Alone on an Island Floating in Space
This episode explores how the construction of a map can impact which stories are given prominence. We explore Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth, the beginning of the proto-environmentalist movement, the dawn of the atomic age, and where we are today.
Featuring environmental historian Adam Rome, artist Mary Kavanaugh, and urban geographer Stephanie Wakefield.
Christina Battle
Here’s a question: how big is Greenland?
You could look it up and find out that the land size of Greenland is 2.166 million kilometers squared, but if you’re like me, that probably doesn’t mean anything.
What I’m asking is, how big do you picture Greenland being?
If you’re picturing a gigantic landmass in the upper center of a map: Good memory. It’s massive!
That is, it’s massive on a certain version of a map of the world, the one that most of us likely grew up with in our grade school classrooms. It’s the one that’s on Google Maps if you zoom out far enough, and probably the one that you think of when you think of The World.
This map that most of us think of is called the Mercator projection and, as you may have guessed by now with this leading build up, it’s wrong.
Greenland is not huge. On our maps it seems to be roughly the same size as the entire continent of Africa, when in fact it’s more than 14 times smaller.
So, why are the maps inaccurate? Well, the most diplomatic answer is that it’s really hard to transpose something that’s in three dimensions to something that’s in two dimensions. The Mercator map, for example, is essentially created by wrapping a piece of paper around a globe at the equator to form a cylindrical shape that goes all the way around the earth. Imagine a ball in a tube. From there, the landmasses are projected directly outward from the globe, making shadows on the cylinder. Somewhere like Africa, because it is so close to the equator and therefore so close to the wrapped cylinder, the distortion of its shape is minimal, like a shadow if the sun is directly overhead. But as you move up or down the globe and get further and further away from the wrapped cylinder, the shadows act like your shadow does at dusk: it elongates and distorts, making you look way taller than you actually are.
Despite this distortion, the Mercator map is actually pretty good at accurately depicting the contours of land masses and, most importantly, for north-south coordinates. This is why it’s been used since the 1500s for nautical navigation, and why it’s still used by Google. Where it totally fails is in depicting the relative size of land masses. Due to their more northern placement in the globe, European and North American nations are presented larger and African and South American countries are disproportionately smaller. Although Europe and South America look to be the same size on the map, in reality Europe is half the size. How are our thoughts about the way aid is distributed affected by this Eurocentric image of the world that we have in our heads? How do we think of ourselves and our place in the world depending on where we live? In more recent years, the UN and many aid agencies have adopted a new map called the Gall-Peters projection, which was first presented in 1973. This map is equally distorted, with Africa and South America comically elongated and Greenland getting squished nearly flat along its northern border, but importantly all of the land masses are given their correct relative size, making the overall map less Eurocentric.
But even before the Gall-Peters projection, there was an article in Life magazine in 1943 with an odd craft project as its centerfold. The article was titled The Dymaxion World, and it featured a picture of a young Buckminster Fuller with his characteristically large spectacled eyes, looking directly at the camera and holding an odd cubist-looking version of a globe. The earth he was holding was made of 6 squares and 8 triangles that were printed in the magazine. Readers were encouraged to cut out the shapes and assemble their own Dymaxion globe. In Fuller’s version, the world map distortion is distributed evenly, making it more true to the actual globe than both the Mercator and Gall-Peters maps. Fuller suggested that, laid flat, it offered a means by which to see the world fairly and all at once. The geometric shapes could be reordered so that any point on the map could be focused in the center. And instead of political boundaries, the map was marked with a snaking pattern of coloured lines demarcating temperature zones, which Fuller felt had more influence on the history of mankind than nation states.
The Dymaxion map, though, didn’t really work well as a map. Laid out flat it was an awkward arrangement of squares and triangles, and for a terrestrial traveler who relies on north and south in order to orient themselves it was nearly useless. But Fuller wasn’t concerned about these limitations. When Fuller pictured the Earth, he saw it as a ball, spinning on its axis and hurtling through space. And in outer space, north and south are irrelevant, laid bare as the somewhat arbitrary inventions that they are. In reality, Europe makes as much sense at the top of a map as it does on the bottom.
Music
Fuller Recording
“We are really very literally on a spaceship. Now everyone’s saying, I wonder what it would be like to be on a spaceship. We’re making 60,000 miles an hour around the sun on our spaceship. It has been beautifully equipped to take care of us, despite all our ignorance. It’s a beautiful design. We have everything here to generate life.”
