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Governments use metrics made possible by new data technologies to allocate budgets, manage pandemics, valorize ecosystems, and demonstrate how these actions are legitimate. Big data is pointed to as providing objective answers that emerge untampered from observations of the world as it is – a view from nowhere. While data is more valued than ever in environmental governance, so too are arrangements that seek stakeholders' input and otherwise address their subjective interests – a view from everywhere. Different kinds of metrics perform state actors as accountable in both registers: metrics that are responsive to dynamic conditions; that account for specific stakeholders; that can be prioritized against one another in interactive data visualization tools. Louisiana, USA's Coastal Master Plan is an attempt to stem wetlands loss through fine-scale modeling of large volumes of data and calculation of these kinds of social and environmental metrics. State actors there make accountability claims that appear contradictory: their decisions are legitimate because they are driven by the best available coastal science and technology, while their data tools 'didn't make decisions for us.' As state actors deploy environmental big data and metrics to make sense of it, we should be able to explain these apparently contradictory stances and the controversies that result. STS theory on metrics in environmental governance benefits from characterizing how 'modes of authorized seeing' are given expression by different metrical forms and what brings modes into contact and conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

REMAKING NEW ORLEANS: Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity. Thomas J. Adams and Matt Sakakeeny, editors. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2019. 368pp.; maps, illustrations, bibliog., and index. $28.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-4780-0287-1). [...]

Those concerned with climate governance will want to keep watching what is happening in AI governance. Far from unrelated, the two parallel one another in terms of how fractions of capital—whether within fossil fuel or tech sectors—call for legislating in the face of crisis or for voluntary pledges. In truth, both may be said to be forms of self‐governance. Climate and AI intersect firstly in how they are imagined: dominant climate and AI discourses are both symptoms of Anthropocene thinking and 'capitalist realism'. They also intersect in as much as 'AI for Good' initiatives propose that AI is ethical because it can help to address climate change. What seems missing, however, is any consideration of this climate AI as a procedure—is its knowledge valid, what knowledges does it displace or exclude, what biases are reproduced?—and consideration for its consequences, including harms. Does it actually result in climate mitigation and/or adaptation in a given context? What 'maladaptive' outcomes might it drive? What alternatives does it foreclose? These sorts of questions are ones where geographers will continue to have a lot to say. Those concerned with climate governance will want to keep watching what is happening in AI governance. Far from unrelated, the two parallel one another in terms of how fractions of capital—whether within fossil fuel or tech sectors—call for legislating in the face of crisis or for voluntary pledges. They also intersect in as much as 'AI for Good' initiatives propose that AI is ethical because it can help to address climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number and variety of technologies used for environmental surveillance is expanding rapidly, making constant data collection and near 'real time' analyses possible. 'Smart Earth' describes networked infrastructures comprised of devices and equipment and signals to the human dimensions inherent to developing, deploying and putting technology and large datasets to use. In this paper, we situate Smart Earth in terms of technological products and human practices and consider the relationship between Smart Earth and global environmental governance. Specifically, we review emerging literature and present a case study of an organization founded by environmental non-profit, SkyTruth, tech industry behemoth, Google and marine conservation NGO, Oceana. Called 'Global Fishing Watch' (GFW), this organization builds geospatial datasets, hosts an online mapping platform where anyone with internet access can surveil various types of ocean-going vessels and shares data and map products with scientists and practitioners. Two critical points emerge through the case. First, we show that GFW expands its surveillance capacity by pursuing 'data sharing' partnerships with sovereign states, many in the Global South. Second, the maps and datasets produced by GFW link vessels to a 'flag state' while the firms, subsidiaries and financiers that may own and/or operate these vessels remain obscure – and hence so too does the political economy of oceans fisheries. GFW maps and datasets offer new approaches to tracking fishing and are advancing fisheries science. At the same time, they rely on and are only legible through hegemonic geopolitical and political–economic orders deeply implicated in industrial (over)fishing. The norms and domains of global environmental governance are expanding, but Smart Earth 'solutions' risk leaving the structural drivers of environmental change unaddressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Conservationists, governments, and corporations see promise in digital technologies to provide holistic, rapid, and objective information to inform policy, shape investments, and monitor ecosystems. But it is increasingly clear that environmental data does more than simply offer a better view of the planet. This special issue