Abstract
This article focuses on a series of connections between space infrastructures and environments in northern Sweden. Swedish space professionals often highlight the centrality of outer space for contemporary imaginaries about the planet as an interconnected whole. At the same time, the country's sounding rocket range outside the city of Kiruna relies on deep-seated constructions of the subarctic environment as empty wilderness. With the ongoing development of small satellite launch capability, the surrounding landscape needs to be sustained as an impact area, with the consequence that Sámi land practices are increasingly pushed to the sidelines. By turning to reindeer herders’ own uses of satellite technology, I delineate an oligoptic-satellitarian environment that runs athwart panopticonic understandings of satellite vision. Rather than trying to see everything from nowhere, the herders bring into view a limited set of more-than-human relations in order to challenge conceptions of the landscape as empty and exploitable. While showing that space activities in Sweden fold into and reproduce colonial histories, the article also argues that space infrastructures contain the potential for their own reconfiguration by eliciting the other worlds that are already being performed from within dominant socio-technical regimes.
Introduction
In 2020, the Swedish government announced its decision to support the expansion of the country's sounding rocket range, Esrange, which is located some 40 km to the east of the subarctic city of Kiruna. The contribution was part of a larger investment in the modernization of the launch site, with the aim to proceed with the state-owned Swedish Space Corporation's goal to develop a small satellite launch capability in the years to follow. This is undertaken in response to the broader commercialization of space (Valentine, 2012) and concomitant surge in small-satellite companies (Alvarez León, 2022) that are tapping into space as an arena for addressing contemporary planetary challenges.
Around the same period, a network of regional space actors broadcast a panel discussion in which the remoteness and geography of Kiruna were framed as especially convenient for such endeavours. Indeed, actors from the Swedish space community more broadly often maintain that Esrange's vast and ‘unpopulated’ surroundings make this a most apposite setting for satellite launches. As one of the panellists humorously responded when asked why their activities are always situated in remote and obscure settings: ‘Isn’t that what space is? Far away, where you can’t see anything, and where it's dark?’
Prompted by these connections between space exploration and Swedish subarctic geographies, in 2022 I travelled to northern Sweden to begin inquiring into the ongoing transformation of the launch site. Some time later, after several unanswered emails and postponed meetings, I was finally invited to sit down with some of the members of the above-mentioned network of local space actors. There were representatives from SSC, a local space high school, the Institute of Space Physics (IRF) and the European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association (EISCAT). 1 Picking up on the topic of remoteness, my interlocutors traced the region's space activities to the 1950s, when scientists had been drawn to the area by the ubiquity of aurora borealis and the absence of light pollution. In my interlocutors’ assessment, it all began with geomagnetic measurements and the study of cosmic noise. Together with infrastructural accessibility and a potential impact area twice the size of Luxembourg, it was the existence of such activities that had motivated the subsequent establishment of Esrange in this particular region about a decade later (see Backman, 2015). 2
The group had just wrapped up a meeting when I arrived at IRF. We were sitting in a room named Mimasalen, inspired by the 1956 science fiction poem, Aniara, by Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson. This book-length poem narrates how, in the aftermath of environmental destruction on Earth, a spaceship bound for Mars suddenly gets off course upon colliding with space debris. As the passengers gradually realize that they will not make it to Mars nor back home, they begin to make increasing use of a room, Mimasalen, which allows them to experience natural environments on Earth prior to environmental devastation. What was initially an insipid feature quickly turns into one of the spaceship's most frequented venues, in which the planet is experienced through a reversal: Earth's absence presents that which the passengers were so eager to leave behind in a new light. Towards the end of the 2018 film adaptation of this poem, 5,981,407 years after departure and when the passengers have long lost the battle against time and material decay, this science fictional reversal is performed once again. Though now, in the absence of passengers, it is evoked within the viewer through a simulated ‘overview effect’ (White, 2014). Having returned to Earth's orbit, the spaceship floats peacefully against the background of the blue planet as if to remind us to take better care of what Martinson dubs ‘the jewel in our solar system’ (Martinson, [1956] 1999: 127).
This article attends to a variety of planetary and environmental imaginaries as they emerge through socio-technical engagements with space, exemplified above by my interlocutors and Martinson's Aniara. Against this backdrop, I shall argue that it is from this very multiplicity of environments, generated amidst thickening infrastructural relations to the extraterrestrial, that we might elicit modes of relating to our more-than-human surrounds distinct from the global space industry's current regard for asteroid mining, space-based geoengineering and space settlement and colonization (Rubenstein, 2022; Scharmen, 2022).
