Environmental Justice in Space
Reflections on my recent workshop
Why space environmental justice?
I missed last month’s edition of Making New Worlds1 partly because I was preparing for a virtual conference I was organizing on behalf of my nonprofit, the JustSpace Alliance. This was the Environmental Justice in Space (EJiS) Workshop, which I mentioned at the end of my last newsletter.
The EJiS Workshop was inspired by several conversations I’ve had over the past few years in which people working in space science/industry expressed concern about the damage we’re doing to some part of the space environment— or will likely do in the future. Specific areas of worry include the space debris filling up low Earth orbit, the effects of rocket launches on the local area and the atmosphere, and longer-term concerns about mining on the Moon or Mars. As I listened to these conversations, I recognized that these space people were acknowledging a real threat (one I wrote about in my book Off-Earth), but I also sensed that they were on the verge of attempting to reinvent an environmental protection movement from scratch.
This is a common tendency among STEM-trained folks— they (we) will excitedly jump into addressing a problem by deriving a solution from first principles rather than looking at what work has already been done on similar problems. It’s funny, because we’re not like this in our own fields: scientists are trained to perform literature searches and cite previous work, and programmers use copy/paste more than any other keyboard combination when writing their code. But when it comes to the social sciences and humanities, which STEM workers are often undereducated in, we’re more likely to start by attempting to reinvent the wheel. Which can often mean cycling through the same mistakes and harms that are already well-known to the relevant experts, before we get to a workable solution.
So I decided to put together a conference to bring together these environmentally-concerned space people with experts in terrestrial environmental justice movements, in the hopes that the former would provide specific case studies of environmental justice issues in space and the latter could share some applicable “lessons learned” from their fields. The EJiS Workshop was held on June 20-21, and I am pleased to say that it went very well, thanks to all our wonderful speakers. I personally really got a lot out of listening to the talks and panels, and I hope our attendees felt the same.
If you missed the workshop, don’t worry— most of the events were recorded, and are still available to registered participants. And registration is still open and free! Just go to https://bit.ly/ejis-workshop.
Lessons from the workshop
A lot of the same common threads ran through the workshop that I’ve seen in other conversations about the space environment: the importance of diverse participation in space research, engineering, and regulation; how crucial it is to incorporate Indigenous perspectives; urgent fears about the current state of low Earth orbit and its under-regulation. But there were a few themes that caught my attention in particular at this event:
Language Barriers
Space ethics in general, and space environmental justice specifically, is extremely interdisciplinary, as well as being international and intercultural. EJiS workshop speakers included astronomers, lawyers, environmental activists, architects, philosophers, science fiction writers, policymakers, artists, engineers, and more. Although the workshop was conducted in English, each of these fields has its own language and culture, its own way of analyzing problems, identifying priorities, and framing arguments. These language barriers must be overcome if we are to work together on the problems we face.
This is an obstacle I really became aware of at the Artemis & Ethics Workshop at NASA Headquarters last year: not only does each field have its own jargon, but commonly used terms that aren’t immediately identifiable as jargon (like “sustainability”, or “value”, or “accessibility”), can have diverse and even contradictory definitions in different communities. More interactions between these fields— through workshops like this one, professional collaborations, and informal conversations— will help us break through these language barriers. The key, however, is that all parties involved in these discussions must make the effort to reach for understanding (and not just assume that our field’s or culture’s perspective is the default “correct” one).
The Value of Storytelling
One of the EJiS Workshop panelists, climate activist Isaias Hernandez, spoke early in the event about the importance of storytelling in public advocacy and getting people to care about these issues. In particular, Hernandez says, “We have to tell better stories,” about space and the space environment, stories that are intersectional.
As is always the case when you get a bunch of space-loving people together to talk about human activity in space, there were plenty of science fiction references flying around. I often say that science fiction writers were doing space ethics long before humans ever went to space, by using stories to infiltrate their audience’s imagination and ask what it means to be human regardless of our environment.
In fact, science fiction was brought up as a solution to the language-barrier problem I mentioned above: policymakers and astrophysicists may struggle to communicate clearly on issues like satellite megaconstellations or lunar mining, but if they’ve both seen Star Wars or The Expanse, these stories can be used as a cultural touchstone— perhaps even a Rosetta stone— to find common ground.
I should note, though, that when the idea of science fiction as a common language was brought up during one of the EJiS panels, two of the panelists immediately identified themselves as “not science fiction people”, a good reminder that there is no such thing as a universal language, and that we should always try as many routes as necessary to ensure that everyone can communicate in these conversations.
The Need for Preparation
There was a fair amount of pessimism in some of the EJiS panels, much of it stemming from the observation that human activity in space (especially the kinds of activities that could damage the space environment) is moving faster than environmental justice activism or regulation can keep up.
Many of the talks argued for the importance of preparation, caution, and deliberate planning in our space activities to avoid causing permanent harm to space environments and to each other. But this kind of work takes time, and in the meantime, space companies and spacefaring nations are scrabbling to extract resources and advantages from the environment that we want to protect.
We didn’t come up with a solution to this problem at the EJiS Workshop. But this is a challenge that terrestrial environmental movements have faced as well, and there’s much we can learn from their approaches. I most appreciated my JustSpace co-founder Lucianne Walkowicz’s reminder during their panel on Grassroots Organizing that while their may be cause for pessimism, “We don’t have time for hopelessness.” The work continues.
Other News
I’ll be speaking about space environmental justice at the Moon Society’s virtual Lunar Development Conference on July 20-21.
I’ll also be attending the ASCEND conference in Las Vegas, and will take part in a panel on August 1 along with Kelly Weinersmith, co-author of A City on Mars!
And I’m giving a keynote talk at a conference on Social and Ethical Frontiers in Space Exploration in Kiruna, Sweden in late September.
Last month, I had a very interesting conversation with philosopher Christopher Phillips and moderator Kris Kimel for a webinar for Kimel’s Humanity in Deep Space, which is available on YouTube.
And earlier this month, I participated in a webinar along with my colleague Jayme Johnson-Schwartz for the Moon Village Association, on Alternative Visions of Space Exploration, which was also recorded and is available on YouTube.
Do subscribers notice when a newsletter writer misses an edition? I always see the writers I’m subscribed to apologizing when they miss a day, but I certainly don’t keep that much track.
Thank you for planning and hosting this conference. I got a lot out of it and hope to see more conferences like this in the future.