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Accepted Paper:
Finding point Nemo: Place-making in the south Pacific ocean
Zi Yun Huang
(University of Chicago)
This paper examines the history of Point Nemo, the most "remote" place on Earth in the South Pacific Ocean and how it became an aquatic graveyard for space crafts and space debris in the later half of the twentieth century.
Paper long abstract:
What is environmental history the history of? What can it be about? This paper considers these questions using Point Nemo, the most remote place on Earth in the South Pacific Ocean, as a case study for exploring the fringes of environmental history as it intersects science and technology studies. Since the 1970s, international space agencies have directed over 260 defunct space crafts and space debris into Earth’s Oceans. This paper examines the history of how a certain region in the South Pacific Ocean became an aquatic space ship graveyard and subsequently the most “remote” place on Earth, in short, Point Nemo or the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. Located 1,450 nautical miles from the nearest land, well beyond the 200 nautical mile boundary of territorial seas, Point Nemo as a site for the accumulation of space junk raises new questions about environmental justice in a place outside of environmental jurisdiction. Building on existing scholarship on “extreme environments,” I develop the idea of technoscientific environments to emphasize the crucial role of science and technology in mediating how humans have known, accessed, and constructed places such as Point Nemo, in ways that are deeply value- and power-laden.