Data and Distraction: The Politics of Species-Tracking
Ginger Greene
Ginger Greene is completing her final year at McGill University with a Joint Honours degree in Cultural Studies and History. Throughout her academic career, she has become interested in the coalescence of disciplines on the topic of animal and environmental studies. She wrote her History thesis on how the figure of the Dog in Enlightenment Europe was inextricable from gender, race, and class structures. She is also interested in film, politics, literature, and popular culture, and hopes to write creative, academic work that can reach a broader audience. In Montreal, Ginger has acted in a production by the student-run Tuesday Night Café and volunteered as a producer at Television McGill. In her spare time, she likes to walk her dog Oyster, watch scary movies, and play guitar.
Introduction
Sensing technologies are increasingly being used by scientists to track biodiversity, animal movement, and environmental conditions. Not only have these efforts transformed professional and amateur data collection as well as scientific research on the effects of climate change, but they have also transformed the very environments, subjects, and relations they seek to understand. This paper explores the relationship between environmentalist politics, species-tracking, and sensing technologies. Drawing on the work of communications theorist, Jennifer Gabrys, I explore the goals, effects, and articulations of animal tracking endeavors by examining the discursive modes through which they operate. First summarizing the work of Gabrys in relation to the scientific discourse around species-tracking, I go on to excavate the cultural, legal, and political significations of the milieus that sensors give rise to. Touching on citizen engagement, I look at the way in which sensor technology is relayed into information that informs or propels a set of sustainability politics. I furthermore ask whether species-tracking has the effect of changing cultural sentiment or inciting legal and political action. I explore the cost of species tracking–on living bodies, resource pools, and media consumers–to put into question the presumed value of collecting vast quantities of data in the face of environmental collapse. Finally, I look at a recent case of species-tracking, in which a young fox travelled as fast as 155 kilometres in a day, to examine how sensing technologies are represented and consumed by both scientists and an Internet public. In each section, I take up Gabrys’ notion of milieus and examine the myriad subjects and forms of relating they create. Ultimately, I suggest that there is an ongoing failure of climate scientists and scientific data collection projects to collaborate with critical theorists who might help create better, more ethical, and productive discourses and attitudes about a future for humans and non-humans alike.
Scientists on Species-Tracking
In an issue of Science published in June of 2015, two lengthy articles focused on species-tracking using sensing technologies: “Terrestrial animal tracking as an eye on life and planet” and “Aquatic animal telemetry: A panoramic window into the underwater world.” These articles reveal the intended goals of species-tracking, the questions they seek to answer, and the data they imagine they will collect. Both take the position that expanding the scope, resources and research of the field would be beneficial to scientific research around ecology, environmental and climate change, and animal behaviour. Using GPS technology, sensors fastened to collars or actually glued onto the body locate animals as they move through their environments, which, the authors argue, “provides essential insights into patterns of biodiversity, ecological characteristics of individual species, and ecosystem function.”[1] Furthermore, advances in technology have allowed more detailed information to be gleaned, such as: the interior functions of the tagged animal, visual data recorded by the tagged animal, and information about the surrounding environment that may or may not relate to the tagged animal.[2] Despite the more detailed and ever-expanding amounts of data being collected, questions remain as to the long-term benefits of these practices. Acknowledging the usefulness of this information as it stands, the article on terrestrial animals nonetheless proposes the advancement of “integrative models” that would help understand the causes of animal movements and ultimately increase the value of the data. It is not until the end of the article that the authors explicitly delineate the environmentalist politics behind these endeavors in a subsection headed “Animal tracking to monitor a changing planet”.[3] They argue that monitoring animal’s movements and coopting them as proxy sensors will be crucial in watching and understanding environmental changes. As well, biodiversity might be managed, and public interest engaged, through these various sensing strategies.
These articles highlight the importation of species-tracking into “big-data” and the subsequent problems to be contended with. Noting the necessity of more resources to be allocated towards data management, the article references online databases (Movebank and Map of Life) that employ automatic processes that make data accessible. Data management, as it is accomplished manually or rendered through algorithms, requires (like sensor programming) a set of criteria by which information is deemed relevant. Animals, however, are adaptive and their actions are motivated by encounters with their environments. As scientists attempt to understand the causes of non-human animal movements, they must guess at the environmental conditions to which they are responding. While technological advances have made more detailed information about the surrounding conditions of the tagged animal available, questions still remain as to what detected is relevant and what, perhaps, undetected might also be relevant. If the response to these questions is to increase the ubiquity and sophistication of technologically mediated environments and animal tracking, it seems as though the costs might outweigh the benefits. In fact, the authors themselves make note of this:
The ethics of animal tracking is a cost/benefit analysis, and scientists need to consider how they can offset the inherent costs of capture and tagging by extending the benefits of their study. This includes designing studies that maximize the long-term utility of data and addressing issues of important global concern that help confront the conservation challenges these same animals currently face.[4]
This moment is crucial as it suggests, not that data collection is futile, but that there might first need to be more work to understand how vast quantities of data can translate into useful information. These scientists, though admitting that there is room for optimization, thus ultimately maintain the view that sensor tracking practices are of value and should be continued.
