Environmental Knowledge Production Research Articles

Imaginaries of democratization and the value of open environmental data: Analysis of Microsoft's planetary computer

The proliferation of environmentally oriented programs within the tech industry, and the industry's coinciding efforts toward data and technology democratization, generate concerns about the status of environmental data within digital economy. While the accumulation of digital personal data has been a cornerstone of domination of the data analytics industry, many believe environmental data to be a source of “untapped potential.” The potential of environmental data, the argument goes, would benefit equally the digital economy, environmental sciences, and academic data and artificial intelligence experts. This article analyzes the proliferation of the rhetoric about open environmental data by focusing on Microsoft's Planetary Computer cloud computing program and computer vision experts who curate and use biodiversity data stored on Microsoft's servers. Through an analytical framework of sociotechnical imaginaries, the article draws connections between visions of future for environmental knowledge production and governance promoted by Microsoft and the work of computer vision experts intending to benefit from the potential of environmental data as machine learning training sets while at the same time helping environmental sciences. Although environmental data on the Planetary Computer is democratized, it nonetheless becomes a valued asset to data economy, but often with unintended consequences, such as enabling citizen science biodiversity data to be used by state surveillance apparatus. The article challenges the view that data's democratization is unproblematically serving environmental sciences by examining the consequences of imaginaries of democratization emerging from the data industry leaders and processes of nonmonetary valuation of environmental data by experts who curate these datasets.

The Airport and the Zoo

This article focuses on the shared history of Frankfurt Zoological Garden and Airport, developing an infrastructural perspective on the rise of behavioral thinking in postwar environmental sciences. It shows that technical and logistical environments, such as seaports, airports, train stations, and highways, shaped the way environmental scientists and a broader public conceptualized animal behavior. Similar to ergonomics and human factor engineering in the 1950s and ’60s, human-made spaces and interiors became central reference points for developing and testing new ideas on the interaction between animals and “the environment.” Further, airports were sites of knowledge transfer between practitioners, including animal traders, care attendants, veterinarians, logistics experts, and scientists. The first part of the article draws on the works of biologist and Frankfurt’s Zoo director Bernhard Grzimek, who made excessive use of air cargo to ship wild animals to Frankfurt. The second part traces the emergence of new spaces for animals at Frankfurt Airport in the 1950s—such as the “animal room” in the cargo area. The third part of the article uncovers the hidden networks of animal traders and shipping companies that made Frankfurt Airport a major international hub in animal air cargo. Lastly, the article argues that hands-on experience of animal behavior, such as that conducted in airports like Frankfurt, is part of a broader pattern of environmental knowledge production in in the twentieth century—in close proximity to infrastructure projects.

What Was the Norm Is No Longer the Norm: Capturing Socio-Ecological Histories of Flood Resilience in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area through Archival News Analysis

Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, an unglaciated region defined by steep river valley systems, has been plagued by chronic flooding in part due to Euro-American agricultural practices and anthropogenic climate change. The region, which has played a central role in environmental knowledge production, has a storied history of resilience practices and flood experience. To capture histories of Driftless Area flood experience and underlying socio-ecological dynamics, we performed a qualitative analysis of regional news archives from 1866 to present on flood trends, experiences, and responses. Our analysis identified hazard response trends mediated by socio-ecological factors including crisis-induced windows of opportunity for change, conflicts over structural and nonstructural responses to flooding, and psychological dimensions of environmental crises. Finally, our analysis noted the key role of community flood knowledge in producing shifts toward enhanced resilience, suggesting the need for empowering flood response planning at the community scale.

Undisciplining Environmental Communication Pedagogy: Toward Environmental and Epistemic Justice in the Interdisciplinary Sustainability Classroom

This article moves beyond an understanding of environmental communication as merely the “translation” of scientific knowledge for the general public and advocates for environmental science and sustainability (ESS) educators to understand environmental communication as a critical practice with complex social, cultural, and political stakes. Due to the interconnectedness of environmental issues and social, political, and cultural contexts, environmental communication pedagogy is an important site of both environmental and epistemic justice. This article addresses the question: What forms of environmental communication pedagogy contribute to dynamic communication competencies for students while also promoting environmental and epistemic justice? The authors begin with a literature review of environmental communication and environmental justice research. Subsequently, they develop a theoretical argument advocating for an “undisciplining” of environmental communication pedagogy to promote critical thinking about the exclusionary politics of environmental knowledge production and communication. In doing so, the authors advocate for cultivating dynamic and ethically engaged real-world literacies for students through social and participatory media, including Wikipedia and podcasts. The article concludes with two sample assignments that instructors can adapt to their classrooms.