makes a single overarching argument: that we cannot fully understand the current conjuncture in global environmental governance without understanding the platforms, devices, and institutions that comprise environmental data infrastructures. The papers draw together scholarship from political ecology and science and technology studies to demonstrate how data has become a significant site in which contemporary environmental politics are waged and socionatures are materialized. We address: (1) the contested practices of utilizing and maintaining data infrastructures; (2) the ways they are governed and the territorial statecraft they enable; (3) the socionatural materiality they arise within but also produce. The papers in this special issue show that, against its dominant representation, data is material, governed, practiced, and requires praxis. Political ecologists could adopt such an approach to make sense of the emerging ways in which data technologies shape environments and their politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservationists around the world advocate for "data-driven" environmental governance, expecting data infrastructures to make all relevant and actionable information readily available. But how exactly is data to be infrastructured and to what political effect? I show how putting together and maintaining environmental data for decision-making is not a straightforward technical task, but a practice shaped by and shaping politico-economic context. Drawing from the US state of Louisiana's coastal restoration planning process, I detail two ways ecosystem modelers manage fiscal and institutional "frictions" to "infrastructuring" data as a resource for decision-making. First, these experts work with the data they have. They leverage, tweak, and maintain existing datasets and tools, spending time and money to gather additional data only to the extent it fits existing goals. The assumption is that these goals will continue to be important, but building coastal data infrastructure around current research needs, plans, and austerity arguably limits what can be said in and done with the future. Second, modelers acquire the data they made to need. Coastal communities have protested the state's primary restoration tool: diversions of sediment from the Mississippi River. Planners reacted by relaxing institutional constraints and modelers brought together new data to highlight possible winners and losers from ecological restoration. Fishers and other coastal residents leveraged greater dissent in the planning process. Political ecologists show that technocentric environmental governance tends to foreclose dissent from hegemonic socioecological futures. I argue we can clarify the conditions in which this tends to happen by following how experts manage data frictions. As some conservationists and planners double down on driving with data in a "post-truth" world, I find that data's politicizing effects stem from what is asked of it, not whether it is "big" or "drives." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science Rebecca Lave. University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA. 2012.184 pp. Photo, tables, figures, bibliography, index, notes, appendix. $59.95 [...]

Algorithms – instructions for acting on data, executed by code – are increasingly being enrolled into climate policy governance via the prediction of policy outcomes, the evaluation of climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, and the design of practitioner actions. Yet the political implications of these technological changes in environmental governance are only just beginning to be theorised. In this paper, we examine one particular facet of this emerging politics: the relationship between thinking algorithmically and hegemonic power. Drawing from Laclau and Mouffe's theorisation of hegemony we argue that algorithmic forms of reasoning lend themselves towards producing hegemonising knowledge regimes, with important implications for a democratic politics of climate change. Recognising that algorithms stand for wider socio‐technical assemblages that structure and create knowledge, we call for greater attention to the reliance on algorithms within climate governance – less for the algorithms themselves than for their particular epistemic commitments that create algorithmic ways of thinking, with associated claims to power. Through a critical review of scholarship at the intersection of critical digital studies and environmental governance, we first identify three key epistemic commitments involved in thinking algorithmically: induction, abstraction, and optimisation. We then examine the correspondence between these key features of algorithmic thinking and the conditions that Laclau and Mouffe propose form the grounds for hegemony: objectivity, universality, and necessity. Better understanding what "thinking algorithmically" entails, and the forms of knowing and acting that it affords and excludes, is vital, we argue, to begin naming the political implications and transformative potential of new forms of climate governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Websites have become the primary means by which the US federal government communicates about its operations and presents information for public consumption. However, the alteration or removal of critical information from these sites is often entirely legal and done without the public's awareness. Relative to paper records, websites enable governments to shape public understanding in quick, scalable, and permissible ways. During the Trump administration, website changes indicative of climate denial prompted civil society organizations to develop tools for tracking online government information sources. We in the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) illustrate how five data visualization