On historical photographs of the Orange Empire in Southern California

The goddess Pomona stands watch over the inner sanctum, her arms outstretched in welcome. Though the temple is laden with ripe fruit, visitors to the shrine are left in no doubt: the oranges are not for taking. Or so we might assume. But, in truth, it’s quite possible that the whole display was put together primarily for the photograph, or, rather, for its dissemination in the press. Perhaps, once the exposure had been made, people could simply help themselves. Either way, the structure is pure theatre, a disposable monument to youth and fecundity that from today’s perspective appears decidedly eccentric.

We can better make sense of the extravaganza when we recognise its disingenuous character. It isn’t, of course, an offering to the goddess of fruit trees and orchards, or even really a celebration of the orange as such, as pure gift of nature. Rather, it is a kind of triumphal paean to the orange as commodity. The particular cultivar that underpinned the rise of southern California’s mighty citrus industry, the ‘Orange Empire’, was the Washington Navel, brought to California from a monastery in Bahia, Brazil. It was this which fuelled the transformation of the dusty L.A. basin into a picturesque sea of aromatic groves.

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On the level of theatre or metaphor, the luminous structure stands as an ornamental repository for something more significant: whatever lies within. But it is, of course, a facade, a Potemkin shrine - a Hollywood set like any other.

We can discern something similar operating on the level of political economy. Although the words on the pediment, and the overall excess of the scene, are apparently suggestive of a state of rivalry between various orange-producing counties, this too is something of a front: the assertion of local pride belies a longstanding situation of strategic coordination. In 1893, a powerful growers’ collective, the Southern California Fruit Exchange, was founded. It worked to create a unified image for California citrus, and enjoyed a virtual monopoly for decades. Its great clout was not enough, however, to prevent the systematic destruction of the groves in the postwar period. By the year of this photograph, the heyday of citrus in the L.A. basin was almost over.

The archive of the California Historical Society Collection is home to an extraordinary array of photographs taken between 1860-1960. Browsing the collection one day, I became curious about the large number of records testifying to the Orange Empire. They opened my eyes to a whole period in the economic and cultural history of this region, a crucial but lesser-known stage in the development of one of the world’s most influential megacities.

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Why, out of a trove of more than 25,000 records, did I find this theme so compelling? In part due to the vital role that images played in luring would-be workers from the East. Boosters presented the state as the nation’s garden, an ‘Eden’ famed for its Mediterranean airs. But also because some appear to bear witness to a gentler, softer form of enterprise that is not generally associated with California.

The longer you spend with the archive, though, the more the romantic impression conveyed by certain images (of snow-capped peaks, abundant harvests, manual labour) is complicated. These are not windows onto a lost horticultural idyll, but rather documentary evidence of a sprawling plantation economy, factories in the field. Every stage of the production process is represented: seeding, picking, grading and packing. There are sweeping aerial overviews, making clear the regimentation of trees into orderly rows, and close-ups of the fruit as they’re swept along conveyor belts.

Occasionally, such disenchantment is intrinsic, self-contained. It’s all too easy to project onto this gorgeous photogram, for instance. The man kneeling before us, canvas bag slung casually round his waist, stands in for the Gatherer, a representative of the Jeffersonian ideal, attuned to the rhythms of nature. Closer scrutiny of the image throws up an uncomfortable detail, however. Just to the left of the vibrant orange tree, faint yet unmistakable, lies the outline of a mesh fence - a reminder of confinement, property, and, on a broader scale, the man’s own enmeshment within an expansive enterprise reliant upon a hierarchical workforce of racialised wage labor.

Picking and loading, Riverside, c.1900

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Artesian well, c.1900

The story of the Orange Empire’s rise and fall takes on an added poignancy when one considers that in Riverside, the spiritual home of California citrus, the enterprise grew out of utopian dreams. The first Washington Navels were planted there in 1874 by the Spiritualist Eliza Tibbets who, along with her husband Luther, was part of a wave of idealistic settlers from the East. The community had been founded a few years earlier by the abolitionist lawyer John North. With its abundant sunshine, mild temperatures, minimal frost, and porous alluvial soil, the region was ripe for flourishing. The San Gabriel mountains provided both a suitable microclimate and, in time, a reliable water source for the expanding Garden.

To begin with, though, growers could rely on an apparently inexhaustible flow of pent-up paleowater. The discovery of immense subterranean reservoirs in the 1870s provided a straightforward solution to the problem of irrigation: artesian wells. As this miraculous water source started to dwindle, however, more radical interventions into the landscape were required. The neighbouring town of Ontario was in many respects a pioneer. Its innovative system of irrigation, hydroelectric power and land rights became a model for many other horticultural ‘colonies’ in the surrounding basin. In 1881, the Canadian brothers George and William Chaffey routed mountain streams down to the basin via concrete pipes; the desert tract was soon transformed.

In Riverside, residents experimented with various cash crops, but it was the Washington Navels that proved pivotal. They were unrivalled in flavour, size and sweetness, and, due to a mutation, almost seedless - meaning that growers had to graft cuttings onto other varieties of citrus trees, propagating, essentially, millions of clones. A June 1880 article in the Riverside Press and Horticulturist compared the variety with another batch of Navels imported from Australia:

The marked points of difference between the two Navel oranges lie in their external appearance. Instead of being like the Australian, ribbed lengthwise, it is smooth and more globular. The skin is of a finer texture, has more of a satin like appearance and shows a much higher color, being of a bronzy gold tint.

By the early 1890s, a sea of orange groves ran from the interior counties of Riverside and San Bernardino into Los Angeles. Many farmers switched from growing wheat to fruit. Land prices soared and, among the groves, new towns emerged: Pomona, Corona, Redlands, Highlands.

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Southern Pacific Railroad line near Redlands, c.1880. The opening of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1876, and the advent of refrigerator cars in the late 1880s made possible nationwide shipping for the first time.

For the Fruit Growers Exchange, the need to foster a market for the continuously expanding agricultural yield became paramount. As Pierre Laszlo observes in Citrus: a History, oranges had historically been seen in Europe and its diaspora as symbols of opulence. Sunkist embarked on a mission to reshape this perception. Its iconography began to appear on billboards all over the country, and consumers increasingly came to see the orange as health-promoting, a vitamin-rich antidote to the pathologies of urban life.

The advertising strategy necessarily occluded a troubling fact about the conditions of production, that the industry was becoming increasingly dependent on exploited minorities (Chinese during the 1870s, then Japanese, Mexicans and Filipinos) to work as pickers, packers and sorters, who were routinely excluded from the body politic. California’s Alien Land Law of 1913, for instance, forbade immigrant farmers from owning land or possessing long-term leases. In contrast, Sunkist posters frequently featured a Victorian lady or rural maiden bedecked with flowers proffering fruit - an unmediated transaction, direct from garden to household.

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Looking at these images from inside packing houses, it strikes me that while the machinery, uniforms and buildings may be obsolete, the underlying forces and rationality remains operative. In the early twentieth-century, the Exchange spearheaded the introduction of what political theorist James Burnham later dubbed the ‘managerial revolution’ into California agriculture. This meant a new emphasis on efficiency, scalability and the implementation of scientific growing techniques, which in turn stimulated new tools for growing, packing and shipping the fruit: mechanised orange graders, box makers, labellers, packing equipment and pest eradicators. A moment which marked, arguably, the crystallisation of factors that are now typical of contemporary agribusiness.