Bonanza o Falsas Riquezas: Cambiantes Imaginarios Mexicanos del Trópico y el Impulso Civilizatorio

Existing scholarship on “tropicality” emphasizes how Europeans and US-Americans constructed the tropics discursively and visually in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scientists, investors, and travelers denigrated tropical spaces to legitimize imperialism, labeling them backwards, racially degenerative, disease-ridden, and unconducive to civilization without white European intervention These works unwittingly reproduce a central assumption of the very imperialists they critique: namely, that North Atlantic elites controlled knowledge production. They thus marginalize the important theorizing and conceptualizing that transpired in tropical spaces. Following independence, Latin American national elites agonized over how to integrate their tropical territories, many of which remained isolated, and make them legible for economic modernization. This article uses Mexico as a case study for Latin American representations about the tropics given its diverse temperate and tropical geography, its key role in the global commercial economy, and its robust intellectual production. I argue that the ways in which Mexican intellectuals—public officials, geographers, philosophers, and others—thought about their low-lying tropical lands molded nation-building projects and contributed to the global production of environmental knowledge at a time when notions of tropical peril and degeneracy were giving way to the promise of tropical bonanza. By tracing the changes and continuities of Mexicans’ tropical discourses in a global context, I underscore the underappreciated environmental and geographic thought of influential Mexicans—from Matías Romero and Francisco Bulnes to José Vasconcelos—who rarely appear in environmental historiography. A focus on these different imaginaries regarding the significance, purpose, and place of Mexico’s tropical lands also reveals the extent to which material interventions in the tropics and discursive representations of the tropics have co-constituted each other.

Sociography of a curious object: Descriptive research, the #OneLess refill pilot, and practices of hesitation

The implications of sociography for thinking with global environmental problems are foregrounded by Bruno Latour in Down to Earth. In order to deal with the metamorphosis of the world and take into account multiplying viewpoints, Latour argues sociologists must shift the focus of enquiry from theoretical analyses of environmental problems to descriptions of the existence of environmental issues in experimental settings, local shared spaces and common practices. Taking up Latour’s challenge of description from the bottom up, this article examines London’s #OneLess refill water fountain pilot project initiated in 2018 to reduce plastic water bottle consumption, as an example of how scientists are at the forefront of assembling the public existence of environmental problems in local settings. Addressing my participant observation in the refill experiment, the article highlights the methodological challenges the #OneLess pilot poses for generating descriptions of what it means to engage with environmental issues sociographically. By engaging description as a methodological problem, the article examines the strengths and limitations of existing descriptive approaches and develops a different way of deploying a sociographical imagination that attempts to make sense of hesitation as a transformative practice of environmental knowledge production.

After the collapse: Evaluating undone science in the wake of a global environmental crisis

This study deepens our understanding of environmental knowledge production under varying political-economic regimes. While the extant scholarship on undone science, that is the systemic non-production of knowledge, is largely based in liberal democracies in the US and Europe, it elides important differences in the making and unmaking of science elsewhere. Using the case of Peru’s left-leaning military dictatorship (1968–1980), I show how undone science contributed to the 1973 collapse of the world’s largest fishery and one of the most studied fisheries on the planet: the anchoveta (Engraulis ringens). In an effort to reconstruct the fishery and resolve undone science, I also demonstrate how the state collapsed established boundaries by brokering research between previously antagonistic scientific fields and enabling South-South coalitions across Latin America. The evidence presented here illustrates how, during times of crisis, states can nationalize fisheries science, meaning they promote novel scholarship from domestic data sources, among local scientists, and between endemic research institutions. Thus, the main drivers of epistemic change, in this case, are state actors exercising “conventional” practices, undermining the assumption that only bottom-up and “contentious” pressure can do so. This research offers important lessons for future research on state-science relations in the Global South.