I set the scene for my account with a discussion on the role of space exploration and satellite imagery for contemporary conceptions of the Earth as an interconnected ecosystem or whole. It is often maintained by historians and space professionals alike that such imaginaries came about in part as a consequence of the Apollo programme's photographs of the planet from space (Chakrabarty, 2021: 17; Jasanoff, 2001, 2004: 42; Olson and Messeri, 2015: 37). 3 Similar arguments about space technology's transformative effects have been made with respect to satellite vision (Sörlin and Wormbs, 2018), which scholars have then nuanced with recourse to bias, partiality and the terrestrial situatedness of space infrastructures (Gärdebo et al., 2017: 45; Klinger, 2021; Mitchell, 2017; Redfield, 2000; Timko et al., 2022; Warf, 2012: 42–43). In this connection, next, I focus on Sámi reindeer herders who were working within Esrange's 5200 km2 impact area outside Kiruna. Drawing on their accounts, I demonstrate how space exploration in Sweden folds into historical constructions of the region as empty wilderness (Hastrup and Lien, 2020; Sörlin, [1988] 2023). For satellite launches to successfully materialize, the landscape needs to be sustained as an impact area but with the consequence that Sámi land practices are increasingly pushed to the sidelines (Sheehan, 2018; Sörlin and Wormbs, 2008). While often assumed to be decoupled from terrestrial affairs, space activities are in fact intimately enmeshed with, and arguably perpetuate, deep-seated colonial relations.
By turning to reindeer herders’ own uses of satellite technology, I then delineate a satellitarian environment that does not quite square with widespread conceptions of satellite vision as a form of panopticism (e.g., Herscher, 2014; Poster, 1990; Warf, 2012; cf. Ballestero, 2019). Instead, these instrumentalizations of satellite technology render perceptible a limited set of more-than-human relations that challenge imaginaries about the landscape as empty and exploitable. As I will show, this is undertaken by the herders through a combination of Global Positioning System (GPS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and satellite images, whereby the reindeer are allowed to draw a series of environmental relations to which land exploiters are otherwise oblivious. Importantly, herders’ uses of satellite technology elude the panopticon metaphor not necessarily because they are non-optic or represent a form of ‘counter-panoptic state surveillance’ (Dodge and Perkins, 2009: 500), nor because they are socio-culturally embedded and fail to see everything from nowhere (Haraway, 1988), but rather because they are not seeking to produce overviews to begin with. The herders instead permit the reindeer to draw a non-totalizing picture of the landscape from ‘beneath’, as it were. The notion of ‘oligoptica’ (Latour, 2005: 181), therefore, better captures what is at stake. Whereas panoptica makes claims on absolute vision, oligoptica does not share that aspiration at all. The latter remain incapable of producing overviews since they deliberately hone in on a limited set of things not everything (see also Harvey et al., 2017: 15).
While scholarly accounts have demonstrated that space exploration has had a major impact on our understanding of contemporary environmental crises (Masco, 2010; Olson and Messeri, 2015), the terrestrial situatedness of space indicates a somewhat different connection between satellite vision and environments on Earth. Here, it is not so much that space affords perspectives from above, but rather that such views are predicated on infrastructures that reshape certain earthly geographies. By returning to Aniara and my meeting with the members of the aforementioned network of space actors, in conclusion, I argue that Esrange's interventions in the subarctic landscape epitomize a narrow understanding of environmental relations to which herders’ oligoptic uses of satellite technology hint at an alternative. Accordingly, in this article, I suggest that space activities in northern Sweden rely on and reproduce older forms of marginalization. Yet I also elicit the other worlds that are already being performed from within dominant socio-technical regimes (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021: 186); that is, how space infrastructures carry the potential for their own reconfiguration, away from the environmental imaginaries that currently inform the development of orbital launch capability outside Kiruna.
Environments from space
As part of my fieldwork, I attended several space events and I also conducted interviews with a wide range of space professionals. In these encounters, I was often reminded of the historical links between space exploration and contemporary understandings of environments on Earth. Whether dealing with Earth observation, space-based sunshades for global temperature control or the development of small satellite launch capability, at conferences and seminars this point was repeatedly brought home by presenters through one of the iconic photographs of the planet from space: Earthrise (1968), Blue Marble (1972) or the more recent Pale Blue Dot (1990).
Per, an engineer working at a space systems company in Stockholm, drew a similar connection. I had my eyes on his company for quite some time. After hearing him talk about an ongoing space debris project on a Swedish podcast, I wrote Per an email and asked whether he was willing to meet and tell me more. While most of our conversation revolved around the topic of space debris recollection, what I wish to highlight here is simply that before taking a seat in one of their meeting rooms, and upon asking me to summarize my research interest in space infrastructures and the environment, Per immediately postulated a historical relation between the two domains by pointing out that, ‘after all, the photos of the planet from space were the starting point of the environmental movement [miljörörelsen]’.
This was an argument that I had come across many times in scholarly accounts on space exploration, either under the label of the ‘post-Apollo paradox’ or the ‘overview effect’. Geppert (2012) defines these notions as ‘the view back onto the earth usually associated with the epoch-making 1968 spaceflight of Apollo 8’ and, moreover, ‘the standard argument that humankind's thrust into outer space would, ultimately, constitute a return to itself’ (Geppert, 2012: 8). Specifically, the post-Apollo paradox denotes a historical juncture that is said to have taken place over a decade after Martison's 1956 science fictional reversal in Aniara; by contrast, the overview effect, which was coined in 1987 by White (2014), refers to the ostensibly general experience of astronauts who upon experiencing Earth from above undergo something akin to a spiritual conversion.
