To Bernadette (1926-1996)

Discourses of
the Environment
EDITED BY ERIC DARIER
I] BLACI<WELL
Publishers
Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999
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First published 1999
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Hritish I j/Jrary Catah>Kuing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
tibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Discourses of the environment I edited by Eric Darier.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-631-21122-5 (alk. paper).- ISBN 0-631-21123-3 (pbk.:
alk. paper)
1. Environmental sciences. 2. Environmentalism. 3. Foucault,
Michel. I. Darier, Eric.
GE105.D58 1998
363.7-dc21 98-26079
Commissioning Editor: jill Landeryou
Picture Researcher: Michael Craven
Typeset in I O.S on 12.5 pt Sa bon
hv Granhicr,,ft Limitl'd. flon11. Kon11.
CIP
Contents
( :ontributors VII
xt
Foucault and the Environment: An Introduction 1
Eric Darier
Part I Histories 35
2 'The Entry of Life into History' 3 7
Paul Rutherford
J The Construction of Environmental 'Awareness' 63
Isabelle Lanthier and Lawrence Olivier, translated
hy Martine Eloy
4 Sex at the Limits 79
Catriona Sandilands
S Ecological Modernization and Environmental Risk 95
Paul Rutherford
Part II Environmentalities
6 Environmentality as Green Governmentality
Timothy W. Luke
7 Art and Foucauldian Heterotopias
Thomas Heyd
S Natur.: Writing as Self-Technology
Syh,ia Howerlhlnk
119
121
152
163
VI Contents
Part Ill Resistances
9 Nature as Dangerous Space
Peter Quigley
10 Foucault's Unnatural Ecology
Neil Levy
11 Foucault against Environmental Ethics
Eric Darier
Bibliography
Index
179
181
203
217
241
267
Contributors
Sylvia Bowerbank teaches in the Arts and Science Programme and
Fnglish Department of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
llrr present research interests include women and ecology and
1 he theorizing of ceo-criticism. She is completing a book on early
modern women's contributions to ecological thought, entitled
S{Jcaking for Nature: Women and Ecology in Early Modern Eng-
f,md. Her recent publications include an essay on the greening of
literary studies in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/
l ~ v u Canadienne de Litterature Comparee (Sept. 1995); (with
Dolores Wawia) 'Literature and Criticism by Natives and Metis
Women in Canada', Feminist Studies (Fall 1994); and 'Does
Women Speak for Nature?: Toward a Genealogy of Ecological
Feminism', in Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti (eds), Between
Monsters, Mother Goddesses and Cyborgs (Zed Books 1996).
f:ric Darier is a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study
of Environmental Change at Lancaster University, England. In
I Y95-6, he was a Post-Doctoral FeHow at the Environmental
Policy Unit, Queen's University, Canada. He taught in several
gr;1duate and undergraduate environmental studies programmes.
I k obtained his Ph.D. in Political Studies in 1993 from McGill
l JnivLrsity, Montreal. His doctoral thesis was entitled 'L'Environne-
flll'llt au Canada: une approche foucaltienne'. His publications
111dude 'Time to be Lazy: Work, the Environment and Modern Sub-
Jl'ctivities', Time and Society ( 1998); 'Environmental Govern-
nH:ntality: The Case of Canada's Green Plan', Environmental
l'oliltcs, 5 ( 4) ( l996a ); 'The Politics and Power Effects of Garbage
1\n:ydinp, in llalifax, Canada', Local hwironment, 1(1) (1996);
VIII Contributors
and 'Environmental Studies in Context: Knowledge, Language,
History and,the Self', in Michael D. Metha and Eric Ouellet (eds),
Environmental Sociology: Theory and Practice, Toronto: Captus
Press, 1995. He is co-author (with Simon Shackley) of an article
entitled 'The Seduction of the Sirens: Global Climate Change and
Modelling' (Science and Public Policy, forthcoming).
Thomas Heyd teaches philosophy in the Department of Philo-
sophy of the University of Victoria. He has written on indigenous
knowledge ('Indigenous Knowledge, Emancipation and Aliena-
tion', Knowledge and Policy, 8(1) (Spring 1995), performance art
('Understanding Performance Art: Beyond Art', British Journal of
Aesthetics, 31(1) (1991) and installation art ('Blair Brennan: Art
and the Sacred', Artichoke, 7(3). His other areas of research and
publication include history of philosophy (Modern period) and
philosophy of the environment. He is the former (1990-5) Chair
of the Canadian Society for the Study of European Ideas, and
organized a session on Ideas of Nature and Land at the Society's
Annual Conference (28-9 May 1996) held in conjunction with
tlw I .earned Societies at Brock University, Canada.
Isabelle Lanthier obtained a B.A. in political science from the
t lnivlrsity of ~ u c h e c at Montreal. She was a parliamentary intern
for ( :anadian Mcmhn of Parliament Francine Lalonde. She is
completing an M.A. in political science on 'The Genealogy of
llappincss: Birth of a Political Stake'. She has published in the
Canadian daily, The Globe & Mail, and has presented several
papers to political science conferences.
Neil Levy was educated at Monash University, in Melbourne,
Australia, where he received his Ph.D. in comparative literature
and critical theory. He is currently a tutor at the Centre for Crit-
ical Theory at Monash, and is working on a comparative study of
Continental and Anglo-American approaches to ethics.
Timothy W. Luke is Professor of Political Science at Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. He con-
ducts research in the areas of comparative politics and inter-
national political economy as well as in political philosophy and
social theory. Author of Shows of Force (Duke University Press
1992), Social Theory and Modernity (Sage 1990) and Screens of
Contributors IX
/'ower (University of Illinois Press 1989), he is now completing
a book on contemporary ecological criticism and social theory.
Lawrence Olivier has a B.A. in political science and a M.A. in pol-
itical philosophy from universite Laval, Canada. He obtained his
Ph.D. in history and civilization at the universite Aix-Marseille,
!:ranee. Professor in the Department of Political Science at the
llniversity of Quebec in Montreal, Canada, he specializes in epis-
temology, political philosophy and the issue of Francophones and
J\cadians in Canada. He taught at the universite de Moncton and
11niversite Laval. Author of a recent book entitled Michel Foucault
f>enser au temps du nihilisme (Liber 1995), he has also edited
hooks to which he has been a contributor, and has published
\l'vcral scientific articles.
Peter Quigley obtained his Ph.D. from Indiana University of Penn-
... ylvania in 1990, focusing on cultural studies, Marxist aesthetics,
poststructural theory and environmental literature. He then won
.t Fulbright Scholarship and went to lecture and do research on
J\ merican literature and culture at the University of Bergen, Nor-
way. Invited to stay for a second year, he took a permanent
position as Associate Professor of American Studies at the Univer-
..;ity of Tromso, Norway. He currently holds tenured positions at
hoth Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona and the
llniversity of Tromso. He continues to do research in environ-
lllcntal, technological and literary issues, and is developing a B.A.
programme in science, technology, and society for ERAU, where he
111tends to stay. In addition, he is working with University of Utah
l'ress to bring out a collection of articles on the much maligned
.tnd ignored environmental author Ed Abbey.
Paul Rutherford teaches environmental politics in the Depart-
tncnt of Government and Public Administration at the University
ot Sydney, Australia, and is currently completing a Ph.D. in the
l{cscarch School of Social Sciences at the Australian National
llnivcrsity, Canberra. His current area of research deals with the
problcmatization of natural environment in contemporary polit-
llal and social theory, and in particular seeks to use the notion of
'governmcntality' to understand the growth of environmental pol-
Itics and regulatory practices. He has had extensive experience as
.t policy advisor and political advisor in the areas of environmental
protection and natural rcsoun.:e management, with both non-
govl'ntllll'ntal organizations and state agencies in Australia.
X Contributors
Catriona Sandilands is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of
Environmental Studies at York University, Canada. Her work
inhabits a liminal zone between feminism, political theory and
environmental thought; she has published on these and other topics
in Environmental Ethics, Canadian Women's Studies, The Z
Papers, among other places. She has also been involved in other
political arenas, including the Women and Environments Educa-
tion and Development (WEED) Foundation in Toronto.
Acknowledgements
Like most writing, I suspect, this book is the result of academic
frustration and intellectual loneliness. While working on my doc-
toral thesis on Foucault and the environment at McGill Univer-
sity, I became frustrated, as it seemed that I was the only person
on this planet doing this kind of research, despite the fact that
I knew there must have been others. Thanks to these creative
academic frustrations and the diligent and stimulating support
of James Tully, my thesis supervisor, I managed to complete the
thesis in 1993.
It was only in 1995-6, during my year as a Post-Doctoral Fellow
at the Environmental Policy Unit, at Queen's University, Canada,
that I finally decided to make a systematic attempt to discover
other Foucauldian scholars working on the issue of the 'environ-
ment'. Through the process of editing this collection of articles, I
discovered an active group of Foucauldian scholars working on
this topic. Finally I was not alone any more! I shall be eternally
thankful to William Leiss, the Eco-Research Chair in Environ-
mental Policy, who generously offered me a Post-Doctoral Fellow-
ship, thus creating the material conditions for the realization of this
hook. In these dark days of education and research 'cut-backs',
'down-sizing', 'fiscal austerity', and other poor excuses, I felt pri-
vileged, not unlike winning the lottery. I am also grateful to Bill
I .eiss for creating an extremely friendly and creative Environmental
Policy Unit with remarkable colleagues: Christina Chociolko,
( ;eorgia Hanias, Michael Mehta, Holly Mitchell and Debora
VanNijnatten.
Despite the fact that Queen's University tends to be too 'white'
and too 'middle class' for rny personal taste, and is located in the
XII Acknowledgements
provincial town of Kingston, ( >nt;lrio, I am thankful for the
dozens of intellectually stimulating individuals I met, most notably
through the Institute of Women's Studies, the departments of
sociology, history, and English, and the Queer Study Group. I am
particularly grateful to Paul Jackson for stimulating conversa-
tions, friendship, coffees and bicycle rides.
Back in Montreal, I am specially thankful to Kevin Crombie for
his patience and his editing and formatting skills, and to Eric
Laferriere for his comments on the manuscript.
I want to thank my current colleagues at the Centre for the
Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) and in other departments
at Lancaster University, including among others Robin Grove-
White, Phil Macnaghten, Leslie Moran, Simon Shackley, John
Urry and Brian Wynne.
Finally, I want to thank the following individuals who directly
or indirectly have created the conditions for the emergence of this
volume: Eugenio Bolongaro, David T. Brown, Jacqui Burgess,
Ravi Chimni, Raymond Cote, Michael Craven, Ann Dwire, Alain-
G. Gagnon, Nick Garside, Susan Guppy, Sue Hendler, Steve Jordan,
Innocent Kabenga, Martha-Marie Kleinhans, Andrea Levy, Bill
Marshall, Rhonda Mawhood, Steven Maynard, Maureen McNeil,
John Middleton, Viviana Patroni, Thierry Schickes, Gale Stewart,
Carl Stychin, Charles Taylor, Michael Temelini and people at
Blackwell, including Jill Landeryou, Cameron Laux, and Jean
van Altena.
Foucault and the Environment:
An Introduction
Eric Darier
Grazing sheep can be beautiful, very different from 'sulphureous
vapours' though actually ... no more natural.
-Raymond Williams
. rhe desire for knowledge has been transformed among us into a
passion which fears no sacrifice, which fears nothing but its own
extinction. It may be that mankind will eventually perish from this
passion for knowledge. If not through passion, then through weak-
ness, we must be prepared to state our desire or choice: do we wish
humanity to end in fire and light or to end on the sand?
The law doth punish man or woman
That steels the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose,
That steals the common from the goose.
-Nietzsche
- author unknown; eighteenth-century protest against
the Enclosure Act in England, quoted by Parsons
II If it is extremely dangerous to say that Reason is the enemy that
should be illiminated, it is just as dangerous to say that any critical
questioning of this rationality risks sending us into irrationality.
Foucault
Contexts
I kspire - and because of - 30 years of environmental legisla-
tton, regulation, institution building ar national and international
level, and the emergence of a diverse and relatively powerful
2 Eric Darier
environmental movement, there is a general concern and anxiety
about the 'environment' in the North. As a result, there has been
a proliferation of discourses about the environment from most
quarters of society which has also coincided with a general increase
in scepticism about scientific knowledge and the meaning and
efficacy of political and social change. For example, at least since
(
Thomas Kuhn ('1962), there has generally been less confidence
that scientific knowledge and technological innovations are the
necessary conditions for human betterment. This scepticism mani-
fests itself through discourses of scientific 'uncertainty' and 'com-
plexity'. Jerome Ravetz accurately noted that 'while our knowledge
continues to increase exponentially, our relevant ignorance does
so even more rapidly. And this is ignorance generated by science'
(1987: 100). In this context of 'generated ignorance', there is
increased anxiety among the population of the North about the pos-
sible consequences of rapid scientific and technologically induced
changes on humans and the environment. Apart from business,
which has vested interests in always justifying changes in positive
terms like 'benefits' and 'improvements', very few experts would
volunteer a resolutely optimistic outlook for the environment in
tlw future (Simon and Kahn 1984; Easterbrook 1995). The absence
of obvious credible solutions and the knowledge to implement
thLm susra in concerns and anxiety for the environment. This is
rdkcn.d in the extreme diversity of assumptions and solutions
ofkred by many in the 'environmental movement' (Eckersley 1992:
.B-47; Marshall 19'12; Merchant 1992: 85-210; Murphy 1994:
x-xi). As Andrew Ross has noted, 'Except for the name of "eco-
logy" itself, virtually nothing unites the bioregionalists, Gaians,
ee<)-feminists, eco-Marxists, biocentricists, ceo-anarchists, deep
ecologists and social ecologists who pursue their ideas and actions
in its name' (1994: 5).
