Aparna Venkatesan: Protecting space as ancestral global commons (Ep402)
“The legacy of Earth colonization… is still [in its] early days. We can protect this shared environment and also what I see as the intangible heritage of humanity. Space belongs to us all.”
In this episode, we are joined in conversation with Dr. Aparna Venkatesan, a cosmologist working on studies of “first-light” sources in the universe. She also works actively in cultural astronomy and space policy, is recognized internationally for her research and DEI leadership, featured widely in the media, and received numerous prizes and awards. Dr. Venkatesan is deeply committed to increasing the participation and retention of underrepresented groups in astronomy and the sciences and is active in developing co-created scientific partnerships with Indigenous communities worldwide.
Invoking us to think deeply about the ‘culture of science,’ Dr. Venkatesan offers an invitation to examine tapestries of life in relation to the more-than-earth world. Through joyful rhetoric and a love for the language of science, she calls for reflective examination deemed necessary to preserve the heritage of our ancestral global commons—space—that is currently under threat by extractive and colonial interests. In response to the growing privatization of the cosmos, Dr. Venkatesan urges for the immediacy of un-rooting these legacies by inviting other ways of knowing and engaging in communal practices of interplanetary justice as luminous as the night sky itself.
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Dive deeper:
“We Have Always Been In and Of Space,” an essay by Aparna Venkatesan
Artistic credits:
Musical interlude: Trust The Sun by Mother Juniper.
Episode graphic artist: Lucy Haslam
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Aparna Venkatesan: I grew up mostly all over India and Southeast Asia, and early on, I developed a very deep love of mathematics. I think most of us would agree that language can be a complicated medium of communication. And, language is often loaded, and it's an incomplete reflection of what people are wanting to convey or might be thinking. So some of my earliest inspirations came from this love of mathematics; I see it as a fundamental language for the cosmos, and I also see it as a very simple and pure way of communication, something that's not subject to a lot of misunderstanding or misinterpretation. But I see it as very fundamental, yet subtle and beautiful, so that's my love of mathematics. And I also love the stars.
So I loved thinking about and exploring for myself what a career looking at math in the universe might look like. And I do feel very fortunate that I'm getting to live the dream of studying the stars for a profession. As I've grown older, I've begun to invite my integrative self to this endeavor.
We talk a lot about science versus culture, but we don't think enough about the culture of science.
So my upbringing in Asian culture and my cultural sky traditions and beliefs have become a very rich part of my inner landscape that I bring to my scientific lens. And as you know, I also work a lot with Indigenous communities worldwide, particularly in the Americas, for over two decades, and learning about other cultures' sky traditions and their seamless integration with science, art, and culture that has also been an ongoing inspiration for me.
Kamea Chayne: There's so much in what you just said that I'm very curious to dive deeper into. We haven't gotten to talk about the subject of satellites on this show before, but especially as people's expanding cable networks, communication navigation systems, and more become increasingly reliant on these technologies, it just feels like a point of critical awareness to bring to the forefront, especially because they're often invisiblized and occupying spaces that do not displace or pollute communities as directly in the same ways that other land-dependent industrial scale projects would. So to provide more of a big-picture backdrop, first, I'm curious how you would introduce the connections and relationships you see between our satellite constellations and our histories of colonization, militarism, and the expansion of empires. I'm sure we could spend hours on this alone, but what are some key points that people should know as starting points?
Aparna Venkatesan: Satellites in orbit around Earth have been around for decades, but the current expansion is relatively new. Historically, for 50 to 60 years, we've had a few hundred satellites or so. And in fact, some of the earliest constellations had just a few dozen or so and managed to do fairly well on those. But as our digital needs and our communication needs have grown, people began to think about expanding the presence of satellite networks in space, because ground-based Internet can sometimes run into issues with terrain or delivering the same even quality. So having satellite bandwidth, digital bandwidth delivered through satellites became of greater interest. I would say 2019 is the first year that satellites burst into public awareness. That first link of 60 StarLink satellites from SpaceX went across the sky almost like a flotilla of lights. It was May 24th, 2019, I remember because it was my younger son's birthday that day. And I think the whole world woke up to what was that? And it's been brewing that the situation would be happening for some time, I would say a decade.
