The Fourth Dimension of Care Moving historical environmental activism online

Lea Beiermann

The glacier flickers as it retreats. It looks patchworked, made of square-cut layers of ice stacked on top of one another. I am watching the Columbia Glacier in Alaska retreat, but what I am actually seeing are satellite images, taken over the last thirty-seven years, one giving way to the next in a looping timelapse video, over and over. Google’s new timelapse feature, launched in April 2021, adds timelapse imagery to Google Earth, drawing on more than 24 million historical satellite images. With this project, Google wants to raise awareness of the environmental transformations on our planet and “empower everyone to create positive change” (Moore, 2021). I roam the planet in the familiar Google-Earth fashion, but I am also travelling in time, or so it seems. I catch myself marvelling at Google’s software engineering more than the Columbia Glacier. Zooming out to see the planet in its entirety, I wonder if the timelapse feature continues a long tradition of depicting planet Earth as a blue marble floating in space, a kind of imagery that is deeply problematic.

While the “blue marble” has become an emblem of Western environmental activism, historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz remind us that the stunning images of our planet taken during the moon landing of 1969 also inspired the Nazi aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun to imagine the moon as a new observation platform that would make it easier to locate (and exploit) the Earth’s resources. Bonneuil and Fressoz argue that there is a risk that “the image of the Earth seen from space … gives an intoxicating sense of total overview, global and dominating, rather than a sense of humble belonging” (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016, p. 62).

Environmental historians thus help us historicise Google’s attempt at “creating positive change” through timelapse imagery, laying bare how it continues the long-standing discourse of man exerting power over nature. Google Earth Timelapse gives us a sense of 4D total overview and, being a remarkable feat of software engineering, sustains the idea that we will be able to geo-engineer our way out of the climate and biodiversity crisis. Google frames the timelapse feature as a way of effecting change, suggesting that by adding a fourth dimension to Google Earth – time – we can learn to better care for our environment. However, in the timelapse feature, time, or history, is flattened into satellite images that can be navigated too easily.

This betrays the vast potential history really has for making us care about our planet. While Google Earth shows us historical images, historians can help put these images into context, demonstrating that satellite images are not neutral carriers of historical evidence. As the Historians for Future climate group argues, the climate crisis we are facing is “a human problem, bound up in questions of social justice and human values, and … the humanities can help to solve it” (Historians for Future, n.d.). Being one of the founding members of the group, I am convinced that historians are well equipped to help build sustainable and just climate futures from our environmental past.

During the global climate protests of 2019, several historians, including myself, began to use the #HistoriansForFuture hashtag to connect on Twitter. Drawing inspiration from the Fridays for Future climate movement, we founded Historians for Future in early 2020. Initially, our only plan was to set up a Twitter account and website and help promote activist environmental history projects online. After we used mailing lists to draw some attention to our initiative, our group gradually grew. Since Historians for Future was founded just before the first wave of coronavirus lockdowns in February 2020, our members have only been able to meet in digital spaces; but, as we got used to working together on digital platforms, we managed to write a statement together, launched a blog, and organised an event during Environmental History Week, among other projects.

Our digital collaboration remains a challenge, with time differences and the lack of face-to-face meetings often making it difficult to connect, and the pandemic has exacerbated the precarious position of some of our members who are on temporary contracts or have childcare responsibilities. Since we do not want members to feel that Historians for Future only increases their workload, we encourage everyone to offer only as much time as they can, and we try to make it possible for everyone to participate in small, time-limited projects, for example writing or editing a single blog post. We have found it helpful to collaborate with other organisations as much as possible, making our first event part of Environmental History Week and cross-posting blog posts from the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). We also find it important to think of ways of receiving credit for the work we do for Historians for Future, such as publishing an article like this, which we can more easily integrate in our CVs than administrative work.

Historians for Future points out the importance of history in thinking critically, for example by using source criticism as a way of assessing the reliability of digital sources on climate change. But we also make it clear that, as the literary scholar Rita Felski writes, it is time for us to think about what the humanities can make, or re-assemble, instead of focusing on what they can unmake, or tear down through critical thinking (Felski, 2016). Historians for Future emphasises the imaginative power of the old saying that “it could have been otherwise”, looking to history to imagine more sustainable futures. This imaginative approach echoes the observation made by the STS scholar María Puig de la Bellacasa that “the commitment to care can be a speculative effort to think how things could be different if they generated care” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, p. 96). In a sense, Historians for Future is engaged in historical care work. We care for the future of our planet and its human and non-human inhabitants by bringing a historical perspective to bear on the climate and biodiversity crisis.

While historians have much to gain from the idea of care as a speculative effort in thinking about alternative environmental futures, they also have something to contribute to concepts of care. A historical way of caring adds a fourth dimension to care: time. Historians can help establish caring relationships between historical, present-day, and future inhabitants of our planet. This historical fourth dimension is quite different from the fourth dimension promoted by Google with its timelapse feature, which extracts satellite imagery from its historical context. The approach taken by Historians for Future is more in line with Puig de la Bellacasa’s claim that we need to recognise “the embeddedness of thought in the worlds one cares for” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 75).

Since Historians for Future was founded in 2020, we have had lively discussions about how to write activist histories that are empowering but do not reproduce the man’s-power-over-nature discourse, and the group has also given us room to experiment with digital formats and historiographical approaches. For example, we have compiled a rotating list of accessible educational resources on environmental history that features diverse authors and formats and avoids canonisation – anyone interested in environmental history and activism is invited to contribute. We have also begun to work on an annotated visualisation of the climate crisis, which connects rising temperatures to lesser-known environmental histories, histories of positive change that may help us imagine alternative climate futures. Our virtual event during Environmental History Week brought together storytellers from around the world, who presented environmental histories from their home(s); stories firmly rooted in place that asked us to reconsider our own place in the world, and to look at our academic work from an environmentalist perspective. Our podcast, which we are planning to launch later this year, will allow us to continue some of these conversations with other global scholars and activists.

Perhaps ironically, the digital spaces we meet and work in have a fraught relationship with time. Many early internet users and theorists considered cyberspace to be presentist, or altogether timeless, arguing that while digital items can be archived, they are, in fact, recreated every time they appear on our screens (Shields, 2003). Maybe this makes Google Earth’s satellite images seem even more removed from their historical context. However, thinking about the projects Historians for Future has initiated over the past year, I would argue that by doing historical work in digital spaces, we are reminded that our work is embedded in the present, and that it has consequences for our future. Working in digital spaces has given our group room for a rotating reading list, for inviting diverse storytellers from far-away places, for visualising alternative environmental histories and futures, and, crucially, room for a “speculative effort to think how things could be different if they generated care” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, p. 96).

For their feedback on an earlier version, the author would like to thank Hillary Briffa and Isabelle Schürch.

References and further reading

  1. Bonneuil, C. & Fressoz, J.-B. (2016). The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Translated by David Fernbach. Verso Books

  2. Felski, R. (2016). Introduction. New Literary History. 47(2), 215-229. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2016.0010

  3. Historians for Future (n.d.). Statement. https://historiansforfuture.org/statement/

  4. Moore, R. (2021, April 15). Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years. https://blog.google/products/earth/timelapse-in-google-earth/

  5. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2011). Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things. Social Studies of Science. 41(1), 85-106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312710380301

  6. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press.

  7. Shields, R. (2003). The Virtual. Routledge.