According to some of the environmentalists from the spectrum
identified above, one of the obstacles to addressing the environ-
mental crisis has been the perceived extreme relativism and the
'anything goes' attitude of what they call 'postmodernism' (Book-
chin 1990; Gare 1995; Sessions 1995a; Soule and Lease 1995) or
'moral pluralism' (Callicott 1990). Their position seems to be
based on nostalgia for a presumed lost coherence. For example,
Callicott feels
th<lt we must maintain a coherent sense of self and world, a unified
moral world view. Such unity enables us rationally to sdcct among
Foucault and the Environment
or balance out the contradictory or inconsistent demands made
upon us when the multiple social circles in which we operate over-
lap and come into conflict. More importantly, a unified world view
gives our lives purpose, direction, coherency, and sanity. (Callicott
1990: 121)
3
Bookchin echoes Callicott in condemning postmodernism as 'a
nritable campaign ... to discard the past, to dilute our know-
ledge of history, to mystify the origins of our problems, to foster
dcmemorisation and the loss of our most enlightened ideals'
( Bookchin 1990: 73-4 ). Because of the vagueness and general con-
lusion regarding what is understood by 'postmodernism',
1
it would
probably be sterile and simplistic to embark on a prolonged debate
pitting 'postmodernism' against 'environmentalism'. Recent works
h;lve recontextualized this debate (Andermatt Conley 1997; Bennett
.md Chaloupka 1993; Bird 1987; Darier 1995; Haraway 1991;
lagtenberg and McKie 1997; Macnaghten and Urry 1998; Oelsch-
beger 1995: 1-20; Redclift and Woodgate 1997; Ross 1994; Soper
1995, 1996; Zimmerman 1994, 1996). One of the central issues in
this debate is the tension between, on the one hand, the argument
that for humans, 'nature' can only make sense through the various
lilters of 'social construction'
2
and, on the other hand, the argument
that nature has an irreducible positivist reality outside human
mterpretations. Kate Soper calls these two views 'nature-skeptical'
;tnd 'nature-endorsing' respectively (Soper 1995; 1996: 23). In part,
this debate reflects the two broad general perspectives and world-
views offered by the social sciences and the natural sciences. It also
reflects the 'primacy of epistemology' in the natural sciences over
rhe more interpretative practices in the social sciences (Connolly
ltJ92; Taylor 1987). Even within the 'primacy of epistemology',
l his disciplinary divide reflects irreconcilable differences regarding
the possibility of knowledge, ranging from 'value-free' positivism
to absolute relativism (Feyerabend 1981a, 1981b, 1991; Taylor
1971, 1980). Nevertheless, there are examples of cross-over be-
t ween the two broad categories of disciplines and epistemological
premisses, of natural scientists adopting a constructivist approach
(Latour and Woolgar 1986; Latour 1987; Woolgar 1988) and of
social scientists opting for a more positivist approach. Beyond
this excessively Manichaean framing of the controversy, it is
important to note that others have attempted to find an inter-
mediate position which doesn't epistemologically deny- or affirm
the material cxistenn: of what is referred to as 'nature' or
4 Eric Darier
'environment', but stresses the diversity and changes in human
interpretations of 'nature' through history, which might in turn
explain the 'domination', the 'destruction', the 'protection' and/or
the 'transformation' of 'nature' by human activities (Benton 1994;
Ellen 1996; Hannigan 1995; Murphy 1994;
3
Simmons 1993).
It may be time to reframe the controversy in different ways. In
a rare, probably unique insight into this topic, Michel Foucault
perceived the heated .:debate in environmentalism in terms not of
epistemological options from which one has to choose, but, on
the contrary, of essential and necessary conditions for the emer-
gence of an ecological/environmental movement itself.
[T]here has been an ecological movement - which is furthermore
very ancient and is not only a twentieth-century phenomenon
which has often been, in one sense, in hostile relationship with
science or at least with a technology guaranteed in terms of truth
['nature-endorsing']. But in fact, ecology also spoke a language of
truth. It was in the name of knowledge concerning nature, the
equilibrium of the processes of living things, and so forth, that one
could level the criticism ['nature-sceptical']. (Foucault 1988b: 15)
l r i ~ h l k ~ k has restated Foucault's observation in a similar manner:
The observable consequence is that critics [i.e. environmentalism]
freqlll'lltly argue more scientifically than the natural scientists they
dispute against ... I but I fall prey to a naive realism about definitions
of tlw dangers one consumes. On the one hand, this naive realism of
hazards is (apparently) necessary as an expression of outrage and a
motor of protest; on the other it is its Achilles' heel. (Beck 1995: 60)
One of the main objectives of this book is to explore this essen-
tial, necessary tension between currents in environmentalism as
noted by Foucault and Beck, and, more precisely, the controversy
between the 'nature-endorsing' claim of a truth-discourse about
nature and the 'nature-sceptical' radical critique about the inescap-
able power effects of all knowledge, of all truth-claims. Despite
the fact that the work of Foucault seems to promise a challenging
contribution to our understanding, there has been a tendency to
omit Foucault from most critical studies in environmental theory
(Andermatt Conley 1997; Eckersley 1992; Goldblatt 1996; Hay-
ward 1994; Merchant 1994 ). Hopefully, this book will fill the
obvious gap and explore the possible creative synergy between
two large corpora of critical literature which surprisingly haven't
yet met in a systematic fashion: (a) the works by, and about,
French theorist Michel Foucault and (h) environmental criticism.
t-oucault and the tnvtronment
Foucault and the Environment:
'My Back is Turned to It'
1\dore embarking further on an exploration of the possible relev-
.tm:c of Foucault for environmentalism, it is important to state a
lew points.
Michel Foucault (1926-84) is probably one of the most influen-
ll.tl thinkers of our time, at least in France, the English-speaking
world and parts of Latin America. The evidence is the large number
'' books and articles about Foucault published since his death.
llowtver, this is only the tip of the Foucauldian iceberg. The real
cxtenr of his influence is far more extensive than books with the
n.tme 'Foucault' on their cover, in their chapter titles, in their
tndex or in their bibliography. To get an idea of the extent of the
tttfluence of Foucault, one must also take into account the gigan-
t tl body of works which use some of the concepts developed by
hn11:ault without making any explicit reference to him. Those con-
upts include 'discourse analysis', 'power/knowledge', 'disciplinary
t n hn iq ues', 'field of power', 'governmentality', 'normalization',
'rl'sistance', 'non-strategical ethics' and 'aesthetic of existence'.
What is also surprising is the breadth of the influence of Foucault
.1cross virtually every academic domain, ranging from legal studies,
and queer studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology,
political studies, to philosophy, history, literary criticism, media
.tnd u>mmunication studies, geography and so on. Foucault's
lltlluence can also be encountered in non-academic, openly
.tltivist contexts such as the gay, lesbian, bisexual movement, the
women's movement, the anti-racist movement, the prisoners' rights
lltovement and community activism generally. In North America,
loucwlr- alongside non-essentialist strands of feminism and queer
theory (Bersani 1995; Halperin 1995; McNeil 1993; Terry 1991)
.111d a 're-discovery' of aboriginal peoples in the context of an 'age
ol diversity' (Tully 1995)- is also having a profound impact on
tlw nworking of pluralism, or rather in the 'ethos of pluralization'
(( !llliH>Jly 1995).
lo my knowledge, there are no systematic studies aimed at
, . ., ploring the possible connections and relevance of Foucault to
t'ttvtrotmlental thinking, although the idea has been suggested (Gare
f'l'l lJ4 ). This is a puzzling lacuna when one examines Foucault's
tlltl'llnlltal legacy in more detail: for example, his concept of
'htopolitils' is a strong, rdlection of a 'politics of life' which
,., l losl' lo tlw rmJnrns of environtnl'ntalism. It is true that Foucault
6 Eric Darier
never addressed the environmental issue directly, or the ecological
crisis as such, except in the brief insightful quote already given.
It is also true that Foucault 'detested nature', or rather, that he
preferred 'visiting churches and museums'. Eribon's biography
recounts a car trip through the Italian Alps that Foucault took
with a colleague, Jacqueline Verdeaux, which revealed his attitude
to nature. '[Verdeaux] remembers ... well that Foucault detested
nature. Whenever she showed him some magnificent landscape
- a lake sparkling in the sunlight - he made a great show of walk-
ing off toward the road, saying, "My back is turned to it"' (Eribon
1991: 46).
4
If one shouldn't look in Foucault for an obvious aesthetic
appreciation and/or some empathy with nature, it doesn't mean
that Foucault's work is irrelevant or unimportant for environmental
thinking. In fact, as this collection of essays illustrates, Foucault's
concepts can be made highly relevant to environmental thinking,
whatever attitude to 'nature' Foucault himself might have held.
Therefore, bracketing Foucault's attitude toward 'nature' is not an
attempt to side-step an embarrassing 'character' trait in Foucault!
It is also a way to put into practice Foucault's own position
regarding the highly historical contingency of the function of
'author' and 'text' in our societies. Foucault noted that the dis-
appearance - or death - of the author was due to the fact that
the 'author function is ... characteristic of the mode of existence
circulating, and functioning of certain discourses within society'
(Foucault 1984g: 103, 108). This means that increasingly, in our
current society, texts 'could be read for themselves' without the
anchoring presence of an 'author' (ibid. 110). Consequently,
Foucault was advocating the 'total effacement of the individual
characteristics of the writer' (ibid.). He also systematically resisted
the boxing of his work in the existing intellectual categories such
as 'structuralism', 'poststructuralism', 'modernism' or 'postmoder-
nism'. In order to achieve this, he employed several 'de-locations'
in the focus of his research (the literal translation of the French
word deplacements is more accurate than the too mild word
'shifts'). The rupture between 'author' and 'text' explains how
concepts can have unintended, unpredictable effects in 'back of
the author'. I would argue that despite his having 'turned his back
to nature', Foucault's writings are having profound, albeit indir-
ect, effects on environmental thinking. The virulent critique of
Foucault by many environmental thinkers, via the postmodernist
category, may also indicate that Foucault is having an effect 'in
the back' of environmental thinkers themselves.
Foucault and the Environment I
Mapping Foucault in Contexts
Mapping Foucault's work may help us to understand and appre-
.:iate the various possible Foucauldian contributions to critical
environmental theory. But before embarking on this task, I wish
to make the following general remarks.
First, it is generally recognized that there are not one or two
but at least three Foucaults (archeological, genealogical and ethical).
Foucault 're-located' his research agenda several times. However,
this doesn't mean that each period in Foucault's intellectual life
was totally divorced from the others or was part of an overall
singular project. Because of the existence of multiple Foucaults, it
is important to be as clear as possible about the periods in which
concepts emerged before engaging in a critique of Foucault's work.
For example, the early archeological period may indeed have been
structuralist in tone. However, it is more difficult to make the
structuralist label stick for the intermediate genealogical period,
and it is quite irrelevant to use it for the final ethical period.
Second, Foucault's books and articles were written in typical
scholarly style, which may make them difficult to read at times.
This is why so many commentators use the numerous interviews
he gave all through his life. The problem with the interviews is
that Foucault, as a member of the French intellectual star system
5
(centred of course in Paris), was very aware of the audience he
was addressing when interviewed. For example, if he was giving
an interview to a Marxist journal, he would employ Marxist
vocabulary. Therefore, one has to go beyond Foucault's textual
answers to the context of the particular interview to gain an
.Jccurate appreciation of what he was trying to say. Unlike some,
... uch as Habermas, who considered the activities of intellectuals as
serious matters - such as shaping the communicative expression
of the transparent and increasing manifestation of 'Reason' -
hHlcault saw his intellectual production as 'tactics', 'strategies',
'toolbox', 'laughter' (de Certeau 1994), 'irony' (Connolly 1992;
Rorty 1989: 61), 'games' (Kroker 1987) or 'fiction'. 'I have never
written anything but fictions .... It seems to me that the possibil-
ity exists for fiction in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce
effects of truth, and for bringing about that true discourse engenders
or "manufactures" something that does not as yet exist' (Foucault
I'JXOc: 193).
Third, there arc major differences in the interpretations of
hll!cault's work. For example, the English-speaking world (espe-
(
8 Eric Darier
kind of closeted ironic liberal (Rorty 1989) or as 'normatively
confused' but with 'empirical insights' (Fraser 1989); whereas in
France (and in southern Europe more generally), he tends to be
seen as closer to Nietzsche than to the liberal tradition. Foucault
was able to get lots of attention because of the generally privil-
eged position of intellectuals in France as cultural icons extens-
ively involved in political and social life. Although Foucault has
now become an intellectual icon, his academic career in France
was not easy or straightforward. This was due to what I have
called elsewhere his 'marginal belonging' (appartenance marginate)
in the French university milieu (Darier 1993: 5-51). Despite being
marginal in the sense that he didn't fit into any of the dominant
intellectual schools or in any precise academic discipline, Foucault
did manage to obtain a Chair at the prestigious College de France,
a symbol of the intellectual establishment in France, but experi-
enced the 'solitude of the acrobat' (Eribon 1991: 212-13). Else-
where, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, Foucault's influence
- and the influence of intellectuals generally - is more limited,
to pockets inside the walls of university campuses. At best, intel-
lectuals are tolerated as long as they don't disrupt the dominant
preoccupations of society, such as 'economic efficiency and com-
petition', 'fiscal responsibility' and widespread 'commercialism'.
The differences in intellectual contexts lead to different readings
of Foucault (Dumm 1996: 9-15; Gordon 1996: 253-70). How-
ever, one should not underestimate the influence of Foucault,
especially in the current reworking of liberalism (Connolly 1993b;
Dumm 1996; Flathman 1992; Kateb 1992) into what William
Connolly prefers to call 'an ethos of pluralization' (Connolly 1995).