Program Earth
In her book, Program Earth, Jennifer Gabrys argues that sensor technologies program environments and in so doing give rise to new subjects and relations. Rather than simply documenting their surroundings, sensor technologies implicate the environments they inhabit, the subjects–humans and nonhumans, technical and organic–within them, and the relations that emerge.[5] She wonders “how environmental sensors are not simply providing access to new registers of information for established subjects but are changing the subjects of experience as well as the sensing relationships in which subjects are entangled and through which they act.”[6] She defines environments as processual and adaptive, activated in relation to the subjects within and around them.[7] The concrescence of environments with subjects, Gabrys argues, creates the subject-superject, “where everything—even a stone, as Whitehead would say—counts as an experiencing subject; or where everything is individuated from a shared preindividual reserve.”[8] This concrescence, this joining together of separate entities to make something new, is located in the milieu, a space of “transfer, influence and environmental inhabitation.”[9] Milieus thus describe the technical, organic, political, affective, and perceptual conditions of relating and inhabiting experienced by the subject-superject.
As sensor technologies are inserted into environments or on subjects’ bodies, they activate new milieus. Undergirding the desire of scientists to make these technically-mediated milieus ubiquitous, as I have observed, is the belief that the earth can be programmed, processed as information, and ultimately, managed.[10] But, when looking at the kinds of subject-superjects and forms of relating that emerge in relation to sensor technologies, Gabrys demonstrates that species-tracking has more complicated effects than just the collection of data points. Tracking non-human animals has been considered by scientists to be an important way to collect detailed information on biodiversity, habitat loss, environmental and climatic conditions, and animal life. Not only are animals sensed, then, but they also act as proxy sensors, collecting information about the surroundings they move through. Drawing on the work of Simondon and Canguilhem, Gabrys argues that traversing through their milieus, organisms respond to various problems depending on which matter to them, and their responses dictate “how they become,” or how they are individuated.[11] But Gabrys demonstrates that scientific endeavours into species-tracking often assume that the problem of milieus has already been addressed–where “understanding how to respond to the problem of our shifting milieus has become a project of ensuring there are no ‘blank spots’ on our maps of environmental change.”[12]
Monitoring the planet thus becomes the solution to managing it, as it changes in unprecedented ways under the new epoch. But, as Gabrys demonstrates, the problem of milieus cannot be solved by the current technoscientific approaches taken, because “no milieu or experience of a milieu is more real than any other, unless we adhere to the universal milieu of science, which establishes a version of the real that disqualifies all others.”[13] Here, we see one of the key problems of species-tracking, which orients itself toward the notion that the environment can be understood through qualities such as temperature, salinity, precipitation, and through the movements of tagged animals acting out in response to these conditions. But because individuals encounter their milieus differently, and so too respond to them differently, understanding what these inventive encounters mean is difficult, if not impossible.
The failure of scientific projects of species-tracking, in their reductionist approach, are not difficult to find. One such study examined 81 marine species on the northeast US continental shelf to identify how they tracked and responded to changing sea surface temperature (SST). Drawing on data spanning decades, the scientists ultimately concluded that “species distributions appeared sensitive to relatively few of the temperature variables we analyzed”.[14] The responses of various species to these variables did not provide the evidence that the scientists had anticipated, and thus prove that the methods by which species-tracking is conducted are not able to account for “inventive encounters”. The researchers themselves question their capacity to understand the “mechanisms” by which organisms adapt to climate change.[15] Their broader usefulness in generating information applicable across species, they conclude, should not be assumed: “In fact, we might actually expect to see relatively diverse climate sensitivities among closely related species, regardless of whether they are ectotherms or endotherms, living in marine or terrestrial ecosystems.”[16]
Another problem of species-tracking is that the actions of tagged animals are already impacted by the very devices used to track them.[17] These devices, Gabrys argues, are created by humans to understand milieus and the responses of their inhabitants, but they are constrained by their human-oriented mode of perception. The projects to track wolverines help illustrate this. Wolverines are particularly difficult animals to track, given that they travel alone and live at often unreachable distances from humans. In a recent effort to identify the wolverine population in the Uinta Mountains in Utah, the U.S. Forest Service paired up with the Montana-based group Adventure Runners, to send citizen scientists into high altitudes in order to set up cameras, and change batteries and memory cards. However, with “3,000 nights worth of footage” collected, no wolverine sightings were captured.[18] Despite their resources, researchers were unable to gather the data they desired. They demonstrated that the “problem of milieus” remains, and that these technoscientific processes still struggle to account for the “senses” of the non-human animals they wish to document.
