Knowing the planet: Practices and technologies of environmental knowledge production in Africa (1950-2000)

• Applicant: Dr. Ismay Milford
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; History of Science
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 555897172

Through case studies on the African continent, this Emmy Noether research group will analyse satellite technologies and practices of remote sensing, together with their application in the earth sciences, pioneering a more dispersed global history of environmental knowledge production. During the second half of the twentieth century, environmental knowledge production was intrinsically global: international organizations, wielding specific technologies, sought to consolidate and standardize vast quantities of data about local environments from every region of the globe. Ambitions to survey and inventorize had a longer history: large-scale geological and meteorological surveys in the mid-nineteenth century underpinned European imperial expansion. From the 1960s onwards, low-orbit satellites were heralded as a breakthrough in the realization of this ambition, producing data and images relating to the earth’s surface (remote sensing) and atmosphere. Managing this data internationally proved challenging, precisely because its applications spanned (and disrupted the remit of) various fields in the earth sciences, including meteorology, hydrology, and geology. Today, historians have limited understanding of how this process looked outside of centers of economic and political power in Europe and North America, even though remote sensing was imagined to be most transformative for the least mapped regions of the world. The need for other geographical vantage points is urgent, given claims that non-Western perspectives on the environment have been marginalized, while many formerly colonized regions face the most extreme effects of climate change. The research group comprises four members. My own monograph project historicizes Nairobi’s regional remote sensing center - East Africa being a space viewed by colonial powers since the nineteenth century as a 'laboratory' for scientific experimentation, a site for the exploitation of natural resources, and later a hub for international environmental policy, with Nairobi chosen as the headquarters of the UN Environment Program (UNEP) in 1972. Two postdoctoral projects and one PhD will trace the practical applications of satellite data and related surveying technologies in three scientific fields entangled in discourses of sovereignty and development: hydrology, geology, and (agricultural) meteorology. Under my leadership, the research group will scrutinize a central hypothesis: the events and debates of political decolonization in the second half of the twentieth century fundamentally shaped understandings of the planetary environment.

• DFG Programme: Emmy Noether Independent Junior Research Groups