The Three Foucaults
With others (Davidson 1986; Smart 1994), I believe that there
are three broad periods in Foucault's intellectual oeuvre which
involve different 'methodological'
6
approaches: (1) an archeological
approach to scientific discourse and knowledge generally; (2) a
genealogical approach analysing social practices; and (3) an ethical
concern for the possible conditions for the creation of the self by
itself. Furthermore, there are at least two ways of entering the
Foucauldian constellation. First, one can survey the three periods
one at a time; or one can choose a key concept from one of the
three periods and show how (and if) it relates to the other two
Foucault and the Environment 9
periods. For example, the concept of 'governmentality' developed
in the genealogical period not only offers a way into a historical
survey of the conditions for the emergence of the modern form of
power called 'government'; it also incorporates an archeological
understanding of knowledge (hence 'power/knowledge') and a tool
with which to examine conditions for the emergence of the pro-
blematization of subjectivities, as the 'ethical', 'final' Foucauldian
period suggests.
7
For the purpose of this book, I hope to show
that not only are both ways of entering the Foucauldian constella-
tion valid, but that both should be used simultaneously. By negoti-
ating this dual entry into Foucault, one may be able to avoid
transforming Foucauldian thought into either a discontinuous
collage of three periods or a single coherent 'meta-theory'. To try
to live up to this dual entry approach, I suggest the following: for
mainly pedagogical reasons, I shall briefly review separately each
of the three Foucauldian periods. However, in my subsequent
general introduction to the contributions to this book, it should
become obvious that most of them, although using concepts from
one of the periods as a starting-point, end up making linkages to
the other periods. Consequently the titles of the three parts of this
volume don't 'follow' the periodization of Foucault's work.
The archeological approach
This first period is that of the early Foucault, and includes books
published in the 1960s (Foucault 1961, 1963, 1966, 1969).
8
f'he most comprehensive and systematic critical examination of
Foucault's archeological approach to date is that of Gary Gutting
( 1989). At least one theorist has explicitly adopted Foucault's
archeological approach to his study of the environment (Berman
1981: 74).
The method, or more precisely the approach, is called 'arche-
ological' because it attempts to undertake excavations of historical
texts. The purpose of these intellectual archeological digs is to
reveal the various historical layers of what constitutes, or con-
stituted, knowledge. Foucault was interested in what he called
(;{Jisteme, which is a historically specific, coherent configuration of
how knowledge is organized (around disciplines, concerns, themes,
etc) and what kind of justifications are deemed acceptable to
support that knowledge. It is important to stress two points. First,
archeology is not an isolated method reflecting Foucault's idio-
syncratic approach to the history of thought. Rather, it is rooted
10 Eric Darier
in the french tradition of history and philosophy of science' {Gut-
ting 1989: x-xi) represented by, among others, Jean Cavailli':s,
Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem {Canguilhem 1988,
1989). However, this 'tradition' doesn't represent the established
intellectual mainstream even in France. It may be a 'tradition',
,hut it is a marginal one in the ocean of Marxisms, ranging from
Caraudy through Althusser to Bourdieu, and of the different
schools of the 'philosophy of experience' {]. Miller 1993: 59)
represented by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and post-1-'reudian/Lacanian
psychoanalysis. This illustrates further what I described earlier
as Foucault's 'marginal belonging'. Secondly, archeology is not a
coherent theory or 'method' from which flow Foucault's studies
of madness {Foucault 1961, 1963) and the human sciences
{Foucault 1966). Rather, archeology is a post facto reconstruction/
justification of his earlier case studies. In fact, archeology is an
'ill-defined methodology' {Gutting 1989: 109) emerging from spe-
cific historical studies. Foucault only attempted to systematically
work through his archeological method in the last book of this
period The Archaeology of Knowledge which already pointed
to the subsequent deplacement toward 'genealogy' (Foucault 1969).
The main point that Foucault tried to make throughout this
period was that knowledge is relative to the historical context
from which it emerges. 'We are doomed historically to history, to
the patient construction of discourses about discourses, and to the
task of hearing what has already been said' {Foucault 1963: xvi).
For Foucault, there can be no adjudicating positivist external
'reality' by which to evaluate the 'truth', the validity of a discourse
about knowledge. However, this position doesn't make Foucault
a relativist in the sense that 'anything goes', that it is impossible
to know anything and so forth. On the contrary, Foucault's
archeology adopts 'truth-claims' in themselves as the factual
background on which he builds his detailed studies. The only
level of factual 'reality' that interests Foucault is statements about
a presumed objective reality. This makes Foucault a contextualist
of the statements of observers of 'objective reality', an observer of
'situated knowledge' {Haraway 1989), an observer of the 'manu-
facturing of knowledge' (Knorr-Cetina 1981, 1983).
Foucault's main focus during his archeological period was on
scientific discourses and how objects of legitimate scientific inves-
tigations emerge. His principle interest was the emergence of
discourses about human nature through the 'human sciences'. and
how humans become the objects of their own scientific enquiries.
Foucault and the Environment 11
For example, one of the specific scientific discourses that Foucault
studied was 'madness' and the creation of social medical institu-
tions in the European context around the eighteenth century
(Foucault 1961, 1963). In Order of Things (1966) Foucault offers
a more global, or at least structural, view of the historical landscape
of knowledge. According to him, there was a clear rupture, a
clear break (sometime around the sixteenth century), between what
he calls the 'Classical Age' and 'Modernity'. In Order of Things, he
t;lkes three areas of knowledge, which we now might call linguis-
tics, economics and biology. Foucault found that around the end
of the eighteenth century there was a rupture in the epistemolo-
gical field, which led to the emergence of these disciplines. For
example, in the Classical Age, there was a direct link between
words and things. This was the point that the French title of The
( Jrder of Things - Les Mots et les chases ('words and things') -
was trying to convey. Words directly represented the objects they
named. The Classical Age was the age of 'representation'. After
rhc Classical Age, a gap between 'reality' and language opened
up, which meant that representation ('representationalism' to
usc Charles Taylor's term) was no longer credible (Taylor 1985).
'Representation no longer exists; there's only action - theoretical
action and practical action which serve as relays and form net-
works' (Deleuze in Bouchard 1977: 206). The new focus became
the meaning and significance of linguistic signs. The second example
1s the transition from an analysis of 'wealth' as static, which was
prevalent during the Classical Age (Adam Smith), to an economic
analysis based on the dynamic circulation of production and
nlllsumption (Ricardo and Marx).
The third example is more directly pertinent to the contem-
porary environmental debate. It is about the emergence of the
biological sciences. During the Classical Age, knowledge about the
natural world was based on the construction of categories built
.mmnd 'resemblance'. Thus, Carolus Linnaeus the well-known
Swedish naturalist ( 1707-78) established a comprehensive nomen-
llaturc of plants and animals based on their similarities. For
flowers, this nomenclature was based on the number of flower
parts. After the Classical Age, classification was based no longer
111 I .innaeus's visual similarities of flower parts, but on a radically
lll'W centred on hidden dynamic mechanisms of life called
11ow 'biology' (Foucault 1970). It is the knowledge of this new
di'il'iplinc calkd 'biology' which created the conditions for an
.1rt intlation of the contemporary environmental critique. For
12 Eric Dorier
Foucault the emergence of 'biology' as a new scientific discipline
signals the 'entry of life into history', what Foucault later calls
'biopower'. This historical contextualization of biology makes
some environmental theorists worried about the tactical use of
non-epistemological grounded environmental knowledge in the
current struggle against polluters who could argue that there is
no 'objective' yardstick by which to measure 'pollution', that the
crisis' is relative, and therefore that there is no
need to change existing practices (Soule and Lease 1995). Because
Foucault was not a relativist but a contextualist, this charge can-
not be sustained. Furthermore, because validated environmental
scientific knowledge often retains a certain degree of uncertainty,
and is subject to challenge and change over time, there is little
point in trying to anchor it in a static epistemological justification
system. In my view, it is more productive to follow Foucault's
path and highlight some of the historical contingencies in the
construction of knowledge about the 'environment', including the
justifications for what some might call 'environmental pollution'
and others a minor price to be paid for 'progress'. A Foucauldian
discursive approach might help us to understand 'science as an
environmental claim-making activity' (Hannigan 1995: 76-91) or
the process of 'constructing environmental risks' (ibid. 92-108).lt
might be more productive than investing effort in establishing a
homogenized, fundamentalist environmentalist epistemology as
desired by Callicott, for example (1990).
However, there are at least four problems with Foucault's
archeological approach (Gutting 1989: 222-6). First, in Foucault's
archeological method, 'there is nothing that goes beyond the meth-
odology of Canguilhem's history of concepts' (ibid. 218) and, I
might add, very little beyond the British school of science historians
(Porter 1977; Rousseau and Porter 1980). Furthermore, Foucault's
historical case studies present 'major gaps at crucial points in the
argument' (Gutting 1989: 226). Second, Foucault's archeology
remains, in the final analysis, a structuralist approach, in the sense
that it tries to reveal the deep historico-epistemological structure
of the conditions of knowledge that Gutting calls the 'structural-
ist temptation' (ibid. 266). There is indeed a tension between
Foucault's truth-claim about revealing the structure of knowledge
and the contextuality of all knowledge, including presumably
Foucault's own archeology. Foucault's subsequent response to this
critique was to say that he was never a structuralist, but instead
offered a critique of structuralism. The irony is that this critique
Foucault and the Environment 13
of structuralism happened to be structural in approach.
9
Foucault
may have tried to 'turn his back' to structuralism, but structural-
ism remains stuck to his back! Third, the 'structuralist tempta-
tion' of Foucault's archeology creates what Charles Taylor would
call a 'kind of distance from its own value commitments, which
consists in the fact that it alone is lucid about their status as fruits
of a constructed order, which lucidity sets it apart from other
views and confers the advantage on itself on being free from
delusions' (Taylor 1989: 100). Ultimately Taylor finds 'this view
as deeply implausible as its empiricist cousins' (ibid. 99).
10
Fourth,
the archeological approach was criticized mainly - but not ex-
clusively - by Marxists for being too focused on ideal categories
of knowledge and for ignoring social relations and power relations
in the everyday life (Gutting 1989: 224-6). Reading the early
Foucault, one might indeed get the impression that what makes
history tick are the ruptures/discontinuities which occurred in
the historico-epistemological structures of knowledge. In the next
section, we'll see how Foucault responded to this criticism through
his genealogical approach.
In conclusion, Foucault's archeological 'history is sufficiently
responsible and challenging to be worth serious attention, but it is
also often greatly oversimplified and lacking in evidential support'
(Gutting 1989: 262)_11 His archeological approach has definitively
challenged some environmentalists in either reassessing or com-
ing to the defence of their epistemological justification - and the
need for such epistemological justification- to articulate their own
environmental critique. In this context, it is important to restate
what Foucault said later about environmental knowledge (i.e. 'eco-
logy'): '[l]n fact, ecology also spoke a language of truth. It was in
the name of knowledge concerning nature, the equilibrium of the
processes of living things, and so forth, that one could level the
criticism' (Foucault 1988b: 15).
However, this 'language of truth' about nature can also lead to
a form of environmental I green fundamentalism. As Andrew
Dobson reminds us,
ITlhe foundation-stone of Green politics is the belief that our finite
Earth places limits on our industrial growth. This finitude, and the
scarcity it implies, is an article of faith for Green ideologues, and
rrovides the fundamental framework within which any putative
picture of a green society must he drawn. (Dobson 1990: 73, my
emphasis)
14 Eric Darier
Even if Foucault's archeological methodology is shaky, one of
its political effects might be to help environmentalists resist the
'fundamentalist temptation' of unreflexively reducing the justi-
fication for environmental activism and actions to a presumed epis-
temologically solid ground of what is understood by 'nature' as
defined by the natural sciences. It is becoming more urgent to resist
this fundamentalist temptation, because, while the 'geopolitical
reach of environmental science has become more and more expans-
ive, its irellectual temper has become more reductionist' (Wynne
1994: 171). .
The genealogical approach
This second period - the 'middle' or 'genealogical' Foucault -
includes Foucault's writings published in the 1970s. It includes
not only his main books (Foucault 1969, 1975, 1976) but also
numerous articles, book reviews, interviews and course descrip-
tions (Defert and Ewald 1994).
The genealogical approach is in part an attempt to respond to
critiques levied against archeology. By adopting genealogy, Foucault
tried to distance himself further from structuralism and detached
empiricism. This genealogical deplacement operates at two levels.
First, as a method, genealogy 'rejects the metahistorical deployment
of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies' (Foucault 1984c:
77). On the contrary, genealogy
record[s} the singularity of events outside of any monotonous
finality, it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what
we tend to feel is without history, in sentiments, love, conscious-
ness, instincts, it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order
to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the
different scenes where they engaged in different roles. (Foucault
1984c: 76)
Foucault borrowed strongly from Nietzsche's analysis of 'descent',
which is 'not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it
disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments
what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was
imagined consistent with itself' (Foucault 1984c: 82).
Secondly, genealogy adds to the archeological and contextual-
izing understanding of knowledge within a scientific discursive
r-oucault ana rne t:nv1ronmenr 1.:>
rationality, the broader context of social practices. This broader
genealogical context refers to the vast heterogeneous webs of social
practices criss-crossed by relations of power, which include the
human 'body - and everything that touches it: diet, climate, and
soil' (1984a: 83). Instead of searching for a grand structural narrat-
ive explaining the various layers of knowledge, his project became
more specific in the scope of his studies, and more modest in his
objectives. He wanted to offer a description of the conditions of
emergence of the present ('a genealogy of the present') at the
micro-level of 'forgotten' social practices.
12
For Foucault the genea-
logist, the structure and structuration of knowledge became less
important than what he identified as a 'will to knowledge', which
seems to be the main driving motivation behind modern sciences.