All these factors came together to fuel a highly profitable enterprise which reached its peak in the 1920s and 30s. Then, when it was no longer fit for purpose, when events - sprawl, war, disease, technological change - took over, it was rapidly destroyed. In the decade after World War II, Southern California lost a quarter of its citrus landscape. Thousands of acres of trees were bulldozed every year, and by 1970 agricultural acreage in Los Angeles County had fallen by over ninety-six percent. One of America’s most picturesque landscapes, the visual magnet that had attracted hundreds of thousands of immigrants to the state, had been eradicated.

But as Douglas Casaux Sackman puts it, the fruit trees were not so much destroyed as ‘metabolised by the Growth Machine’, which had simply found more profitable ways to manage the landscape. Great mounds of forlorn trees were burned, chipped and shredded - sold on for firewood and mulch. As can be seen in these remarkable aerial photographs by William Garnett, tract homes spread out from urban centres in waves of state-subsidised development, carpeting the basin, and when there was no more flat land, the surrounding hills were terraformed into landslide-prone terraces. The resulting sprawl became a national scandal.

It’s tempting to see this as the climax of a struggle between industrial and agrarian California. However, as is evident from many photographs in the archive, the Orange Empire was already part of the industrial world. In environmental historian William Cronon’s terms, we could perhaps view its rise as the grafting of a ‘second’, artificial nature onto the given, pre-existing (‘first’) nature. However, since the given landscape was far from untouched wilderness (Southern California was an outback during the Spanish colonial period, consisting of large ranchos), this is also problematic. Ultimately, we should heed Cronon’s caution about the inseparability of these terms: the nature we inhabit is never purely one or the other, but rather a ‘complex mingling of the two.’

References

• Francesca Russello Ammon, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (Yale University Press, 2016)

• Douglas Casaux Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (University of California Press, 2007)

• Willian Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W.W. Norton, 1991)

• Pierre Laszlo, Citrus: a History (University of Chicago Press, 2007)

Poisoned Garden: Richard Mosse's Broken Spectre (180 Studios, 2022-23)

“I would like white people to stop thinking that our forest is dead and placed here without reason. I would like to make them listen to the voice of the xapiri who play here incessantly, dancing on their glittering mirrors. Maybe they will want to defend it with us? I would also like their sons and daughters to understand our words. I would like them to make friendship with our sons and daughters in order not to grow up in ignorance. For if this forest is entirely devastated, no other forest will ever be born.”

— Davi Kopenawa

There’s a striking tension in the title of Richard Mosse’s new project. The conjunction of two concepts which really shouldn’t go together - one suggesting materiality, the other its opposite: a lingering resemblance of some departed being. Even in strictly metaphorical terms, the image doesn’t feel right, is jarring. We tend to think of ghosts as unitary, indivisible apparitions that may nevertheless contravene the laws of physics. And so the notion that they could somehow break is not intuitive. Spectres may appear, disappear and hang ominously over a place, unseen yet always felt, but they cannot crack like a precious glass vase. As the master-signifier for the cycle of imagery which loops appallingly onwards in Broken Spectre, though, this inherently discordant phrase is, I think, apt. What is the Anthropocene if not a historical epoch, or rather boundary Event, in which we have apparently ‘broken’ the very planet whose Holocene state now figures as a kind of spectre in political discourse?

How this predicament came about is not a question Mosse sets out to answer. Broken Spectre, as multi-channel film and photobook, immerses the viewer in one of the great resource frontiers of the twenty-first century, Amazonia, and confronts us with, as Jon Lee Anderson puts it, a ‘composite view of an almost unfathomable crime in progress’. It’s not just the destruction of primary rainforest with fire and chainsaw, jeopardising all manner of lifeforms. It’s also the reckless daring of the tipping point, beyond which begins the rapid transmutation of the rainforest into savannah, a cascade so terrible it feels unreal. The result is intense, overpowering. You’re never quite sure where to look. There’s no beginning, and no end; just a horrifying, beautiful panorama. And it dramatises something crucial about our situation: very many people continue to act as though ‘nature’ is just that mute, impersonal stuff of Enlightenment philosophy. Basically something to be mastered, acted upon, and, in the fundamentals, dependable - an essentially stable ground for human action.

At certain moments while watching the film, in a sort of pre-reflexive mode of thought, I caught myself wondering: do these people not know that what they’re doing? Do they not care? Much of the film’s power, though, stems from its subtle conveyance of the multi-dimensionality of despoliation. There’s no simplistic moralising, and yet there’s still an implicit meta-narrative - and in this way it confounds. Loggers, ranchers (vaqueiros) and illegal miners (garimpeiros) are not crudely vilified, but on a structural level there is no equivocation or understatement. Ben Frost’s visceral soundtrack, which draws on ultrasonic field recordings - birds, insects and bats - is key to creating this effect. But I had to keep checking myself; even as we’re taken up close to these people, there’s a nagging knowledge that they’re just bit players, local actors - often, too, with few other options. Most of the surplus from these operations is siphoned off to São Paolo or further afield, and in many cases the agents of destruction are languishing in debt bondage. Here then, is the film’s central tension.

In the cultural imagination of the West, at least, the signifier ‘Amazon’ is charged with an existential resonance. The urgency is real. For as we cannot fail to be aware, Earth’s largest rainforest is vulnerable, and we are in danger of losing it altogether. How could somewhere so vast and flourishing just disappear? Although many of her inferences have since lost favour, the archaeologist Betty Meggers’ 1971 characterisation of Amazonia as a ‘counterfeit paradise’ remains helpful. The lush primary forest, she suggested, a remarkable adaptation to unfavourable climatic conditions, is a ‘castle built on sand’. The foundation contributes nothing to the structure’s overall strength, and if the bonds are sufficiently weakened, the entire configuration, this ‘masterpiece of natural selection’ will collapse and disappear.

And yet, at the same time, deforestation has become so normalised, or so Mosse believes, that a radical subversion of the established image regime is needed to shock us into simply seeing it. To this end, much of Broken Spectre is shot on infrared film, specifically Kodak HSI, a discontinued stock which renders vegetation a brilliant, ghostly white. As a result, it’s highly effective in showing up the boundaries between life and death - charred wood and still vibrant, beleaguered striving. In the accompanying photographs, there are almost tender portraits of vaqueiros and garimpeiros, rendered delicate and gossamer-like by the film, which also ‘fails’ in a very visible way, with certain images showing signs of degradation, and others mottled with imperfections and the photographer’s fingerprints. The emulsion is highly sensitive to heat, especially humidity.

