On Seeing the Planet

No one sees the Earth globally and no one sees an ecological system from Nowhere, the scientist no more than the citizen, the farmer or the ecologist —or, lest we forget, the earthworm.

Bruno Latour, Waiting for Gaia, London, 2011

The Image and Its Critics

In 2017 the art historian T. J. Demos published Against the Anthropocene, and on its cover he put a still from our film Welcome to the Anthropocene: the Earth at night, its continents laced with the light of roads, shipping lanes, air routes and undersea cables.¹ Our picture had become the emblem of what the book opposed.

He was not the first to distrust such pictures. Ever since the Apollo crews brought back their photographs, writers and scholars have asked what the image of the whole Earth hides, whom it flatters, and what it lets us forget. GLOBAÏA has spent its existence drawing the planet, and those questions have shaped how we think about the work. What follows is an attempt at a theory of it.

Five Objections

The first concerns a pronoun. For Demos, Anthropocene imagery serves as “a mechanism of universalization”, letting those who caused the damage “disavow responsibility for the differentiated impacts of climate change”.² Plenty of people, he notes, “would certainly resist identifying with the collective ‘we’” of our narration.³

The second concerns the zoom, and it is Bruno Latour’s. A globe, he said, “by definition is not global but is, quite literally, a scale model”.⁴ Things are ordered by connection, like nodes in a network, and not by size, like boxes inside boxes; hence “there is no zoom effect”.⁵ Pass from one map to a map at a smaller scale and you do not see the same world with less detail. You see other data, assembled another way.⁶ The world drawn as a globe was, in his phrase, “unified too fast”.⁷

Timothy Morton raises a third difficulty. Global warming is for him a hyperobject, spread so widely through time and space that nobody can perceive it whole; what reaches us are its local traces.⁸

Donna Haraway named the fourth. Seeing “everything from nowhere” is a “god-trick”, and its instruments include satellites and the mapping of planetary hemispheres.⁹ Her remedy was partial perspective, which in her argument is the only kind that “promises objective vision”.¹⁰

The fifth is historical. Denis Cosgrove traced two rival readings of the Apollo photographs, One-world and Whole-earth, each with a politics of its own.¹¹ Sheila Jasanoff called the Earth seen from space “a deeply political image”, and showed how slowly and unevenly the global consciousness credited to it actually spread.¹²

The Case for Seeing

Some things exist only at the scale of the planet. Carbon passing between rock, ocean, air and leaf. The slow overturning of the Atlantic. Plastics and reactive nitrogen dispersing through every basin, the ice sheets thinning, the planetary boundaries themselves. Stand wherever you like and you will perceive none of them, because they take shape for us only when measurements from thousands of places are gathered, reconciled and drawn, and without that labour there would be no climate science and, very likely, no climate politics either.

Dipesh Chakrabarty separates the global from the planetary.¹³ The global belongs to human history: trade, empire, communication and capital, a sphere we made for ourselves. The planetary is the Earth system those histories now unsettle, a system that was never made for us and does not put us at its centre. Our maps of the Anthropocene sit across that divide. They draw global infrastructure on a planetary body, and that is what makes them useful, since they show where the made world bears down on the born one.

Responsibility is measured at this scale too. Who emitted what, and since when? Who pays for it now? Answering requires a planetary ledger: the carbon budget, the cumulative emissions of each country, the geography of heat and harm.¹⁴ Set a map of the world’s lights beside a map of who lit them, and the lights stop looking like the work of one undivided humanity.

Against Every Zoom

In 2019 Latour replied to a letter of ours. He asked us to forgive what he called his obsession against the globe, and assured us it implied no dislike of images of the Earth taken as a whole. His worry lay in what slips into such images: a unity presented as already made, politically finished, which then undoes every patient effort to compose the politics of Gaia piece by piece. One could, he wrote, go on making beautiful global images and still fight, in Gaia’s name, against every effect of zoom.

We have taken that double task as ours. A planetary image turns dangerous when it behaves like a zoom, suggesting that the planet is one picture we need only enlarge until our own street appears. Latour gave his alternative in one line, “la connectivité oui, les échelles non”: connectivity yes, scales no.⁶ Between a riverbed and a distant mine there is no nesting of boxes. There is a link, and someone has to trace it.

