Why Space Pollution is no Solution: Thoughts on Technology and Climate Change
by R. Zackary Seitz
“We can move all heavy industry, and all polluting industry off of Earth and operate it in space”
Human-caused climate change is leading to numerous interconnected and escalating harms for human and more-than-human life on Earth. Just within the last month, news reports detail how Earth’s changing climate have led to a shocking transformation of forests in both North and South America (Milman, 2022), the Arctic region is warming much faster than previously thought (Mooney et al., 2022), and climate change is accelerating the spread of infectious diseases (Vaughan, 2022). The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have released numerous reports detailing current and projected effects that climate change is having on life and societies and they have all called for the need to act quickly (IPCC, 2022a; IPCC, 2022b). Technological “solutions” from people like Mr. Bezos, who simply suggests moving pollution and industry to space, often fail to consider the collateral effects of these technologies and infrastructures. Rather than simplified proposals, we need to consider how our technological choices have contributed to anthropogenic climate change, including the collateral effects these technologies pose to human and more-than-human life. These considerations can help citizens vision and implement technological and infrastructural solutions that are feasible, nuanced, and rooted in societal justice.
How Technologies Extend our Unsustainable Existence
Technologies, tools, and machines are extensions of the humans that design and adopt them (Kline, 1985; Lawson, 2010; Krutka et al., 2022). If we are to combine these ideas of technology as any extension of ourselves with the understanding that mass is neither created nor destroyed, then any extension of ourselves inherently involves using matter and resources of the Earth. We can think of all technology as environmental technology. While humans have long transformed the world through technological development, it has only recently led to climate change on a global scale. Marx (1887) explained “not till the invention of Watt’s… steam engine, was a prime mover found, that begot its own force by the consumption of coal and water, whose power was entirely under man’s control… as an agent universally applicable in Mechanical Industry” (pp. 263-264). In other words, humans came to use polluting fuel sources to power the steam engine, which powered more complicated and powerful machines for efficient production. Marx also argued that the technology we utilize illuminates how human production impacts nature, sustains human life, and formulates our social relations and understandings of our existence.
Our technologies are ecologically destructive. Our refusal to examine the collateral effects of our technologies and how they shape us have allowed for us to live in unsustainable ways. These technologies have become mythic, “a part of the natural order of things” (Postman, 1998, p. 4), increasing the difficulty in visioning a future without them (as the first Civics of Technology Conference urged us to do).
Photographer Virginia Hanusik has documented how human infrastructure designs exacerbate the unjust causes and effects of climate change on the land and people. Her collection titled On the origin of High Water specifically focused on different structures, infrastructures, and landmarks along the Mississippi River watershed as they normally exist, eschewing disaster photography. Her photographs of refineries, levees, cargo ships, and rampikes illustrate the collateral effects for the natural environment and communities such as the Historic Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans and Pinhook, Missouri. These communities were harmed because of unjust infrastructure designs and policies designed to protect white communities at the expense of Black communities. These images illuminate her observations that “infrastructure is not neutral; it is a physical marker of tension that results in both loss and gain” (Hanusik, n.d.). Showing the impacts from human alterations to the environment forces us to confront our technological decisions.
Photographs taken by Virginia Hanusik. Pinhook, Missouri (left), and Downtown Cairo, Illinois (right).
Pinhook, Missouri was founded by black sharecroppers, and has a long history of being harmed by levee building to insulate larger communities nearby from flood risk. In 2011 the Army Corps of Engineers and flood agencies from Illinois and Missouri (without input or notice to the citizens of Pinhook) decided to purposefully destroy a levee, and flood Pinhook to alleviate the flood risk for citizens of Cairo Illinois (Nielsen, 2018). You can read the history of the town of Pinhook here and you can read how Pinhook was purposefully flooded here.
Her photographs illustrate the idea of Maslow’s hammer, which postulates “if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail” (Maslow, 1968). Every river must be met with a levee, every oil discovery must be met with extraction and a refinery, every flood must be met with higher and higher elevated foundations for homes. Culkin’s (1967) point that “we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us” (p. 70) resonates when viewing these photographs. If a river is prone to flooding, we can use levees to control that river and build homes, businesses and infrastructure right along rivers that were never meant to flow along the same course year after year. If the sea is rising, we can build a wall to keep the sea out. If the temperatures are rising, we can just install air conditioning to keep ourselves cool.
Yet, each of these infrastructure designs comes with several collateral effects that are too often ignored and further removes us from our natural world (Houser, 2009). Building levees not only stops the buildup of nutrient rich sediment and forces engineers to decide which towns or areas they will flood if they need to release water (Magee, 2021). Rising seawalls and levees make flooding worse for other people outside of your community, as this video shows (Meadows, 2021). Air conditionings use chemicals that further trap greenhouse gasses, raising temperatures even further (Irfan, 2022).
Photograph by Virginia Hanusik. Old River Control Structure Concordia Parish, Louisiana. This control structure prevents the Mississippi River from changing course.
Thus far, we have deluded ourselves to thinking that we have control and that the benefits of our actions to change the environment have outweighed the costs. We have failed to consider both the collateral effects of our technological and infrastructure changes and how those changes impact us. These delusions were not only wrong, but allowed for us to accelerate our ecologically destructive behaviors on a societal level. As the climate has changed, more extreme weather events are happening more frequently, which has led to infrastructure failures that put more and more communities in harm's way when those failures occur.
Considering Collateral Effects of “Green” Technologies of a Sustainable and Just Future
While my discussions thus far have been mostly critical of the collateral effects of technology and infrastructure, I do recognize the need for new technologies and infrastructure development that are environmentally sustainable if we are to reverse and mitigate human-caused and unjust environmental damage. We must seek to identify the collateral effects of technological development if we are to develop the just and sustainable society that we need to survive (Abram, 2018). If technologies extend ourselves and our society’s beliefs and values, then we cannot merely design technologies shaped by our current values and expect sustainability and justice to save us. For example, simply substituting electric vehicles for gasoline powered combustion engines fails to address the unjust harm caused by highway development and suburban sprawl, pollution from concrete and tire dust, or the harmful working conditions in places where battery resources are extracted (Tabuchi & Plumber, 2021; McVeigh, 2022). In addition to new technologies, we must also design infrastructure that supports these sustainable technologies in just ways, and not be afraid to acknowledge that sometimes we should let a place be, that it doesn’t have to be developed, extracted, or levied. We must recognize that our technological and infrastructure developments are destroying our only home.
We must come to understand that technological solutions alone will not save us from massive extinction. We need to fully believe and act upon the opening salvo of the Civics of Technology project that “technology is not neutral and neither are the societies into which they are introduced” (Civics of Technology, 2022, n.p.), reject over-simplified solutions, and anticipate the collateral impacts that technologies will cause and seek justice and sustainability in their adoption. Teachers have increasingly been encouraged to help students seek solutions to environmental problems through STEM projects or clubs, but these technical pursuits must be accompanied by relational and reflective pedagogies. We cannot rush into technological solutions. Or else, we’ll end up cleaning up a whole set of new problems from Bezos’ space pollution “solution.”
Thank you to Virigina Hanusik for allowing me to share her photos here. You can follow her on Twitter @virginiahanusik.
References
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