The film’s refusal of the conventional documentary style doesn’t end here. Broken Spectre’s searing, psychedelic colour palette comes from a comparatively futuristic technique: multispectral imaging. Unlike infrared, this can capture multiple wavelengths and has wide application in environmental monitoring. Scientists employ the technology to track changes in vegetation cover, detect deforestation and monitor the overall health of the forest ecosystem via satellites. A lofty enforcement tool. But, notably, the same remote sensing capabilities are also employed by agribusiness, to improve yields and precisely manage harvesting times, and by illegal miners to detect subtle variations in soil and topography - the ‘spectral signatures’ which indicate the presence of certain minerals. As such, Mosse’s chosen medium is internal to the narrative; the film could be seen as a kind of immanent critique.

Over the years, numerous artists have sought to represent ‘climate change’, which, in its amorphous yet all-encompassing scope, approaches the unrepresentable. In an effort to visually grasp this ‘hyperobject’, many have turned to the ‘God’s eye’ perspective afforded by aerial photography. Such is the grandeur of the resulting images that, in discussing Edward Burtynsky, Daniel Beltrá and others, commentators often reach for the ‘sublime’ - whether toxic, petro, industrial. All gesturing, I think, to the sense that these blasted landscapes - mines, tar fields, oil spills, landfill site - induce both aesthetic pleasure and existential grief.

Mosse and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten don’t eschew such elevated perspectives in Broken Spectre. Indeed, the helicopter sequences are among the most arresting moments in the film: we fly over clear-cuts, flooded valleys and vast open pits. But it works on other levels too. Blended into the macro, and occasionally interrupting it entirely, is imagery from the other extreme: close-ups of the undergrowth, transplanted chunks of rainforest drenched in ultra-violet light (in another echo of scientific practice) and photographed in a contrived indoor environment. A single square-inch of soil in the Amazon, Mosse reminds us, is ‘tripping with life’, and this dimension of the project reveals the micro-worlds whose interests we rarely consider. These images, ‘almost gothic nocturnes’, also probe the limits of human perception and help to relativise it. In this respect, I was reminded of the concept of Umwelt as proposed by the biologist Jakob von Uexüll (1864-1944) to describe how the world is sensorially perceived by particular organisms. Each inhabits a different subjective environment, and so there is an interpretive gap between human perception and ‘reality’. What we see in everyday life, around 0.0035 percent of the spectrum, is just the quirk of a bipedal mammal. On one level, Broken Spectre could be seen as a meditation on this gap.

Between these two extremes is the human scale, which has two poles: destroyers and defenders. We witness innumerable acts of violence in Broken Spectre: the felling of an ancient tree, hacking and burning, the dismemberment of slaughtered cows. A kaleidoscope so intense I was almost grateful when the panorama shifted back to an overview. The let-up is only ever fleeting, though. In one sequence, the horror returns sonically: an eerie, pulsating cacophony gradually builds until suddenly pierced by a truly spine-chilling siren. There are scenes of daily life on ranches, and of settlers at work. Mosse has spoken of spending the great majority of his time in the field negotiating access to these spaces. The Amazon is among the most dangerous places in the world for environmental activists, so being upfront about his intentions was out of the question. It turned out that flattery was the best approach. These macho figures are often proud of what they’ve achieved, and showing admiration for their tenacity and success in beating back the frontier of the jungle was the best way to win them over. An unpalatable bargain, perhaps, but I think a price worth paying.

Even though they’d doubtless feel betrayed upon watching Broken Spectre, I also wonder whether on some level they wouldn’t mind the portrayal. The vaqueiros in particular are amply dignified. In one scene, the camera follows as they gallop along a track in in ten-gallon hats, the lush vegetation on both sides gradually giving way to a blasted prairie. Evocation of the Western was a deliberate strategy on the filmmakers’ part, an attempt to somehow implicate the viewer through familiar imagery - to remind us that these processes are tied to a much longer history of encroachment into ‘wilderness’ by Europeans. Remarkably, only around one percent of the Amazon’s primary forest was lost before 1970. But with the construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway under the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985), and, not long after, BR-163, the ‘Soy Highway’, the rainforest was opened up for large-scale exploitation. In this way, it is just the latest bitter frontier of ‘progress’.

If industrial plundering of the rainforest is a relatively recent phenomenon, the decimation of its native peoples is not. Until quite recently, it was thought by scholars that pre-contact communities were small and itinerant. But it is now widely believed that the seasonally-inundated várzea floodplains, at least, were densely populated before the arrival of Europeans. Evidence points to the presence of agricultural chiefdoms in areas like Marajó island, and it’s even possible that, in addition to cultivating maize and manioc, people managed banana plantations. Crucially, though, none of this activity undermined the ecosystem. In the early 1990s, the archaeologist Anna C. Roosevelt concluded that contemporary Amazonian groups are descendants of people who fled to the unproductive upland environment to escape disease, missionaries, and slave raiders. Recognising this history not only underscores the devastating impact of the conquest, but also stands as a corrective to longstanding portrayals of the rainforest as essentially primeval, untouched. Even after overtly ideological narratives about ‘savages’ lost traction, certain strains of anthropology continued to propagate a geographically deterministic view of indigenous Amazonia up until the 1980s. According to the paradigm of cultural ecology, in particular, the attainment of civilisational autonomy was prohibited by native peoples’ subjection to a hostile, constraining nature. Roosevelt’s approach was instrumental in sidelining the view that Amazonia lacked the necessary conditions for social complexity to emerge.

Another perspective can be gleaned from ethnography. While developmentalist discourse relies on the Amazon being characterised as a wilderness, for the Achuar of Ecuador, as the anthropologist Philippe Descola has observed, the rainforest is rather an immense garden carefully cultivated by some spirit, an ‘extension of the world of the homestead’. Not only does it provide an abundance of food, medicine and hallucinogens, its other inhabitants are not seen as beasts: even the great predators - jaguars, anacondas - are associates of shamans, who are, of course, included in society. As such, the discontinuity of outward forms belies an essential continuity of souls. And although the precise hierarchies and modes of interaction vary across cultures, the ontological system underlying this according to Descola, animism, is common to many Indigenous peoples of Amazonia.

We come closest to an encounter with ‘radical alterity’ in Broken Spectre during the speech of Adneia, a young Yanomami woman. For around seven minutes, the dyssynchronous channels resolve into one (momentarily blacking-out entirely while the reel is changed), as she stands before a circle of her people, flinging her arms with every utterance, at once distraught and furious.

‘Who will helps us to live in peace? Who will recover this forest?…It’s no use saying for nothing that you have lots of money. Put up a wire forbidding the prospectors to pass! Help us! Bring health back to this place! We want to live in peace. Be firm! You white people, see our reality! Open your minds! Don’t let us talk so gallantly and do nothing…This is what I ask of you, my friends: don’t film me for nothing. I don’t want that. I want you to really help me.’

It makes for deeply uncomfortable viewing. Sitting there in a darkened basement off one of London’s grandest streets, aware that our daily actions interpenetrate with the processes driving destruction of the Yanomami world, we know, feel, that we are the probem. But perhaps what’s most unsettling about the soliloquy is the nagging feeling that it won’t make much of a difference. With the return of Lula to office, there is hope, once again, that deforestation can be slowed. But it will take time to restore environmental agencies gutted under Bolsonaro, and it’s possible that 2023 will even see a rise. At the start of the government’s operations against garimpeiros in January, officials estimated there were up to 20,000 people connected with illegal mining in Yanomami territory - a chilling indication of the previous administration’s negligence. In a country riven by culture-war, in short, the long-term forces arrayed against the rainforest are formidable.