Critics maintain that the view from above is alienating because it severs us from our spiritual, material and relational commitments (Arendt, 1968; see also Ingold 1993). According to this perspective, ‘the move to space is […] radically decontextualizing and depoliticizing’ (Valentine, 2016: 512). Even so, the overview effect has been evoked by environmental and peace movements to, as Bimm (2014) observes, ‘justify “whole Earth” or “borderless” perspectives’, and space advocates have also ‘used the idea in attempts to accelerate investment and speed technological change’; for example, by ‘triggering the overview effect via simulation here on Earth’ (Bimm, 2014: 39; see also Gärdebo et al., 2017: 48). Among proponents and sceptics alike, the view of the planet from aloft is granted major influence on relationality.
This is perhaps unsurprising given the significance that the Apollo photographs, Earthrise and Blue Marble are claimed to have had for popular conceptions of the planet as an interconnected ecosystem or a globe (Chakrabarty, 2021: 17; Jasanoff, 2001, 2004: 42; cf. DeLoughrey, 2014: 262), which was what Per was referring to in his comment above. As Olson and Messeri (2015: 37) have summarized: The iconography of these images has come to stand not for the feat of exploring outer space, but rather in advocacy for attending to and caring for our own planet (Cosgrove, 1994; Jasanoff 2001). The Blue Marble quickly became the mascot of Earth Day (Maher, 2004) and ‘Earthrise’ was used on the cover of the counterculture publication ‘The Whole Earth Catalog’ (Turner, 2006; see also Helmreich, 2011; Lazier, 2011), both of which spurred the environmental movement as we know it today. These highly circulated photographs enabled the western world to imagine a planet in environmental crisis (Masco, 2010).
In an article on the remote sensing of underground water in Costa Rica, Ballestero (2019: 5) notes that scholarship on the politics of verticality often works with ‘a singular understanding of power as securitization’. Consequently, this line of analysis ‘extrapolates militarized logics across unequal and diverse contexts’ (Ballestero, 2019: 5): Authors in this lineage argue that making subterranean things visible – tracking the movement of people and materials – is a tool for disciplining and repressing social and material worlds. By pairing government and the conduct of conduct with practices of vertical surveillance and panopticism, these authors give a literal meaning to the idea of seeing like a State (Scott, 1998) (Ballestero, 2019: 5).
The critique against satellite vision is reminiscent of that which has been raised against panopticism in other contexts. Scholars invoke the metaphor of the panopticon when taking issue with claims on absolute vision, both with respect to satellites (Herscher, 2014; Poster, 1990; Warf, 2012) and other forms of representation (Tagg, 1988). To draw on Haraway's (1988) influential statement, attempts to see everything from nowhere are proven to always be partial views from somewhere. Highlighting a series of links between panopticism and satellites, Warf (2012: 42–43) argues in this fashion when contending that satellite images, ‘far from constituting some “objective” vision on Earth, are always wrapped within and bounded by cultural understandings and assumptions’. Similarly, Gärdebo et al. (2017: 45) suggest that ‘[f]ar from being a view from nowhere, the satellites sensing Earth's surface are rooted in earthly infrastructures, geopolitics of access and use of data, as well as shifting epistemologies that arise from having new tools for sensing the environment’.
At the same time, it has also been proposed that scholars attend to the way satellite television's ‘imperializing potential’ coexists with ‘alternative (non-Western) knowledges and views formed via satellite’ (Parks, 2005: 165), even if asymmetrically. Parks (2005) describes how Aboriginal Australians have used satellites that lie beyond their immediate control ‘to circulate countermemories of the creation of the universe, offering an alternative cosmology that contests Western knowledges produced via satellite’ (Parks, 2005: 165). Likewise, Warf (2012: 56) explains that ‘[t]he global diffusion of remote sensing expertise has generated a new arena of “satellite imagery activism”, in which satellite data is used for non-panopticonic purposes’. If views from space have participated in processes of ‘environing’ or ‘the making of environment’ (Sörlin and Wormbs, 2018: 115, emphasis omitted), then that environment must be assumed to be multiple and to have taken a variety of forms.
As mentioned in the introduction, SSC is currently turning its sounding rocket range, Esrange, into an orbital launch site. Akin to a number of other European countries such as England, Norway, Portugal and Scotland, Sweden aims to attain independent access to low Earth orbit so as to provide launch services to commercial actors, space agencies and the international scientific community. The development of these services, or what SSC calls ‘SmallSat Express’, is happening in response to prognoses about a growing, global demand for small satellite launches over the forthcoming decades. In the next section, I describe how, in addition to producing environmental imaginaries from orbit, space infrastructures also reshape environments on the planet in an immediately tangible way. I do so with recourse to accounts provided by Sámi reindeer herders who were working within Esrange's impact area outside Kiruna.
Environments on Earth
‘The entire area is ruined, they punctuate the area. It's like poking a hole in a balloon’. Jon, a middle-aged reindeer herder, was describing to me the consequences of the Esrange staff's collection of sounding rockets and payloads on their herding lands. This work is undertaken with the help of snowmobiles and helicopters. Whereas the helicopters are heard from several kilometres away, sending the reindeer off in different directions, the snowmobiles leave tracks in the snow, creating pathways that can lead the animals away from the herd, like air escaping from a balloon. ‘Often, it's difficult to make the reindeer stay in an area if they’ve been frightened, and the tracks remain the entire winter’, Jon explained.
