A Case for Space Environmentalism: Emerging Impacts of Spaceflight
As space activity accelerates, identifying and assessing its environmental and socioeconomic impacts is becoming increasingly important. With a particular focus on emerging space technologies and applications, this two-day workshop makes a case for addressing how space activities may affect both the Earth environment and environments beyond Earth, now and in the future.
In addition to examining ongoing impacts, the workshop explicitly engages with plausible future activities, including large-scale orbital infrastructure, space-based illumination systems, lunar resource extraction, and longer-term human presence beyond Earth. The workshop will further explore how the common treatment of Earth and space as separate domains can limit understanding of the environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural impacts of these activities on Earth, while also considering how space environments themselves may be affected, may hold value in their own right, and may warrant stewardship in light of how future generations may depend on and value them. It will also examine how expanding space activities could reshape human cultural relationships with space, especially via the night sky.
By bringing these perspectives together, the workshop aims to synthesize the most urgent emerging concerns to inform a connected workshop on space law and policy.