There's been planning out to this, but the scale at which it's unfolding and the pace is what has been in my mind, some of the greatest challenges. So there's a lot to parse here, but a summary would be that right now we are up to a few thousand satellites in low-Earth orbitals, or L.E.O. Why do we put them there? Because the communication time roundtrip with them is shorter, so it allows us to have latency in the signal that promotes higher bandwidth in the internet, and faster communication. We don't have to wait for it to go all the way up to a higher satellite. There are different tradeoffs between satellites in high elevations versus low, but let me not get sidetracked by that. Let me just say that people knew that there would be some issues even going into this. For example, satellites glint and reflect light unpredictably, so people knew this might become an issue for astronomers.
But the scale of what's unfolding already has become very alarming, not just for astronomers, but for a broader swath of constituencies.
So we can delve more into that, but I would say some of the most alarming parts are that we are at just a few percent of what's been approved for launch in the next 5 to 10 years, so close to half a million satellites have been approved for a launch. Now, even if we say only a fraction of those already approved will launch, that's still a factor of a few tens to a few hundred more than we've ever had up there. And even at the low level that we have up there, the orbits are getting congested. There's a lot of interference with radio signals, there's a lot of interference with astronomical observations, and a number of times collisions have only been narrowly avoided. So each collision creates debris that lingers for decades if not centuries. There are a lot of side worries coming from the debris. So there are real concerns for astronomers, we're seeing lots of streaks already in our data from satellite reflections and long exposures, but there are environmental degradation and debris concerns.
And of course, if we have skies that are getting brighter from satellites, it impacts cultural sky traditions and entire ecological systems reliant on dark skies, like the migration of animals and birds or circadian rhythms.
But I want to end on a note of hope for this question. From my perspective, yes, we are witnessing the real-time unfolding of the colonization of space. In the past, because the world wasn't so connected throughout, we missed historical events that were unfolding in a global way with broad, worldwide consequences. But now we really are seeing this slow motion, in a way, yet happening too quickly, we are seeing what could be a preventable disaster unfold. And in my mind, we're also seeing real-time colonization unfold in an entirely new environment, space. So we're kind of taking the legacy of Earth colonization up to a cosmic scale. But it's still early days yet, and I think we can protect this shared environment, and also what I see as the intangible heritage of humanity.
Space belongs to us all.
And in a way, so much of the privatization and militarization of other arenas has unfolded in many similar ways, taking something that belongs to everyone and then funneling it with a lot of publicly paid-for tax subsidies or programs, but funneling it back into corporate profits and private or military agendas. But again, it's early days yet, and I have personally been surprised in my work by how much awareness and collaborative potential there is with the military In this case. They, too, are worried about crowded orbits and debris.
Kamea Chayne: It certainly feels concerning for me as well that the number of satellites currently in space, which has already caused a detrimental impact on various communities, is just a small fraction of what's been approved. And the subject, I just don't think is even on the radar of a lot of people- who got to approve all of these satellites, and who provided the consent, and who is left out, and all of these things. You're right that this is something that's currently taking place, and hopefully, with greater awareness, people can organize more passionately around this, so we ensure interplanetary justice for all.
And on the topic of satellites, something that I have been thinking about is that there is no universalized vision of justice. And oftentimes, if they are narrower in their scope of considerations, they can be conflicting, and I think satellites illustrate this quite well. So in addition to space litter, as you shared, the expanding satellite constellation is contributing significantly to sky glow and worsening light pollution in a lot of very illuminated places, which makes it more difficult for communities to engage with their night skies and sky traditions, and also making it more difficult for astronomers to study space. And I see a nuance here, as a lot of more rural and underserved communities want to have access to the Internet, to extended communication networks, to engage in global discourses, politics, and change. And especially for those in conflict and war zones, sometimes the ability for people to communicate with their loved ones can be critical for survival and community care. Of course, some other rural communities have no interest in being integrated into the globalized network and economy in this way, and people have to respect that as well. But regardless, addressing the injustice in digital and network accessibility for the increasing number of communities that want in does mean more satellites and all of the other infrastructures associated with them. But their expansion also means more light and space pollution, which a lot of people want less of. So I'm curious how you would address these conflicting visions of justice and liberation. And I don't know, maybe the number of satellites serving rural and underserved communities pales in comparison to ones used for other purposes, so it could be relatively negligible. But what do we know about all of this?