techniques can be used to document and analyze changes to government websites. We examine a large sample of websites of US federal environmental agencies and show that between 2016 and 2020: 1) the use of the term "climate change" decreased by an estimated 38%; 2) access to as much as 20% of the Environmental Protection Agency's website was removed; 3) changes were made more to Cabinet agencies' websites and to highly visible pages. In formulating ways to visualize and assess the alteration of websites, our study lays important groundwork for both systematically tracking changes and holding officials more accountable for their web practices. Our techniques enable researchers and watchdog groups alike to operate at the scale necessary to understand the breadth of impact an administration can have on the online face of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a novel dataset of hazardous waste shipments among Canada, Mexico, and the United States, we seek to enhance dominant modes of understanding transnational trading and regulation at the scale of the nation-state. We argue that these, while valuable, are limited by methodological nationalism. This epistemological position identifies the nation-state as the most relevant unit of analysis in examining “transnational” phenomena. In the case of transboundary waste trading, tracking waste between nation-states has come at the expense of identification and analysis of specific sites within nations that receive hazardous materials or send them abroad, obscuring the ongoing proliferation of waste havens at a subnational level and related environmental justice concerns. Working against methodological nationalism entails an epistemological shift that we pursue in this article through a series of empirical, analytical, and representational practices. We propose three visualization tactics that undermine nation-centered imaginaries: (1) documenting waste havens within the understudied United States through identifying subnational sites importing hazardous waste for processing; (2) establishing connections through flow maps connecting importing and exporting localities transnationally trading specific hazardous wastes; and (3) analyzing the corporate networks dominating the transnational waste trade. We argue these tactics build toward an alternative conception of methodological cosmopolitanism that highlights alternative routes toward environmental justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This illustrated essay attempts to respond to the slow violence of the hazardous waste trade. We introduce and analyze common representational styles of hazardous waste: greenwashing, ruin porn, environmental justice toxic tours, and Ngai’s concept of the merely interesting. We argue that the first two styles tend to reproduce the status quo, but that the latter two are potentially more disruptive. We then turn to a data set about the transnational hazardous waste trade in North America to argue for and produce alternative representations of this waste, literally drawing from the data and figuratively drawing inspiration from toxic tours and the merely interesting. Our intervention is thus visual as well as conceptual: We argue against status quo representations of hazardous waste and then discuss and produce alternatives based on a novel data set we created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HazMatMapper is an online and interactive geographic visualization tool designed to facilitate exploration of transnational flows of hazardous waste in North America (http://geography.wisc.edu/hazardouswaste/map/). While conventional narratives suggest that wealthier countries such as Canada and the United States (US) export waste to poorer countries like Mexico, little is known about how waste trading may affect specific sites within any of the three countries. To move beyond anecdotal discussions and national aggregates, we assembled a novel geographic dataset describing transnational hazardous waste shipments from 2007 to 2012 through two Freedom of Information Act requests for documents held by the US Environmental Protection Agency. While not yet detailing all of the transnational hazardous waste trade in North America, HazMatMapper supports multiscale and site-specific visual exploration of US imports of hazardous waste from Canada and Mexico. It thus enables academic researchers, waste regulators, and the general public to generate hypotheses on regional clustering, transnational corporate structuring, and environmental justice concerns, as well as to understand the limitations of existing regulatory data collection itself. Here, we discuss the dataset and design process behind HazMatMapper and demonstrate its utility for understanding the transnational hazardous waste trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers of technology illustrate software code's contexts, effects, and agencies as they shape urban space and everyday life, but the consequences of code for nature remain understudied. Political ecologists have critiqued remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based conservation projects, but have not engaged more broadly with the role of software in the contested production, circulation, and application of ecological knowledge. Yet, around the world, data analytics firms and conservation nonprofits argue for optimizing environmental management through faster and bigger data collection and new techniques of data manipulation and visualization. I present a case study from the US state of Oregon, illustrating how conservationists and environmental regulators employ computer programming to plan markets in which entrepreneurs restore stream and wetland ecosystem services to earn offset credits. In these markets, code-executed algorithms constituting spreadsheets, web maps, and GIS utilities