Imaging Infrastructures and Global Environments

Dr. Benson’s comments will reflect on the history of global biology and different imaginations of the “global environment.” In February 2014 the journal PLOS ONE published an article by a team at the British Antarctic Survey that had successfully counted "whales from space": that is, Southern right whales that could be identified in high-resolution satellite imagery. Using an image from the WorldView-2 satellite operated by a private company, DigitalGlobe, the team, led by biologist Peter Fretwell, had developed software that could automatically identify 90 percent of the whales found in a manual search. In the conclusion of their paper, the team envisioned a future in which fluctuations in global whale populations could be continuously monitored using automated methods. In his remarks he will trace the roots of such dreams back to the Cold War period and argue that we need to carefully distinguish between the different imaginations of the "global environment" that emerge when particular epistemic communities adapt shared infrastructures to their own purposes.