I had met Jon through Bengt. Both were members of the same Sámi village.
4
Curious about the impact of Esrange's sounding rocket experiments on reindeer herding, I had contacted Bengt and driven off to pay him a visit a two-hour journey away from the city of Kiruna. The scenery was astonishing. Snow-covered hills loomed in the distance, with small conglomerations of houses appearing between ice-covered lakes, rivers, fir and birch trees. Crows and ravens were flying in circles overhead, sometimes feasting on reindeer carcasses lying along the roadsides. The sun had already set when I reached my destination. The snow dampened all sounds, creating an eerie calm. ‘We don’t have any addresses’, Bengt had commented chuckling in response to my query about his whereabouts, instead suggesting that I give him a call once in town. With my phone lacking signal, however, I reckoned I would try my luck at the local gas station. Upon mentioning Bengt's name, the man at the counter gave me his directions, and shortly thereafter, upon ringing the doorbell, Bengt led me to their Sámi village's office inside a red wooden house sitting next to the main road. We were soon joined by Jon, who immediately began recounting an incident with a falling rocket: Jon: It fell exactly where it was not supposed to fall, inside our herd. And I didn’t receive any information about where it was supposed to fall. I was in touch with them [the Esrange staff], asking for the coordinates, but they didn’t want to share them with me. Now, you know, we have these GPS transmitters on the reindeer that work via satellites. And so I’d seen how some of the reindeer had suddenly left the area, which later made me realize that it must have been due to the rocket. That's why they’d suddenly run away several kilometers. And this creates additional labour for us. Author: In what way? Jon: You have to stop them, return them [the reindeer] to the area where there's pasture. And it's also that, first you have the engine [the rocket], but then you have the payload, which comes down with a parachute. Depending on the wind, the payload can fall somewhere else. And it [the parachute] is very visible when it comes down, because it's big, and I don’t think any reindeer wants to be nearby when this happens.
My interlocutors further recounted that herders’ concerns about past and potential incidents were often met with ignorance and, occasionally, outright disrespect. For example, when complaining to the Esrange staff about stratospheric balloon materials that had been left in their herding lands, one of their friends had not only been dismissed but also called ‘an troublesome bastard [en jobbig jävel]’. Esrange had promised to collect the remains of a balloon experiment within a week, even so these had lied around for several months. The balloons sometimes have a volume of over one million cubic meters and can carry experiments weighing well over a ton. ‘They damage the vegetation’, Jon pointed out, as do unretrieved rocket stages. ‘These are our grazing areas, and you never know what chemicals they [the rockets] might contain. And then we get those chemicals from the reindeer’.
At times, the risks were strikingly severe. Some years ago, two members of Jon and Bengt's Sámi village were not far from getting hit by a falling rocket. When out on their snowmobiles, they had been interrupted by a sudden, roaring noise and later discovered a large, crater-like hole in the ground; 150 kg of metal, pulled down from the sky by gravity, had missed these herders by only one kilometre. This particular incident was due to the Esrange staff's failure to properly inform the herders about the exact day and time of the launch campaign, but hazards prevail even if such information is provided. As Jon made clear: They inform us about the launches [including re-entry], but we don’t have the time to wait, we have to go out regardless. They have these announcements saying that there will be a launch campaign on this or that day or week, but we can’t control our work. The reindeer decide. And we’re not compensated if we stay home.
The Sámi village receives a yearly compensation for the infringement, but as my interlocutors explained, this sum was settled back in the 1960s. It is a small amount that the herders described as merely symbolic. Note in this regard that until the early 1970s, the village was represented by a state-appointed Sámi bailiff who had concluded that a few minor measures were sufficient to counterweight the risks entailed by Esrange's sounding rocket launches. Among these were a series of shelters and a road that ran through Jon and Bengt's herding lands. Whereas the road would provide quicker access in and out of the area, the shelters were meant to protect those herders who were unable to exit during launch campaigns (see Backman, 2015; Sheehan, 2018). Yet these preventive actions have had several negative effects. Maintaining the shelters requires that the Esrange staff use snowmobiles, and to link back to Jon's balloon metaphor, these leave tracks in the snow that prevent the reindeer from remaining in areas with good pasture. ‘We try to create tracks around the herd’, Jon said, ‘and then they come and drive right through’. And with respect to the road, my interlocutors explained that Esrange had gradually lost control over it. Something that was supposed to aid the herders had gradually turned into a public road that is used for recreational activities, including fishing, hunting, berry picking and off-road driving. Thanks to this road, ‘there's a lot more people in the area than there used to be’.
Early in our conversation, the herders asked whether I had any information about the negotiations that had taken place in connection with the construction of the rocket range back in the 1960s. They hoped that by learning about the premises of those discussions, they might be able to put pressure on Esrange, now that it was being developed with a view to launch satellites within the next couple of years. To my surprise, talk about the Sámi was almost entirely absent in my conversations with the Esrange staff and other space actors in the region. Whenever it did come up, the relation between the herders and the space sector was almost always described in positive terms. Yet SSC's framing of the launch site's impact area as uninhabited leaves much to ask for. Similar descriptions of the landscape as a wasteland (ödemark) or wilderness (vildmark) were ubiquitous among local residents in and around Kiruna, and they were strongly opposed by the herders. The landscape, they told me, is far from ‘wild’ or ‘empty’. Rather, it is their work field (arbetsfält) and has been used since time immemorial by their ancestors and according to the reindeer's migration patterns.