Aparna Venkatesan: I think these are excellent points and I appreciate your bringing them up. And I think one of the ways that we get divided and eroded is by being forced into siloed or binary thinking by systemic factors. So let me explain what I mean by that. For example, it's very important for astronomers to be vocal about the incredible inequities in access to resources, particularly the digital divide. So this whole explosion of satellites in space unfolded during the pandemic years, when the whole world shut down. There's one thing that didn't slow down, which was satellite launches. And when the whole world slowed and shut down, I think all of us will take away our lessons from the pandemic years. And I learned a lot about the world and how it works and how fragile systems are, but how there was no limit to human collaboration and ingenuity if we just put our shoulder to the wheel together. So the digital divide, which was very real before the pandemic, became a digital chasm, right? I teach university, and it is very clear to me when I receive freshmen who had a high school education that had reasonable digital resources and bandwidth access versus those who didn't. It's become a very real divide that is lingering now in people's years after the pandemic.
So it's very important for astronomers to advocate for affordable broadband globally because it's not just about our future STEM workforce, it's simply about justice for the world and access to what is essentially now a non-negotiable utility.
It's also become a basic right in education, medicine, and medical access.
So what we need to assess, and this is what's been so complicated, there's no centralized regulatory authority that oversees approval. Who approves all these satellites? Well, there's one branch of the federal government that does that, but then who manages the space traffic and who deals with situational awareness in L.E.O., low-Earth orbit, we need to centralize all that. Right now, there are a lot of different offices that may not always be in contact with each other, but we need to centralize that because the goal is important, globally affordable broadband, and the rhetoric is very lofty. You know, we want to democratize space. We want to bring all those wonderful things to all of humanity. But we have to see how that shakes out. When you look at the owners of some of these companies and you look at some of their other companies, they don't convey a sense of a very just or democratic workplace environment. It's quite the contrary. So we have to see if this model of, we're going to bring economic development for all and the broadband is going to be cheap, actually works because what we don't want is to be left with a sky full of orbiting hardware forever. And that stuff's going to spiral down and crash down, and we shouldn't have the situation where the companies walk away leaving us with a mess to clean up.
But I think it's very important for communities to have broadband. The question is, is this the only way? Can we do some environmental assessments before we put quite so much? And then who will clean up the mess? I mean, these are all needing clarification. There's some language for it in The Outer Space Treaty, but we are kind of in new terrain because the legal gray area is being taken advantage of, in my opinion, in the name of these lofty public good goals. But it is a very big legal gray area. For example, do you know that space has not yet been declared an environment or a human environment? It's seen as a separate entity and wherever Earth's jurisdiction ends, I mean, people argue about how many miles that is above the Earth's surface, that's the extent of Earth's laws. But coming back to my original point, nothing's ever binary, nothing's ever siloed. It's all a spectrum, it's an integrative continuum. And we're living in that integrative continuum as human beings, but also from Earth to space.
Kamea Chayne: We certainly learned a lot about entanglement in terms of humans and the more-than-human world. And I think this speaks to our entanglement with the more-than-Earth world that we have to honor and take into account as well. And I want to speak to some of the underlying worldviews. So in your piece titled We Have Always Been In and Of Space, you talk about these different perceptions of time, juxtaposing cyclical views of time which most cultures and Indigenous communities have had over the millennia, from more linear views of time as held by dominant Western worldviews. How would you expound on how these differing perceptions of time impact how people then relate to or attempt to control and manage time? And critically, how has this led to different approaches and mindsets to space exploration and understanding?