On environments of not knowing: How some environmental spaces and circulations are made inscrutable

In this paper we develop the concept of “inscrutable spaces” to describe spaces that are made difficult to know by an interplay of biophysical, epistemic, and political economic factors, and whose unintelligibility has serious repercussions for environmental politics and everyday life. We also offer an analytic that can be used to examine how inscrutable spaces are produced and maintained. Together, the concept and analytic provide scholars with tools for examining how and why knowledge is not produced in some environmental spaces despite their importance, as well as how knowledge absences persist over time. After developing the analytic, we apply it to two case studies – one about airborne dust and one about aquifer management – to show how atmospheric and subsurface spaces were actively made inscrutable. A key component of the inscrutable spaces analytic is its inclusion of biophysical attributes in examinations of environmental unintelligibility. Rather than relegating biophysical dynamics to the background, the framework encourages analysts to investigate how biophysical factors interact with epistemic and political economic influences to produce gaps in environmental knowledge production that are persistent and consequential. The utility of this approach is three-fold: (1) working to tease these factors apart makes the impacts of each more discernible; (2) putting them back together again highlights how they interact to produce and maintain inscrutable spaces and circulations; and (3) leveraging a systematic approach to analyzing inscrutability allows for fruitful comparisons among case studies that can illuminate broader trends in the (non)production of environmental knowledge.

Mining, Waste and Environmental Thought on the Central African Copperbelt, 1950-2000

Abstract Since the early twentieth century, the copper-mining industry on the Zambian and Congolese Copperbelt has moved millions of tonnes of earth and dramatically reshaped the landscape. Nonetheless, mining companies, governments and even residents largely overlooked the adverse environmental aspects of mining until the early 1990s. By scrutinising environmental knowledge production on the Central African Copperbelt from the 1950s until the late 1990s, particularly regarding notions of 'waste', this article problematises the silencing of the environmental impacts of mining. To make the environmental history of the Copperbelt visible, this article examines forestry policies, medical services and environmental protests. Moreover, by historically tracing the emergence of environmental consciousness, it contextualises the sudden 'discovery' of pollution in the 1990s as a local and (inter)national phenomenon. Drawing on rare archival and oral history sources, it provides one of the first cross-border environmental histories of the Central African Copperbelt.

‘Climate Change as a Spice’: Brokering Environmental Knowledge in Bangladesh’s Development Industry

ABSTRACT This article examines whether the use of climate change as a ‘spice’ in order to attract donor funding may instead exacerbate existing environmental problems. The World Bank’s latest adaptation project in coastal Bangladesh aims to create higher and wider embankments against rising sea levels. This disregards a long history of how embankments, by stopping beneficial monsoon inundations, result in dying rivers and damaging floods that devastate rural livelihoods. Bangladeshi ‘development brokers’ must therefore balance their roles as project employees supporting embankments as adaptation, and as locals knowledgeable about their harmful effects. The article shows how donors, NGOs, consultants and government bodies with different agendas, priorities and knowledge backgrounds ‘translate’ climate change to legitimise their activities. It contributes to debates about the politics of environmental knowledge production by arguing that development brokerage helps explain why some climate adaptation projects increase environmental vulnerability, while others address local needs.

The Challenge of Oral History to Environmental History

Abstract Oral history has much to offer environmental history, yet the possibilities and promises of oral history remain underutilised in environmental history and environmental studies more broadly. Through a reflection on work in environmental history and associated disciplines, this paper presents a case for the strength and versatility of oral history as a key source for environmental history, while reflecting on questions of its reliability and scope. We identify three major insights provided by environmental oral history: into environmental knowledge, practices and power. We argue that, rather than being a weakness, the (inter)subjective and experiential dimensions of oral accounts provide a rich source for situating and interrogating environmental practices, meanings, and power relations. Oral history, moreover, provides a counterweight to a reliance on colonial archives and top-down environmental accounts, and can facilitate a renewal - and deepening - of the radical roots of environmental history. Furthermore, as a research practice, oral history is a promising means of expanding the participatory and grassroots engagement of environmental history. By decentring environmental expertise and eroding the boundaries (both fictive and real) of environmental knowledge production, oral environmental histories can provide key interventions in pursuit of a more just, sustainable world.