In his book Travel Accounts and Other Accounts, the reindeer herder, hunter and author, Turi ([1931] 2019), provides a series of descriptions of Sápmi, parts of which now coincide with Esrange's impact area. 5 Written in the early twentieth century, Turi's descriptions picture a landscape that is remarkably lively and shaped in continuous correspondence with herding and hunting practices, thus bearing witness to deep-seated histories of Sámi involvement in the making of the region's environments (see also Ingold and Kurttila, 2000; Mazzullo and Ingold, 2008). Alongside settlers, states and famine, there are also animal traps, seasonal residences and trails that have been moulded and remoulded by wind, movement and weather.
Drawing on Turi's writings, Joks et al. (2020) note that the North Sámi term for landscape, meahcci, does not map onto understandings of landscape as empty wilderness. Meahcit (plural) are instead ‘lived and worked taskscapes, activity spaces, or places-times-tasks’ that are composed of contingent, uncertain and ‘lively encounters and relations with beings of all kinds endowed with their own will and their own moral sensibilities’ (Joks et al., 2020: 313). As was also conveyed in Jon's comment that the reindeer decide, this means that little can be planned in advance, because encounters and ‘[i]nteractions unfold iteratively and unpredictably, and they have to be negotiated and renegotiated’ (Joks et al., 2020: 314). The underpinning temporalities and spatial conceptions of the space industry do not mesh with such task- and place-based enactments of the landscape. Space activities presuppose a quantifiable spatio temporal emptiness: the landscape needs to be sustained as an impact area for ‘express’ services scheduled several years in advance by international clients.
In an article on the Nordic Arctic region more broadly, Hastrup and Lien (2020: xi) observe that ‘a first step towards resource extraction is often to conjure an image of an empty land ripe for state intervention’. It is on the basis of such understandings that the region has been historically constructed as resourceful (Sörlin, [1988] 2023; Szolucha et al., 2023: 10–11). In Norway, the concomitant securing of territorial sovereignty and encouragement of settlements ‘implied marginalisation, if not replacement, of traditional Sámi patterns of seasonal migration and of multiple landscape engagements, already practised by people living there’ (Hastrup and Lien, 2020: xiii). Others have shown how this was likewise the case in Sweden (Beach, 2007; Lantto, 2014; Lundmark, 2010).
Rocket launches in and around Kiruna should be understood against this background. As Klinger (2021: 12) has argued, ‘[f]or humans to reach “the final frontier”, they must first find a frontier space on Earth that can be made into an empty space’ (see also Mitchell, 2017; Redfield, 2000). Alongside other forms of resource extraction in northern Sweden, space activities participate in the making of what Hastrup and Lien call ‘welfare frontiers’: a formation composed of ‘practices of exploiting, controlling, and even colonizing land seen as somehow peripheral, uninhabited, up for grabs, exploitable from elsewhere, and in need of pioneering development and resource transfer’ (Hastrup and Lien, 2020: vii). In our conversation, Jon drew a succinct connection between such broader configurations and Esrange's infringement on their herding lands: ‘Swedish power, Swedish state – a colonial power’. 6
Besides environing with the help of satellites in orbit, space activities in Sweden also reshape landscapes on Earth in a manner that becomes starkly palpable for the herders. Below, I turn to herders’ deployments of satellite technology for foregrounding environmental relations better in tune with Sámi land practices.
Other satellitarian environments
Jon's comment above about having noticed his herd's sudden dispersal via GPS prompted me to inquire into herders’ uses of satellite technology more broadly. It turned out that this was an extension of a more long-running initiative that had begun in the late 1990s. Originally spearheaded by the Swedish Forestry Agency, the project was later transferred to the Sámi Parliament and now involves most of the Sámi villages across Swedish Sápmi in one way or the other. 7 In conversations with the current project coordinator, I learned that one of their main goals is to support the Sámi villages in their consultations (samråd) with land users. Through a combination of GIS software, herders’ own GPS devices and satellite images that are made publicly available by the state, herders are able to provide evidence of how their reindeer's movement and well-being become affected by various kinds of interference in the landscape. While having started mainly as a means for the herders to monitor the impacts of forestry, the initiative has gradually evolved to also include other forms of exploitation, including tourism, mining and wind power or what the herders sometimes described to me as a form of green colonialism.
Each Sámi village owns the data produced by their GPS-equipped reindeer and the herders also use the technology to track the animals in their daily work. During conversations, several of my interlocutors showed me where their reindeer were located on their smartphones, meanwhile explaining that the technology spared them from spending hours searching for their animals. At times, the combination of satellite images and GPS had even revealed grazing areas that were rarely frequented by the animals but which might prove useful when other parts of the land become overgrazed or difficult to access.
The project coordinator at the Sámi Parliament explained that the situation is such that herders need to ‘speak the idiom of their counterpart’ in order to make their case. Reindeer herding is a practice that is passed on between generations orally and through ‘learning by doing’, but this kind of knowledge does not have any bearing around the negotiation table. There, ‘hard facts’ are all that count. Reindeer herding, she told me, is insufficiently documented, and so ‘[i]f we don’t have this [data], then what are we supposed to show in the consultations?’
