CONTINENTAL PICTURES: REPRESENTING NATIONAL AND NATURAL RESOURCES WITH LANDSAT

This article takes up the early history of observing and representing Earth environments through the U.S. Landsat satellite program of the 1970s. Landsat was a keystone project in the emerging field of ‘earth resources’ monitoring, which turned the powerful technologies of the Space Race around to regard the planet itself as a site of both commercial exploitation and environmental protection. And yet, within this ‘earth resources’ framework, certain regions of Earth became more visible than others. One image that marked the success of this new Landsat vision was ‘Portrait U.S.A.’, a photo composite produced by NASA and National Geographic in 1976 and circulated in celebration of the American bicentennial. This triumphal public satellite mosaic demonstrated the satellite’s power to render natural and national resources visible, therefore subject to new forms of governing from above. In order to accommodate the disparate aims of Landsat’s many users, the framing of ‘earth resources’ was deliberately flexible, capacious enough to contain a wide and sometimes contradictory set of applications, and yet produced gaps and blind spots around which territories, ecosystems, and resources could be visualized at all.