Aparna Venkatesan: That's a great question. And also, a topic worthy of a deep dive by regulatory agencies. I'm not sure they'll do it. So in that piece written for the Center for Humans and Nature, I quoted the wonderful Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith. She talks about the manufactured urgency of colonial systems. And I want to quote that again here because, let's face it, we've all been around for 14 billion years. So what's the rush to get there this year? Why can't we move forward after consulting all constituencies in space, which is not just all of humanity, but a lot of ecological systems dependent on dark skies and space? Why can't we move forward after thinking things through, consulting different human constituencies, doing some test runs with low levels of satellites, seeing what goes well, and what doesn't go well, and then keep on adjusting the path? But that's not what's happening.
We are being told that we have to get there first, and it's a vision that's rooted in conquest and claims rather than communities and consensus.
And the view of time from my perspective, is at the root.
There's the kind of deep panic about getting there first to claim a lot of the resources there- a lot of countries are rushing to get to the moon, we know that there will very likely be a bunch of bases in the next decade or two from different space actors and nations. But everyone's also rushing to get to the South Pole of the moon, which is where frozen water ice is because that's going to be a great resource for whoever gets there to continue to expand out in the solar system. I'm personally pretty offended by how some space actors don't even pull back from colonization rhetoric. They say, let's go colonize, and they use the colonization rhetoric, they wear cowboy hats to the launch pads. Cowboy hats by themselves are not offensive. I personally like them, but it's along with the rhetoric of that, it's conveying the mindset of the frontier and all the mythology that goes with the frontier. Like you're riding out into a desolate landscape where nothing else is, and if something or someone happens to be there, displace them and we'll just claim it. So there's a lot of mythmaking and storytelling that is very rooted in a colonial frontier mindset, in my opinion. So again, it's this linear view of time where you get one chance at everything; there's a beginning, a middle, and the end, and everyone's rushing to get to the end first so that you're not the last to arrive. Rather than seeing each day, each year, and each age as a chance to learn as we do on a spiral staircase, where maybe not at the same place as we get to higher floors, but we can look down, see where we've been and say, what can I learn? So I do think that anxiety and the frontier mindset are very closely intertwined with this view of time and how we're approaching space, but really in how colonization has unfolded on Earth.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I was going to say this goes beyond space as well, because perhaps the underlying worldviews of time are also related to certain cultures' mindsets of scarcity and values of short-term extraction and individual gain over longer-term collective nurturing and thriving. And it does feel like right now the most dominant and funded forms of astronomy and space exploration are driven by particular interests, worldviews, goals, and intentions, which aren't reflective of our immense diversity of communities and cultures that take a different but active interest in growing our intimacies with our skies, with our dark skies and with space. But what have you noticed as being limiting or troubling from the industry and field of space exploration as it stands today? And what possibilities could come about from more integrative approaches that honor the diversity of scientific, spiritual, cultural, and ethical knowledge of different peoples?
Aparna Venkatesan:
I think we are going to start hearing a lot more about the ethical aspects of space exploration in the coming years.
It's very hard, even when there are motivated individuals and systems. I find systemic factors have such momentum. Systems are created to serve a particular fraction of humanity, and their goals are very clear, and systems can be very implacable in delivering their predetermined outcomes for a few because that is what they are designed for. So even if we have very motivated individuals in those systems, the systems just have a lot of momentum. So I would say for astronomers, many of us have benefited from land grant universities and the legacies of colonization. But there's a growing number of astronomers and STEM professionals who are cognizant of this, and who are trying to make change in the system. And we're also actively working with local Indigenous communities, particularly if they work at an observatory that happens to be near a tribal nation or well, all of the land is traditionally Indigenous land.
Examples are Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Tohono O'odham Nation. Everyone saw the headlines on the 30-meter telescope and Mauna Kea, but recently there's been a lot of progress with that, in the sense that after eight years of stalemate, there is now a new Mauna Kea stewardship oversight authority that's moving away from individual constituencies- the astronomers, the storytellers, the Hawaiian community organizers- it's moving away to the stewardship of Mauna Kea itself as the shared environment for all initiatives. So I am closely watching how that plays out. And I feel very hopeful knowing the amazing heartful people who are involved, but it's going to be a journey because building an ethical, relational approach to a shared environment that has tremendous potential is slow, messy work. But I don't see any other way forward because the opposite of that is what you said. It's rushed, it's extractive, and ultimately very destructive; destructive to the communities, and destructive to the environment.