In another study, a wolverine was caught on camera, scaling a tree to sniff out a hanging deer carcass.[19] The video also depicts the wolverine sniffing the camera, even knocking it around, and thus proves that these devices affect the responses of the animals they track. It might not be so much of a stretch, then, to ask whether the cameras strapped onto trees or the consistent scent of humans checking these devices might have themselves been enough to divert the sophisticated animals from approaching. Further still, focusing on seeing these animals may have put crucial limits on understanding how they traverse their environments. This study’s failure suggests that we are underestimating the limitations of sensing technologies, even in their less obtrusive forms.
While technical milieus might have conservation as their goal, they nonetheless must be understood as “expressions of value: of which problems matter, and how they are to be addressed.”[20] The question of how species-tracking is already mediated by value-judgements and human-oriented modes of perception is addressed in the reviews of the Science articles discussed in the preceding section. In an issue of Science published later that year, a review of the article argues that it largely obfuscated the effects of tagging on the non-human animals and even the environments within which they move.[21] McIntyre argues that the impact of species-tracking (or biologging) has yet to be adequately researched and, while acknowledging the benefits of telemetry studies he nonetheless calls on more work to be done. This critique reveals that concerns about non-human animal livelihoods are marginal within scientific discourses.
Another review points to the disproportionate focus of telemetry on vertebrates noting that “the tracking of even 15,000 bird and mammal species would only cover 0.2 to 0.3% of all terrestrial animal species on Earth.”[22] Kissling demonstrates that as it stands, the field accounts for just a tiny fraction of non-human animal life. Where Kissling asks for more research to be done on insect life, we might also read this review as illuminating some of the larger problems of animal tracking that are difficult to address. That is, sensing technologies is particularly focused, for practical reasons, on mammals and birds. The notion, then, that the extent to which species decline and environmental change can be accurately monitored and mitigated if we just had the resources to put into sensors, is put into question. Perhaps it would be possible to track insect species in sufficient numbers, to fill the “blank spots” in our data stores, but given the difficulty of these efforts, and the time frame laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) it appears a daunting task.[23] And, as Gabrys wonders, what kind of milieus and subjects might emerge out of these conditions? If hungry polar bears and named storks work affectively to engage citizen scientists in not only data sourcing but also critical discourse around environmental change, then how might the tracking of insects, of life visible best under microscope, change human perceptions of climate change? Without sympathetic, anthropomorphized characters to cling on to, there is the possibility that species-tracking could distance the human subject further from non-humans. Transforming the non-human world into endless charts and graphs informs our politics of climate change, but it does so at the expense of other conditions of relating. Might more sensors, then, in their concrescence with environments, sediment a human-oriented perception of milieus and further entrench a paradigm of human exceptionalism? Without a cross-disciplinary approach that validates these issues as significant ones, species-tracking remains limited by the implicit logic that more data is always better.
Gabrys asks “how does the sensor-actuator logic implicit in these technologies not only program environments but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives that might concretize through these processes?”[24] Concerned as to the kinds of relationships that a “programmed Earth” allows for, she does not assume that human-animal interactions will become less anthropocentric or serve the epistemological goal of environmentalist groups that emphasize non-human agency and human responsibility. Rather, she argues that the encounters of the subject and the milieu are turned into “informational exchanges”. By this logic, individuals and their actions are simply information that can be computerized and made operational by scientists.[25] Not only is this assumption based on a perspective of perceptual encounters that favours the human (which, as we have seen, often fails to account for the meaning of these encounters), but it furthermore affects the way in non-human subjects are conceptualized and cared for. Thus, in addition to their effects within the sciences, sensor technologies have political and cultural ramifications too.