Exploiters often come well prepared with environmental impact analyses, vegetation maps and other materials. Yet they fail to consider the cumulative effects of converging megaprojects and forms of exploitation, which ultimately fragment the landscape and prevent the reindeer from following their seasonal pathways. Aware of my interest in the space sector, the coordinator exemplified how this occurs with reference to Esrange's ongoing expansion of its launch pad. The extension of the launch site's enclosed area meant that one of the Sámi villages had to give up additional pieces of land. At the same time, an Australian company was currently planning to establish a new graphite mine a few kilometres to the east, outside the rocket range's impact area. While the land claimed by Esrange might seem insignificant, the consequences will be detrimental in conjunction with the envisaged mine. In combination, these two infringements prevent the reindeer from accessing large segments of the given Sámi village's herding territories.
Under such circumstances, satellite images and GPS coordinates help reveal changes in the relation between different kinds of vegetation and the reindeer's migration patterns. By producing data that may be combined and juxtaposed with exploiters’ data, the Sámi villages are able to visually demonstrate and argue for the importance of land, which the project coordinator framed as one of the core purposes of the initiative. Accordingly, another official at the Sámi Parliament recounted how the combination of GPS and GIS had served to demonstrate that a group of newly installed wind turbines further south have had significant consequences on the reindeer's behaviour. By comparing GPS data from years when the turbines had not yet been installed, the study showed how the reindeer, affected by sound and aeolian vibrations, now avoided an area that extended several kilometres beyond the turbines’ physical location. 8
The instrumentalization of satellite data for land management can be understood in a broader context. In early 2022, Swedish newspapers reported on the discovery of rapidly growing cracks in buildings around the Kiruna city center. Using satellite data, the National Space Agency could identify the cause: ground movements at the local mine, one of the world's largest underground iron ore mines. The provision of such data forms part of a longer campaign to demonstrate the societal or public benefit (samhällsnytta) of space infrastructure. As it happens, the use of satellite data by reindeer herders is presented on the Space Agency's website as one among a series of examples of such benefits.
It is tempting to interpret this as a means whereby the Swedish space sector seeks to display a frictionless relationship with the Sámi and gloss over herders’ complaints. Indeed, Jon and Bengt described the space sector's frequent assertions about a good collaboration with the Sámi as deeply hypocritical, particularly in light of SSC's reluctance to adhere to their pleas or even listen to what they have to say. When seen in this light, herders’ adoption of satellite technology could be understood as but a step towards their own subsumption by the Swedish state. Pursuing such an argument is especially compelling considering that the first Swedish astronaut to visit the International Space Station, Christer Fuglesang, brought a Sámi silver spoon with him on his second trip to the Space Station in 2009, which was then returned to Sámi Parliament representatives two years later at a public event in the northern city of Jokkmokk. If pushed far enough, this somewhat cynical line of reasoning might suggest that, given how satellite data has become an integral aspect of their activities, herders are simply part of a broader outer space public from which they can no longer step outside.
Thus understood, herders’ use of satellite technology is an example of ‘environmentality’, a term coined by Foucault (2008) in his biopolitics lectures to denote governance not through control over populations but indirectly by way of the milieu (see Gabrys, 2016: 191). 9 By entering the very fabric of herders’ relations with their reindeer and, by extension, the reindeer's relations with the landscape, the state effectively brings these actors into an ever-finer ‘grid of observation’ (Foucault, 1980: 169). Reinert (2008) has described in this connection how the industrialization of reindeer slaughter in Norway renders conspicuous otherwise inaccessible herds to the state optic through the production of information. This, he explains, runs athwart ‘an indigenous ethic that works to preserve the autonomy of the reindeer’ (Reinert, 2008: 32), instead ensnaring the herders in modern practices of purification that are predicated on dichotomies between ‘human and animal, domestic and wild, subject and object’ (Reinert, 2008: 33). If allowed to guide my present account, this framework would have to postulate uses of satellite technology as but a form of government by proxy that forecloses herders’ ability to act as anything but a predefined (counter)public.
I am wary of developing such an analysis, especially considering its resonance with contemporary settler colonial discourses on the motorization of reindeer herding in northern Sweden. Why, non-Sámi residents, politicians and journalists ask, are they but not the herders sometimes barred from using snowmobiles, especially as the Sámi motivate their rights to the land with recourse to notions of ‘tradition’? Such objections are reminiscent of earlier concerns among ‘Sámi experts’ about herders’ uses of horse carriages, the assumption being that the mechanization of reindeer herding would ultimately eradicate the imagined monolith of Sámi culture. Hence the twentieth-century establishment of Nomad schools (nomadskolor) by the Swedish state, a paternalistic enterprise that sought to protect the reindeer herding Sámi from the forces of modernization (Lundmark, 2010: 166). These very same essentialist tropes inform contemporary discourses on the motorization of reindeer herding, and in which an analysis along the lines of environmentality risks reproducing albeit with reference to satellite technology.
