On her book Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Earth
Cover Interview of June 24, 2018
A close-up
I hope the reader will thumb through the book and check out
the images and illustrations. U.S. human spaceflight is both a civil and a military
activity, which means that it produces images that are offered to the public at
large as well as images that are kept secret. I included lots of fair access images
that call attention to the stolidly technical and extravagantly creative
spectrum of government environmental systems work.
While browsing through the book, I hope readers will also
take a look at the quotes I got from the many people I worked with and
interviewed. Spaceflight stories are usually focused on high-profile machines, astronauts,
and events. As an ethnographer, I’m also interested in portraying the work of the
spaceflight scientists, engineers, technicians, and student interns who show up
at the gates of spaceflight centers every day.
I had, literally, thousands of images, to choose from and hundreds
of pages of interviews and fieldwork notes to build this book from; I selected
those that I felt would support my analytic goals, namely to call attention to
the ways the contemporary solar system is being produced as a sociocultural,
and political, environment. In this way, I situate space and spaceflight in the
unfolding arenas of environmental history and politics.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
A close-up
I hope the reader will thumb through the book and check out the images and illustrations. U.S. human spaceflight is both a civil and a military activity, which means that it produces images that are offered to the public at large as well as images that are kept secret. I included lots of fair access images that call attention to the stolidly technical and extravagantly creative spectrum of government environmental systems work.
While browsing through the book, I hope readers will also take a look at the quotes I got from the many people I worked with and interviewed. Spaceflight stories are usually focused on high-profile machines, astronauts, and events. As an ethnographer, I’m also interested in portraying the work of the spaceflight scientists, engineers, technicians, and student interns who show up at the gates of spaceflight centers every day.
I had, literally, thousands of images, to choose from and hundreds of pages of interviews and fieldwork notes to build this book from; I selected those that I felt would support my analytic goals, namely to call attention to the ways the contemporary solar system is being produced as a sociocultural, and political, environment. In this way, I situate space and spaceflight in the unfolding arenas of environmental history and politics.