Furthermore, Foucault is not only highly sceptical about the one
universal truth sought by this 'will to knowledge'; he also pointed
out some of the unintended effects, including environmental effects,
of the 'will to truth' (Sheridan 1980).
Even in the greatly expanded form it assumes today, the will to
knowledge does not achieve a universal truth; man is not given an
exact and serene mastery of nature. On the contrary, it ceaselessly
multiplies the risks, creates dangers in every areas, it breaks down
illusory defenses ... ; it releases those elements of itself that are
devoted to its subversion and destruction. (Foucault 1984c: 95-6)
Beyond the general ranting against 'postmodernism' by some
environmental theorists (Sessions 1995a; Bookchin 1990: 73-4),
it is interesting to note the similarities between the critique of
environmental 'management' (i.e. instrumental knowledge) by the
same environmental theorists and Foucault's concept of the 'will
to knowledge'.
[I]ncreasingly intensive management produces a host of unintended
consequences which are perceived by the managers and the pub-
lic, and specially by the environmental/ecology movement, as real
and severe problems. The usual approach, however, is to seek more
intensive management, which spawns even more problems. And
each of these problems is seen as separate, with separate experts and
interest groups speaking to each other across a chasm of different
technical vocabularies. (Devall and Sessions 1985: 146)
These similarities between the environmental theorists' critique
and foucault's suggest that there may be common ground in their
16 Eric Darier
analyses of contemporary social practices despite differences in
their epistemological premisses. However, nature sceptics like
Foucault would remain deeply suspicious of the 'belief that society
ought to conform to nature' because of the normalizing effects of
this belief and the danger identified by Andrew Ross 'that the
authority of nature, and hence of the status quo, will become a
despotic vehicle for curtailing rights and liberties' (Ross 1994: 12).
Through genealogy, Foucault also responds to the Marxist cri-
tique of archeology by looking not only at discourses about know-
ledge practices'), but also at the social practices through
which people live ('non-discursive practices').
13
This genealogical
deplacement led him to consider power relations which occur in
social practices, specially at the micro-level, and at the 'practice of
everyday life' (de Certeau 1984). Foucault refrains from explicitly
defining his concept of 'power'. In fact, he spends a lot of effort
stating what power is not, rather than what power is. This radical
'negation' has to be situated in the context of Foucault's tactical
writing.
14
By constantly defining power as what it isn't and refus-
ing to say what it is, Foucault resists the temptation to adopt
'power' as an essentialist, empiricist category. Or at least, this
enables Foucault to keep the concept of 'power' within the vari-
ous contexts which led to its emergence, and removes the need to
anchor it in any precise fixed location. Genealogy is the approach
which enables Foucault to show that any anchoring point for the
concept of 'power', for example, is historically contingent. Far
from adopting a privileged objectivist/empiricist position, as Taylor
seems to believe, Foucault's 'own value commitment' (Taylor 1989:
100) is explicitly Nietzschean in theory and in practice through
his tactical writings.
15
Foucault's refusal to define concepts like
'power' is not a 'failure', as Taylor would argue, but, on the
contrary, highlights the constraints imposed on us by the con-
tingency of language and vocabulary in which we are embedded
and by which we are constituted. Therefore, Foucault's 'own
value commitment' is the systematic, constant transgression of the
limits of the given language, as with the term 'power' (Lemert and
Gillan, 1982) Foucault has no interest in defining/anchoring a
theory of power 'outside' the limits of what power is currently
understood to be. On the contrary, his only purpose is to con-
stantly challenge the limits as defined by the various discourses
and practices. Within these constraints, it is possible, nevertheless,
to make the following points about the various concepts emerging
from Foucault's genealogy.
r-oucault and the tnv1ronment I/
First, 'power' is not something which the State or a dominant
class has or possesses and which others don't have. Power is not a
zero-sum game. Power is mostly relational; it rarely entails absolute
domination. Even in the most unequal situations of relations of
power, those subjected to power do exercise some choices, however
limited. In Michel de Certeau's view, Foucault attempts
to bring to light the springs of this opaque power that has no pos-
sessor, no privileged place, no superiors or inferiors, no repressive
activity or dogmatism, that is almost autonomously effective through
its technological ability to distribute, classify, analyse and spatially
individualize the objects dealt with. (de Certeau 1984: 46)
The Foucauldian idea of power can be conceptualized as a 'field
of power' similar to the field of forces and vectors described by
physics or the workings at the level of the 'microcellular' de-
scribed by biology (Baudrillard 1987: 12). However, it is import-
ant to stress that Foucault wasn't making a strong epistemological
claim about a presumed superiority of physics and biology to
explain social phenomena; he was using the imaginary of physics
and biology as a tactical allegory to undermine prevalent dis-
courses about 'power' .
16
Second, 'power' for Foucault is more than simply preventing or
forcing others to do something they would not do on their own. It
is more than just 'naked' violence. In fact, under the specificity of
European 'Modernity', the practice of power
has been characterized on the one hand, by a legislation, a dis-
course, an organisation based on public right, whose principle of
articulation is the social body and the delegative status of each
citizen; on the other hand, by a closely linked grid of disciplinary
coercions whose purpose is in fact to assure the cohesion of this
same social body. (Foucault 1980h: 106)
These two simultaneous, 'heterogeneous' aspects of modern power
- 'a right of sovereignty' and a 'mechanism of discipline' - mean
that, for Foucault, the exercise of power has normalizing effects
on the population. Disciplinary mechanisms can indeed restrict
the possibilities regarding what individual and collective identities
can do, be or become. However, the existence of disciplinary
mechanisms with a 'right of sovereignty' also enables individuals
or groups to take on an identity which might be the condition for
18 Eric Darier
subsequent, unintended actions. It is because of this process of
constructing identities - through the 'heterogeneity between a public
right of sovereignty and a polymorphous disciplinary mechanism'
(ibid.) -that Foucault qualified power as being 'positive', in con-
trast to the more conventional view of power ('royal' form of
power) as solely repressive. For example, current 'gay', 'lesbian' or
'queer' identities are the unintended effects of, on the one hand,
legal and medical discourse creating and disciplining 'homosexual-
ity' in late nineteenth-century Europe and, on the other hand, the
'delegative' urge of the discourse on public right.
17
For Foucault,
the 'strategies of normalization' (like constructing 'heterosexu-
ality' as the norm, by contrasting it with the 'abnormality' of
'homosexuality') constitute one effect of power which in many
cases is resisted by those who are supposed to be normalized as
'abnormal'. One of the central objectives of Foucault's genealogy
was to reveal these 'tactics of resistance' which may have been
forgotten and use them as 'counter-memories'. The distinction
between strategies of normalization and tactics of resistance
18
can
he appreciated only at the micro-analytical level, in the sense that
only detailed, localized studies of events can capture that dis-
tinction within the specificity of its own context. Because in-
stances of normalization and resistance constantly interact in a
dynamic manner, reversals occur. Yesterday's resistance can become
today's normalization, which in turn can become the conditions
for tomorrow's resistance and/or normalization. The concept of
normalization I resistance cannot be understood as a fixed meta-
narrative describing 'power' in the abstract, but, on the contrary,
should be approached as a constant recontextualization of power
relations as lived and experienced by humans. For example, it is
important to understand how populations living in industrialized
countries had their daily conduct normalized to become throw-
away 'consumers' (de Certeau 1984: 30-4; Luke 1993b), and
how parts of the radical environmental movement can be seen as
tactics of resistance against it (e.g. Darier 1996b). Environmental
tactics of resistance can include the systematic use of irony against
an extremely 'serious' normalizing discourse like the one coming
from the pro-nuclear lobby (Chaloupka 1992; Seery 1990).
Third, the field of power is not a structuralist framework in
which humans are passive objects and mere products. Humans
have some degree of 'liberty' or 'freedom'. However, 'liberty' as
understood by Foucault is not an ontological quality of humans
or an ideal state of suspended power relations- as it is for Liberals,
l"oucault and the tnv1ronment I 'I
Marxists and humanists generally - but an expression of indi-
viduals' very own existence in the specificity of power relations.
19
For Foucault, there cannot be liberty in a space without power
relations. T otalliberation from 'oppression', from power relations,
is a delusion, because power is not exclusively repressive, and
because power is 'capillary', diffused and everywhere. Those who
still want to believe in a grand teleological narrative of liberation
see Foucault as being pessimistic because of the impossibility of
escaping power relations. However, Foucault's view is simultane-
ously more accurate in terms of the conceptualization of power
('repressive' and 'positive'; constitutive and enabling) and ultimately
more optimistic for several reasons. First of all, Foucault's con-
cept of power is less deterministic than that of those who believe
that humans are limited by their inherent nature or by the eco-
nomic structure or by the iron law of historical materialism.
Foucault's focus on the 'conditions of emergence' and 'resistance'
suggests that power relations in the 'field of power' are not deter-
ministic, but, on the contrary, a form of what I would call an 'open-
ended determinism'. The field of power imposes constraints about
the possible options open to individuals and groups, but it is those
individuals and groups which ultimately make choices to accept
these constraints or to challenge them. Foucault reminds us that
[i]f one or the other were completely at the disposition of the other
and became his thing, an object on which he can exercise an infi-
nite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of
power. ... In order to exercise a relation of power, there must be
on both sides at least a certain form of liberty. (Foucault 1988b: 12)
Even in situations of extreme domination, there are possibilities
of freedom. Thomas Dumm's interpretation of the biography of
Nazi camp survivor Primo Levi is an illustration of Foucault's
point (Dumm 1996: 144-52). Secondly, this 'open-ended deter-
minism' is very unnerving for believers in a grand narrative of
liberation or for some of those who are 'nature-endorsing'. Their
critique can be summarized in relation to the following question:
what is the clear direction I the teleological purpose which can
guide humans in their resistance and in the choices open to them?
Before even trying to answer this question, it is important to point
out that Foucault was highly suspicious of any grand narratives
of liberation such as humanism, liberalism or Marxism, because
they also turned into new disciplinary regimes. Humanism's
20 Eric Darier
anthropocentrism led to justification for the 'domination' of nature;
Liberalism justified disciplining humans as workers and consumers;
Marxism - or at least its Stalinist experimentation - resulted in
fast industrialization; and all three created the conditions for
ecological 'crises'. For Foucault, ignoring the possibilities of a 'dark
side' of any liberation project is the sure recipe for the demobiliza-
tion of social activists once the liberation project turns sour or
becomes obviously unfulfillable. It is in this context that one can
see how Foucault would be suspicious of the brand of environ-
mentalism which desires a world free of pollution, in which life is
simpler, and social and natural harmony are established upon
presumed 'natural limits'.
2
Foucault's counter-suggestion is that
humans should be constantly vigilant and critical of all actions,
especially those undertaken in the name of liberation or in the
name of 'saving the environment' or obeying 'naturallimits'.
21
In
brief, social change, revolution or environmental activism is a
never-ending activity in which tactics and 'goals' are constantly
re-evaluated and adapted to changing circumstances within the
field of power. Foucault's position on this point is not far from -
Marx's refusal to give precise details about what Communism
would be: Marx thought that it was presumptuous to define pre-
cisely the form of a future society which could only be imagined
by individuals and groups located in radically different sets of
power relations in a different historical context.
Foucault was attacked not only by 'modernists', but also by
postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard. His critique of Foucault
centres on Foucault's alleged (over-) preoccupation with 'power'.
For Baudrillard, 'Foucault's discourse is a mirror of the powers it
describes' (Baudrillard 1987: 10) in the sense that 'with Foucault,
we always brush against political determination in its last in-
stance' (ibid. 40). For Baudrillard, Foucault's 'theory of control
by means of a gaze that objectifies, even when it is pulverized into
micro-devices is passe. With the simulation device we are no doubt
as far from the strategy of transparence as the latter is from the
immediate, symbolic operation of punishment which Foucault him-
self describes' (ibid. 16}.
Baudrillard complains that Foucault 'does not tell us anything
concerning the simulacrum of power itself' (ibid. 40, emphasis
original). For Baudrillard,
I i It is useless ... to nm after power or to discourse about it ad
infinitum since from now on it also partakes of the sacred horizon
nf '11"\I"H"lrlllt't...: 11\,j j, :lkn thptr nnlv tn hidt tht f ~ l t th:lt it no
roucautr ana rne t:nvtronmenr
longer exists, or rather to indicate that since the apogee of the
political has been crossed, the other side of the cycle is now start-
ing in which power reverts into its own simulacrum. (ibid. 51)
Ll
There are at least two ways of responding to Baudrillard's cri-
tique. First, Foucault's preoccupation was not about power per se.
It is not by design that Foucault defined power by saying what
it is not. For Foucault, 'power is not an institution, and not a
structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with'
(Foucault quoted in ibid. 42). The systematic use by Foucault of
'negatives' to define - or rather to 'n/efine' - a concept is evidently
a tactical move to avoid having to redefine concepts that one might
not want to employ in the first place. Foucault lifts the concept of
power (its simulacrum?) from its context (by the use of the negat-
ive), and leaves it suspended in order to lose the conventional
meaning of 'power'. Baudrillard would probably answer that 'it is
a good thing that terms lose their meaning at the limits of the
text', but would still complain that Foucault doesn't 'do it enough'
(ibid. 38). Secondly, when Foucault doesn't use a negative to
describe 'power', he gives an open definition which might not be
too far from what Baudrillard might consider to be a definition of
the 'simulacrum of power itself': 'it is the name that one attributes
to a complex strategical situation in a particular society' (Foucault,
cited in ibid. 93 ). Although Baudrillard would argue against the
'strategical' aspect of Foucault's definition, might it be possible to
say that this 'complex strategical situation' is the mise-en-scene of
the 'simulacrum of power itself'? After all, isn't a mise-en-scene a
strategy even if it is without any strategist or strategical intentions?
