Sabine Höhler

Sabine Höhler as a MSc Physics, Karlsruhe University (today KIT Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) 1993 and a PhD History of Science and Technology, TU Braunschweig 1999. She is also a
Docent in History of Science, Technology and Environment, TU Darmstadt 2010 and KTH 2014

With a focus on historical science and technology studies, Sabine Höhler seeks to answer a fundamental question. How has our earthly environment become governable through science and technology?

Sabine is interested in the technologies and practices that humans have created to observe, describe, and manage the large-scale earthly spaces and systems that make up the global environment. She explores how science and technology shaped what is perceptible – and what has remained invisible – in different social and geographical constellations.

Society today perceives the environment mostly through techno-scientific instruments, from satellites to autonomous sensor systems. Over the 19th and 20th centuries, the skies turned into the atmosphere; local weather events became an expression of the global climate; the zone of life on Earth became the biosphere – they all became objects of scientific exploration and technological intervention. Science and technology changed people’s understanding of the environment, their concerns about the capacities and limits of the planetary ecosystem, and their expectations of engineering the environments yet to come, both on Earth and beyond.

But who, Sabine asks, has benefitted and lost from such technoscience-based human-nature interactions?