Gabrys also raises the issue of the sheer quantity of data being collected, giving the example of Wytham Woods, where some twenty-five million records were gathered when monitoring tagged badgers.[26] Even with the researchers working hard to manage the data as efficiently as possible, it remained an issue and one that is prevalent in many instances of species-tracking. Not only does too much data necessitate labour to sift through and process relevant information, but it also requires energy. Despite its appearance of immateriality, data must be stored in server farms that need to be powered and cooled constantly, and of which many run on coal.[27] While the housing of data may be a price we are willing to pay, it is still worth accounting for as one of the many costs of species-tracking, especially by initiatives that purport environmentalist goals.[28]
Gabrys also notes that citizen-sensing projects engage people in environmentalist causes, like species decline, by asking them to either submit or manage data. Thus species-tracking both requires a continuous stream of data and struggles to make use of it. Despite the fact that scientists continue to monitor the planet as a means of managing it, (in order to preserve biodiversity, life and sustainable conditions,) Gabrys suggests that, along with the anthropocentric biases of the latter task, these two projects might not be perfectly aligned.[29] She considers, for example, the material effects of tracking technologies in her book Digital Rubbish. She demonstrates that electronics, including those used for sensing projects, are material once they are disconnected, contributing to the heaps of e-waste that emit toxins into the environment. Furthermore, sensor technologies require infrastructure to function. Not only is this infrastructure material, but it also requires continuous maintenance. She writes, “Material stored in electronic format undergoes rapid and inevitable decay and may become inaccessible, unless it is continually migrated to new formats.”[30]
Another cost Gabrys relates to sensing technologies is the exposure of participating animals to risk. Not only are animals being tracked to monitor species decline, but they are also employed as proxy sensors to examine a number of other variables, unrelated to issues of their own.[31] If the collection of data can help scientists better manage issues separate from species decline, we might ask to what extent should we prioritize the health of the non-human animals involved in gathering this data. A group of scientists examining the proliferation of new technologies to track animals argue that “even the least-intrusive attachments may pose a risk” to the populations of endangered species being tagged.[32] They demonstrate that the unintended consequences of sensing devices are not known, and despite the technology getting smaller and lighter, and captures getting less invasive, the threat for those non-human animals involved is a factor to be seriously considered.
As I have discussed in relation to wolverine-tracking, Gabrys also asks how sensor technologies implicate the activity of subjects: not just the human modes of interacting with the non-human world, but also the non-humans being sensed. She asks us how these devices might impact the movements of organisms, how they might be generative of inventive responses—which may or may not be able to be accounted for in their programming.[33] Ultimately, Gabrys proves that sensing technologies give rise to various milieus and that, despite the problem-logic approach that informs the human perspective in these tracking projects, participation by the organisms cannot be programmed.[34] When looking closely at the studies available, it is not difficult to see the tension between the animals in question and the scientists documenting their movements: tags stop working, cameras are destroyed, collars are broken off. Furthermore, problems with data logging environments and their inhabitants arise from the “technicity” of these milieus, of how they are meant to operate within an environment. This, Gabrys describes, as the sensors’ relation to sense, where the questions meant to address perceptual encounters between organisms and their milieus are already inscribed by our own “cultural agendas.”[35] She asks,
If these data gathered through tracking techniques are meant to influence citizen sensing, policy, and conservation, then how might we also make room for attending to the very particular worlds and inhabitations that are accounted for, and the milieus, inventions, and becomings that might remain off the computational map, no matter how many more data points we add?[36]
Internet publics and online participation
Data collection, in its raw state, cannot necessarily change public sentiment. In fact, scientists have, for years, delivered disturbing information about an impending crisis only to have it lost in the news cycle and ever-refreshing feeds. But sensor technology and the increased surveillance of at-risk environments and species have allowed for more detailed narratives and striking images to emerge. Where scientific discourse fails, “attitudes towards the need for climate action engage a broader set of ideas, attitudes and emotions about non-scientific spheres such as morality, politics, economics and culture.”[37] The deployment of affect, then, in discourses around climate change is crucial to changing cultural sentiment and emphasizing the immediate threat at hand. Sensing technologies can aid this project by illustrating more detailed narratives around environmental catastrophe and lend proof and intimacy to environmentalist causes.
