Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Earth

Author:   Valerie Olson
Publisher:   University of Minnesota Press
ISBN:  

9781517902551


Pages:   280
Publication Date:   22 May 2018
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable   Availability explained
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Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Earth


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Overview

The first book-length, in-depth ethnography of U.S. human spaceflight What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it? This is the unusual starting point of Valerie Olson\u2019s Into the Extreme, revealing how outer space contributes to making what counts as the scope and scale of today\u2019s natural and social environments. With unprecedented access to spaceflight worksites ranging from astronaut training programs to life science labs and architecture studios, Olson examines how U.S. experts work within the solar system as the container of life and as a vast site for new forms of technical and political environmental control. Olson\u2019s book shifts our attention from space\u2019s political geography to its political ecology, showing how scientists, physicians, and engineers across North America collaborate to build the conceptual and nuts-and-bolts systems that connect Earth to a specifically ecosystemic cosmos. This cosmos is being redefined as a competitive space for potential economic resources, social relations, and political strategies. Showing how contemporary U.S. environmental power is bound up with the production of national technical and scientific access to outer space, Into the Extreme brings important new insights to our understanding of modern environmental history and politics. At a time when the boundaries of global ecologies and economies extend far below and above Earth\u2019s surface, Olson\u2019s new analytic frameworks help us understand how varieties of outlying spaces are known, made, and organized as kinds of environments-whether terrestrial or beyond.

Full Product Details

Author:   Valerie Olson
Publisher:   University of Minnesota Press
Imprint:   University of Minnesota Press
Dimensions:   Width: 14.00cm , Height: 3.80cm , Length: 21.60cm
ISBN:  

9781517902551


ISBN 10:   151790255
Pages:   280
Publication Date:   22 May 2018
Audience:   General/trade ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable   Availability explained
The supplier advises that this item is temporarily unavailable. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out to you.

Table of Contents

Contents Introduction: Space Systems 1. Metasystem 2. Connection 3. Separation 4. Transhabitation 5. Solar Ecosystem Conclusion: Future Space Acknowledgments Bibliography

Reviews

This captivating book tells the story of how 'outer space' is being reimagined and remade in the key of the environmental, as a cosmic ecosystem. Drawing on fieldwork with scientists at an undersea space-analog habitat, at NASA mission control, and at a center for space medicine, Valerie Olson artfully demonstrates how our human home planet is the scale and place from which a habitable cosmos is made and imagined. -Stefan Helmreich, author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond In this seminal ethnographic study, Valerie Olson offers nothing less than a new anthropological object: the system-solar, living, artificial, conceptual-for showing how `future space' is being made on the horizons of the contemporary ecopolitical moment. Traveling alongside her, we come into close contact with knowledge that unEarthed entities are uniquely placed to reveal, and with questions that closed and semi-open systems pose to timeworn discliplinary limits. -Debbora Battaglia, author of E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces


This captivating book tells the story of how 'outer space' is being reimagined and remade in the key of the environmental, as a cosmic ecosystem. Drawing on fieldwork with scientists at an undersea space-analog habitat, at NASA mission control, and at a center for space medicine, Valerie Olson artfully demonstrates how our human home planet is the scale and place from which a habitable cosmos is made and imagined. --Stefan Helmreich, author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond In this seminal ethnographic study, Valerie Olson offers nothing less than a new anthropological object: the system--solar, living, artificial, conceptual--for showing how 'future space' is being made on the horizons of the contemporary ecopolitical moment. Traveling alongside her, we come into close contact with knowledge that unEarthed entities are uniquely placed to reveal, and with questions that closed and semi-open systems pose to timeworn discliplinary limits. --Debbora Battaglia, author of E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces


Author Information

Valerie Olson is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.

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