So I think we could apply a lot of that to space.
But I would say the leading problems that I see in the industry are how very quickly things are happening.
They move fast, they're nimble, they're accountable to their shareholders and to maintain their licensing to launch. They must keep launching every month and every year a certain number of satellites. Otherwise, the conditions of licensing are impacted. So the pace at which this is unfolding, I would say, is the greatest challenge. And one last point here- the reason they're able to keep up this pace and launch at such a furious pace is that they have not been brought under the purview of a lot of Earth laws, including NEPA, the National Environmental Protection Act, because space is not yet considered an environment. So we need to attach more conditions to licensing, not because we feel like it, but because there is a genuine and justified concern for what might happen to this pristine environment of orbital space if we get there at unsustainably high levels and do too much, we don't want to degrade or ruin that environment. It's our only way out of and back to Earth. So we don't want to leave a permanently rotating cage of debris that we can never pass through.
Kamea Chayne: That these companies have to launch every single month to keep their license is quite mind-boggling, and it incentivizes kind of this rushed approach that you mentioned. And for some reason, perhaps due to the impacts of skewed narratives and storytelling, I feel like the topic of space and space exploration is often associated with futurism and what's considered futuristic. And yet this association leaves out how our skies reflect ancient history. For example, as you write beautifully, "As we analyze the ancient light of distant systems, we know that our songs and electromagnetic transmissions are leaving Earth on interstellar voyages to other worlds. Space is therefore our ancestral home in a physical and metaphysical sense." To these points, I would be curious to hear you speak more about the heritage of our dark skies, what it could mean to look at space as our ancestral global commons, and also if it feels relevant here, what Dark Sky Nations refers to.
Aparna Venkatesan: Thank you very much for your kind words and also for the very thoughtful questions. So let me start with Heritage. Five, ten, 30 years ago, heritage had particular meaning for different communities, for space. It tended to be defined as maybe a specific landing site on a distant world, or astronaut boot prints on the moon- it was very narrow, the definition of heritage on worlds other than Earth. And on Earth, there were definitions through the U.N. for intangible cultural heritage or UNESCO's sites, so specific structures, and so on. But now, after the last three years, from my perspective, we have lost a lot of elders to the pandemic. And I teach young people and I see, hear, and sense there is a hunger for traditions, for ancestors, for heritage, I see it every week. And we've lost a lot of elders to the pandemic, but climate change, too, is steadily erasing Earth's heritage, whether through redwoods burning down, those are more elders burning down, whether it's heritage sites getting flooded or impacted by climate change, or rising ocean levels. And I would take it even further—
when you have entire communities whose languages and way of life are tied to the environment and are tied to the place in which their traditions are grounded, the skies in which their traditions are grounded, then the definition of heritage is calling to be expanded.
Given the crossroads we're at, the late pandemic stage, climate change is fully in our face now, it's not a distant threat on the horizon. So what do we define as heritage? Do we define it just as these narrow specific instances or the very environment in which this rich human relationship to the broader tapestry of how we understand and relate to our world and cosmos first arose? So is that through our language? Is it through our sky tradition, our art, our storytelling, or all of it?
In my mind, as Earth faces increasing crises, the skies for me are a last stand of heritage.
I've begun to think of dark skies as an inalienable human right, something that is ours and should not be taken away, particularly by corporate interests in the name of our common good and in the name of economic development for all of us, which we have to see if that happens. But it's interesting to have this interview when the entire banking system is wobbling this week, and when cryptocurrency has been in freefall for the last six months, because wasn't this some of the language of cryptocurrency, that it would allow the average investor to have material gain and economic growth? It invited amateur and citizen stakeholders and there were a lot of narratives, a lot of storytelling around, come get your piece of the economic pie. But it was not managed well and it entered freefall like some banks are. So in all these situations, citizen stakeholders are left in bankruptcy while the industry is rescued over and over.