Using Benedict Anderson’s framework of the census, map and museum, the geography article, “Imagining Wildlife”, conceptualizes technological monitoring of animals to understand the implications on human-animal relations. It is useful insofar as the census describes the main goal of conservation organizations in data collection, that is, learning which species are in a given environment and how many individuals there are.[38] The map is then constructed based on this information—and enhanced by more detailed knowledge on individual animal movements, recorded either by other technological devices or by citizen sightings. In fact, the map is a critical visualization of data that increases citizen engagement and understanding. Mapping not only increases interested viewership, but also, in many instances, is greatly benefitted by participants who actively send in data they have collected. The information gathered enables conservation organizations to show proof of species decline that can sway public opinion and give leverage to calls for stricter policies on issues of climate change and biodiversity loss.[39]
However, mapping also exposes animals by increasing their visibility and pointing to their locations. In these databases, open to the general public, poachers can gain access to the specific locations of individual animals and exploit it to their advantage. [40] A number of cases prove that this data has been used to successfully hunt the animals it was intended to protect, threatening the goal of the tracking mechanisms themselves. [41] Finally, the museum encompasses the ways in which the data collected and the maps created are arranged and communicated to conservation circles and the general public. Various interfaces and experiences make up the “packaging” of this information, such as: the “gamification” of data by awarding users points for identifying species in camera-traps, maps that are constantly updating with new sightings, and individual profiles for animals that have been tagged. The authors argue that these tactics have worked:
[Digitization] afforded by electronic wildlife monitoring sensors created public interest and awareness of particular species, expanding the circle of people better disposed to engage with conservation monitoring projects in various ways, including participating in causes, joining the organization as members and donating money.[42]
The map, they argue, thus engages citizen scientists in data collection as well as environmentalist politics and education.
We might, then, examine these various ways of “packaging” data as both informed by and an extension of how technological milieus give rise to different forms of relating between subject-superjects. The rise of applications like BirdWatch, for example, demonstrate that data gathered through sensing technologies can be configured to anthropomorphize non-human animals and circulate affect for the purposes of conservation and sustainability causes. In an article on the implications of naming and identifying non-human animals for environmentalist causes, Tema Milstein exemplifies “the force of discursive abstractions as distancing and objectifying nature, further reifying human nature binaries and exacerbating humanity’s devastating ecological destruction.”[43] Looking at the case of whale conservation efforts, she demonstrates that identifying individual whales led to a “cultural paradigm shift” which saw the rise in interest and support of policies intended to protect these species.[44]
In Ursula Heise’s book, Imagining Extinction, she writes about biodiversity databases that employ narrative strategies to engage citizens in the fight against species extinction. Published in 2016, one chapter focuses on the website ARKive.org, a project initiated by Wildscreen, a non-profit organization that compiles and connects creative content under the goal of environmental and species conservation.[45] ARKive.org stored multimedia files on endangered species and was accessible to the public. Despite its global reach and high-volume traffic, the website was officially shut down in February 2019 due to lack of donations. The website’s statement says, “Despite appeals for support, just 85 of our 5.6 million users in 2018 made a donation. […] The complete Arkive collection of over 100,000 images and videos is now being stored securely offline in perpetuity for future generations.”[46] The closure of this website exemplifies the problems still being contended with—where data collection and computational archiving can fail in their intended goals of education and engagement. Not only was ARKive.org unable to operate due to lack of funds (that are required for both human labour and digital maintenance,) but its call to the public for help proved fruitless. This example asks us to think about how effectively these platforms incite long-term participation in environmentalist causes and what kinds of relating they give rise to. In her chapter, Heise argues that ARKive.org favoured “charismatic megafauna” that could be easily anthropomorphized and thus functioned affectively through narrative. Despite the entertainment and education that ARKive.org provided, the affective pull of the database was not strong enough to gather monetary support.
Furthermore, this example speaks to the ways in which sensing technologies and their technicity are naturalized. Gabrys writes, “As we input heaps of data into digital devices, it seldom occurs to us that the digital devices themselves are rapidly changing entities and that they, too, generate data for the record.”[47] This inability for the electronic archive to archive itself might then work to obfuscate the temporal and material limits of these devices. Gabrys gives the term “fossil” to describe “the remainders and residues of technology and media.”[48] In so doing, she entangles nature, technology, and materiality, while also emphasizing historicity. If we examine sensing devices and archives as fossils, outdated versions already discarded or offline, then we are forced to question the efficacy of these endeavors in the long term, the ways in which cataloging functions epistemologically, and the presumed importance of compiling ever-increasing data stores.