Intro music
Christina Battle
Welcome to Remote Stars; my name is Christina Battle. In our three part miniseries, we’ll be thinking about a recently rediscovered recording that Greg Curnoe made on an evening in London, Ontario in 1968. In this episode, Spaceship Earth and the dawn of the sustainability movement: how the atomic age changed our world and where we are today.
Episode Two: Alone on an Island. Floating in Space
Intro Music fades out
Audio from Earthrise photo comes in
Christina Battle
This is audio from the Apollo 8 mission to the moon. Astronauts Jim Lovell and Bill Anders are scrambling to track the earth as it suddenly appears in one of the small hatch windows of their spacecraft. The image is iconic — the first full colour view of our planet. It looked incredibly beautiful and utterly alone. A brilliantly coloured blue and white marble set against the grey edge of the moon and the infinite blackness of space.
Many people feel this image helped launch the early environmental movement.
Adam Rome
The basic idea was that the Earth was essentially like the rockets with people that we were sending up to try to get to the moon, that they had to be a self-contained system; there was no sunlight, no resupply of anything essential. So the spaceships that we were creating had to be able to protect life support systems and ensure continuous cycling of the materials needed to sustain life. And the idea was that the whole Earth — which people had been used to thinking of as essentially limitless, endless, and infinite — was actually also a closed, self-contained system.
Christina Battle
This is Adam Rome, a historian and professor in the Department of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo.
Adam Rome
And an expert on the history of the modern environmental movement.
Christina Battle
“Spaceship Earth” is how Fuller referred to our planet. The term was intended to emphasize the fact that we were all on this one spaceship together and all responsible for its continued existence. He’d point out that the ship itself was so well-designed that it has allowed us to screw up for a long time — to be aboard the ship without really knowing how it worked.
Adam Rome
But we were getting to a crisis where we were creating so many problems, so many pilot errors as he put it, that we had to, since we were at the controls, understand how the system worked on spaceship Earth if we wanted to sustain ourselves.
Interestingly, this is before climate change was an issue, but people already had a sense that we were edging closer to doom.
Christina Battle
But it was in this doom scenario that Fuller’s message resonated so strongly. When we were putting together this podcast, we kept coming back to Fuller’s public persona, because I think it’s really hard to understand now. Who would he be today? In Fuller’s talks, he has the cadence of a salesman trying to hook you on his new revolutionary product.
Maybe what’s awkward about these pitches is looking at them in hindsight and realizing that the technology that was supposed to save us just kept spiraling out of control.
Adam Rome
So by the 60s, people were beginning to have a sense that technology was running away from us, that we really weren’t in control of it anymore, that we were creating a host of new hazards that could do away with us.
Christina Battle
What Fuller emphasized in his talks is that we were at a turning point. A fork in the road where we could reexamine our technological progression and reengineer our technologies for sustainability.
Adam Rome
If we started to try to make technologies that were sustainable, if we thought about the waste and the possible unintended consequences, we could avoid those. We can make technologies that would be super-efficient, super lightweight, wouldn’t demand a lot of resources. Fuller talked about it as an industrial retooling revolution.
Christina Battle
In a lot of ways, this argument is still around today. Dire environmental warnings and industrialists claiming we can invent our way out of it. But at the time, this idea of techno-utopianism was still new and just beginning to become a reality. As a prophet of this new age, Fuller’s lecture attracted a diverse audience.
Adam Rome
So establishment types, elite types, corporate types, thought this might be a very cool new technology. But it was also inspiring to, you know, Stewart Brand, who started the Whole Earth Catalog or these alternative technologies, who created an institute in the late 60s called the New Alchemy Institute in Massachusetts that was very hippie trying to find alternative technologies.
So I think some of his ideas were amazingly taken up by people who didn’t have a lot else in common.
Christina Battle
On paper, Fuller was expressly anti-capitalist. In his books, he would use his own terms like FinCaps and LawCaps, which stood for “the bad guys” — Financial and Legal Capitalists who were accruing and hoarding wealth. Their greed was to the detriment of the common man and stood in the face of what Fuller believed was a technological march toward social equality.