Toward a genealogical critique of environmental practices:
environmental governmentality, eco-politics and space
There are at least three concepts emerging from the genealogical
period which can be particularly helpful for an environmental
critique: 'governmentality', 'biopower' and 'space'.
'Governmentality' is the broadest term, and occurs in the con-
text of Foucaults historical interpretation of the literature on 'rea-
son of state' in Europe from around the sixteenth century. Foucault
identifies and qualifies the emergence of modern deployment of
power in the context of three axes: institutional centralization
around governmental agencies, the emergence of new instrumental
knowledge, and the capillary diffusion of power effects across the
ntin ''wi:1l hodv. is:
22 Eric Darier
1 The ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and
reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise
of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as
its target population, as its principle form of knowledge polit-
ical economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses
of security.
2 The tendency which over a long period and throughout the
West, has steadily lead towards the pre-eminence over all other
forms (sovereignty, discipline, etc.) of this type of power which
may be termed government, resulting, on the one hand, in the
formation of a whole series of specific governmental appara-
tuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole com-
plex of savoirs.
3 The process, or rather the result of the process, through which
the state of justice of the Middle Ages, transformed into the
administrative state during the fifteenth and sixteenth centur-
ies, gradually becomes 'governmentalized'. (Foucault 1991a:
102-3)
The concept of governmentality has potential for an environmental
critique, because it explicitly deals with issues of (state) 'security',
techniques of control of the population, and new forms of know-
ledge (savoirs). Contrary to more traditional analyses of 'public
policy', which focus narrowly on 'objectives', 'results' within an
instrumental framework of linear causalities and quantifiable data,
governmentality focuses on the deeper historical context and on
the broader power 'effects' of governmental policy (Dean 1994b;
Pal 1990). A certain number of studies explicitly using the con-
cept of 'environmental governmentality' already exist (Rutherford
1994a, 1994b; Darier 1996a).
The more specific concepts of 'biopower' I 'biopolitics' emerged
initially from Foucault's archeological studies of the natural sci-
ences and, more precisely, biology, but were recontextualized in
the framework of governmentality and power/knowledge. Bio-
politics is the series of governmental strategies centred on this
new concept called 'life'. More precisely, for Foucault, biopolitics
is 'the manner by which it has been attempted, since the sixteenth
century, to rationalize the problems posed to government prac-
tices by phenomena concerning the totality of human beings con-
stituted as a population: health, hygiene, natality, longevity, race'
(Foucault 1989d: 109, my trans.).
This concern for life ('biopolitics') identified by Foucault is largely
anthropocentric, in that the prime target is the control of all aspects
t-oucault and the tnv1ronment LJ
of human life, especially the conditions for human biological repro-
duction. Current environmental concerns could be seen as an
extension of 'biopolitics', broadened to all life-forms and called
'ecopolitics' (Rutherford 1993). On this scenario, the normalizing
strategy of ecopolitics is the most recent attempt to extend control
('management') to the entire planet (Sachs 1993). In this context,
the promotion of ecocentrism by deep ecology, for example, can
be seen as not only a critique of prevalent, increasing instrumental
control of the natural world, but as inserting itself very well into
the new normalizing strategy of an ecopolitics. My point here
should not be interpreted as a negative evaluation of deep ecology
per se. Instead, I want to illustrate the complexity of power rela-
tions and the constant dangers - but also opportunities - lurking
in the field of power. In this context, the adoption of a Manichaean
approach to environmental 'issues' by many environmental theor-
ists fails to acknowledge that their tactic of environmental resist-
ance is always what de Certeau calls 'maneuver "within the enemy's
field of vision",' and cannot be positioned as a referential 'external-
ity' (de Certeau 1984: 37). This is why Foucault's genealogical
approach is so important for an environmental critique.
Foucault's approach to 'space' is the third concept which might
also be extremely relevant to an environmental critique. Foucault
explored the problematization of 'space' within a historical context
(Foucault 1984e; 1989d: 99-106). According to the framework of
governmentality, the 'security' of the state is guaranteed not so
much directly by the control of a territory (space), but rather
through the increasing control of the population living in that
territory. In fact, Foucault suggested that at the beginning of the
seventeenth century the government of France started to 'think of
its territory on the model of the city'. According to Foucault,
The city was no longer perceived as a place of privilege, as an
exception in a territory of fields, forests and roads .... Instead, the
cities, with the problems that they raised, and the particular forms
that they took, served as the models for the governmental rationality
that was to apply to the whole of the territory. A state will be well
organised when a system of policing as tight and efficient as that of
the cities extends over the entire territory. (Foucault 1984b: 241)
Consequently, one historical rupture which became a condition for
the environmental 'crisis' was the attempt to extend the system
of social control in place in the cities to the countryside. This histor-
ical analysis of the increasing control of the non-urban space (the
24 Eric Darier
more 'natural' environment) is similar to the critique of social eco-
logists who might agree with Foucault that the domestication of
nature was part of a system of (urban) power relations among
humans which had for its objective the maintenance of the given
social order (Bookchin 1982). As the environmental 'crisis' was
one of the results of specific power relations - such as social
inequalities and political hierarchy- it would presumably have to
be addressed before - or at least at the same time as the environ-
mental 'crisis'. Obviously, deep ecologists, like George Sessions,
would interpret this focus on human issues as the continuation of
anthropocentrism which created the environmental 'crisis' in the
first place (Sessions 1995b). Locating Foucault with social ecologists
against deep ecologists is not accurate either. Foucault's studies of
the emergence and rise of 'human sciences' in the context of
governmentality - as a specific 'reason of state' based on security
- could also be the basis for a critique of anthropocentrism. How-
ever, unlike deep ecologists, Foucault would not suggest replacing
anthropocentrism by ecocentricism, which also presents its own set
of traps. For example, Foucault would probably agree with Timothy
Luke's critique of ecocentrism (i.e. anti I non-anthropocentrism)
as being also, ultimately, a humanly constructed category which is
policed by all-too-human ecocentrists. Justifying human actions in
the name of 'nature' leaves the unresolved problem of whose
(human) voice can legitimately speak for 'nature' and the inherent
dangers of such an approach.
As Luke remarks admirably,
deep ecology could function as a new strategy of power for nor-
malising new ecological subjects - human and non-human - in
disciplines of self-effacing moral consciousness. In endorsing self-
expression as the inherent value of all ecospheric entities, deep
ecology also could advance the modern logic of domination by
retraining humans to surveil and steer themselves as well as other
beings in accord with 'Nature's dictates'. As a new philosophy of
nature, then, deep ecology provides the essential discursive grid for
a few enthusiastic ecosophical mandarins to interpret nature and
impose its deep ecology dictates on the unwilling many. (Luke
1988: 85)
This longing for 'nature', either through the self-effacement of
humans before 'wilderness' (deep ecology)
22
or through nostalgia
for a simpler social order in harmony with nature (social ecology)
23
is possible only in the context of an 'intimate distance' brought
Foucault and the Environment 25
about by the 'dislocation of nature in modernity' (Phelan 1993 ).
Consequently, the 'space' that Foucault is talking about is not the
unproblematized physical and material environment of the environ-
mentalists, but the various problematizations of 'space' raised, for
example, by feminists (Lykke and Bryld 1994). In this sense,
Foucault and the environmentalists are not located in quite the same
space! However, the reconceptualization of space - for example,
as 'heterotopias' (Foucault 1986) enabled Foucault to create a
break in our current 'physical' understanding(s) of space. We shall
come back to the important concept of 'heterotopias' as two of
the contributors to this volume, Thomas Heyd and Peter Quigley,
apply it.
The final Foucault
After the publication of the first volume of his History of Sexual-
ity (1976), Foucault remained silent until just before his death
in 1984. Foucault's silence was relative in the sense that he car-
ried on giving numerous interviews. In retrospect, however, one
can see a shift occurring sometime in the 1977-84 interval. Just
before dying of AIDS, Foucault published the second and third
volumes of The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1984a, 1984).
The introduction to The Use of Pleasure constitutes another
deplacement from the second Foucault and from the first volume
(Foucault 1976). Until The Use of Pleasure was published, the
assumption was that, for Foucault, the forms taken by our sub-
jectivities were the contingent effects of power relations and nothing
more. For this reason alone, Foucault was highly suspicious of any
teleological project such as, for example, 'ethics', which he saw as
a technique for the normalization of the population, a technique
whose objective was to control daily human conduct.
24
In this sense
one could argue that Foucault was strongly against ethics. What
surprised many readers after the publication of the second and
third volumes was the focus on Greek ethics or, more precisely,
on conditions for the emergence of the self-construction, by some
Greeks, of how humans related to themselves. Now the question for
foucault was: how can individuals or groups of individuals shape
I construct their own self I their own subjectivity I their identity
and consequently their conduct in the world I in relative distance
I autonomy from the process of normalization? This exercise illus-
trates what foucault called a 'practice of freedom'. Some readers
26 Eric Darier
saw in Foucault's final volumes the affirmation of an ontological
subject which he spent all his life seeking to escape. I believe that
this is a gross misreading of Foucault. In the first place, Foucault
was not an 'anti-humanist' in the sense of rejecting humanity; he
simply offered a critique of 'one style of being human' (Dumm
1996: 15). The only thing he was doing in the second and third
volumes was debunking over-determinist readings of normaliza-
tion, as outlined by the genealogical Foucault and more precisely in
the first volume of History of Sexuality. Up to the end, for Foucault,
there was no ontological subject, as humanists would have every-
one believe. However, for him the subjectivities of individuals
were not the sole effects of the normalization process. The various
forms that the subject takes also emerge from the specificity of the
field of power: this is to say, the occasional cracks in the dispositif
between normalization and resistance.
According to the second and third volumes, the subject can also
be self-constituted in 'a more autonomous way, through practices
of liberation, of liberty'. This 'autonomous way' is not based
on an ontological autonomy of the subject. 'I do indeed believe
that there is no sovereign, founding subject, a universal form of
subject to be found everywhere. I believe, on the contrary, that
the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a
more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of liberty'
(Foucault 1988a: 50).
What Foucault was not doing in the last two volumes of The
History of Sexuality was giving a prescriptive ethical norm. He
was not suggesting that the ethics of the Greeks should be our
norms. On the contrary, the final volumes should be interpreted
as containing examples of non-strategic ethics that is, ethics
which are not part of a strategy to normalize I control the popu-
lation, but an ethics which emerges in relative autonomy from the
normalization process. The central objective of Foucault was to
tell his contemporaries that, in some cases, it is possible to remake
ourselves, to remake our self-identity independently of the nor-
malization process, and for us to 'understand the ways in which
we are free' (Dumm 1996: 63). Thus the 'ethics' described in the
second and third volumes are merely examples of radical alterity,
of practices of freedom, from other spaces and from other times,
not a universal, ahistorical ethical prescription to be followed
to the letter. Foucault's ultimate position I ethical stand is well
summarized by Lawrence Kritzman, for whom 'the quintessential
challenge in the post-Sartrean age is to invent new forms of life
Foucault and the Environment 27
based on an ethical stance endlessly disengaging itself from all
forms of discourse based on the familiar and accepted' (Kritzman
1988: xxiv-xxv).
Foucault's non-ethics has important consequences for environ-
mental ethics in that the focus shifts away from the presumed
discovery or 'rediscovery' of a true permanent 'ecological sel'
25
to the active constitution of subjectivities which constantly rework
humans' relations with themselves, with other life-forms, and with
the world generally. The ethical constitution of what might be
called 'green' subjectivities might be the endless process of 'ethiciza-
tion' of being human in the world.
Where Do We Go from Here?
In summary, we have seen a degree of overlap between Foucault
and environmentalism. In general, there is an irreconcilable con-
flict between the contextualizing premisses of Foucault's archeology
and the frequent recourse by many environmental theorists to a
naturalistic position in the last instance. However, Foucault and
the environmental activists have potentially more in common when
it comes to practical political tactics of resistance and to under-
standing the construction I deconstruction of subjectivities. Foucault
wasn't interested in defining what is 'good' or 'bad' in the abstract,
because these terms make sense only within the specificity of their
contexts. Rather, Foucault's ethico-political project is to 'deter-
mine which is the main danger'. For him, 'not everything is bad,
but everything is dangerous'. And if this is the case, then 'we always
have something to do', which 'leads not to apathy but to a hyper-
and pessimistic activism' (Foucault 1984d: 343 ). Surely this is the
way that most environmentalists approach their political prac-
tices, asking 'What are the main dangers we are facing- including
the normalizing dangers of environmental discourses themselves?'
Even if there is deep pessimism in the environmental movement
about the chances for the ecological survival of humans and many
other life-forms on this planet, it hasn't lead to quietism. On the
contrary, it has stimulated both a 'hyper-activism' of environmental
resistance and a constant refashioning of one's own subjectivities.
Despite 'turning his back to nature', Foucault's provocative and
creative thinking may help us to face up to the environmental
challenge.
Because of the stimulating diversity and richness of Foucault's
approaches, themes and concepts, it is only possible to touch on
28 Eric Darier
some of them. This collection of essays intends to illustrate only
the diversity of unintended Foucauldian effects on environmental
critique. The first part of this volume approaches discourses of the
'environment' from a Foucauldian historical angle - that Is, a
genealogy of the present with several 'histories'.
In his chapter '"The Entry of Life into History"', Paul
Rutherford focuses on 'biopolitics', which is probably the closest
Foucault ever came to addressing the environmental issue from the
perspective of how the mechanisms of biological life themselves
became an object of 'reason of state' calculations and strategy. In
this sense, 'life' as an object of scientific knowledge, as a state
preoccupation, and as an ethical I normalizing guiding principle
for individual conduct enters 'history', because it becomes an
articulated, explicit strategy. Building on the Foucauldian concept
of 'biopolitics', but pushing it beyond its central concern for human
life, Rutherford shows that the current interest in ecology can be
characterized as an 'ecological governmentality' in which all life-
forms become objects of scientific enquiry, a series of state calcula-
tions based on 'security' and on the disciplining I normalization of
the population. He illustrates this 'ecological governmentality' by
reviewing in detail the procedures for environmental impact assess-
ment as an emergence of discourse about eco-risks.