The Yanomami have long been one of the best-known Indigenous peoples among anthropologists and Western publics - if not for wholly salubrious reasons. In recent years, though, their mythocosmology has travelled beyond ethnographic circles in a more or less unadulterated way via a remarkable book, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (2013), which, like Broken Spectre, contains a profound appeal to the Western conscience. In some ways a kind of memoir, offering an account of Davi Kopenawa’s upbringing, his shamanic induction (‘becoming other’) and subsequent expeditions into the world of whites (the people Bruno Latour calls ‘Moderns’), first to Boa Vista and Manaus, and then to far-flung cities in Europe and North America, it also provides an unparalleled insight into the Yanomami thought-world. Part two of the book, ‘Metal smoke’, offers a haunting account of how Kopenawa makes sense of the death and destruction wrought by settlers - ‘Earth-eaters’ - in Yanomami cosmological terms. Although we don’t know to what degree his beliefs differ from other Yanomami, The Falling Sky can therefore be seen as a kind of direct, hermeneutic counterpart to Broken Spectre.

In conversations with the anthropologist Bruce Albert, Kopenawa vividly describes his confrontations with garimpeiros. He is forced to watch as they dig vast ditches, blast the land with high-pressure jets and soil the waterways with motor oils and a yellowish mud, all in a quest for an ‘evil thing’ about which the Yanomami knew nothing - gold (a vain search, anyway, because such dust is only derivative of the ‘true’ metal, which, Kopenawa explains, is buried much deeper and defended by spirits). Sometimes, working alongside FUNAI agents (the federal agency responsible for protecting Indigenous territory), he was able to expel prospectors from his ancestral land. But they always came back, in greater numbers, armed and ‘very bellicose’. Now, perceiving the desynchronisation of seasons and hydrological cycles, the shaman senses that the world is heading towards chaos. Fumes from factories are spreading in all directions, sickening trees and endangering even the xapiri spirits. The sky itself will become riddled with holes from the heat of mineral fumes, an outcome so far avoided only because hutukarari sky spirits are constantly pouring water on it to cool it down. But they cannot defend the Yanomami against evil things indefinitely.

As the Yanomami see it, the ignorance of whites (nicknamed ‘monster peccaries’ on account of their ceaseless digging and upsetting of the soil) as to the agency of spirits and shamans has already started unleashing a supernatural revenge in the form of droughts and deluges. If ecological unravelling continues, the last shaman will die, evil spirits will take over the cosmos and the sky’s roots will be torn out. Kopenawa is tormented by all this, and has sought for years to make whites understand. Perhaps if their thought could be steered away from minerals and merchandise, they might be able to ‘dream of something other than themselves’. Several times in the book, he expresses hope that young people may hear his words and show ‘far more friendship for the forest’ than their forebears. Although delivered more directly, this is also Adneia’s plea.

Davi Kopenawa with Yanomami children, Watoriki community. Fiona Watson, 1991 .

Before visiting the exhibition, my main qualm was that Broken Spectre would aestheticise ruination. Mosse has been criticised for this in the past, fairly or not. But when it came to it, the experience was so unsettling, the documentation so brute and unsparing, that my concerns were mostly dispelled: there’s a way, I think, in which the inherent tension between beauty and devastation is productive. In previous attempts to represent the climate crisis, environmental destruction has often figured as a thing rather than a contingent process - and not just as a function of the medium’s intrinsic fixedness. The epic composites of Burtynsky, for example, arguably show the impact of human ‘progress’ on such an abstracted scale that they effectively negate hope that something could be done to arrest our death-march. Disconnected from the social and political context, moreover, they invite us to adopt a purely contemplative stance, to gaze upon despoliation in a way that arguably promotes passivity. In this way, as Clint Burnham has suggested, they allow us, perversely, to ‘enjoy our symptom’.

For me, Broken Spectre’s multi-perspectival structure, as well as Adneia’s speech, an unforgettable inflection point, are the keys to a more complex, unsettling work of art. The project is an indexical record of unfolding physical, chemical and biological processes, but it also raises questions about the transparency of images and the ways in which we are culturally attuned to respond to them. We can’t really believe that the Amazon is being sacrificed for the sake of cattle and soy, that the panoramic horror unfolding before us is all for profit. At the same time, though, we recognise our complicity in the integrated global system that drives it, and the film’s power derives in part from this sense of dislocation. Mosse doesn’t downplay the criminality of the settler-invaders, but he does remind us that short-termism, binds and self-justifying behaviour are not localised in climate flashpoints; they are an almost universal condition of humanity in the Anthropocene.

Reflecting on it afterwards, it struck me that, in its appropriation of sophisticated scientific imaging techniques, Broken Spectre is inextricably tied to the very complex of forces that have taken us beyond the point of no return. Despite its decidedly anti-naturalist aesthetic, the film could be seen as an advanced product of naturalism, the ontology of the Moderns according to Descola. Only under the hegemony of naturalism, whose foundation is a mute, impersonal Nature, could the Earth be plundered with such wanton disregard. In contrast, the Yanomami - and countless other Indigenous peoples - take for granted that humans are just one element in a vast whole in which no real discrimination is made between themselves and non-humans. Nature, in other words, is subjectivised. 

Does this matter? I don’t mean it as a criticism of the film per se, which may be the most powerful work of art yet made about climate breakdown. After all, one could make this argument about photography itself, a medium long harnessed for conquest and resource extraction. Merely to suggest that it is inescapably external to, and disconnected from, the Umwelten of the humans and non-humans it sets out to champion. This gap is thrown into sharp relief by The Falling Sky, which offers a glimpse of what it might be like to live in a world charged with agency. Ultimately, both works aim, on some level, at cross-cultural communication. But while the film presents only absence (of health, autonomy, a secure future ), the book gives us - in immense detail - the positive, constructive and affirmative side to the Yanomami. While in the film they are presented as basically reactive (though certainly not passive), the book gives us a rich and textured insight into an alternative way of simply being in the world.

Collective house near the Catholic mission on the Catrimani River, Roraima. Claudia Andujar, 1976.

Although Davi Kopenawa long ago renounced his youthful wish to become a white man, he continues, in his late sixties, to engage in outreach and activism. Just this year, he attended the opening of ‘The Yanomami Struggle’ in New York City, an exhibition of photographs by another friend and collaborator, Claudia Andujar, who first visited their lands in 1971. Strikingly, alongside a number of visionary portraits, the series also includes aerial images made on (colour) infrared film. Although her focus, at this time, was less on highlighting jeopardy than on conveying radical alterity, there is, then, a direct line from Andujar to Broken Spectre.

It may be coincidental that these two exhibitions ran simultaneously on opposite sides of the Atlantic. But it will surely mean that their message was amplified. While the prognosis for the Amazon may seem bleak and the problems intractable, it is equally true that the work of Mosse and Andujar is likely to have unknown and untraceable consequences, rippling out through actions and conversations in a way that makes a collective difference. During sleep, Kopenawa says, the xapiri ‘never stop looking at us and wanting to talk to us...They call us: ‘Father, do you hear us? Or are your ears really blocked?’ At this grave moment in human history, Broken Spectre avers, the responsibility is on us to unblock our ears, if not for the xapiri, then at least for Adneia and the shaman.

