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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the work of technicians in the Nairobi remote sensing sector during the 1970s. Their trajectories help to explain the unequal processes of environmental knowledge production during a period when the notion of a ‘global’ environment gained currency.

Paper long abstract:

While histories of ‘worldmaking’ in the 1970s (through movements like the New World Information and Communication Order) have gained prominence in recent years, the insights of this research have not been brought to bear on histories of how the environment ‘became global’ in the same period. The interests of newly independent states and their citizens were fundamental to the day-to-day production of data as well as the narrative of a shared human existence. Far from being mere recipients of technology and expertise, scientists and technicians in regions such as East Africa navigated the processes of knowledge production that have defined our contemporary understanding of the environment.

Based on preliminary archival work, I will present a case study of East African technicians working in the remote sensing sector – where, since the 1970s, image-based data of the earth’s surface has been produced by satellites and interpreted by specialists in fields from agriculture to forestry. Nairobi is a continental hub for remote sensing, framing its work squarely within the remit of ‘sustainable development’ and adaptation to climate change. But its history predates these ideas, extending to colonial cartography and more concretely to the founding of the Regional Centre for Services in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing in 1974 – two years after Nairobi was chosen for UNEP headquarters. Inventorying and distributing resources was a major stake in independence struggles; collaboration with international organisations, coordinated regionally, appeared a way to meet society’s expectations of the postcolonial future.