Using a Foucauldian-inspired 'archeo-genealogical' approach,
Isabelle Lanthier and Lawrence Olivier also address the theme of
'biopolitics', and identify a recent rupture in the discourse of
medicine and human health which introduces the concept of 'life-
style', linking issues of human life to the quality of air, water,
urban space and working environment. It is the technique of nor-
malization of individual conduct through 'life-style' practices which
created the conditions for the emergence of an environmental
'awareness'. Lanthier and Olivier show that the current environ-
mental 'awareness' is not simply an extension or a deepening of
biopolitics, but also an unexpected effect.
For her part, Catriona Sandilands's 'Sex at the Limits' critically
explores the theme of ecological 'limits' and, more precisely, 'popu-
lation control' in the recent history of environmental discourses.
For Sandilands, 'calls for limits' have disciplinary and normative
consequences which environmentalism rarely acknowledges. For
example, the problematization of population control translates
'natural limits' into 'sexual limits', which have racialized, gendered
and heterosexualized power relations. Sandilands concludes by
advocating 'the reassertion of an overt sense of "polymorphous"
Foucault and the Environment 29
pleasure into environmental discourses' as a tactic of resistance
to the normative constraints of the discourses about 'population
control'.
In 'Ecological Modernization and Environmental Risk', Paul
Rutherford reviews part of the debate between German social
theory and Foucault and its possible consequences for an under-
standing of the current problematization around the issue of
'environment'. It seems that the concerns for 'security' which
emerge out of the 'reason of state' result in taking more environ-
mental risks in order to guarantee more 'security'!
The second part of this collection is devoted more specifically
to the effects of various techniques of enviro-normalization on the
construction of subjectivities and conceptions of space. To reflect
the plurality and heterogeneity of these techniques, this second
part is entitled 'Environmentalities'.
The article by Timothy W. Luke on 'Environmentality as Green
Governmentality' is a practical case study of 'ecological I green
governmentality' in the current American environmental political
context, which includes among others the Wise Use I Property
Rights movement, the pro-business agenda of the Republican Con-
gress, and President Clinton and Vice-President Gore's 'environ-
mental musings'. Luke illustrates very well how 'environmentality'
is one central characteristic of the new political economy of 'global-
ization' which includes 'eco-knowledge' and 'enviro-discipline'.
In his article, 'Art and Foucauldian Heterotopias', Thomas Heyd
explores the concept of space in Foucault, especially heterotopias
as an example of resistance against the homogenization and nor-
malization of space. Heyd suggests that 'medicine wheels' located
on the plains of North America and their occasional use as a source
of inspiration in contemporary arts are an illustration of the import-
ance of 'other places' in imagining other possibilities for the present
and the future.
Sylvia Bowerbank's article 'Nature Writing as Self-Technology',
warns us about the dangers in techniques of nurturing a 'green self'
by a growing number of environmentalists. Bowerbank reminds us
that 'self-technologies' such as nature retreats and 'ceo-pastoral'
exercises used by contemporary environmentalists are not new,
hut are part of a broader history of disciplinary strategies.
The third and final part of the volume deals with the intense
debate between the 'nature-endorsing' and 'nature-sceptical' sides
of environmental theory and the deployment of many strategies of
resistance.
30 Eric Darier
In 'Nature as Dangerous Space', Peter Quigley offers a fierce
critique of the 'grounded responsibility' suggested in recent pub-
lications, most notably by Aaron Gare, Charlene Spretnak, Neil
Evernden and George Sessions. To get away from problematic
'grounded responsibility' and/or 'nature-endorsing', Quigley pro-
poses using Foucault's concept of resistance. As an example of
resistance, Quigley mentions Foucault's 'heterotopias' as 'places
where sites of opposition are created'.
For his part, Neil Levy resists the discourses associated with
poststructuralism and Foucault because they tend to be 'profoundly
anti-naturalistic', 'dangerously relativistic' and 'abstract'. If Levy
identifies overlaps between the anti-humanist critique of post-
structuralism and the anti-anthropocentrism of some of the environ-
mental discourses, he also identifies profound differences. For Levy,
'if there is nature in Foucault's work, we can have no knowledge
about it'. Nevertheless, he acknowledges the importance of the
Foucauldian concept of resistance as one which works 'without
committing us to a belief in an ontological referent'.
In the final chapter I build on Quigley's critique and also try to
resist environmental ethics, which I see as moralistic and justified
ultimately on the 'naturalistic fallacy'. I suggest instead a
contextualized concept of resistance a Ia Foucault and use the
example of non-essentialist gay/queer political tactics to outline
what a Green aesthetic of existence might look like.
Notes
1 Madan Sarup identifies four features of poststructuralism, which
he equates with postmodernism: ( 1) dissolution of the subject and
subversion of the notion of structure; (2) critique of historicism;
(3) critique of meaning; (4) critique of philosophy (1989: 2-3, 118).
For a general introduction, see also Smart 1993. For a critique of
postmodernism, see Norris 1990.
2 The 'filters' can also be considered as the only reality. The metaphor
of the filter as filtering an objective reality for humans might be part
of the illusion. Paraphrasing Derrida, one could say, 'il n'y a pas
d'hors filtres'! For a stimulating discussion of textuality in Foucault
and Derrida, see Said 1978b.
3 For an illustration of an acrobatic statement on the topic, see Murphy
1994: ix: 'The sociological construction of the relationship between
the social and the natural must be done in a way that maintains the
importance of social constructions without reducing reality to a
social construction.'
Foucault and the Environment 31
4 There are three important biographies of Foucault (:Eribon 1991;
Macey 1993; ]. Miller 1993) and a more recent rebuttal of critiques
by Eribon (1994).
5 This is probably why Thomas Dumm see Foucault as a performer, as
'a sort of intellectual Elvis'. '[Foucault's] referentiality is not a sign
of his lack of originality but is instead, an artifact of the unusually
meticulous preparation of the archival retrieval' (Dumm 1996: 72).
6 I agree with Olivier (1995: 20) that Foucault's intentions were more
philosophical than methodological.
7 For a similar 'bothends' way of approaching Foucault, see Mahon
1992, which, starting from a Nietzschean genealogical perspective,
explores the foci of research of the three Foucaults: viz. 'truth',
'power' and the 'subject'.
8 For the purpose of chronological coherence and clarity, I give the
date of the first publication in French, but in the Bibliography, I
also give (in square brackets) the date of the first publication of the
English translation, followed by the title in English.
9 Gutting shows that Foucault removed the word 'structural' from
the later reprinting of The Birth of the Clinic. With archeology, it
may be 'possible to make a structural analysis of discourses that
would evade the fate of commentary by supposing no remainder,
nothing in excess of what has been said, but only the fact of its
historical appearance' (Foucault 1963: xvii; quoted in Gutting 1989:
134, my emphasis).
10 It is important to note that the target of Taylor's critique in this pass-
age (1989: 99-100) is 'neo-Nietzscheans', which explicitly includes
Foucault. Taylor's critique was directed not against the archeological
approach, but against the Nietzschean position taken by Foucault
in response to the limitations of the archeological approach. I took
Taylor's critique out of its context on purpose, because, although I
may disagree with Taylor's view of the Nietzschean Foucault, I believe
that Taylor's critique is perfectly pertinent to the archeological period.
11 For an example of a subsequent archeological study of scientific
knowledge which incorporates a genealogical 'power' dimension (i.e.
'power/knowledge'), see Rouse 1987.
12 For an example of genealogical re-memorization of forgotten prac-
tices, see Kubrin 1981, which shows that the founding father of
'modern' physics, Isaac Newton, was also an adept of magic.
13 It is interesting to note that the most supportive 'Marxian' (not Marx-
ist?) evaluation of Foucault focuses exclusively on the genealogy,
not the archeology (Smart 1983). For another stimulating Marxian
reworking of Marxism through Foucault, see Poster 1985. Foucault
also offered his own genealogical critique of Marxism: 'What strikes
me in the Marxist analyses is that they always contain the question
of "class struggle" but they pay little attention to one word in the
phrase, namely "struggle" ... But when they speak of the "class
32 Eric Darier
struggle" as the mainspring of history, they focus mainly on defining
class, its boundaries, its membership, but never concretely on the
nature of the struggle. One exception comes to mind: Marx's own
non-theoretical, historical texts, which are better and different in
this regard' (Foucault 1988d: 123).
14 Another technique of tactical writing employed by Foucault is the
use of quotation marks to create a rupture between the accepted
meaning of a word and the object it is suppose to signify. For a
discussion of the use of quotation mark by Foucault, see Visker
1995: 7 4 ~ 1 3 5
15 For an account of Foucault as a 'self-professed' Nietzschean, see
Olivier 1995.
16 For a similar likening of 'chaos theory of contemporary physics and
postmodern critique of modernity's search for a univocal, stable
structure that organizes all phenomena', see Zimmerman 1994: 13,
318-77.
17 Among many 'gay' historical studies, see Halperin 1990; Weeks
1985. From a historico-legal perspective, see Moran 1996; Stychin
1995.
18 I borrow this useful distinction from de Certeau. 'I call a strategy
the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes
possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an
army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a
place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from
which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats
(consumers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the
city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed' (de
Certeau 1984: 35-6). '[A] tactic is a calculated action determined
by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority,
then, provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy ... it is
maneuver "within the enemy's field of vision" .... It does not, there-
fore, have the options of planning general strategy and viewing the
adversary as a whole within a district, visible, and objectifiable
space' (ibid. 36-7).
19 I am not using the word 'individual' to affirm an individualist onto-
logy and/or epistemology. On the contrary, one should see the
'individualization' of self-identity as one of the effects of modern
power relations. Again, we are trapped in the boundaries of lan-
guage, for we don't have vocabulary for describing what is not!
20 '[E]nvironmental consciousness has ... helped to reinforce the cur-
rent recessionary messages about self-sacrifice and deprivation in
our daily lives' (Ross 1994: 266). 'While it may be necessary to
rebut the calls for limits - sounding across a whole spectrum from
the economics of corporate environmentalism to the cultural pol-
itics of traditional values- it would be historically naive to suggest
that ntlmral fn\doms can he uncoupled from the social conditions
Foucault and the Environment 33
in which they were won and are maintained today. On the one
hand, popular consciousness tenaciously insists that people are less
free when they have less to consume even though many consumers
recognise that higher levels of consumption involve them in socially
constraining networks of dependency and debt that are not always
visible or economically quantifiable. But it is rank First World arrog-
ance to suggest that people in non-consumer societies are some-
how more free in their less commodified ways, or more healthy in
their freedom from diseases associated with life in high-consumption
societies' (ibid. 267). For a study of the social construction of human
'needs', see Leiss 1976.
21 Baudrillard makes a direct link between 'consumption' and the
'desire for totality' which implies that, for example, the longing for
a coherent ecological totality in fact sustains 'consumption'. For
Baudrillard, '[t]he desire to "moderate" consumption or establish a
normalising network of needs is naive and absurd moralism. At the
heart of the project from which emerges the systematic and indefinite
process of consumption is a frustrated desire for totality' (Baudrillard
1982: 25). It is because we cannot achieve a totalizing objective
world-view that we are consuming the world.
22 The discourse of 'wilderness' by deep ecologists is indeed the 'litmus
test of whether someone has firmly adopted a non-anthropocentric
ecological ethic that transcends mere environmental pragmatism and
enlightened human self-interest' (Chase 1991: 18).
23 'The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may well have marked a
unique watershed for Western humanity. History seemed to be poised
at a juncture: society could still choose to follow a course that yielded
a modest satisfaction of needs based on complementarity and the
equality of unequals. Or it could catapult into capitalism with its
rules of equivalence and the inequality of equals, both reinforced
by commodity exchange and a canon of "unlimited needs" that
confront "scarce resources"' (Bookchin 1982: 214-15).
24 For a superb application of the conceptual framework of the nor-
malization of 'conduct' to the seventeenth century, see (Tully 1993a).
See also Rose 1990.
25 For an example of this position, see Mathews 1991. For Mathews
the issue is to 'find a metaphysical and ethical expression for the
intuition of "oneness" and interconnectedness' (p. 3). Despite the
obviously fundamentalist character and non-Foucauldian approach
of Mathews's search for the 'ecological self', it is possible to read
Mathews as a strategic counter-example to current non-ecological
modern selves. However, it is quite clear that Mathews does literally
'believe' in her metaphysical ethics. Again, this illustrates the tension
that Foucault identified in the environmental movement between a
critique of existing truth-claims and a political practice justified by
similar truth-claims (Foucault 1 ':ISXh: 1 5).
Part I
Histories
'The Entry of Life into History'
P au/ Rutherford
Introduction
In the decade since Foucault's death there has been a proliferation
of academic literature applying what could broadly be described
as poststructuralist insights to the study of gender, social policy,
health policy and medicine, education, international politics, etc.
However, in the area of environmental issues, works adopting
this approach have been most notable for their rarity, despite
occasional exceptions.
1
Modern thinking about the natural environment is character-
ized by the belief that nature can be managed or governed through
the application of the scientific principles of ecology. This chapter
considers how governing the environment in this sense involves
more than the familiar political activities of the modern adminis-
trative state. Environmental governance in advanced liberal soci-
eties is far more dependent on the role played by scientific expertise
in defining and managing environmental problems than the more
traditional state-centric notions of politics and power would sug-
gest. Scientific ecology has become a political resource that in
important respects constitutes the objects of government and, at
the same time, provides the intellectual machinery essential for
the practice of such government.