Dartmoor’s Lost Rainforest and its Plantation Other

It was thought for a long time that the furthest south the ice reached in Britain during the Last Glacial Period was somewhere north of York. But geologists have recently discovered that the south-western peninsula was also crushed by a massive icecap - on the granite upland today known as Dartmoor. So subtle was the evidence, mostly in the form of weathered drumlins and moraines, it had been overlooked.

Soon after the disappearance of the ice, the area was settled once more by a riot of moisture-loving trees. Atop land once oppressed by an undifferentiated mass up to 100 metres thick, a rainforest emerged - and it endured for many thousands of years before succumbing to an intense wave of clearing by Mesolithic peoples. The Moor as we know it began to take shape. But fragments of the primeval rainforest, or at least something that evokes it, remain.

Thanks in no small part to the efforts of Guy Shrubsole, whose book The Lost Rainforests of Britain was published last year, awareness of the temperate (or ‘Celtic’) rainforest has recently surged. The conditions for this globally rare biome (modest annual temperature fluctuation and lots of rain and humidity- high ‘oceanicity’) still prevail on the Atlantic coasts of Britain and Ireland. But there are only scattered patches left, most of the primordial forest having been cleared and given over to pasture. Today on Dartmoor, the habitat is confined to a few lonely hillsides, where pistachio-green lichens cascade from wizened oaks like so many beards. What really distinguishes the temperate rainforest is the presence of epiphytes - plants that grow on other plants, including lichens, mosses and ferns.

The most famous is at Wistman’s Wood in the heart of the national park. It clings to the slopes above a trickling tributary of the river Dart, and, except for the odd ash and holy, is basically a community of Common Oaks (Quercus robur), the quintessential English tree. In the normal course of things, this species can achieve heights of one hundred feet or more; but here, the tallest individuals rarely surpass fifteen. The Wood is what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn calls a ‘dense thicket of life.’ Every tree is bedecked with other plants, and the boulders strewn amongst them are covered in luminous emerald mosses. The presence of this ‘clitter’ (or collection of stones) has often been cited as the reason for the Wood’s endurance against the odds, preventing grazing.

Scrambling off the Moor and into the dappled gloom felt truly like passing through some kind of portal. I was enthralled by the place, its inexpressible sense of mystery and antiquity. The stillness. Like so many others, I had the feeling that the Wood was enchanted, imbued with an unknown significance. For as long as I stayed, the whole world felt - in a way never possible in cities - steeped in symbolism.

Looking back, it’s clear to me that this feeling was engendered, at least in part, by the visual language of fairytales. Early exposure to Brothers Grimm tropes, through bedtime books and Disney animations, cultivated deeply-rooted associations. And yet it’s also possible that these very motifs - gloomy oak-woods, intertwining branches, speckled fungi - reflect or express something buried in our psyches. A longing, perhaps, for a prelapsarian state, a return to the Wildwood.

Losing myself in ambient music, I sat on a boulder and reflected, trying to figure out how and why the Wood was affecting me. In this place, no particular effort was needed to be present. I stopped caring about the time, and allowed myself to experience the flow of things. At a certain moment, however, I also became aware of a certain desire to know things. Part of me wanted, essentially, scientific information about the Wood, to know something of its natural history, its ecological entanglements. Despite myself, I couldn’t be satisfied with naive observation and attunement. There was no urge to start Googling there and then, and it probably wouldn’t have been possible anyway, but I made a mental note to find out more once I’d returned to normal life.

For Max Weber, it was precisely the pervasiveness of this assumption that indicated a disenchanted world: the internalised expectation that, if we wish to find something out, we can in principle do so. We know that there will be an explanation ready to hand, written in a register by which the denizens of the forest figure as biota or symbionts. This ‘epistemic confidence’ can be considered one aspect of a worldview by which the Earth is ‘revealed’ to us as standing reserve. Such an attitude is starkly dramatised five miles down the road at the Bellever forest, the antithesis of the hold-out copse, which serves as a useful reminder that the great majority of trees on Dartmoor are grown for profit.

There are four large conifer plantations on the Moor of mostly Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), a species native to the Pacific north-west that can reach heights of almost 100 metres. After the last great thaw, it was one of the first trees to establish itself in the glacial moraines and foggy fjords of Alaska and British Columbia. But now here it finds itself in densely regimented stands on a remote peninsular highland, a continent and an ocean away.

The plantations were mostly laid down in the aftermath of the First World War, during which swathes of British forests were felled to line the trenches of the Western Front. Amidst fears of a global timber famine, the Liberal government set up a committee to assess the role of afforestation to postwar reconstruction. Its recommendations led to the founding of the Forestry Commission in 1919, whose central task was to secure timber supplies. But it was also hoped that the new forests would help reinvigorate rural communities in upland areas. For this reason, most of the moorland identified as suitable for planting was close to manufacturing centres and coal fields, making Dartmoor a relatively minor player in the overall scheme.

But as Matthew Kelly recounts in Quartz and Feldspar, it had a landlord keen to be seen to act in the national interest, the Duchy of Cornwall, which swiftly set about planting Brimpts and Fernworthy farms. Responsibility for the plantations was later transferred to the Forestry Commission, however, after officials found a ‘very lax…regime’ during a 1930 inspection - with forestry seemingly subservient to sport.

The Commission also had to contend with the Dartmoor Preservationist Association, which opposed the plantations on the basis that they compromised the Moor’s desolate beauty by blunting the profile of hills and, in the case of Bellever, on account of various antiquities - cairns, hut circles and evidence of an early field system. In the end, the development went ahead, creating the second-largest plantation on the Moor. But not without significant concessions to the preservationists: the antiquities were left uncovered and access to Bellever tor preserved.

It still provides a good vantage point from which to observe the landscape mosaic. Dartmoor is composed of numerous ‘patches’, a term used by landscape ecologists to signify distinct areas of habitat differing from their surroundings. The vast open moorland is interspersed with sheltered valleys and small plots of enclosed farmland, alongside the fragments of temperate rainforest and the plantations.

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View from Bellever Tor over Dartmoor. It’s only when you climb up and look out over the landscape that the contrivance of the plantation really hits: sharp edges and clear-cut wastelands.

Back amongst the trees, I took a detour off-track to examine a fallen spruce, resting atop a mattress of moss. It had clearly been there for quite a while: the haphazard roots, ripped from their sheltered dwelling, had acquired a green tinge, and there was no sign of a cavity at the base. Spruce tend to have quite shallow root systems, making them vulnerable to high winds. And wandering around the immediate area, I came across many other casualties, each at differing stages of integration with the forest floor. Prematurely felled by forces of nature. I remember being struck by the insouciance by which the corpses slowly decayed into humus and returned to the soil from which they came. The casualties do not jeopardise the overall viability of the plantation, and so, seemingly, are just left to be reclaimed.