But in person he was much cagier about expressing strong political opinions, perhaps because he didn’t want to offend his hosts. He would often say that if someone invited him to talk, that he felt a responsibility to quote ‘give them his best’. Or it may have been because, in some cases, he had conflicting interests. If you have contracts with militaries and governments all over the world, as Fuller did, you might not want to alienate them with your principled stands about policy or interventionism. But probably more than anything, Fuller wasn’t interested in nationalism. To Fuller, nationalism was a shorthand for war, and war was antithetical to the project and trajectory of a well-functioning Spaceship Earth.
But at that moment in London in 1968, and during most of his talks, Fuller’s appeal to a younger generation usually meant that he was addressing a crowd who’d grown up for the past 20 years with PSAs like this:
Duck and Cover PSA
Christina Battle
If you’ve never seen this, it’s a cartoon turtle named Bert, who’s wearing a little bow tie and a bowler hat… or maybe it’s a helmet, it’s hard to tell. Anyway, he’s cute, and he’s casually strolling along smiling and sniffing flowers until a lit stick of dynamite enters the frame. The camera pans back to reveal a monkey hanging from a tree, suspending the dynamite from a fishing rod. When Bert sees the dynamite, his eyes go wide; he jumps in the air and tucks himself into his shell. As he hits the ground, the screen flashes. The explosion devastates the tree and seemingly vaporizes the monkey. We zoom back in on the shell and two eyes blink open from inside the darkness.
PSA – “Bert’s OK because he remembered to duck and cover”
Christina Battle
For Greg Curnoe’s generation, this PSA and others like it were a staple throughout childhood and adolescence. In school, there would be duck and cover drills, the same as we have fire drills today. Even seemingly monumental accomplishments like the moon landing were mired by the overt jingoism of warring superpowers.
One of the most interesting segments of the Fuller recording in London revolves around this fundamental difference in perspectives. It’s interesting for a number of reasons—this is Curnoe talking to Fuller later in the evening when they’re having drinks.
Curnoe
Yeah, but shouldn’t our main concern at this point be a political one? Aren’t the kids really doing it right when they, when the urge seems to be on the right of everyone to do his own thing. If that premise were accepted, then the problem of the world exterminating itself with atomic weaponry wouldn’t exist. Shouldn’t that be one of our main concerns?
Christina Battle
Curnoe is asking Fuller about this ever-present nuclear threat that he’s been living with for nearly the past 20 years, and Fuller just sort of shrugs it off.
Fuller
I never … what I eschew is telling anyone what he ought to do. So if you’re asking what I’m thinking, I’ll give you the best that I have….
Christina Battle
Likely a bit confused by Fuller’s answer or non-answer, Curnoe interjects again and is like. “No, what do you think of that.” What do you think about nuclear war?
Curnoe
Well, what do you think about that? What do you think about what I just said?
Christina Battle
And Fuller just replies again that he doesn’t really think about what humans ought to do
Fuller
I don’t think about what he ought to do.
Christina Battle
It’s a funny back and forth because Curnoe’s frustration only becomes more palpable as Fuller refuses to offer a straight answer.
In his book about Fuller, Jonathon Keats notes that “for all of Fuller’s talk of openness, he didn’t really tolerate dissent… Fuller always lectured and never argued, leaving little space in his life for anyone but unquestioning acolytes.”
Mary Kavanagh
I mean, I guess. Greg Curnoe is arguing for a pragmatic response to the nuclear problem, right, that there needs to be a check and balance on those who hold power on the regulation of this industry in order to avoid nuclear annihilation. But so he’s definitely sort of participating in the discourse, it’s on the side of the anti-nuclear activists at that time, right. And so his position is a political one. And Buckminster Fuller, he’s averse to taking political positions.
Christina Battle
This is Mary Kavanagh talking about that moment in the tape. Mary is an artist and documentarian whose work focuses on the history of the nuclear era: the subject that was being so hotly debated that evening in London. Since 2012, Mary has been travelling to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the location of the first atomic explosion. Code-named “Trinity” after a poem by John Donne, the site is said to mark the dawn of the atomic age. For two days a year, they open the site to the public, creating a bizarre pilgrimage to the heart of a desert called the Jornada del Muerto — translated roughly as “The Route of the Dead Man.”
Mary Kavanagh
So there’s been this kind of logistical process of creating the open house structure, and it’s grown in popularity because partly it’s something that is a destination tourist site where people actually have to plan their journey on that particular day. And so there’s a weird, there’s… I think people are often attracted to what is rare.
