Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Earth
English
By (author): Valerie Olson
The first book-length, in-depth ethnography of U.S. human spaceflight
What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it? This is the unusual starting point of Valerie Olsons Into the Extreme, revealing how outer space contributes to making what counts as the scope and scale of todays natural and social environments. With unprecedented access to spaceflight worksites ranging from astronaut training programs to life science labs and architecture studios, Olson examines how U.S. experts work within the solar system as the container of life and as a vast site for new forms of technical and political environmental control.
Olsons book shifts our attention from spaces political geography to its political ecology, showing how scientists, physicians, and engineers across North America collaborate to build the conceptual and nuts-and-bolts systems that connect Earth to a specifically ecosystemic cosmos. This cosmos is being redefined as a competitive space for potential economic resources, social relations, and political strategies.
Showing how contemporary U.S. environmental power is bound up with the production of national technical and scientific access to outer space, Into the Extreme brings important new insights to our understanding of modern environmental history and politics. At a time when the boundaries of global ecologies and economies extend far below and above Earths surface, Olsons new analytic frameworks help us understand how varieties of outlying spaces are known, made, and organized as kinds of environmentswhether terrestrial or beyond.
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