So I do think it's something to keep in mind, again, folding it back to the colonization of space as a frontier. I see this as a modern-day call to manifest destiny with all of the challenges, even the ugliness and wounding that brought. So for me, the way to move forward, and keep in mind that people are exhausted, right? People are in major crisis fatigue, they're sick of bad news. We don't want to present space and orbital space as yet another front, things are bad and they're going to get worse, and here's all the awful things that will happen.
I think it's early days yet, and I think we need to rise up collectively and claim back what has always been ours, our heritage, the dark skies, and claim it not just for ourselves, but for all the systems reliant on that, and that we are affecting day-to-day at this point.
So it's not just about us anymore, but this whole web of life and inanimate environments here on Earth, because we don't want to export this to the moon and Mars, to treat it as there for the taking.
Kamea Chayne: When you offer this invitation to look at space as our ancestral global commons, I also think about the possibilities of creating commons for our networks of communication. And just thinking about the crazy number of satellites that will be launched in the next 5 to 10 years, I wonder if it is partly the privatization of the companies launching these satellites which leads them to compete with one another, driving that immense growth that may not be necessary if the goal were to enable more communities to have broadband connection access. So I guess my question is whether this exponential growth in the number of satellites is necessary to connect the whole world. Or is that just a reflection of privatized and competing corporate interests?
Aparna Venkatesan: I think there's a way to bring this all together. I genuinely think that not all space companies are in this just for pure profit and rhetoric, they do want to leave a legacy and they do want to do good. And I also want to say, that we could just appreciate all the different strands of our human endeavors and bring together the strengths. For example, can we bring together the very real capital and the incredible adaptability and nimbleness of private space companies? Could we bring that together with the broader charge of federal agencies that are accountable to the people? Could we bring it all together? Some private space companies are already claiming Indigenous communities, saying, but look at this tribe, they're happy with us. And astronomers are also like, but Indigenous communities don't want this. But I don't think anybody should be claiming each other. I think we should all bring our strengths together in a mutually beneficial way. But to do that, we need to find a way to slow things down so we can develop relationships. It's going to be hard to find solutions that work for all, and everyone's goals are going to be very different with our moving out into space. But can we find a way, even if our goals are different, perhaps even contradictory with each other, or completely the opposite of each other's goals? Can we find a way to share this environment and build off each other's strengths? Because let's face it, when you're out there on the moon and if something goes wrong, you're going to need all the help you can get, we're not going to be so worried right then about geopolitics or who said what back on Earth. This is a shared endeavor and our shared ancestor.
Space really is our shared ancestor.
Kamea Chayne: When people talk about protecting our lands, protecting our waterways, protecting our planet, understandably so, most of them are referring to our Earth and our planetary health. And what I love about this conversation and your work is that it invites us to see our orbital spaces and our skies also as deserving of love and care and justice. So again, it goes beyond the more-than-human world to the more-than-Earth world. And it can't just be out of sight, out of mind with the increasing number of space debris and space junk that are littering our skies with little oversight over them. And at the same time, all of this can feel distant and out of reach for a lot of people. So I wonder if you can speak more about what interplanetary justice and respectful stewardship for our orbital spaces could look like? And what could it even mean to build or enhance communities, rather than colonies, in space?
Aparna Venkatesan: I speak a lot about communities rather than colonies in space. And I love the term interplanetary justice, and I would say that I have learned a lot in the last few years about environmental justice and light justice on Earth and how they affect the same communities negatively as are impacted by colonization, climate change, and the pandemic. So it's the same few percent of humanity impacted over and over. Having excessive light pollution from urban lights and ground-based light pollution is already a huge issue, as a recent citizen science data-based paper, a groundbreaking paper, recently revealed that since 2011, there has been a 10% increase in light pollution from the ground year to year. Over a child's lifetime, from being born from age 0 to 18. By the time they get to 18, they're going to see a few times fewer stars. So that's huge.