It’s a one-day pilgrimage. And it’s interesting because it’s very visible that it’s a pilgrimage, because what happens is people line up at the stallion gate for the gate to open at 8 a.m. and then they drive and park, and then they have to get out of their vehicles and walk half a mile to ground zero. So you can actually literally see this line of individuals walking all day.
Christina Battle
Her documentary video opens with this footage. Hundreds of tourists, sun hats and glasses on, or squinting against the desert sun. They walk past tents and fences that are transported into the desert twice a year for this ritual. Many of the spectators have big cameras slung over their shoulders, and they look completely out of place against the dusty desert landscape surrounding them in the background. It’s Burning Man minus, well, pretty much everything.
Mary Kavanagh
Some people say there’s nothing there. Some people talk about how knowing what happened there is really what gives it significance. Of course, some people claim to be able to feel what happened there. And then the interpretive sort of dimension of the site in the form of the photographs that ring the perimeter fence, which tell the story or, you know, the guys that are there giving information or talking about radioactivity and talking about the history, offering free information and advice or answering questions is part of the experience. It has a kind of carnival feeling to it.
Christina Battle
The only permanent structure in the desert is a 12-foot obelisk made of lava rock, marking ground zero of the first explosion. Its inscription reads: “Trinity Site: Where the World’s First Nuclear Device Was Exploded on July 16, 1945.” There’s no mention that less than a month later, two of these devices were dropped on mostly civilian populations in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ostensibly ending the war by what Japan’s Emperor Hirohito described as “a new and most cruel bomb.”
Mary Kavanagh
So that first day was interesting because we didn’t know what to expect. And I had some clarity about why I was there, because I was already working on the subject matter. But I had not expected those crowds, and that became really interesting. So the question really by the end of the day was, “so who are all these people, and why do they come here?”
Christina Battle
What Mary captures in her work is a complex tapestry of an American identity that seems to shift through generations and through understandings of our history and our future as it gets revisited, now 70 years into the atomic age.
Mary Kavanagh
And so, let’s see, you have everybody from guys who talk about their fathers who served in the South Pacific, who expressed conflict, who maybe wouldn’t be here today had the bomb not been developed, then they felt guilty about saying that. I’ve had people who are very interested in the science; a lot of people interested in science, because Trinity is definitely considered a site of great scientific achievement, and it’s often considered separately from its relationship to the use of the bomb on civilian populations.
Some people talk about it as a site of spiritual power. A holy place, Mecca. Some people talk about their anxiety, like having lived growing up with fear and anxiety from living through the Cold War, that doesn’t cover killing and… A lot of people, especially younger people, are making the connection between nuclear development and climate change and some of the sort of existential crisis that faces us now, and are more able to kind of discuss those things is linked with a lot of people are very worried about waste management issues because essentially with the nuclear industry, the waste management part of it has never really been solved. So there’s this kind of constant production of radioactive high level waste that no one knows what to do with, and we’re talking about a problem that is so long term, it’s kind of inconceivable in terms of human lifespans, like literally tens of thousands of years in the future. How do you address a problem that’s going to last that long when we can’t think past 40 years, 70 years, maybe 100 years?
Christina Battle
An implicit theme in the video is this complicated relationship that we’ve developed with nuclear technology, and how our ability to alter the planet has fundamentally changed our relationship with the Earth. Now, with nearly 80 years of hindsight since the detonation of the first atomic bomb, some people believe that this moment in the desert in 1945 marked the beginning of a new geological age.
The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch marked by the start of significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. In the past hundred years, new materials like plastics, concrete and aluminum have spread across oceans and land. Nitrogen and phosphorus in soils have doubled with increased use of fertilizers, and nuclear testing has left its mark across the globe.
In one of the last scenes of the film, artist Judy Tuwaletstiwa tells a chilling story about the formation of trinitite — small shards of glass that can be found all around the nuclear test sites in New Mexico.
Judy Tuwaletstiwa
I’d always thought that trinitite was formed by the blast — that it had hit the sand and turned it into glass, into broken shards of glass — but in fact there was a different theory that had been proposed. That some of that happened, but that trinitite — which is basically glass that was formed by the sand being pulled up into the blast — just suctioned, vacuumed up into the blast, transformed in the air, and then rained back down upon the Earth. And that is just so mythical, that concept so different than just fire forming it on the earth.
