“From Blue to Black Marble: Satellites and the Making of the Nocturnal Planetary Since 1961”

History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium

Sara B. Pritchard (Cornell University)

Historians, environmental humanists, and others have explored how the global Cold War, space race, International Geophysical Year, remote sensing, and their associated technologies enabled new conceptualizations of the environment. They have traced the emergence of the reverse gaze, the global environment, and, more recently, the planetary. But what about knowing Earth at night? This talk examines how the development of low-light-detecting sensors installed on satellites materialized the nocturnal planetary, and thus the Black Marble, for the first time—unprecedented ways of looking at the planet in human history. These visualizations are particularly significant, given that night is always half of Earth’s time, space, and environment.

Professor Sara Pritchard is an environmental STS scholar specializing in the history of technology and environmental history. Her current research program critically examines the history, science, and ethics of excessive artificial light at night. Sara’s book, Night as Environment: Light Pollution and the Anthropocene, explores how different scientific disciplines have studied light pollution since the 1970s. Her research has been supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation (Scholars’ Award #1555767, Program in Science, Technology, and Society), as well as Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, Center for the Social Sciences, and Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.

Sara’s first book, Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône, (Harvard University Press, 2011), examined the history of the transformation of France’s Rhône River since World War II. The book’s Introduction and a related article outline a theoretical framework for envirotechnical analysis, which scrutinizes the relationship between nature and technology, both historically and analytically. She has also coauthored (with Carl A. Zimring) Technology and the Environment in History (2020), coedited (with Dolly Jørgensen and Finn Arne Jørgensen) New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies (2013), and coedited special issues in Environment and Planning A (2016), Journal of Energy History / Revue d’histoire de l’énergie (2019), and Minding Nature (2020).