Legal action and political agitation
If one of the driving questions of this paper is whether sensing technologies used to track species can be (or is regularly) transformed into action to combat climate change, then it is crucial to examine the legal and political consequences of these projects. Returning to wolverines, a recent story by National Geographic demonstrates that they are at great risk as temperatures warm. Requiring large amounts of territory and snow-covered land to den, wolverines scale mountains to reach high altitudes and colder temperatures. The article uses data gathered from satellite and radio technology, which has led scientists to estimate that the Canadian wolverine population is around 300.[49] Despite the difficulty of tracking these solitary animals, recent data collecting projects have helped to make a case for listing wolverines as an endangered species, and therefore requiring protection. In a U.S. federal court ruling, the judge asserted:
No greater level of certainty is needed to see the writing on the wall for this snow-dependent species standing squarely in the path of global climate change. It has taken us twenty years to get to this point. It is the undersigned's view that if there is one thing required of the [United States Fish & Wildlife Service] under the ESA, it is to take action at the earliest possible, defensible point in time to protect against the loss of biodiversity within our reach as a nation. For the wolverine, that time is now.[50]
The plaintiff relied on research that compared satellite imagery of territory thought to be used by wolverines with data sets that located wolverine dens. The satellite imagery allowed scientists to determine whether there was snow on the ground during the spring season. When compared alongside wolverine dens, six out seven times wolverines denned in land that was consistently snow-covered. This confirmed scientists’ worries that wolverines require snow in order to give birth. Not only does a warming climate jeopardize the wolverine population, but this species already has one of the lowest reproduction rates of all mammals – as they will purposefully abort litters if they fear they do not have the energy for birthing or rearing them.[51]
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) in the U.S. and the Species at Risk Act (SARA) in Canada are pieces of legislation crucial to contemporary environmentalism. They work to mitigate environmental change and combat hunting through policies that protect the livelihoods and futures of listed animals, like habitat protection and designated sanctuaries.[52] The lists which designate the species that need protection are in flux as the status of species is subject to change depending on a variety of factors. The data that inform these listings are often gathered from sensing technologies, as exemplified in the case of the wolverine. But despite proof of the success of this legislation, (which has helped save bald eagles, grizzly bears and American alligators from extinction) a decision made by the Trump administration in August 2019 threatens its integrity.[53] In a move to prioritize logging, oil, and gas companies, economic considerations will now be able to affect species listings and habitat protections. Furthermore, long-term consequences will hold less importance to the ESA, making effective mitigation of climate change even less likely. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt has said that the changes are meant to “modernize” the legislation, yet scientists are convinced they undermine the growing evidence (much of it thanks to sensing technologies) of worsening conditions for many species. While legal successes for conservation have been tremendously aided by extensive data collection, climate change continues to be an issue of minor importance for many politicians and lawmakers. Unfortunately, even with the vast and credible information gleaned by sensors, species-tracking projects can no longer presume a political impact as one of their benefits.
In June 2019, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his approval of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, despite widespread opposition from Indigenous communities and environmentalist groups who argue that the project works against a goal to mitigate climate change.[54] In a tweet from June 18, he writes: “We made a commitment to make real change happen in this country, and to grow the middle class. We also committed to building a real plan to protect our environment and fight climate change. These goals are not irreconcilable, they are complementary.”[55] Ultimately, he makes the case that climate change is just another issue on his agenda, rather than the structuring crisis of our future. These instances demonstrate that sensing technologies have not yet been entirely successful in proving that the need to prioritize combatting climate change federally is urgent. With the success of the Sunrise Movement and growing support for candidates backing the Green New Deal, cultural sentiment and political lobbying are slowly shifting the attention toward environmental issues—though perhaps not quickly enough.[56]
The question remains as to whether increasing resources for species-tracking is the answer to garnering more support. In fact, the Green New Deal does not emphasize species decline or the risks posed to non-human animals.[57] Even while this research lends itself to the credence of climate change, then, it may not necessarily change human-animal relations for the benefit of the latter. Insofar as species-tracking technologies and data instigates political and legal action to mitigate threats to the environment, it will—as a result—benefit the non-human animals whose lives are at stake. But, as for the broader, long-term conditions of non-human life, epistemological change that would uproot anthropocentrism might not be achieved through sensing technologies.
