Paper short abstract:

This paper highlights the role of animal navigation research and animals in the making of the postwar global communication nexus. It shows that animal researchers were not just active users of satellite technology. Animal behavior also served as sources of inspiration for navigation engineers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper highlights the role of animal navigation research - and to some degree animals - in the making of the postwar global communication nexus. In the historiography on globalization in the second half of the twentieth century, the emergence of global communication and positioning networks, increasingly based on satellite technology, has played a dominant role. Historians of global environments, too, have tapped into this narrative. Authors such as Sabine Höhler, Jennifer Gabrys, or Sebastian Grevsmül have discussed how global technological interconnections contributed to the emergence of planetary thinking that compared life on Earth to that on a carefully maintained space vessel. In this context, animals and biologists have mostly been studied as users of globalized technological systems, for instance in the case of animal tracking by satellite, a practice that has become increasingly important in wildlife management in the 1970s (Benson, 2011).

This paper aims to shift the focus back to animals and animal researchers as actors in postwar and Cold War processes of technological globalization. It shows that animal researchers were not just active users of technology. Their work on animal navigation also served as sources of inspiration for engineers. While the concrete biological mechanisms underlying various animals’ navigation skills are still debated amongst biologists, hypotheses, and visions for their potential applicability to global human navigation, as well as the perceived need for cross-disciplinary coalitions on the issue of navigation, have been tenacious in both the animal navigation and engineering literature.