Foucault's ideas of biopolitics and governmentality can help
provide a critical perspective on contemporary environmental prob-
lems. In this chapter I attempt to demonstrate this by developing
three basic propositions: first, that the concern with ecological
problems and environmental crises can be seen as a development of
what hmcault called 'the regulatory biopolitics of the population';
Paul Ruthertord
second, that this contemporary biopolitics has given expression to
a mode of governmental rationality that is related to the institution-
alization of new areas of scientific expertise, which in turn is based
on a bin-economic understanding of global systems ecology; and
third, that this relatively recent articulation of biopolitics gives
rise to new techniques for managing the environment and the
population that can be termed 'ecological governmentality'.
Discipline and Biopolitics: Foucault
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault examined in detail the emer-
gence of a form of disciplinary power that acted directly on the
body of individuals. Disciplinary power did not completely dis-
place other forms of power; rather, it invested these with a new
capacity to penetrate the most minute, everyday activities of indi-
viduals, to produce docile bodies 'that may be subjected, used,
transformed and improved' (Foucault 1975: 136).
Discipline and Punish focused on understanding these disciplin-
ary technologies as operating in the 'minute, capillary relations of
domination', forming the ongoing substratum for the institutions
and structures of the state (Gordon 1980: 255). The microphysics
of power suggested that the operation of power relations could
be grasped only through analysis of the disciplinary techniques
that produced docile bodies within specific institutional contexts,
such as prisons, schools or the work-place. A key criticism of
Foucault's work in this period was that its emphasis on such
local relations of power ignored the 'macro' issue of the relation-
ships between particular institutions ('society') and the state. His
later work on governmental rationality provided a direct, import-
ant response to this type of criticism (Gordon 1991: 4). In the first
volume of The History of Sexuality Foucault turned his attention
specifically to a consideration of the connection between the opera-
tion of power at the micro-level of the individual within par-
ticular institutional situations and the problem of the regulation
at a global level of entire populations by the state (Dean 1994a:
175-6; Gordon 1991: 4-5).
2
The context in which Foucault develops this is his description
of the emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of a
new form of power concerned with 'administering life' (Foucault
1976: 139). This biopower focuses on the fostering of life and the
care of populations, and developed in two distinct yet related
forms. The first of these, constituting 'an anatomo-politics of the
'The Entry of life into History' 39
human body', focuses on disciplining the body of the individual,
to increase its utility and manageability through its 'integration
into systems of efficient and economic controls'. This element of
biopower is generally equivalent to the notion of disciplinary power
developed in Discipline and Punish. The second, more recent form
of biopower focuses on the supervision of what Foucault calls 'the
species body', 'the body imbued with the mechanics of life and
serving as the basis of the biological processes'. Management of
the species body occurs through a range of 'interventions and
regulatory controls' which he characterizes as 'a biopolitics of the
population' (ibid. 139).
A range of empirical investigations, particularly in demography
and geography, were closely connected with the rise of these re-
gulatory interventions, and Foucault argued in general that the
social sciences developed to meet the particular demands of the
administration of human populations, resources and the economic
relations between them (Foucault 1980e: 171-2; 1991a: 93). In
these developments, population emerges as an economic and pol-
itical problem in which the central concern is the proper balance
between population growth and available resources (Foucault 1976:
25). It is worth noting that in this process, not only does the idea
of a measurable and manageable population come into existence,
but so also does the notion of the environment as the sum of the
physical resources on which the population depends. According
to Foucault, in the eighteenth century population and environ-
ment came to be seen as constituting 'perfect living interrelation',
with the task of the state involving the supervision of the 'living
interrelations between those two types of living beings' (popula-
tion and environment)
3
(Foucault 1988c: 160). Elaboration of this
'population-riches problem' occurs within a network of new types
of knowledge and techniques of government, having as their prim-
ary concern programmes for the statistical description and efficient
management and disposition of all elements of the population and
its resources.
4
Foucault regarded biopower as indispensable to the develop-
ment of modern society. He pointed to the parallel growth of the
institutions of state power alongside the techniques of biopower
(both disciplinary anatomo-politics and biopolitics) within the eco-
nomy and the population. According to Foucault,
it is largely as a force of prodlll:tion that the hody is invested with
relations of powl'r and domination; bur, on rhe orhcr hand, its
40 Paul Rutherford
constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a
system of subjection ... the body becomes a useful force only if it
is both a productive body and a subjected body. (Foucault 1975:
25-6)
Thus the development of capitalism, the economic modernization
of Europe, was dependent on the emergence of disciplinary power.
Investing social relations with these new 'micro' relations of power
was very much the prerequisite for the success of capitalist mod-
ernization (Foucault 1976: 140-1; Rabinow 1984: 18).
It was through the operation of biopower at every level of the
social body, across a diverse range of institutional locations (includ-
ing schools, clinics, the family, the military and administration),
that the modern capitalist economy became possible and was sus-
tained. The techniques of biopower also played a pivotal role in
processes of social segregation and hierarchization, which not only
guaranteed that the political relations of domination and hegemony
of the modern state were more efficiently perpetuated, but also
ensured a congruence between the 'accumulation of men to that of
capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to the expan-
sion of productive forces' (Foucault 1976: 140-1)
Several other factors were identified by Foucault as arising from
the formation of this new domain of political action focused on
human beings as living entities. One was the eighteenth-century
'rupture' in the way that scientific discourse dealt with the 'two-
fold problematic of life and man': that is, the emergence of the
modern view of human beings based on a new relationship be-
tween history and life - the 'dual position' of human life that is
simultaneously 'outside history, in its biological environment, and
inside human historicity, penetrated by the latter's techniques of
knowledge and power' (ibid. 143 ). This dual problematic itself
can be understood, in large part, as arising from the fundamental
shift that occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century, in
the way in which life in general was conceptualized. The trans-
formation was associated, according to Foucault's account, with
a general discontinuity between the 'Classical' and the 'Modern'
era, and in particular with the development of modern biology.
Unlike classical natural history, modern biology saw life as de-
pendent for its existence on the way in which organisms are func-
tionally linked to their external surroundings: that is, on the way
in which they exchange resources with their environment. The
classical view of a timeless continuity of nature was replaced by a
'The l::ntry ot lite into History' 41
concept of life in which species were understood as discontinuous
entities shaped by the evolutionary influence of the environment,
and therefore 'tied to the time in which these forces and their
effects exist' (Gutting 1989: 192).
Another crucial outcome of the growth of modern biopower
was the increasing importance of what Foucault described as the
'action of the norm', at the expense of sovereign power and the
law (Foucault 1976: 144 ). There are several key elements to this
argument. There was a decline in the absolute power of the sover-
eign over his subjects, and a shift to reliance on a series of expert
knowledges that endowed the subject with a multiplicity of prop-
erties denoting such things as sexual aberration, criminality, states
of physical, mental and moral health, etc. In concert with this,
there developed a corresponding series of specific disciplinary
technologies that operated corporeally to train the body, thereby
increasing its economic utility and political docility (Foucault 1975:
128-44). The experts involved in the production of these new
discourses also acted as the technicians and 'normative judges'
responsible for the application of such disciplinary and corrective
programmes. Effecting such detailed, individualized supervision
was beyond the blunt, prohibitive capacities of the judicial sys-
tem. Rather, Foucault argued that what was needed was a subtle,
individualizing mode of power that was able to 'take charge of
life' and distribute the living, biological subject as efficiently as
possible within the social and economic field. Such a task required
'continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms' with the power
to 'quantify, measure, appraise and hierarchise', so as to effect a
distribution about the norm (Foucault 1976: 144).
Biopower did not replace juridical power, but rather functioned
as its correlative, so that the law increasingly tended to function
as a norm rather than as a rigid prohibition. The legal system was
more and more 'incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses
(medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the
most part regulatory' (ibid.), and it was this displacement of sover-
eign power and the incorporation of the juridical as a correlat-
ive to the 'effectivity of the norm' that distinguished biopower
(Hewitt 1983: 69). It was the conjunction of the modern biolo-
gical understanding of life and the proliferation of medical and
social-scientific knowledge as normalizing disciplines that brought
forth a qualitatively different, distinctively modern biopolitics.
For Foucault, the rise of biopower, from the eighteenth century
onwards, represented quite literally the 'entry of life into history'
42 Paul Rutherford
(Foucault 1976: 141). By this Foucault was not denying that the
age-old problems of the biological struggle for existence, as mani-
fested in the threat of famine and epidemic, could exert a political
effect on history. Such influences were clearly not new. Rather,
he was arguing that with economic development and increased
productivity during the eighteenth century it became possible to
gain some control over the threat of death at this basic biological-
demographic level. Foucault's comments on why this occurred are
generally in line with standard accounts of modernization. He
argued that increases in agricultural productivity and availability
of resources in eighteenth-century Europe encouraged rapid demo-
graphic growth, and accompanied greater security from starva-
tion and disease. Essential to this was the development of new areas
of knowledge, particularly in biology, agriculture, and public health
(Foucault 1980e: 168-72; 1976: 142).1t is against the background
of these transformations that Foucault identified the emergence of
the discourses on population and security. He was able to claim
that 'life enters history' precisely because these new technical and
normative disciplines provided relative control over the actual
conditions of life. In doing so, they took upon themselves respons-
ibility for the control and modification of 'the life processes'
(Foucault 1976: 142).
In the modern West, knowledge of the biological conditions of
life and their relationship to individual and collective welfare thus
came to be reflected upon as political concerns, and no longer as
'an inaccessible substrate' that emerged only periodically against
the randomness of fate and death (ibid.). Political power was
no longer primarily sovereign power exercised over legal subjects
(over whom the ultimate authority was death), but was concerned
with the management of living beings and their relations with all
the factors that shape security and welfare. The influence which
biopower exercised over living beings was necessarily 'applied at
the level of life itself'; and in so operating, biopower simultane-
ously gained influence over the individual both politically and as a
biological entity. The corporeal nature of the body of the subject
was brought directly into the explicit calculations of power, and
was thereby transformed into a subjected body. The body (indi-
vidually and collectively) became both the raw material of power
and at the same time that which produces and transforms itself as
a living being (ibid. 142-3; Hewitt 1983: 69).
Foucault explicitly discounts the suggestion that biopower re-
sulted in the total integration of all aspects of life into the techniques
1 he tntry ot Lite mto Hrstory
4.j
that administer it;
5
indeed, life 'constantly escapes them' (Foucault
1976: 143). Nevertheless, with the increasing penetration of bio-
power's normalizing reach into new areas of life activity, and
hence the emergence of life as a political object, a new conception
of rights developed. However, according to Foucault, this was a
form of rights radically different from the traditional right of
sovereignty, and was incomprehensible from within the frame-
work of the classical juridical system. It was in fact a notion of
'rights' that, while couched in the terminology of traditional rights,
was 'turned back' against the traditional systems of rights and law.
Thus the politicization of life, directed as it was at the satisfaction
of essentially biological needs (including the psychological), gave
rise to a recognizably modern interpretation of rights: 'The "right"
to life, to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of
needs, and beyond all the oppressions or "alienations", the "right"
to discover what one is and all that one can be' (ibid. 145).
Biopolitics and Ecological Risk
Foucault suggests a continuity between this modern right to life
and the contemporary concern about risks to the environment.
He claims that the 'biological risks' confronting the human spe-
cies 'are perhaps greater and certainly more serious, than before
the birth of microbiology' (ibid. 143). He further suggests that the
economic and social conditions that, since the eighteenth century,
allowed the West a measure of relief from the struggle against
famine, etc. do not necessarily apply 'outside the Western world',
and goes on to link the notion of modernity directly with biopower
and the conditions under which it emerged:
But what might be called a society's 'threshold of modernity' has
been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own
political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for
Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a polit-
ical existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his
existence as a living being in question.
6
(ibid., emphasis added)
These comments can be seen as an indication that Foucault's
work on biopolitics is capable of addressing the notion of ecolo-
gical risk and the problem of the social relation to nature, which
are emerging as key problems for contemporary social theory. As
will be discussed in another chapter, social theorists Ulrich Beck
44 Paul Rutherford
and Klaus Eder both understand ecological threats as the result
of global processes of modernization and rationalization, which
have created new ecological fields of conflict within contemporary
society. Beck in particular points to a link between the success of
economic growth and the consolidation of welfare state mechan-
isms in providing an unprecedented level of security for life in the
West. From a different, yet not unrelated perspective, Eder emphas-
izes the rise of a new, post-industrial 'politics of class' involving
competition for the symbolic definition of the social relation to
nature. These perspectives inextricably link ecological problems
with social systemic processes of modernization.
One useful way of approaching Foucault's notion of biopower
is to follow Brian Turner, who has argued that, notwithstanding
his apparent hostility to systematic theorizing, Foucault's work
nevertheless implicitly embraces a particular causal explanation
of the modern world (Turner 1984: 159). Turner identifies the
'unifying theme' of Foucault's work as a dual focus on the 'ration-
alisation of the body and the rationalisation of populations by new
combinations of power and knowledge', and argues that these
rationalizations are the effect of increasing population densities,
which in the nineteenth century came to threaten 'the political order
of society' (ibid. 163, emphasis added). Turner rightly emphasizes
the role which population pressures played in Foucault's analysis
of the development of biopower, pointing out that
it is this factor which stands behind the expansion and develop-
ment of new regimes and regimens of control - a profusion of
taxonomies, tables, examinations, drills, dressage, chrestomathies,
surveys, samples and censuses. The pressure of men in urban space
necessitates a new institutional order of prisons, asylums, clinics,
factories and schools in which accumulated bodies can be made
serviceable and safe. Just as the space of knowledge experiences
accumulations of new discourses, so the social space is littered with
bodies and the institutions which are designed to control them.