generate, relate, and make sense of the data that define credit commodities. I argue that code tends toward three effects: producing a landscape defined by wetlands' modeled value, performing social relations associated with nature's neoliberalization and financialization, and legitimating these moves. Although emphasis on the performativity of code and other technological objects is warranted, the contexts in which these are authored, deployed, and evaluated should remain central to understanding environmental governance. This is to caution against seeing technology as reducing nature and society to state or capitalist rationalities and to hesitate to differentiate prima facie code's work on space and on nature. I call for bridging political ecology and geographies of technology in ways that can explain how code is generative of environmental knowledge, change, and conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I question how representations of tourist destinations color and are colored by development. Presenting the results of ethnographic fieldwork conducted on the southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, I find that the authenticity of portrayals of place is important not for its veracity, but for the social work it performs. Authenticity is not merely socially constructed but expressive of social relations which value people and places. Tourist perceptions of thecaribe suras genuinely underdeveloped—gauged by an analysis of photos and guidebooks as well as surveys—produce an approach to resource use within the community that is limiting. Because the value of the place is its underdevelopment, development itself constrains the possibility of sustaining further growth. Ultimately, reading development via place can be a guide for critically appreciating contemporary patterns of tourism and sustainable development in thecaribe surand elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) formed in response to the 2016 US elections and the resulting political shifts which created widespread public concern about the future integrity of US environmental agencies and policy. As a distributed, consensus‐based organisation, EDGI has worked to document, contextualise, and analyse changes to environmental data and governance practices in the US. One project EDGI has undertaken is the grassroots archiving of government environmental data sets through our involvement with the DataRescue movement. However, over the past year, our focus has shifted from saving environmental data to a broader project of rethinking the infrastructures required for community stewardship of data: Data Together. Through this project, EDGI seeks to make data more accessible and environmental decision‐making more accountable through new social and technical infrastructures. The shift from DataRescue to Data Together exemplifies EDGI's ongoing attempts to put an "environmental data justice" prioritising community self‐determination into practice. By drawing on environmental justice, critical GIS, critical data studies, and emerging data justice scholarship, EDGI hopes to inform our ongoing engagement in projects that seek to enact alternative futures for data stewardship. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) formed in response to the 2016 US elections and the resulting political shifts which created widespread public concern about the future integrity of US environmental agencies and policy. One project EDGI has undertaken is the grassroots archiving of government environmental data sets through our involvement with the DataRescue movement. However, over the past year, our focus has shifted from saving environmental data to a broader project of rethinking the infrastructures required for community stewardship of data: Data Together. By drawing on environmental justice, critical GIS, critical data studies, and emerging data justice scholarship, EDGI hopes to inform our ongoing engagement in projects that seek to enact alternative futures for data stewardship. e00061 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immediately after President Trump's inauguration, U.S. federal science agencies began deleting information about climate change from their websites, triggering alarm among scientists, environmental activists, and journalists about the administration's attempt to suppress information about climate change and promulgate climate denialism. The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) was founded in late 2016 to build a multidisciplinary collaboration of scholars and volunteers who could monitor the Trump administration's dismantling of environmental regulations and science deemed harmful to its industrial and ideological interests. One of EDGI's main initiatives has been training activists and volunteers to monitor federal agency websites to identify how the climate-denialist ideology is affecting public debate and science policy. In this paper, we explain how EDGI's web-monitoring protocols are being incorporated into college curricula. Students are trained how to use the open-source online platforms that EDGI has created, but are also trained in how to analyze changes, determine whether they are significant, and contextualize them for a public audience. In this way, EDGI's work grows out of STS work on "critical making" and "making and doing." We propose that web-monitoring exemplifies an STS approach to responsive and responsible knowledge production that demands a more transparent and trustworthy relationship between the state and the public. EDGI's work shows how STS scholars can establish new modes of engagement with the state, and create spaces where the public can not only define and demand responsible knowledge practices, but also participate in the process of creating STS inspired forms of careful, collective and public knowledge construction.