Klinger opines that the cultural, legal, budgetary, infrastructural, and logistical processes through which the contemporary space race unfolds have measurable environmental footprints on Earth and in outer space. The question of where these footprints fall is arbitrated by larger questions of geopolitical power and vulnerability, which means that human engagement with outer space is also a question of environmental justice. On Earth, environmental (in)justice unfolds on multiple scales: local and stratospheric emissions from space launches, the placement of outer space related infrastructure in so-called peripheral places, and the role of power in determining whether the use of such infrastructure aids socio-environmentally constructive or destructive practices.
Beyond Earth, the environmental geopolitics are likewise multi-scalar, manifesting in contemporary pollution issues such as orbital debris and conservation debates such as planetary protection protocols. The environmental geopolitics of Earth and outer space are inextricably linked by the spatial politics of privilege and the imposition of sacrifice – among people, places, and institutions. This paper explores the concept of outer space environments through classical, critical, environmental, and feminist geopolitical theories.
Klinger concludes that the stakes of engaging outer space as a domain of inquiry within environmental geopolitics are indeed about life and death as we reshape environments on Earth and in space: who is allowed to live, what is valued as life (or protected as the pre-biotic conditions for life), and what is considered acceptable death in our movements beneath, across, and beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Diverse schools of geopolitical thought are useful for interrogating how outer space is conceived and engaged by differentially empowered actors.
A classical geopolitical framework concerned with competition among nations not only elides the inequalities and environmental injustices that can characterize diverse use of outer space, it reinforces them. Classical geopolitics rely on fixed hierarchizations between “big” and the “little,” and this too has been critiqued by critical and feminist geopoliticians for obscuring how the banality of everyday life comprises part of an intertwined complex with the exercise of power at multiple scales. The lens of critical environmental geopolitics enables us to examine how multiple competing space aspirations transform physical and lived spaces by placing biospheres and the biotic at the center of political analysis.
This dialectical relationship between the Earth and space environments, first elaborated by Dickens and Ormrod (2007) and Beery (2011) who were building on Harvey (1982) and Smith (1990), respectively, reminds us that nature and society are coproduced; therefore, how we produce outer space is inextricably intertwined with the production of socio-natures on Earth. This is a question of horizontal and vertical territory, and territorial questions are always also environmental questions. Environmental questions concern people, which from a feminist standpoint are questions about justice mediated through unequal power relations. The manners in which different interest groups (fail to) attend to questions of justice in specific places determine broader environmental outcomes on Earth and in space. These struggles shape geopolitics in diverse ways that are – like the cosmos we have come to know – at once immense and immediate.
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