The View from Within

Our own answer to the zoom, and perhaps the most original thing we have offered to the perception of the Earth, is InnerEarth. We usually meet the planet from outside: a globe on a desk, a map on a wall, the blue marble photographed from orbit. InnerEarth turns that relation inside out. It places the viewer inside the sphere, in a space that wraps all the way around. Your own location lies at your feet, at the nadir. Your antipode, the point on the opposite side of the Earth, hangs overhead at the zenith. Your neighbourhood lies below you, the continents climb the walls, and the far side of the world forms the vault.

There is no horizon. Maps have one, lived landscapes have one, and even the astronaut sees one, the curved limb of the planet against the dark. InnerEarth removes it, so that the teleconnections, cycles and flows of the Earth system can be followed as one continuous surroundings, an environment one stands in and not a picture one looks at. Its projection, the Complex Algorithmic Spherical View, carries the complex logarithmic view devised at the University of Konstanz onto the inner surface of a sphere.¹⁵ The mapping is conformal, so shapes stay recognisable while magnification changes by orders of magnitude: the nearer a place, the more detail it keeps; the farther, the more it is gathered and compressed, until whole continents fit overhead. Detail and globality share one field of view, and nothing has to be enlarged. Down is local. Up is global.

What InnerEarth aspires to is transcalarity: near and far at once, or, put differently, details in context. It means holding several scales in a single gaze, the way our own eyes already do on a summit, where we can make out the grain of the rock beside our boots while taking in the whole mountain we stand on and the valleys beyond it. Perception has never needed a zoom to do this. A spherical logarithmic view simply extends that ordinary experience to the whole planet. Our InnerEarth exploration is an early experiment in this direction, and still a pale version of the vision: it already turns the Earth inside out around the viewer, with the nadir underfoot and the antipode overhead, but it does not yet carry the logarithmic gradient that would let the rock and the mountain, the street and the continent, be seen together.

Two things follow. InnerEarth has no zoom to fight, since street and continent are present at once, joined by a continuous gradient. And it has no view from nowhere, since every view begins from somewhere: the ground beneath a particular viewer’s feet. Two people standing in different cities stand inside two different planets, each true, each partial. Haraway asked for a vision that starts from a body and says where it stands. This is one way to build it.

The same search runs through our other experiments. We draw the Earth from many centres and in many orientations, South-up or centred on places usually pushed to the edge, so that no projection can pass for the planet itself. Sfera compares where a zoom would enlarge, gathering the planet’s water, air, life and human-made mass into spheres at true scale. And How We Learned We Live on a Planet follows the planetary as a long realisation with countless authors, from long before anyone photographed the Earth from orbit.

Many Eyes, No Outside

If nobody sees from nowhere, the planet can only be seen from many somewheres, joined together. That was Haraway’s own answer to the god trick: see from a body, say where you stand, and connect your partial view to others.¹⁰ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak proposed planetarity in a kindred spirit, a way of dwelling on the Earth that resists the flattening of globalisation and holds the planet as something we inhabit on loan.¹⁶

This, for us, is the heart of the matter. The planetary is no picture waiting for the right camera. We are uncovering it together, slowly, and it will come into view only through many voices, worldviews and points of view: scientists and the keepers of other knowledges, the farmer and the modeller, the coast that floods and the room where the decisions are taken, and, lest we forget, the earthworm. A planetary image earns its place when it opens onto those other views. When it shuts them out, it does harm.

The Loss in Every Map

We call the principle behind this the Minimum Information Representation Algorithm, or MIRA. Any representation of a universal concept loses information and carries bias, and the wider its scope, the more falls away. The loss cannot be avoided, so it should at least be shown. Each planetary image owes its reader a minimum of information about itself: what it shows, what it leaves out, how it was made, whose world it describes, and where else to look.

A map need not explain everything. It should let its reader see what it holds, what it drops, and what it claims.

Explorers

The questions Demos put to our image were good ones. Who built these roads and routes? Who profits from them, who lives beneath them, and what never made it onto the map? We want our images to provoke such questions and to leave room for the answers.

We do not claim to see the planet. We are curious but humble explorers of new ways of seeing it.