Case study
In July 2019, the findings from a Norwegian Polar Institute publication swept the Internet news cycle. Headlines such as: “An arctic fox walked 2,700 miles from Norway to Canada. Yes, that’s possible”; and, “One arctic fox’s incredible journey from Norway to Canada” appeared on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.[58] The original study was conducted by Eva Fuglei and Arnaud Tarroux, who tagged about 50 foxes with KiwiSat Argos transmitters affixed to collars. The intended goal of the study was to understand “Arctic fox spatial ecology in Svalbard”, but when one of the tagged foxes made the fastest ever recorded inter-continental journey, the scientists wrote a report assessing the findings.[59] Trapped and tagged on July 29, 2017, the young fox did not begin her trek until March 2018. The satellite transmitted her location every minute for three hours each day – this data was then filtered via a Bayesian state-space model and plotted into daily points on a map. The scientists gathered that the fox’s journey might have been the result of food shortages or else that her long-distance dispersal was an effort to transfer genes to distant populations. While this type of movement is not the norm, animal populations tend to have outlying individuals who execute long-distance movements–though the cause is unknown. The report thus remains ambiguous, despite the amount of data collected, as to the reasons for this particular fox’s movement. Furthermore, the collar stopped transmitting once the fox reached Ellesmere in July 2018.[60]
The original report implies the scientists’ own amazement at this fox’s journey, who begin with a quote from the 19th century polar explorer, Fridtjof Nansen: “What in the world was that fox doing up here out on the wild sea?” Sea ice has, for over a century, been known to be a travelling landscape for the Arctic fox. But this fox’s movement was “exceptional”, reaching a maximum speed of 155 kilometres a day when travelling on the ice sheet in north-western Greenland.[61] The researchers thus gathered that the fox’s speed indicates that she was not foraging on the ice, but using it as a means of dispersal. While the broader study aimed at understanding how declining sea ice might affect Norway’s Arctic fox population, this fox’s journey did not directly reveal information explicitly addressing the researchers’ questions. However, the conclusion of the report notes:
If Svalbard becomes ice-free throughout the year, it will imply an isolated Arctic fox population there, entirely cut off from other Arctic foxes, such fox populations may still be highly viable, as they are in Iceland (Hersteinsson & Macdonald 1996) and the Beringian islands (Volodin et al. 2013), where isolated Arctic fox populations persist in a substantially warmer climate.[62]
The scientists can make inferences based on the data gathered, but in large part the participation of this fox in her being sensed was both inventive and disruptive. The results were unplanned for and thus could not be accounted for. Furthermore, because her collar stopped transmitting once she had reached Ellesmere, the scientists were unable to gain information about the milieus through which she continues to traverse, or perhaps does not.
The article also notes that it used foot traps and cages to capture the foxes, who were then tagged within five minutes. While these methods adhere to the guidelines of the Norwegian Animal Welfare Act, it is not certain that the tagging did not affect the fox’s actions. What becomes clear from this brief report is that sensing technologies and data collection does not imply understanding. It is an example of how technological milieus did not function in the way scientists had programmed them to, that the sensor-actuator logic which worked to turn perceptual encounters into informational exchange, could not, in fact, provide the relevant information. While this case does little to help these scientists prove that the Arctic fox’s spatial ecology depends on sea-ice variables, however, it may still have helped the environmentalist cause.
The way in which this story was circulated on the Internet reveals how data collected by sensing technologies are packaged and digested by the general public. As some researchers have shown, certain animals are more easily anthropomorphized than others. The Arctic fox looks similar to a dog or a cat, can be easily recognized and can elicit empathy. Despite there being no public photos of the fox in question, images of anonymous Arctic foxes stand in for her in virtually every article. As some researchers on communication and climate change have observed, “In contrast to the remoteness of scientific images, images with wider cultural import are valuable because they can provoke affective responses and promote lines of identification with visual subjects.”[63] The article furthermore demonstrates how certain narratives around climate change get mobilized. Here, the fox serves as a tragic hero, navigating the terrain of a changing climate–where her exceptionalism, highlighted by the scientists themselves, is emphasized against the vast expanse of a frigid landscape. Despite there being little evidence to prove that the fox’s movements were a result of warming temperatures, other causes given seem more improbable. While this report may not have helped scientists very much, it worked well as a consumable news article and for that reason was well-circulated. But it is also indicative of how species-tracking has a number of effects, not just data collection to be organized and analyzed by environmental scientists. Rather, sensing technologies help tell stories about individual animals, either already affected by or endangered by environmental change.
Conclusion
As the climate warms, scientists are still working to convince the world that the environment needs to be an international priority. Sensor technologies help keep watch and sometimes understand the changes occurring to and within species populations and their ecosystems. Yet much of the data collected is unusable or irrelevant, and the very milieus created to address these problems generate issues of their own. This paper has examined that the hidden costs of these technologies are large enough to be taken into greater consideration by scientists. The many failed experiments in species-tracking speak to this argument. The notion that technoscientific processes that impact non-human animals and program their environments are inherently beneficial to environmentalist causes thus needs to be rigorously unpacked in each instance of their deployment. Furthermore, scientific research that relies on sensors ultimately impacts law, politics and culture through its dissemination and reception, and thus its deficiencies have a broad impact. Looking at how certain cases of species-tracking are mobilized help draw out the nuances of their successes and, crucially, their failures. This allows us to better understand whether and when these projects are useful and make better choices knowing these complexities. We must be more vigilant when proposing, researching, and analyzing species-tracking projects, because without the critical work of exposing the epistemological frameworks employed and the conditions of relating that they assume and perpetuate, we do a disservice to humans and non-humans alike. Whether or not the troves of data collected will later prove to have been useful or unimportant still remains to be seen. In the meantime, we are sure to see more exceptional animals mystifying scientists, unsettling their research, and evading their sensors.