So now we're moving this problem out to space. What does light justice in space look like? And the problem with space is, and you're right, that not very many people know this is unfolding yet. Just like when there were all these other historical patterns and events, whether it was corporate greed and the banking system or the unfolding of colonization, people were not aware that injustices were building, and that things that would enormously impact their lives were unfolding until it was often too late. But in the case of this orbital space situation, I do think people are already seeing streaks, they're already seeing satellites. We are already seeing debris fall back in an uncontrolled way, not regularly, but now and then in enough of an unpredictable way that it's already concerning. And then, of course, there's going to be some environmental degradation that happens, which will also become unavoidable.
So how do we maintain interplanetary justice? I think by really looking at all our strands of human strength and wisdom, inviting all ways of knowing. What can we learn from the broader Oceania diaspora of way finders, their profound non-instrument, scientific, celestial navigation? What can we learn from them about living together in close quarters while being mariners out in the open ocean for weeks and weeks on end? How can we apply that to NASA missions? Because it takes a few months to get to Mars. We have to figure out how we're all going to live together, bringing very different worldviews. What can we learn from different global cultural traditions about the ways we approach new spaces? Do we pay respects to it, do we not assume that it's just empty and there for the taking? Do we leave open the possibility for surprises? Do we view time as a reset every day, a chance to learn and move forward, but not to carry anxiety and baggage? So I think when we expand our realm of justice, it's important to move forward in celebrating and honoring our strengths.
I believe that because the peculiar crossroads we're at is one of exhaustion and fatigue, where many injustices and inequities deepened over the pandemic. People are tired. So phrasing this as a story that's still unfolding that all human ways of knowing are invited to. And again, honoring the different systems' strengths. Having a wise, integrative approach that's un-assimilated and unique where we build a vision of a future because the reality is we are going to space, but how can we do it in a way that's not messy and short-lived?
Can we have a vision of our future and space that arises from the beating heart of what makes us human?
Where we use corporations and capital and technology layered in as the tools and the delivery mechanisms, but not the driving principles. We can't go to some entities for the grounding principles, the sort of opening vision of what is driving this ethically, but we can use the technology, the tools, the scientific knowledge. And in a way, I feel cultural traditions, and millennia-old Indigenous knowledge can be that grandmotherly wisdom that guides the curious, nimble, youthful energy of capitalism-driven exploration. Any gardener knows you need to plant short-lived plants and crops with longer-lived plants and crops that renew the soil. And that's how I feel. Again, the grandmotherly wisdom of millennia-old human knowledge, including Indigenous knowledge, can guide, and be patient with, this very energetic, nimble, curious energy of capitalism and space exploration.
~ musical intermission ~
Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books that you've read or publications you follow?
Aparna Venkatesan: I recently reread Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Braiding Sweetgrass. Dr. Kimmerer is an Indigenous ecologist. It's a profoundly beautiful book, it's been out for a decade. It just won the McArthur Award last October. But even though it was written a decade ago, it seems more relevant than ever, and I took away something from every chapter for our future in orbital space.
Kamea Chayne: What has been a personal motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Aparna Venkatesan: Just to breathe and reconnect to all. And mystery and wonder, because that is the space from which we can move forward creatively and playfully. Anxiety is not that space. So to breathe and to marvel.
Kamea Chayne: Hmm. I just took a deep breath there. And as we're wrapping up, what is one of your biggest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Aparna Venkatesan: I would say my students, it is such an honor to be with the future every day, and also the skies. I get a visceral thrill from watching celestial cycles unfold, whether it's little occultations or transits, or a couple of weeks ago, Jupiter and Venus came to their closest approach in a long time. The moon in January was at its closest approach, I think in 992 years. And the tides where I live by the beach in San Francisco were crazy like the low tides were low and the high tides were high. I get a mystical thrill from the cycles of the cosmos.
Kamea Chayne: Aparna, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an honor to be in conversation with you. And for now, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Aparna Venkatesan: I would say let us move forward in hope and collaboration. We've got this and let's be the elders that the future deserves.