While wandering around, I became fascinated by the variations in tone and texture of the bases: the fresh, vivid soil of the newly fallen, through to the dry, green-tinted faces of the partially reclaimed. The longer the repose, the more epiphytic ornamentation: bright garnishes of ferns and mosses - even the odd spruce sapling, daringly trying to establish itself on a precipice. This speaks to one of plantations’ strangest qualities: they are organised around the extreme manipulation of nature, but simultaneously teem with an abundance of life. No more so than in managed forests, where, at least relative to other plantation types, there’s a sense of disorder. After all, the product is timber. It doesn’t have to be coaxed into expressing pleasing tastes.

But it’s not possible to trick yourself here, to forget that this is a commercial forest managed according to a masterplan, its vitals constantly monitored - ‘a machine of replication’, in the words of Anna Tsing. The plantation was compelling in its own way, but couldn’t come close to inducing the same feelings of peace and transcendence I’d experienced the previous morning at Wistman’s Wood.

And yet, as I cycled back to Exeter later that afternoon to catch the London train, it struck me that without the late-summer serenity of the day, the last of August, which bestowed on the place a dappled perfection, my response to the Wood would surely have been different. I later caught a glimpse of its dark side in John Fowles’ poetic description of a solitary winter expedition there in 1946. It appeared to him a bad place, not somewhere to linger: ‘forlorn, skeletal, almost malevolent’. With such an image in mind, it makes more sense, perhaps, that our ancestors felt moved to strip the hills so thoroughly, with fire and axe, of their vegetation.

The boundary between open moorland and Wistman’s Wood.

Planetary Dreams: a critique of Google Earth

Hannah Arendt’s words have particular poignance for an age in which the entire planet has been measured, mapped and simulated. We know the contours of every island, their relative size, the depth of every lake, even the rough trajectory of continental drift. Within two-hundred million years, the familiar landmasses will have crunched back together again to form a new supercontinent: Pangaea Proxima.

Such thinking is so deeply naturalised that psychologists and geographers speak of perceptually salient features being copied into the mind like a map (the ‘cognitive’ approach to orientation). Against this, an anthropological approach emphasises that places do not so much have locations as histories. People do not ‘navigate’, but wayfind. Without the map, the world has no contour, form, or limits. It is just the world. 

This idea is something alien to us moderns, so entrapped in a mode of thought which separates humans from ‘nature’, subject from object. With our capacity for ‘whole earth observation’, epitomised by the famous Blue Marble image, the world has been shrunk into a ball, its basic contours as familiar as an iconic logo. Google Earth is one of the most significant products of such dualist thinking; an intensification of its analogue antecedents: physical globes by which continents are mapped perspectively onto a spherical surface made variously from hides, papers and plastics.

But while the latter are inherently ‘global’ in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2021) sense (humanist; encompassing histories of state consolidation, dialectics of empire and capitalism), the former aspires on a fundamental level to embody the ‘planetary’ - a category which decentres humans. However, this objective cannot be reached and will remain forever elusive. Google Earth can be seen as a fetish object, the psychological equivalent of a synecdoche, by which a part (the idealised surface) is made to represent the whole: Gaia.

This is crucial in the age of the Anthropocene. Not only were humans never separate from nature, it is becoming increasingly difficult to clearly differentiate so-called natural shocks from the symptoms of ‘our’ cumulative actions. Such circumstances have profound implications. And there is a wealth of literature in anthropology, philosophy, science studies addressing them, much of which concludes with a clear imperative: to overcome dualism, cultivate climate-thinking, ecological awareness, planetary social thought and so on.

I want to suggest that Google Earth hinders such awareness, both through its fundamental architecture and more granular properties, by reproducing tendencies towards calculation, oversight and objectification. As a product of one of the world’s most powerful monopolies, the originator of ‘surveillance capitalism’, the program should be regarded with critical scrutiny by default. This is all the more important given the unique success of Google’s public relations strategy. The name is something almost magical, inscribed into the symbolic order as an essential public service in a way that necessarily obfuscates the underlying business model, which returns extraordinary profits. 

But my purpose is not so much to critique Google Earth as such, to somehow unveil its pernicious ideological mystifications. Rather, I explore how it exemplifies a condition by which we have lost control of our tools, cast adrift without a compass in a world we thought we had mastered. Google Earth is a product of the ideological condition particular to postmodern culture, whereby there is no Logos (God, History etc) to guide us. It protects us from the traumatic Real of our time: that we are sleepwalking into the abyss, in thrall to the logic of enframing, with no map to show us the way out. 

Regimes of historicity: the global and the planetary

Since Google Earth emanates from servers as binary code, beamed to computers all around the world, it therefore ‘exists' in potentially infinite forms at all times. We know then that we are dealing with something very different when Google promotes the program as the ‘the world’s most detailed globe’. Striking in this slogan is the proximity of the three terms (Earth, world and globe), whose meaning it takes for granted. Although used interchangeably and inconsistently in everyday speech, it is worth interrogating these terms. Taken too far, each collapses under the weight of conflicting interpretations.

With respect to ‘globe’ and ‘planet’ (the conspicuously absent term in Google’s formula), an illuminating discussion is found in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty. His latest book, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021) extends the ideas sketched in ‘Four Theses’ (2009), a seminal intervention in the Anthropocene debate. Reckoning with what Isabelle Stengers calls the ‘intrusion of Gaia into the horizon of human history’ collapses the old distinction between natural and human histories and so requires us to bring recorded and deep time together in our analyses of the predicament and all that led to it. Chakrabarty argues that this means thinking in two ‘distinct registers’ at the same time: planetary and global. 

The former is the aggregate outcome of Earth system science, which foregrounds the march of epochs - successive chemical, biological and geological configurations, each giving way under pressure from various shocks, exogenous and not. Chakrabarty’s other category, by contrast, has emerged over centuries through the work of humanist and social-science historians. The ‘global’ is essentially the story of how the Earth as indifferent natural object-realm was converted into a sphere of action for humans, an interconnected global space inseparable from the logics of empire, capitalism and technology. These two ‘regimes of historicity’ operate on radically different timescales.

Martin Behaim’s Erdapfel (1492)

Globes in the traditional sense are both productive of and produced by the global regime of historicity in Chakrabarty’s sense, encapsulating the human need to find and stabilise our place in the cosmos. When viewing pictures of historic globes in succession (cf. Sumira, 2014), the viewer is struck by the diversity of idiosyncrasies and mysterious embellishments: whirlpools, hideous sea monsters and personified winds. The oldest surviving example, Martin Behaim’s Erdapfel (1490-92) displays a vast empty ocean between Europe and Asia (Columbus did not return to Spain until 1493), as well as the mythical Saint Brendan’s Island in the North Atlantic. These are products of profoundly different worldviews; mythological and religious thinking. We are left with a scattered material history of fallibility, explicitly provisional and, from our perspective, ultimately failed efforts to map the world.

How does Google Earth fit into Chakrabarty’s paradigm? Only on a first approach should it be read as an outcome of the planetary regime of historicity. Certainly, it represents some kind of culmination of Earth System Science: an assemblage of vast volumes of scientific data generated through various forms of Earth observation particular to industrial modernity, geophysics, geochemistry, geological surveying, ground sensor networks and, above all, satellites. When viewed without superimposed borders, the simulation decentres humans. However, as the next section explores, it is innately ideological.  And so, in the final analysis, it falls back into the domain of the global, though in a disavowed, paradoxical manner.