By the same token, such an analysis would succumb to the panopticon metaphor that I began complicating earlier in this article, and according to which herders’ adoption of satellite technology cannot result in anything but dispossession (or, at best, the constitution of a sousveilling counterpublic). My argument is instead that these practices lay bare space infrastructures' diversifying capacities. Setting aside speculations about the underlying intentions of space actors or herders’ gradual subsumption by the Swedish state, in what follows I suggest that herders’ uses of satellite technology are non-panoticonic and, in so being, complicate the construction of a uniform outer space public.
As I described above, critics of panopticism often emphasize the biases and power relations by which space technology and the production and interpretation of satellite data are inevitably informed. It follows that the panopticon remains a mere ideal, one that is shared by the ‘one-World’ and ‘borderless’ perspectives characteristic of the aforementioned overview effect. This ideal also surfaced in my conversations with space actors for whom the benefits of satellite vision were often increased ‘transparency’, especially in questions around deforestation, climate change and national and international security. However, uses of satellite technology among reindeer herders showed no trace of such totalizing ambitions as they were geared towards drawing out a very specific set of environmental relations.
Emma, a reindeer herder in the Municipality of Härjedalen, explained to me that the juxtaposition of GPS data and satellite images serves to highlight how the timber industry fragments the landscape to such an extent that the reindeer are unable to move between winter, autumn, spring and summer grazing areas to access pasture. These areas are distributed across vast geographies, stretching between the eastern and western parts of the country and in some cases across the border in neighbouring Norway. Land users recurringly disrupt this seasonal grazing cycle by disturbing the reindeer's food-based pathfinding as they search for mosses, fungi, lichens, ferns and other kinds of sustenance. While enthusiastic about the technology, Emma also made clear that, ideally, they would not need this data because forestry companies would simply listen to what the Sámi villages have to say based on their first-hand knowledge obtained on the ground. She pulled up a map covered with red dots and lines in her GIS software. Whereas the dots indicated the places where the reindeer had spent extended periods of time, the lines represented the trails they had used to reach those locations. My interlocutor framed this in terms of a ‘drawing’. The patterns drawn by the reindeer, she said, indicate the reindeer's own ‘areas of interest’. At times, these drawings even reveal areas of interest that the herders themselves have been unaware of when trying to locate their animals: ‘So this is where you hang about when we can’t find you!’
The project coordinator at the Sámi Parliament used a similar idiom: ‘The reindeer draw maps showing that, “we’ve been grazing here”, and then we can play [videos] using different time intervals, which gives us a living map that is used in combination with satellite images’. She described the patterns exposed by such maps as ‘the green infrastructure’ (den gröna infrastrukturen), denoting a landscape composed of different kinds of grazing areas, each of which has a distinct purpose for the reindeer. As a whole, this grazing infrastructure is a prerequisite for the continuation of Sámi land practices. It permits the animals to opt for the pathways they find most convenient with respect to shifting circumstances such as snow depth and weather conditions. The reindeer's avoidance of certain areas, the project coordinator explained, indicates that the green infrastructure has become fragmented and is no longer able to support reindeer herding.
The elicited infrastructure eludes the panopticon metaphor and resonates better with what Latour (2005) has described in terms of oligoptica. Contrasting these with Foucault's analysis of Bentham's ideal prison, Latour suggests that oligoptica ‘do exactly the opposite of panoptica: they see much too little to feed the megalomania of the inspector or the paranoia of the inspected, but what they see, they see it well’ (Latour, 2005: 181). Harvey et al. (2017: 15) offer the following comparison: Whereas everything can in principle be seen from the Panoptic tower (though it is not certain things are actually seen), the oligopticon is capable of gaining very fine-grained views but only of very specific things. It remains constitutively unable to produce an overview.
In arguing that satellite vision has altered human perceptions of the environment, scholarly analyses are prone to presuppositions about a corollary process of homogenization. If the transformative effects of satellite vision are imagined to derive from its (in)capacity to produce planetary overviews, then it follows that those effects are in principle everywhere the same, conditioned only by situatedness and asymmetries of interpretation. By contrast, uses of satellite technology for the elicitation of ‘the green infrastructure’ are suggestive of a proliferation of environmental imaginaries not reduction. Rather than an overview, this oligoptic disposition produces views from ‘beneath’ by allowing the reindeer themselves to draw the environmental–infrastructural relations of relevance; it sees certain things really well and, in doing so, becomes a means whereby a different, oligoptic-satellitarian environmental imaginary may be enacted, distinct from those underpinning the space sector's efforts to respond to the climate emergency – epitomized in Sápmi by the development of small satellite launch capability.
This speaks directly to scholarly pleas for a renewed attention to the other worlds that are already being performed from within current socio-technical and institutional orders. For instance, in Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences, Clark and Szerszynski (2021) discuss Earth's self-differentiating capacities in conjunction with what they denominate ‘earthly multitudes’ or ‘the different ways this planet is engaged, experienced, known and imagined’ (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021: 9). Against globalist visions of ‘full and inclusive humanity’ (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021: 118), Clark and Szerszynski invoke the notion of earthly multitudes to explore other possibilities of being human; ‘pathways that may have been sidetracked, undervalued, overwritten’ (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021: 75–76). This requires that we pay attention to ‘the interstices of existing technical regimes’ (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021: 186) so as to draw out and speculatively amplify sounder futures stemming from situated experimentation and innovation (cf. Ojani, 2023). Gabrys (2016) provides an account on computational-sensing technologies that resonates with Clark and Szerszynski's proposal. In her book Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet, Gabrys suggests that, rather than reductive or homogenizing, ‘computational-sensing technologies are bound up with the generation of new milieus, relations, entities, occasions, and interpretative registers of sensing’ (Gabrys, 2016: 160, emphasis mine). Environmental-sensing projects are therefore ‘creaturly’, Gabrys explains, by which she means that the entities brought together are ‘creations that materialize through distinct ways of perceiving and participating in environments’ (Gabrys, 2016: 160, emphasis original).
