Environmental Histories of Night: Satellites, Visualization, and Nocturnal Global and Planetary Environments

• In Event: History After Dark: Histories of Nighttime Environments and Cultures

Abstract

The “Blue Marble” image is well known within environmental history, the environmental humanities, and modern environmentalism, but what about the “Black Marble”—Earth at night? Based on research from my current book manuscript, this paper briefly outlines the development of low-light-sensing satellites in the United States originally intended to “see” clouds during the Cold War that inadvertently detected light at night, both natural and artificial. I trace their Cold War roots, preliminary satellite-based studies of artificial light at night between 1973 and 1992, and the development of a sustained research program about nocturnal anthropogenic illumination as seen from low-earth-orbit since 1992.

I argue that these satellites mark a fundamentally new moment in how we view and conceptualize Earth, historically and analytically. I show how these technologies enabled the materialization of a nocturnal global environment, thereby refining scholarship on “the environment” and specifically the global environment. They also materialized a nocturnal planetary environment, contributing to new work on the planetary and planetarity. Moreover, low-light-sensing satellites push us to think beyond environments at night (or the “nighttime environments” in our panel’s title) to consider night as environment. The satellites’ resulting knowledge and visualizations unexpectedly produced environmental histories of night, yet unconsidered in the field.

Author

• Sara B. Pritchard, Cornell University