Occupational Hazard

Yesterday, Nature Reviews Biodiversity published a short comment on drones. Drone delivery and air taxis are expanding rapidly, especially in China, already home to the world’s largest civilian drone industry. The authors call the emerging market the »low-altitude economy«, and note that ecological safeguards for the shared airspace between drones and flying wildlife remain scarce.¹

»Empty space and unoccupied space, it turns out, were never the same thing«

The interesting word here may not be »drone«, or even »economy«, but »shared«.

We think of the sky as empty until something is put into it. A building occupies a plot. The atmosphere resists this picture because its occupants are moving, dispersed, and hard to see. A bird doesn’t leave a footprint on the sky; a dragonfly doesn’t fence off a hunting ground. But that doesn’t mean the space is unoccupied.

In 2008, the biologist Thomas Kunz and colleagues proposed »aeroecology«, a discipline for studying the atmosphere as habitat rather than empty air: the aerosphere on which birds, bats, and insects depend.² Empty space and unoccupied space, it turns out, were never the same thing.

The distinction matters now because the same volumes of air are acquiring a new kind of value. China has just designated the low-altitude economy a strategic emerging pillar industry – an entire layer of infrastructure below conventional aviation, spanning drone delivery, low-altitude passenger transport, and the routes and licensing regimes needed to run them. The government’s own projection has it roughly doubling, from 1.5 trillion yuan in 2025 to 3.5 trillion yuan by 2035.³ The phrase »low-altitude economy« makes that transformation legible: it turns a volume of atmosphere into something that can be mapped, allocated, measured, and invested in.

This is close to what the political scientist James C. Scott meant by legibility: institutions turn complicated realities into categories they can see, count, map, and administer.⁴ The simplification isn’t false, it’s just a way of making reality available to a system.

Aeroecology performs almost the inverse operation on the same sky. It says: this volume contains life. The low-altitude economy says: this volume contains economic opportunity. The two descriptions are now beginning to collide.

Aviation already accounts for birds through the mitigation of bird-strikes: airports monitor populations and manage habitats to reduce collision risk. But the logic is revealing: a bird matters because it’s a hazard to aviation, not because it’s an occupant whose own use of the airspace might be interfered with. That distinction gets harder to maintain now that the new infrastructure is designed to operate at exactly these altitudes. The question is no longer simply whether drones disturb wildlife, but whether a space can be governed properly when one set of occupants is legible to the system and another is not.

This turns Scott’s idea of legibility into more than a description of how institutions simplify reality. What gets mapped and measured is what can enter the machinery of allocation. The drone has an operator, a route, a licence. The bird has a flight path; it doesn’t have a representative.

That’s why the language matters. Calling something an »economy« doesn’t just describe what happens there, it makes the space administratively visible – which is exactly what aeroecology did from the other direction, by teaching us to see the atmosphere as habitat.

So the question isn’t really what we should do about drones. It’s more basic: what makes a space count as occupied? Perhaps occupation was never only physical. Perhaps, in practice, a space becomes occupied once its occupants can be read by whatever system is doing the allocating.

We have a sophisticated vocabulary for allocating space among people: property lines, rights of way, licences, leases. What happens when a space is already occupied by something that can’t appear in any of those categories?

They were there before we thought to ask who was using it.

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