ENDNOTES
[1] Roland Kays et al., “Terrestrial Animal Tracking as an Eye on Life and Planet,” Science 348, no. 6240 (June 12, 2015): aaa2478-1.
[2] Ibid, aaa2478-2.
[3] Ibid, aaa2478-7.
[4] Ibid, aaa2478-3.
[5] Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet, (2016,) 15.
[6] Ibid, 22.
[7] Ibid, 10.
[8] Ibid, 12.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid, 15.
[11] Ibid, 99.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid, 100.
[14] Justin G. Schuetz et al., “Complex Patterns of Temperature Sensitivity, Not Ecological Traits, Dictate Diverse Species Responses to Climate Change,” Ecography 42, no. 1 (2019): 117.
[15] Ibid, 112.
[16] Ibid, 122.
[17] Gabrys, Program Earth, 103.
[18] Brian Clark Howard, “Searching for Wolverines by Running Through the Woods,” National Geographic, January 27, 2016.
[19] Kitson Jazynka, “Elusive Wolverine Snacks on Deer in Rare Video,” National Geographic, July 26, 2018.
[20] Gabrys, Program Earth, 103.
[21] Trevor McIntyre, “Animal Telemetry: Tagging Effects,” Science 349, no. 6248 (August 7, 2015): 596.
[22] W. Daniel Kissling, “Animal Telemetry: Follow the Insects,” Science 349, no. 6248 (August 7, 2015): 597.
[23] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report, 2015.
[24] Gabrys, Program Earth, 8.
[25] Ibid, 101
[26] Ibid, 93.
[27] Ingrid Burrington, “The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge,” The Atlantic, December 16, 2015.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Gabrys, Program Earth, 16.
[30] Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (University of Michigan Press, 2011), 123.
[31] Gabrys, Program Earth, 81.
[32] Stuart L. Pimm et al., “Emerging Technologies to Conserve Biodiversity,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 30, no. 11 (November 2015): 688.
[33] Gabrys, Program Earth, 82.
[34] Ibid, 105.
[35] Ibid, 107.
[36] Ibid, 104.
[37] Eileen Culloty et al., “Researching Visual Representations of Climate Change,” Environmental Communication 13, no. 2 (March 2019): 181.
[38] Verma et al., “Imagining Wildlife: New Technologies and Animal Censuses, Maps and Museums,” Geoforum 75 (October 1, 2016): 81.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Ibid, 82.
[41] Steven J. Cooke et al., “Troubling Issues at the Frontier of Animal Tracking for Conservation and Management,” Conservation Biology 31, no. 5 (2017): 1205.
[42] Verma et al., “Imagining Wildlife,” 83.
[43] Tema Milstein, “Nature Identification: The Power of Pointing and Naming,” Environmental Communication 5, no. 1 (March 2011): 4.
[44] Ibid, 17.
[45] “About,” Wildscreen, accessed August 1, 2019.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Gabrys, Program Earth, 110.
[48] Gabrys, Digital Rubbish, 9.
[49] Douglas H. Chadwick, “As Wolverines Battle to Survive, Warming Poses a New Threat,” National Geographic, July 11, 2019.
[50] Defenders of Wildlife v. Jewell, 2016 Montana App. Western Law: 83.
[51] Ibid, 5.
[52] Legislative Services Branch, “Consolidated Federal Laws of Canada, Species at Risk Act,” May 22, 2019.
[53] Jasmine Aguilera, “What to Know About Changes to the Endangered Species Act,” Time, August 14, 2019.
[54] John Paul Tasker, “Trudeau Cabinet Approves Trans Mountain Expansion Project,” CBC, June 18, 2019.
[55] Justin Trudeau, “Twitter Post,” Twitter, June 18, 2019.
[56] Nives Dolsak and Aseem Prakash, “The Green New Deal and the New Politics of Climate Change,” Forbes, March 13, 2019.
[57] “Green New Deal,” Sunrise Movement, accessed August 1, 2019,
[58] Hannah Knowles, “An Arctic Fox Walked 2,700 Miles from Norway to Canada. Yes, That’s Possible,” Washington Post, July 2, 2019; The World staff, “One Arctic Fox’s Incredible Journey from Norway to Canada,” Public Radio International, July 3, 2019.
[59] Eva Fuglei and Arnaud Tarroux, “Arctic Fox Dispersal from Svalbard to Canada: One Female’s Long Run across Sea Ice,” Polar Research 38 (June), 1.
[60] Ibid.
[61] Ibid, 2.
[62] Ibid, 5.
[63] Culloty et al., “Researching Visual Representations of Climate Change,” 180.
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