‘I know very well but still’: Google Earth as fetish object  

Like all slogans, Google Earth’s cannot stand too much scrutiny. But its central claim nevertheless holds true: the program is the most detailed representation of the planet ever created. Or at least for the inhabited, man-altered surface. All that lies beyond, in the depths of the underlands, the vastness of the oceans, are ignored or inaccessible. The immersive photo-sphere is stitched together from countless satellite images using a technique known us ‘clip mapping’, by which only small regions of graphics - the local area under examination - are displayed in high resolution. This makes possible algorithmic sorting, the selection of relevant data from an otherwise unmanageable volume. 

This process of ongoing self-resolution can be apprehended when zooming in or out: once the user stops navigating and the target location is inferred, the continual flustering of pixels is stabilised at a given distance. This is a world unfolding, fixed for contemplation. But it can be reanimated at will, as the user approaches new levels and planes of perspective. Sometimes, wholly contrasting time sets of images are encountered side-by-side: a patchwork of overlapping seasons, bisected by an intrusive mathematical line. Naked, blasted skeletons on one side; a forest of virulent trees on the other. This is the result of data dynamism, and the effect is to dispel any illusion of ‘visual nominalism’ that might prevail. Such failures are an encounter with the Real of the technology - its inherent bittiness. 

Viewed from a different angle, the outward expression of clip-mapping in in some sense a technological equivalent to our experience of reality according to the post-Kantian orthodoxy (‘correlationism’, to use Quentin Meillassoux’s term). As humans sense the world, by way of the categories, the brain interprets in a contingent way: what we get is not the Thing-in-itself. As Deleuze put it, consciousness is just a dream while awake. Google Earth in this sense is like a steam-age Mental Processing Unit, not yet sophisticated enough to display phenomena without consciousness apprehending their inherent bitty weirdness, but rather a composite of different sensual ‘feeds’, the result of all manner of technologies (the ‘senses’ of industrial civilisation) and reliant on an extensive infrastructure for its existence: transatlantic cables, datas centres and so on. There is not yet an illusion of immediacy; the simulation fails insofar as it appears mediated. 

The significance of the simulation’s failure should not be underestimated. Even though the user cannot avoid apprehension of the program’s basic deception (that this is an indexical representation), we nevertheless act as though it is. The power of Google Earth resides in its representative properties; what awes us is that this is the world in its entirety, all that is known and knowable. Such an attitude is what psychoanalytic theory calls ‘fetishistic disavowal’ -  central to any understanding of ideology today.

Google Earth ultimately relies on a series of mystifications which are both symptoms of postmodern scepticism and a precondition for the continuation of global civilisation. 

First, it reflects actually-existing power relations. Even a powerful entity like Google must make decisions about which regions to prioritise with the latest and most high-definition imagery. It has stated that the key factor is population density, but it is practically inconceivable that relative importance to the global economy does not play a part.

These imbalances are especially acute when it comes to the 3D mapping: a 2018 blogpost announcing the latest updates did not feature a single city in the Global South and only one, Tunis, in Africa. This proposition that certain cities matter more to the established global system is not controversial. And yet the effect is to reproduce naturalised notions about which areas of the world matter: invariably the core, the former metropoles. 

But this is perhaps less significant factor than the God’s-eye perspective inherent to Google Earth. Such a perspective impresses on us the true scale of the planet, allowing us to grasp long-haul flights and transcontinental journeys. The vastness of the Pacific. But this is a disengaged view from nowhere and, indeed, satellite imagery can be conceived as the emblematic technology of ‘mastery over the planet and of abstraction from any place on it’.

At one extreme of the zoom, the planet resolves into a small, luminous orb suspended in the centre of our screens against a backdrop of the Milky Way. The sense is almost pre-Copernican, theistic - but a the same time, decidedly Cartesian: it can be sent spinning at the click of a mouse. The subject acts decisively on the object, which figures as an entity primed for geoengineering. 

This links to a further ‘affordance’ which recalls Arendt’s observation (1958) that it was ‘precisely when the immensity of available space on earth was discovered’ that the shrinkage of the globe began. There are no more terrestrial frontiers or mysteries of the horizon, tales of unknown shores and spectral landmasses.

The original whole earth image, Blue Marble, inspires appreciation of fragility - gratitude, humility. But the (global) history of humanity has been driven by very different impulses: exploration, conquest and brutal subjugation. And once everything on Earth has been measured, this attitude is just displaced onto the cosmos itself. No phenomenon is more indicative that the accelerating ‘billionaire space race’. 

To aspiring world-historical figures such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the finitude of Google Earth is a frustration and a call to arms. The ongoing mapping of the Moon and Mars is a precursor to making of them staging posts in the quest to make humans a multi-planet species. These entrepreneurs are the would-be Pizarros of the twenty-first century; except rather than in thrall to the patronage of monarchs, it is governments, to the contrary, that rely increasingly on their private industrial apparatuses for space services.

And it is to these titans to whom millions look for hope: their grand visions promote faith in coming technological salvation, which is figured as always just around the corner: from self-driving cars and carbon capture through to Neuralink and the terraforming of exoplanets. But in calling for colonisation of other celestial bodies (worlds made for humans by humans) rather than directing all resources to mitigating catastrophe at home, they evince a kind of nihilism particular to advanced capitalism.

Beyond the obfuscatory nature of the program’s fundamental architecture, the more granular can also be steeped in dualistic thought - even when the professed purpose is to promote climate awareness. In 2021, for instance, Google Earth announced a major update to the software: a time-lapse feature that enables users to ‘take a step back’ by sliding between thirty-seven years of satellite imagery. As director Rebecca Moore put it in a blogpost: 

‘With Timelapse in Google Earth, we have a clearer picture of our changing planet right at our fingertips — one that shows not just problems but also solutions, as well as mesmerisingly beautiful natural phenomena that unfold over decades.’

Among a set of features on the lauded ‘solutions’ was an invitation to ‘meet’ the Suruí people’ of Mato Grosso, Brazil, with whom Google Earth (under the auspices of Engine and Outreach, two of Moore’s initiatives) has been collaborating since 2009 to combat illegal logging. This partnership, bringing together computing might and indigenous knowledge, is a striking example of how the program can be used for practical ends.

On first seeing a satellite image of his homeland, Google informs us, the tribe’s leader, Chief Almir, was immediately struck by its power to ‘convey the importance of his tribe’s natural heritage’. And thanks to the application of earth observation technology to protect it, the ‘native peoples themselves will be able to benefit economically from the forest’. The incongruity of this assurance is remarkable insofar as it blithely reproduces the very logic which leads to deforestation to begin with. 