Creaturly arrangements of data might yield the kinds of invention whose potential Clark and Szerszynski identify at the nooks and crannies of socio-technical arrangements. My contention is that oligoptic uses of satellite technology by reindeer herders offer an example of such experimentation amidst the global space industry's regard for ‘technofixes’ (Haraway, 2016: 3), whether in the form of asteroid mining, space-based geoengineering or multi-planetary settlement and colonization. As we have seen, these endeavours were not simply about responding to already-existing data with more data so as to add up to a panoptic totality. By allowing for the reindeer to draw the landscape, they instead produced data of a different character, thus foregrounding a limited set of environmental–infrastructural relations that could challenge conceptions of the landscape as empty wilderness.
Conclusion
I wish to close this article by returning to my introductory remarks on Aniara and my conversation with the space actors in Mimasalen at the Institute of Space Physics. While the morale of Aniara was a return to ‘the only orb where Life obtained a land of milk and honey’ (Martinson, [1956] 1999: 127), to use Martinson's phrasing, then this is also a very particular kind of orb. Throughout Aniara, there are recurring metaphors and references to landscapes and natural phenomena intimately associated with Nordic national sentiments. As such, the narrative exhibits a planetary imaginary that, whilst more specific than those that would later define the ‘post-Apollo paradox’, still shares the latter's singularizing tendencies. Such propensities also inform the contemporary commercialization of space and, moreover, the many micro-launchers that are currently being developed across Europe. While often presented as a response to the climate crisis, the environmental imaginaries exhibited by these endeavours are remarkably narrow in that they are predicated on the exclusion of historically marginalized modes of more-than-human relationality.
Consider how, in my meeting with the space actors in Mimasalen, the representative from SSC told me that one of the local space sector's major difficulties is to do with housing and office space. As he explained, the state owns almost all of the land in the region, meaning that ‘if you’re going to construct something in Kiruna, you need to process it with the state, and that's not easy’. He traced the problem to a legal framework that, as he put it, ‘is meant to protect the interests of the reindeer herding industry’. While careful to present a façade of good collaboration, Sámi land practices are essentially seen as an obstacle to SSC's own claims on the subarctic landscape and, concomitantly, to Sweden's attempts to respond to the anticipated surge in satellite launches in the forthcoming decades.
And yet, while space activities in northern Sweden do, indeed, fold into and exacerbate historical processes of marginalization, herders’ oligoptic uses of satellite technology bypass subsumption and are instead telling of how space infrastructures harbour the potential for their own transformation. Therefore, as I have argued, the herders’ activities are not captured by Foucault's notion of environmentality. If the Swedish space sector seeks to draw together an outer space public whose capacity to object is written off, herders’ deployment of satellite technology engender potentially ‘idiotic registers’ (Gabrys, 2016: 209) 10 ; enfolding the reindeer in a computational-sensing assemblage enacts oligoptic-satellitarian environments that are more consonant with the Sámi notion of meahcci, even if translated into a visual register. Such satellitarian environments do not sit well with panopticonic conceptions of the landscape as they are not meant to produce overviews or a sovereign vision, but rather bring into view activity spaces that historical constructions of emptiness have rendered invisible. Allowing, as they do, for the reindeer to decide, occasionally the elicited patterns even surprise the herders themselves. Under the ‘right circumstances’ (Savransky, 2016: 150), these environmental relations might be allowed to take hold as new objects of relevance and modulate the terms of engagement in a concrescent outer space public.
I have argued throughout this article that the infrastructuring of space generates a multitude of environmental imaginaries. As the infrastructural relations between Earth and the extraterrestrial thicken, we see a proliferation of such imaginaries despite prevailing dispositions towards singularization. Ultimately, it is from this emergent multiplicity, at the interstices of existing socio-technical paradigms, that we may elicit more capacious modes of relationality vis-à-vis our more-than-human surrounds.
Highlights
Space exploration and satellite technology have played a significant role in imaginaries about the Earth as an interconnected whole.
Rocket launches in Sweden rely on deep-seated constructions of the subarctic landscape as empty wilderness.
Reindeer herders use satellite technology to render visible more-than-human relations that challenge dominant environmental imaginaries.
Space infrastructures contain the potential for their own transformation away from panopticonic conceptions of satellite vision.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank his interlocutors for sharing their thoughts and experiences and the three anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and suggestions. Research for this article was supported by the National Science Center in Poland, project number 2020/38/E/HS3/00241.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Narodowe Centrum Nauki, (grant number 2020/38/E/HS3/00241).