So here’s the sand pulled up and returned as rain, that is rain that none of us ever want to be part of, and yet it’s a powerful powerful aspect of who we are as human beings.
Christina Battle
By the time Fuller was giving his talk in London, Ontario in 1968, this new era of irreversible change had already begun. His techno-utopian vision to, as he would say, “make the world work, for 100% of humanity,” had a blind spot. The impact of new technologies, even if they were designed sustainably at the time, couldn’t be properly measured until years in the future once we could calculate their true effects. This is Adam Rome again.
Adam Rome
I mean, there are many things I could say, but the simplest example is something economists have been talking about for generations. It’s this concept of externalities. So, you know, when you flick on the light switch and you’re in a room, you’re not paying for the global warming that you’re causing; you know that’s not part of the price of the electricity. Virtually nothing that we make or consume as it is is really priced correctly in that sense.
And we don’t have a way of valuing what people call natural capital or ecosystem capital, all the millions of ways that the Earth sustains us that are our creation, but that can be destroyed by us or harmed by this. It’s a basic design flaw in our and our whole economy.
Christina Battle
And this design flaw has only expanded over time as neoliberalism and free-market capitalism have pushed for the elimination of price controls, deregulating capital markets and lowering trade barriers. Ultimately, creating a financial system where the value of the global ecosystem isn’t prioritized.
Stephanie Wakefield
I’ve been thinking about the Anthropocene as a concept and as a reality. Both of those are kind of two different things, right, for a long time, kind of since the term really got picked up in the popular sort of culture world when it started being on the covers of the magazines. And then a few years later, all the art institutions started doing events around it and then academic conferences had, you know, that as their theme and all that. Right.
Christina Battle
This is Dr. Stephanie Wakefield.
Stephanie Wakefield
I’m a geographer by training. In my research and my teaching in general, I look at different governmental responses and responses of ordinary people to climate change in urban areas for the most part and, more broadly, sort of the dislocations of the Anthropocene.
Christina Battle
If Fuller was looking at sustainability issues as a fork in the road in the 1960s, trying to choose the best path for the future of humanity, Wakefield’s work helps us to better understand the path that we took, where it is that we are standing now, and how we might imagine and implement paths forward into the future.
In this moment of ecological change, Stephanie explained, there are multiple theories about what humanity should do in the wake of this new age. One approach is in line with what Fuller was advocating for 60 years ago, and what is favoured by tech and big government today — basically, we’ll invent our way out of it. This track is what Wakefield calls resilience thinking, learning from our mistakes and trying to reverse engineer our way back out of them. A competing strategy is a proposal offered by academics and theorists who assert that ecology itself is resilient and that all that is needed is a falling back of humans as a primary force of ecological change.
Stephanie Wakefield
This means that the modern hubristic Promethean approach of the human, of humanism, was wrong. It’s now outdated. It is the source of the problem and that what is needed and what is required and what is possible only now in the Anthropocene is this humbled human being, this self-effacing subject that disappears itself into the world, that returns the world to get absorbed by the world and this kind of anti-humanist subject that will, you know, rather than, trying to project itself in the world and beyond, the present conditions of the world, has to kind of dwell in the ruins still in this world that’s already here.
Christina Battle
In certain ways, resilience thinking (inventing our way out of things) and ecological resilience (letting nature deal with the mess we made) can seem like opposite approaches to the Anthropocene. But in Wakefield’s view they are similar in that they both fail to address the larger issue that led us to this new epoch.
Stephanie Wakefield
So these are very similar sorts of views of life and what’s possible and of change too, that really, I think, you know, are actually very much counter to transformation, deep, deep transformation of social systems, economic systems and so on. There are these views of life, as you know, sort of adaptive and reactive and sort of getting by, you know, of survival and so on.
Christina Battle
In their own research, Wakefield looks at pockets of creativity, collaboration and resistance that are happening on local levels using a concept that they call the back loop.
Stephanie Wakefield
The back loop is a concept that comes from resilience ecology and, in particular, originally the work of C.S. Holling, who was a Canadian ecologist who passed away recently. He is pretty well known for having come up with the resiliency approach that’s now taken up by governments and designers and so on.