Suffice to say, it cannot be separated from the propaganda element of Google’s public messaging. On some level, it reveals that corporate leaders feel a pressure to justify the technology. The program must be more than a neutral instrument, or Earth porn: a tool for good, a consciousness-raising platform. There is an optimistic discourse about the potential applications of Google’s satellite data to geoscience. Another project involves monitoring fishing vessels illegally entering protected waters. But when it comes to corporate mystification, Big Tech is the pinnacle, such is the distance between missions statements (connecting the world, organising its information, continually raising the bar of the customer experience…) and the underlying accumulation model.

But perhaps the supreme ideological gesture of Google Earth is how the planet appears so healthy: all is blue, green and gorgeous. The default is a pristine atmospheric state. Of course, even with the weather option enabled (which superimposes real-time data), there are limits to how far this virtual globe can represent the planet’s complex dynamism. Gaia is unrepresentable. But we can still imagine Google taking more active steps to promote ecological awareness. Perhaps a Google Atmosphere, which would simulate concentrations of greenhouse gases since the onset of industrialisation, the majority of which since 1980, and with no sign of peaking soon.

The backlash would of course be considerable: this would probably be condemned as ‘politicisation’ of an ‘objective’ platform. And so making the reality of climate change overt or somehow integral to the projection would be impossible for Google. It would make of the Earth something radically Other, to defamiliarise and, in a certain sense, renature. It is in this deadlock that we can discern the limits of any effort to render a digital globe removed from the domain of Chakrabarty’s global regime. 

Google Earth as artwork

Perhaps, then, it is better to view Google Earth as a fundamentally aesthetic phenomenon. It is a work of extraordinary beauty, a composite of countless human and non-human contributors, whose dual nature (scientific/artistic) was dramatised in recent miniseries The Billion Dollar Code (2021), whose central drama revolves around a patent infringement case against Google. The fictionalised plaintiffs, idealistic hacker Juri Müller and rebellious art student Carsten Schlüter, met in a techno club in 90s Berlin and founded design agency ART.COM. And with the somewhat unwitting support of Deutsche Telekom, they created the first digital globe: Terra Vision.

The series stands out for a certain boldness in highlighting the malpractices and spin of Big Tech. The injustices of corporate power are starkly portrayed: in the end, might makes right. When Google executive Brian Anderson recalls in court his early excitement about the possibilities of the technology (erasing borders, enabling people to grasp interconnections), the viewer knows full well that he snitched the ideas from Juri during a night of excess at Burning Man.

But the jury finds no infringement, largely, we assume, due to Google’s lawyer presenting a slick slideshow laying out, in grossly simplified form, how Earth is based on different mathematical principles to Terra Vision. Meanwhile, Juri and Carsten must endure the spectacle of their own side’s witness befuddling the jury with specialist terminology and opaque explanations. 

Side-by-side comparison from the series The Billion Dollar Code (2021).

But however much it runs against the grain in these ways, the series ends with a cliché: the old friends, not on speaking terms at the beginning of the lawsuit, reconcile. Here lies the feel-good ideology. What matters ultimately is not the money but the affect, the system can’t be changed.

Beyond highlighting the injustice wrought on start-ups by corporate behemoths, it also highlights how Google Earth can be seen as a spectacular outcome of a kind of technological hubris that emerged in Silicon Valley with the advent of worldwide connectivity. This attitude is reflective of a kind of fideism as old as the Enlightenment: unerring faith in the basic desirability of continual innovation, powered in our time by exponential growth in computing power. Even in the face of widespread democratic decay and extreme polarisation, the faithful in California remain ensconced in their starchitect-designed headquarters dreaming up projects like Metaverse.

This doctrine is realised in Google Earth and its close relative, Street View, which are both, like capitalism, totalising. Both seek, in theory if not yet in actuality, to cover everything. They must continually expand to stay relevant and so there must always be updates to the imagery itself (which in places like Dubai is always outdated), and to the attributes or ‘affordances’ of the platform.

So if Google Earth is a work of art, it could also be seen as an emanation in the sense of German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. The program is a ‘visual manifestation of the scientific, cultural and political rationalisation of the earth within a simulated industrial culture’. We are fast approaching the limit-horizon of this planetary reserve, beyond which the capacity of critical systems to absorb stress is irreversibly destabilised, leading to unpredictable cascade effects.

The epistemic imperative of the Anthropocene is clear: to re-conceive ourselves as part of nature and internalise the impossibility of endless growth. But the predicament is a dastardly one. Google Earth is emblematic of an advanced scientific culture predicated on extreme rationalisation and objectification. And insofar as it reflects power relations and naturalises the ‘overview effect’, the program also reproduces dualistic thought. It should be seen as a ‘fetish object’ in the strict psychological sense, whereby a part is made to represent the whole. 

Google promotes the tool as ‘the world’s most detailed globe’, but all that ultimately can be represented is the (idealised) surface. Seventy percent of the planet’s surface, the oceans, is glossed at best. And what we are left with is a profoundly anthropocentric globe in gamified form. The ineffable dynamism of the planet (tectonic activity, ocean currents, the swirling magma of the outer core) and its sheer temporal depth are impossible to integrate or domesticate. This presents a key difficulty: in spite of Google Earth’s unique capacity to incorporate temporality via regular updates and the Timelapse feature (in effect supplementing the spatial projections of old with a novel temporal dimension), the planet is nevertheless reified. 

Tim Ingold (2000:242) writes of a paradox at the heart of modern cartography: that the more it aims to provide a comprehensive representation of the world around us, the less true to life it appears. Maps necessarily involve a certain fixity. And yet the world of our experience, by contrast, is ‘suspended in movement…continually coming into being as we - through our own movement - contribute to its formation.’

The cartographic project always fails; and in the case of Google Earth it does so precisely because of the collapse of the distinction between the two regimes of historicity Dipesh Chakrabarty elucidates, the very fact that our species has become a geological agent. We can no longer look at ‘nature’ as a wholly autonomous force. The natural events that Google Earth can only partially portray - storms, hurricanes, even earthquakes - are increasingly inseparable from our own actions. This is a profound challenge to what it means to be human. In Heidegger’s terms, a new and distinct mode of the disclosure of Being is upon us. 

In this sense, Google Earth - despite its pretensions - is as ‘global’ in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s sense as was Martin Behaim’s Erdapfel. Both are fundamentally symptomatic of the quest to eliminate ambiguity and master the ‘external’ world. And although we can identify how this keeps us trapped in dualistic thought, it is almost impossible to think outside of this framework. Global industrial civilisation is predicated on knowing the relations between parts and the observer’s relative position to the whole. There is no straightforward undoing of this through thought. So the point is not so much to critique Google Earth itself, a spectacular achievement of science and information capitalism, but to engage the dialectic of the Enlightenment: the notion that, at this late stage in capitalist civilisation, it is more and more the objects that act on us. 

Perhaps nothing dramatises this better than a forthcoming ‘black box’ for Earth on the plains of Tasmania. Its purpose it will be to record changes in the climate, and it is designed to outlast civilisation. The box could be seen as a scientific counterpart to the Golden Records sent out aboard the two Voyager spacecraft into interstellar space in 1977. But while the idea of sending intangible cultural heritage into the abyss is more or less intuitive, when it comes to the remote black box, things are more mysterious. Who are the recipients of this data? For whom are we recording? Lacan’s answer would be: the big Other, the symbolic order itself.