The Confederated Colville Tribes collaborated with DroneSeed, a forestry drone start-up, to use drones to replant their tribal forest after a devastating fire. Using concepts from Bernard Stiegler to interrogate ethnographic data, this article argues that forestry drones are pharmaka: their biopolitics can be therapeutic, that is, negentropic, capable of reversing ecological simplification. Drone forestry is a type of arborescent governmentality, a tree-based computer-coded attempt to control the growth of a forest. For the Colville, this negentropy is also an act (...) of sovereignty that protects culture and honors multispecies relationships. For DroneSeed, it is an experiment in negentropic geoengineering, an attempt to profitably leverage technologies and biological regeneration to sequester carbon and reduce global existential risk. Ultimately the project was not the success desired; the failure of technoliberal projects that blend ecological and economic liberalism shows that a more radical approach might be necessary to root carbon and slow capitalism. (shrink)

This article brings a new perspective to the ethical debate on geoengineering through stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), incorporating the emerging techno-moral change scholarship into the discussion surrounding sustainability. The techno-moral change approach can help us understand different ways in which technology might shape society. First, it helps highlight how values and norms are interrelated. Second, it shows that techno-moral change can happen even if the technology is in no way realized. Through the introduction of two techno-moral vignettes, two diametrically opposed (...) ways in which SAI forces us to rethink sustainability and our relationship with nature are suggested. SAI could lead to a situation of entrenchment, wherein sustainability as a norm is undermined, or transformation where the necessity of acting according to sustainability is highlighted. (shrink)