And the idea of the back loop that he ended up coming up with is from this idea that everything in the world is a system, and every system kind of goes through two phases of its existence: a front loop and a back loop. Together they describe this as an adaptive cycle. In the front loop, this is a time when you go through a phase of, let’s say, rapid growth or exploitation leading up to a time of stability or seeming stability where things seem to sort of be in their place. But then a back loop is a time when those sorts of relationships, those structures that hold that order together are destabilized; they come undone, things come apart. It’s a time of confusion and the time of release.
Christina Battle
Often, when explaining this cycle, ecologists use the example of a forest fire and how a forest will rebuild itself after a fire. This rebuilding process is dependent on many factors in the environment at the time of the fire, and the possible shapes that the new forest might take post-fire are endless.
Stephanie Wakefield
So, you know, I kind of thought that the back loop was, you know, a very interesting way to think about the time that we are in in the Anthropocene and as a civilization as well. So rather than, you know, we’re just at the end of civilization or what have you, it seems like, you know, a time of chaos, confusion and kind of unravelling and forces trying to keep things together as some of them are coming undone. All this sort of dynamic description of what a vacuum might be seems to me apt for the time that we’re in.
Christina Battle
In a project called BACK LOOP TV, Wakefield documents some of these social and economical adaptations that are happening as a result of the environmentally perilous time that we’re living within. On one channel of BACK LOOP TV are conversations with a man who’s created his house to be amphibious in order to withstand the severe flooding in the Mississippi basin caused by climate change. The project documents sea level rise in Miami, where exceptionally high tides can now push up through the porous bedrock and create huge pools of seawater in low-lying portions of the city on otherwise calm, sunny days. And includes interviews with residents of Fukushima as they navigate a new life in a radioactive landscape after the 2011 nuclear disaster.
I think what’s interesting about Wakefield’s project is that it’s at once horrifying to witness the impacts that climate change is imparting on local communities, but also empowering to see how people are figuring out how to adapt and survive in new ways.
Stephanie Wakefield
And I think that element is what matters, actually, the element of humans getting in touch with the means of existence again, which is literally what has been in many ways stripped from people from their everyday life as part of the last several hundred years of, let’s say, capitalism to be very, very quick about it. So that spark is something very real, and I think very meaningful. And it opens a door to a much bigger horizon.
Christina Battle
Within this spark that Wakefield alludes to comes a lot of trial and error. What we’re seeing across communities now, especially as we move through a number of epic crises together, is people taking chances: recognizing the problems they are facing and trying to find solutions on their own since, especially when it comes to the impacts of climate change, governments have so far refused to act. Like those strategies documented across BACK LOOP TV, people are trying…and failing…and trying again. They’re refusing to stand around and wait — often, like those facing floodwaters in Miami, they don’t have a choice. The systems we’re living within are failing us.
It’s not the techno-utopian vision of the future that Fuller prophesied, but it’s the reality that we’ve been left to deal with.
Faded audio of Fuller saying prophetic quote from video
Outro Music fades over top
Christina Battle
On the next episode of Remote Stars. Constructing a Mythology. The stories that we create and what they can tell us about ourselves.
Jamie Snyder
Yeah. Yeah. And it evolves too, I mean, I think that’s one of the things that shows up over time is, you know what you said, I mean, I’m sixty-five. You know what, the way I tell a story about something I did 40 years ago from here. Not only is there a little bit of an issue of memory and remembering the details, but it’s also that I view my life from here. I have a different perspective of what I was going through back then, because then I was in the middle of it and I couldn’t. And so it’s only later sometimes that you get distance, and you go, oh, wow, wow. Look, that was a really hard moment for him.
Music
Christina Battle
This episode of Remote Stars was written and produced by me, Christina Battle along with Angela Shackel and Braden Labonte of Accounts and Records. Kirsty Robertson and Sarah Smith are our supervising producers. Additional research and fact checking assistance by Alyssa Tremblay and Mirella Ntahonsigaye.
Music in this podcast by Habalayon and our theme music is by Adam Sturgeon. The episode was mixed, edited and sound designed by Angela Shackel. Archival footage from Federal Civil Defense Administration. And audio from Mary Kavanagh’s ongoing film titled ‘Trinity’.
Big thanks to everyone we talked to for this episode, Adam Rome, Mary Kavanagh, and Stephanie Wakefield.
From Remote Stars is a production of Carleton University in partnership with Western University, with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.