Forged in flames: indigeneity, forest fire and geographies of blame in the Philippines

ABSTRACT The forests of Southeast Asia are represented as increasingly ‘at-risk' to fire, constituting a regional fire politics concerned with the management and organisation of environmental blame. State governments often place culpability for this increasing flammability on histories of deforestation that disproportionately blame Indigenous peoples who now face a correspondingly large burden in conservation schemes. By tracing the history of fire management from the colonial period to the 1980s, this paper explores how the management of forests and fire in the Philippines has been shaped over time with imperatives to govern and economically exploit upland spaces. While these histories clearly point to a political economy of knowledge production, they also show how forest governance in the Philippines has worked to construct ethnic difference through policies and practices that naturalise livelihoods, spaces and qualities to essentialised ‘tribal' uplanders. To understand the contemporary geography of blame that surrounds forest fires and deforestation in the Philippines and Southeast Asia more broadly, we argue for a more nuanced examination of ‘the uplands’ as a post-colonial geography co-constituted with the historical production of indigeneity and environmental knowledge. We conclude by emphasising the historical role of colonial forest and land management institutions in fashioning lasting socio-spatial differences.

Contested extractivism: impact assessment, public engagement, and environmental knowledge production in Alaska's Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta

For large extractive mineral projects, Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) processes function in part as a procedural tool to adjudicate the legitimacy of divergent environmental truth claims. Successful anti-extraction movements work to litigate divergent knowledge claims in the public arena, but few anti-extraction communities have access to a broad public audience. This article examines the proposed Donlin Gold mine in southwestern Alaska, a locally divisive yet publicly invisible extraction controversy, to understand how communities contest the boundaries of knowledge production and legitimacy set out by EIS procedures without the benefit of broad public awareness. Through a multi-method analysis of the public engagement segment of Donlin's Draft EIS, we find that anti-Donlin activists worked to construct environmental knowledge that drew jointly on claims to local knowledge and scientific expertise through a temporary assemblage of local activists and external consultants. The contested epistemic understandings of residents, expert consultants, and state and federal regulators further reveal the role of regulatory processes in constructing and maintaining boundaries of epistemic legitimacy, while also pointing to emergent possibilities for social action based in locally-situated environmental truth claims.Key Words: Environmental Impact Statement, mining, truth claims, Donlin Gold mine, Alaska

Guest Introduction: More-than-human contact zones

Mary Louise Pratt used the term “contact zones” to describe those spaces where “cultures, meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today”. Building on three sessions at the 2017 American Association of Geographers’ Annual Meeting, this special section features articles which apply Pratt’s concepts to environmental research. We argue that these articles demonstrate a “more-than-human ‘contact’ approach” to (1) better account for nonhuman agency by multiplying perspectives, (2) intervene in cases of violence and injustice, and (3) decolonize knowledge/production. Included are empirical case studies which describe encounters with the nonhuman; these include a postcolonial reading of the BBC’s Blue Planet II, a feminist science study of migratory shorebird conservation on New Jersey’s Delaware Bayshore, and political ecologies of prescribed forest burns by Parks Canada and tidal energy production in the Bay of Fundy. These articles broaden the definitions of “contact” and “justice” as they direct critical attention to the politics of environmental knowledge production, technoscientific means of understanding and managing the living environment, and forms of resistance to the exclusive governance of “wild” spaces. They present sites of environmental management and exploration as places of transformation, co-presence, unpredictability, and often intimate violence. The section demonstrates how political ecologies and more-than-human geographies expand Pratt’s “contact” perspective. An afterword is provided by Mary Louise Pratt.

The “bander’s grip”: Reading zones of human–shorebird contact

This article applies Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact” perspective within a multispecies ethnography of conservation encounters on the Delaware Bay. Using critical insights from decolonial feminist science studies, environmental geography, and critical animal studies, the article deconstructs technoscientific environmental knowledge production within a more-than-human contact zone. The tools, technologies, and “conspicuous innocence” of hands-on shorebird conservation research practices are described. Re-inscribing nonhuman agency and colonial histories of place, it argues that certain elements of conservation research may be fairly read as “violent” expressions of “animality/coloniality” and “anti-conquest.” It concludes by offering some harm reduction strategies for improving conservation and critical environment studies.

