Sensors are increasingly present in our environments and technologies. At the same time, environmental sensing is a set of practices meant to provide more information on environmental change, while enabling new forms of environmental citizenship. Program Earth documents and discusses the ways in which new environments and citizen-sensing practices are emerging along with environmental sensing technologies. Through discussing specific instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution se ... More

Sensors are increasingly present in our environments and technologies. At the same time, environmental sensing is a set of practices meant to provide more information on environmental change, while enabling new forms of environmental citizenship. Program Earth documents and discusses the ways in which new environments and citizen-sensing practices are emerging along with environmental sensing technologies. Through discussing specific instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing, Program Earth asks how sensor technologies are generating distinct ways of programming environments and environmental relations. What are the implications for wiring up environments in these ways? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become? Working across digital media theory, science and technology studies, and environmental studies, Program Earth takes up these questions to examine the distinct environments, exchanges, and entities that take hold through these sensorized projects. This study develops the concept of the becoming environmental of computation in order to map the ways in which sensors are used to understand ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to monitor pollutants, to facilitate urban participation, and to program infrastructure. Through these examples, Program Earth suggests that the programming of Earth yields processes for making new environments not necessarily as an extension of humans, but rather as new “techno-geographies” that emerge across technologies, people, practices, and more-than-human entities.