The anthropocenic condition involves figuring out how we can come to see the environment less and less as a noun (“environment”) and more like a verb (“environing”). This pathway leads you down that trail of thought by exploring the sensorial-technical means by which humans remake the surface of the Earth, the lay of the land, and the course of rivers.4.1.1 How can the shaping of the environment as well as the sensing of it (how environment is known) be conceptualized? In what cases are the shaping and the sensing of the environment related?

Understanding the verb “environing” in this way is part of the struggle of grasping how humans both shape environments as well as sense (name) the environment as “environment”—a term that separates environs from environers. To explore this middle ground, the becoming, is the cumbersome task that we as a species, or, alternatively, as members of a specific polity, must come to terms with and increasingly articulate.4.1.2

Is environing, along with other attempts to structure one’s surroundings, a uniquely human behavior? Take beavers, for example, whose dams submerge swaths of land to build homes for their species, in the process shaping life conditions for many others. The beaver’s “niche construction” skills were acquired in one setting,4.1.3 and then deployed elsewhere, thus remaking environments as the species migrates.4.1.4

It is not human environing itself that makes this phenomenon volatile, but rather the scale and scope of the endeavor(s). With the aid of technologies, humans environ both horizontally across the Earth (at an accelerating pace) and vertically (to dizzying depths and heights).4.1.5 Furthermore, technologies allow humans to augment senses, to re-present geographically and temporally distant places. Juxtaposing these past times and places all at once, side by side, affords developers of sensing technologies the ability to speak about environmental change (“glaciers and forests have decreased”; “ecological deserts on land and at sea have expanded”).4.1.6

The extent of environing is a new experience in human evolution: a quantitative change that became a qualitative shift. So too are the means by which seemingly separate environmental changes are observed to form part of a global, interrelated change, all caught under the term “the Anthropocene.”4.1.7 The sensing of change has in turn fueled a motivation to bring about particular environmental changes, albeit on an ad hoc basis. Proposals for reversing the worst ills of environing (e.g., global warming) are deemed, perhaps tragically, to require further environing (e.g., geoengineering).4.1.8

Satellite images are one example of data in use from the late twentieth century onward that have become crucial for policy-making institutions (such as the UN) to not only monitor but also manage environmental change. When forest-monitoring practices are used for the management of forests, images of the environment are understood not only as data about the environment but as synonymous with the environment.4.1.9 If a tree falls, and no data is around to sense it, today’s governing bodies have an increasingly difficult time thinking the tree ever existed. To understand such historical developments, one has to study how environmental sensing and shaping co-developed. Satellites were in this regard the means, but it was the unholy alliance between environmentalists, technocrats, and remote-sensing engineers—with a motive to formulate a techno-moralistic discourse—that created a space where the analogous relationship between sensing and saving the environment became self-evident.4.1.10

To understand why humans shaped and sensed environments—why they environed—one must follow their verbs. The researchers and practitioners researching the Anthropocene can hope to understand what things are by looking at what they do. In written documents, the emphasis, then, should be not on nouns but on verbs. With regard to sensing technologies, the questions to be posed are, for example: What have been the uses of satellites and their images? What nouns and adjectives have been associated with their activities? Where on the planet have these encompassing infrastructures expanded to or taken anchor in? In asking such questions, one can hope to read, view, and listen to historical and contemporary people and places and come to terms with both the politics of others as well as our own personal concerns, within and as part of the ongoing environing that is the anthropocenic condition.