Environmental Knowledge Cartographies: Evaluating Competing Discourses in U.S. Hydraulic Fracturing Rule-Making

In this article, we evaluate competing environmental knowledge claims in U.S. hydraulic fracturing (HF) regulation. We conduct a case study of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) rule-making process over the period from 2012 to 2015, which was the first attempt to update federal oil and gas regulations in thirty years. Our study addresses a gap in the energy geographies and environmental governance literatures, which have yet to evaluate systematically HF-related decision-making processes at the policymaking scale. We mobilize theoretical insights from science and technology studies on boundary objects and critical environmental discourse analysis to conduct a “cultural cartography” of the BLM’s rule-making process. Our analysis of a subset of 1.4 million public comments submitted to the BLM, combined with fifteen stakeholder interviews, focuses on (1) who participated in the rule-making process; (2) the types of knowledge claims advanced in support or opposition of the rule; and (3) how these claims affected the rule-making process. In contrast to recent literature that finds increased “horizontality” of environmental knowledge production, we find a clear hierarchy that privileges government knowledge—including federal government–sponsored research and existing laws—above all other categories of evidence cited. As such, we argue that government knowledge—which in this case brought disparate stakeholder groups together to debate HF regulation—functions as a key boundary object in the rule-making process. We conclude with a discussion of implications for both research and policy. Key Words: boundary work, Bureau of Land Management, hydraulic fracturing, regulation, rule making.

Accommodating consensus and diversity in environmental knowledge production: Achieving closure through typologies in IPBES

How can a diversity of perspectives be accommodated in scientific and political consensus on environmental issues? This paper adopts a science and technology studies (STS) approach to examine how the pursuit of consensus-based knowledge and diverse participation, as seemingly contradictory commitments, have been converted into practice in the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Through a series of negotiations, these commitments have been translated into a set of situated practices that now dominate this expert panel. Consensus has been achieved through the pursuit of closure, in which meetings of expert and administrator groups produce texts, tables and images that stabilise ostensibly collective decisions. Within this framework, diverse perspectives have been accommodated through the production of typologies, such as lists of comparable options, which allow for the coexistence and commensurability of a range of knowledges and experts. However there is a politics to typologies, which requires specific attention to how decisions are made (deliberation), who participates in them (participation), and the extent to which these participants are representative of broader knowledge and policy communities (representation). While the potential of typologies to accommodate consensus and diversity offers the hope of realising ‘unity in diversity’ for both environmental knowledge and policy, recognising the politics of their production is important for more equitable processes of environmental governance.

Transforming space and society? The political ecology of education in the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement’s Jornada de Agroecología

The occupation of space is a key geographic tactic for social movements. In this article, we explore how movements’ explicit and everyday occupation of space exists along a continuum. Taken together, these occupations can function as part of a broader strategy of creating dialogic spaces for environmental knowledge production. Dialogic spaces have an educational function, and are intended to provoke critical dialogue and transformation within society. Drawing upon a political ecology of education framework, we show that these dialogic spaces are strategically occupied to help transform both material and immaterial territories. We evidence this argument by analyzing the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement’s (MST) Jornada de Agroecology (agroecological journey), which is a social movement meeting. Drawing upon data collected at the 2012 Jornada, we argue that the Jornada’s disparate spatial forms are part of a broader journey related to transforming not only space, but also what constitutes agroecology.

Participatory Maps

There has recently been considerable attention paid to spatial visualizations in data journalism; less as a product and more as practice. This refers to the notion that rather than reading maps as fixed representations, digital mapping is by nature a dynamic, performative, and participatory practice. In particular, mapping environmental damage, endangered species, and human-made disasters has become one focal point for environmental knowledge production. This type of digital map has been highlighted as a processual turn in critical cartography, whereas in related computational journalism, it can be seen as an interactive and iterative process of mapping complex and fragile ecological developments. This article looks at computer-assisted cartography as part of environmental knowledge production. It uses InfoAmazonia, the data-journalism platform on Amazon rainforests, as an example of a geo-visualization within information mapping that enhances embodiment in the experience of the information. InfoAmazonia is defined as a digitally created map-space within which journalistic practice can be seen as dynamic, performative interactions between journalists, ecosystems, space, and species.

“We've Been Studied to Death, We Ain't Gotten Anything”: (Re)claiming environmental knowledge production through the praxis of writing collectives

The women of the Newtown Florist Club (NFC) in Gainesville, Georgia, have been studied. . .a lot. They have been studied by Georgia state governmental organizations that concluded that increased ra...