. Edited by Jenny Goldstein and Eric Nost.

Abstract

Thanks to insights from ecomedia studies, environmental humanists are increasingly studying how the environment becomes digital and the digital becomes environmental. The Nature of Data ably contributes to this research with the editors’ guiding premise that “environmental knowledge, control, and conflict are being routed through data technologies, and data technologies through nature” (3). Building off this premise, Jenny Goldstein and Eric Nost’s valuable collection pursues interlocking questions: as air, water, soil, and biomes teem with data technologies, who controls the infrastructure? What knowledge results from the data and who accesses and benefits from it? How do technoscientific and traditional ways of knowing interact and what environmental decision-making results from these epistemologies? Luis F. Alvarez León encapsulates the claim that undergirds responses to these questions: “data acquisition and analysis, in and of itself, represents a political intervention” (44). The fifteen essays comprising The Nature of Data substantiate Alvarez León's point for an audience familiar with, but not necessarily expert in, environmental and data politics. To investigate this idea, scholars and practitioners from anthropology, geography, ecology, sociology, Indigenous studies, media studies, and policy and governance explore compelling case studies ranging from Indonesia to the Arctic and from the US Pacific Northwest to northeastern Pennsylvania. Some cases feature material conduits, such as dams and roads, while all address digital infrastructures for sensors, satellites, or observation systems that disseminate data and “organize the relationships among people, organizations, and governments” (Gallagher 177). The book’s three parts on data technologies, community-driven data, and governance in the Global South share a political thrust and animate two key concepts: data colonialism, that is, “how infrastructures create, embed, and reproduce colonial structures” (Levenda and Grabowski 84); and data justice, that is, “providing just access to, interpretation of, and control of data as important goals in and of themselves and as a means to broader socioenvironmental transformations” (Walker et al. 196). Along with the titular keywords, these two concepts unite the collection as they gain texture through conflicts over environmental infrastructure.