(ibid. 160-1)
The point I would stress is that not only is knowledge pivotal to
practices of power; it is also central to the constitution of the
objects upon which biopower operates - that is, to the 'making-
up' of both people and things. Biopolitics is therefore inherently
linked to the development and elaboration of specific forms of
expertise. This is an issue I will return to later in the chapter. For
the present, suffice it to say that the definition and administration
'The Entry of life into History' 45
of populations simultaneously requires the constitution and man-
agement of the environment in which those populations exist and
upon which they depend. Such a conclusion is implicit in Foucault's
approach, although not developed, and as a consequence Foucault
does not adequately deal with the way in which the political and
economic problematization of populations also gave rise, in more
recent times, to a similar problematization of nature and the
environment.
7
However, it is clear from Foucault's discussions of
the biopolitical regulation of populations that this assumes not only
the disciplining of individuals and populations, but also, necessarily,
a concern with the administration of 'all the conditions of life' as
represented by the environment.
For Foucault biopolitics, the task of administering life at the
level of the 'species body', represents the multiple points of applica-
tion to the body (both individually and collectively) of disciplines
such as public health, medicine, demography, education, social
welfare, etc. (Barret-Kriegal 1992: 194 ). Ecology and environmental
management can also be regarded as expressions of biopolitics,
as these originate in, and operate upon, the same basic concerns
for managing the 'continuous and multiple relations' between
the population, its resources and the environment. Contemporary
ecological discourse, in other words, is an articulation of what
Foucault calls the 'population-riches problem'. This suggests a
specifically ecological or environmental dimension to biopolitics,
which renders more complex the way in which we understand the
body as the target and site of power. Not only are we forced to
deal with the individual 'anatomical' body and the social body, and
the relations between these, but we must also take into account
an ecological dimension in which the focus is on the relationship
between the social body and the biological species body.
8
This is
not to suggest that there will not be new forms of discipline and
normality directed at the body at the individual level (indeed, these
would appear to be a necessary component in ecological govern-
mentality9), but that, as with areas of social policy such as public
health, the ecological is primarily biopolitical in nature- that is, it
is manifested in specific regulatory controls aimed at the popula-
tion, albeit from a somewhat different perspective.
Governmental Rationality
roucault's work on biopolitics, especially the first volume of The
History of Sexuality, represents a development that goes beyond
46 Paul Rutherford
his earlier writings on the relation between power and knowledge.
As Mitchell Dean argues, the last chapter of The History of Sexu-
ality, volume 1, in particular foreshadowed a new concern with
the problem of government and the role of the state that Foucault
took up during the period 1978-84. This was the only major work
in which Foucault considered in some detail the relation between
the 'institutionalised micro-forms of work upon the self ... and the
global strategies of the government of the state' (Dean 1994a: 175).
Whereas Foucault's earlier work had focused on power in terms of
a local 'microphysics of power', this later work recasts the problem
of power on a much broader, macro-level of analysis. This is not
to suggest that Foucault abandoned recognition of the importance
of the micro-level application (and origin) of power, but rather that
the problem is reformulated in a more complex, sophisticated man-
ner, in which the analysis of the state (and government) is no longer
reliant on a juxtapositioning of micro- and macro-levels of power.
Despite the change in focus that occurs with his writings on
biopolitics, and more fully in those on governmental rationality,
these later works nevertheless maintain continuity with two key
concerns developed in his earlier writings. These are, first, a con-
tinuity between the earlier concern to elaborate a microphysics of
power (the disciplinary technologies of the body) and relating this
to the sorts of biopolitical problems raised by the regulation
of entire populations and societies. Second, there is a continuity
between both of these concerns and the practice of ethics as a
form of 'government of the self' (ibid. 176). Foucault's work on
government thus takes as its object of analysis, to use Dean's
phrase, the 'triple domain' of government. That is, it is concerned
with understanding the multiple means by which human conduct is
governed through various practices of individual self-government,
the government of others, and the government of the state.
Foucault's characterization of government as the conduct of con-
duct (Foucault 1982: 220-1) delineates the field of government in
a very broad sense: it is a 'massive domain' that extends from the
minutiae of individual self-reflection to the depersonalized, anony-
mous rationalities concerned with the political regulation of states,
populations and societies (Dean 1994a: 176-7).
Central to modern government was the development of a new
political discourse (at the end of the sixteenth and during the first
half of the seventeenth centuries) concerning the art of governing.
This discourse specifically centred on the state as being its own
end and having its own logic and nature, expressed in the theory of
'The Entry ot lite into History' 47
raison d'etat. Reason of state, according to Foucault, grew out of
two political technologies that led to the formation of the modern
nation-state: the diplomatic-military practices that developed the
external capacities of states through the system of military alli-
ances and a political technology internal to the state known as the
police, which attended to the development of all 'the means neces-
sary to increase the forces of the state from within'. These two
political technologies came together in the system of mercantilism
or cameralism to give rise to the formation of the modern state
(Foucault 1988c: 103-4).
Central to this new perspective was a definition of government
that no longer focused primarily on the governing of territory, but
rather on the governing of things (see note 4). This new police
doctrine of government represented a radical shift from the negat-
ive emphasis on politics as the 'holding out' of sovereign power
within a territory to an emphasis on the positive, detailed manage-
ment of the entire social body- that is, to ensuring the abundance
and prosperity of the population. The principal concern of the
'police' state became productive, involving a continuous and re-
markably specific series of 'positive interventions in the behaviour
of individuals' and groups (Foucault 1988c: 159}.
The doctrine of reason of state, in holding that the principles of
government were inherent in the state rather than deriving from
natural or divine law, posed the problem of determining the needs
or interests of the state and acquiring the knowledge and informa-
tion necessary to manage these. The task of administration rested
above all on ever more detailed knowledge of the resources of the
state, including all the characteristics of its population and par-
ticularly knowledge of geography, demography, natural resources,
agriculture, climate, etc. (Foucault 1991a: 93-5). The strength of
the state, in police theory, was directly linked to the well-being
of the population. The power of the state is increased inasmuch as
the physical (and social) condition of the population is secured
and improved; thus the police state is also the 'state of prosperity'
(Gordon 1991: 10). Foucault identified, in the writings of police
theorists, the clearest definition of the aim of the modern art of
government: 'to develop those elements constitutive of individuals'
lives in such a way that their development also fosters that of the
strength of the state' (Foucault 1981c: 252). Hence, the police
state's concern with acquiring the most exhaustively detailed know-
ledge, and on the basis of this intervening in the activities of each
of its citizens, assumes a pastoral even totalitarian - dimension
48 Paul Rutherford
(ibid. 248). However, this should not be seen as support for those,
such as Habermas (1985) and Honneth (1991), who see in this
evidence of Foucault's alleged view of modernity as a totally
administered society. What is missed by such an assertion is the
genealogical lineage pointed to by Foucault's analysis. Reason of
state and police science are elements that contribute to the modern
governmental rationality, but do not fully define it. In order to
more fully understand Foucault's account of how disciplinary
biopower and modern state rationality are brought into play, it is
necessary to take into account the influence of liberalism.
Liberalism and Security
Foucault's analysis indicates that modern government derived from
two distinct yet related sources: first, the cameralist/police science
influence, with its emphasis on an essentially pragmatic knowledge
of the state's capacity and resources, and second, liberalism. As has
been suggested, police science harboured within it an aspiration
to a perfect or total knowledge of all the workings of the state's
resources and population. Such knowledge, it was thought, was
necessary if the development of the state was to be regulated so as
to maximize the realization of its own ends (security, prosperity,
etc.) in the most efficient manner. Thus police science, as a govern-
mental technology premissed upon the principle of reason of state,
always operated on the presumption of there being 'too little
government' (Foucault 1981b: 354).
Liberalism, on the other hand, emerged as a critique of state
reason (Gordon 1991: 15). While liberalism is frequently under-
stood primarily as a political (and economic) theory or ideology
concerned with the defence of individual liberty from encroach-
ment by the state, Foucault viewed liberalism as a specific practice
of government that embodies a continuous reflection on not only
the limits of government but also its necessity (Foucault 1981b:
354-6). Where liberalism differs from reason of state is that the
state is no longer considered as its own end; nor is government
considered to be synonymous with the state. Thus Foucault argued:
Liberalism, then, is to be analysed as a principle and method of
rationalising the exercise of government ... the liberal rationalisa-
tion finds its point of departure in the idea that government would
not he considered irs own end. Here, government is not to he
'The Entry at Lite into History'
understood as an institution but, rather, as an activity which con-
sists in directing human conduct within the setting and with the
instruments of state .... Phrased differently, this latter question asked
what makes it necessary for there to be a government and what
objectives ought it to pursue with regard to society in order to
justify its existence. (Ibid. 354-5)
49
The interests of the population could no longer be understood
as necessarily coextensive with those of the state. Liberalism was
still concerned with governing- that is, with how human conduct
can be directed to appropriate ends. Where liberalism differed, as
a governmental rationality, was that it considered what govern-
mental tasks can be efficiently (and legitimately) conducted by the
state and what ambitions must be regarded as outside the compet-
ence of state (ibid. 356; Gordon 1991: 15).
The liberal critique pointed to the impossibility, in the eco-
nomic sphere, of possessing knowledge of the interests and prefer-
ences of individuals such that government could direct and regulate
private economic activities for the public good. Foucault noted
that this also needs to be seen as a problem posed by liberalism for
government in generaL The state, according to liberal theorists,
could not in fact possess the sorts of totalizing knowledge upon
which police science sought to base state action. The opacity, the
unknowability, of economic processes precluded the possibility
of the type of economic sovereignty assumed by reason of state.
Thus the familiar liberal assertion that the state's ability to act
(beneficially) is restricted by the inherently fallible and limited scope
of its knowledge.
10
One result of the influence of liberal thought
was to initiate a new relation between knowledge and government
in which political economy assumed a greater autonomy and
distance from pragmatic state needs (Foucault, cited in Gordon
1991: 16). Liberalism did not dismiss the need for government, but
rather - and this is what Foucault saw as distinctive about liberal
governmental rationality - it dissolved the immediate unity between
knowledge and government, and consequently the equation of
maximized governmental effectiveness with maximal regulation
(Foucault, cited in Burchell et aL 1991: 138-9). In doing so, liberal-
ism brought into being a new relationship between knowledge
and government, involving what Colin Gordon has succinctly de-
scribed as 'a new mode of objectification of governed reality', that
resituates 'governmental reason within a newly complicated, open
and unstable politico-epistemic configuration' (Gordon 1991: 16).
50 Paul Rutherford
This new configuration of knowledge and techniques of govern-
ment Foucault called 'governmentality'. He described this as the
ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and re-
flections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this
very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target
population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy and
its essential technical means apparatuses of security .... [T]his type
of power which may be termed government, (results) on the one
hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental
apparatuses, and on the other, in the development of a whole complex
of savoirs (knowledges). (Foucault 199la: 102-3, emphasis added)
This relationship between particular, more or less formalized
bodies of knowledge and specific administrative mechanisms
has become a crucial feature of government in advanced liberal
societies. Increasingly in such complex societies government, the
conduct of conduct, necessarily relies on the role of professional
expertise. As Donzelot (1979, 1993) has demonstrated, through-
out the nineteenth century there was a proliferation of alliances
between private and professional agents that led to the formation
of a series of welfare programmes directed at perceived prob-
lems within the social body. Over time these welfare programmes
became linked with the functions and institutions of the state.
However, the adoption of these welfare programmes by the state
did not lead to the rise of an all-powerful, interventionist state,
but instead resulted in the bringing together of a diverse network
of arguments, projects and mechanisms through which various
political forces sought to pursue a multitude of social and polit-
ical objectives (Rose and Miller 1992: 192). Thus welfare did not
represent a coherent, state plan for social regulation and normaliza-
tion, but rather was composed of a series of networks assembled
from diverse, often antagonistic elements. Modern social welfare
did not originate as centrally directed projects of state action, but
was 'a composition of fragile and mobile relationships' between
non-state professionals, intellectuals and social movements, and
state agencies (ibid. 193). Just as the development of social welfare
(and subsequently, the welfare state) involved forging and main-
taining alliances and networks between diverse experts and political
forces, of which the state was only one, so too the development of
programmes of environmental security can be understood as draw-
ing on an equally complex, open and unstable 'politico-epistemic
configuration'.
I he tntry ot L1te mto History .:>I
Ecological Governmentality
Foucault saw the emergence of biopolitics in the eighteenth cen-
tury as directly linked to an expanding series of population dis-
courses focusing on health, criminality, education, sexuality, etc.
At the same time we can also find, in the historical scholarship,
evidence of the beginnings of a new discourse that had as its
object the environment. David Worster has dated the first system-
atic documentation of concern about this new problem in 1864,
with the publication of George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature,
a work which sought to demonstrate the danger to humanity and
to nature posed by rapid change in the global environment (Worster
1987b: 91-2).U Clarence Glacken has also identified Marsh's work
as marking the arrival of a modern perspective on the relationship
of humans to nature. The nineteenth century thus saw, in Glacken's
words, the advent of 'an entirely different order, influenced by the
theory of evolution, specialisation in the attainment of knowledge,
(and) acceleration in the transformation of nature' (Glacken 1967:
704-5). Anna Bramwell, in her history of environmentalism, sim-
ilarly pointed to modern ecological concepts as deriving from 'a
set of biological, physical science and geographical ideas that arose
separately around the mid-nineteenth century' (Bramwell 1989:
15). The ideas of Malthus and Darwin on population also contrib-
uted to themes discernible in the modern ecological analysis of
environmental problems (Pepper 1984: 91-100)_12
This problematization of the relationship between population
and the environment can, as previously noted, be linked to three
major social developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies: the emergence of modern biology as the science of life, the
rapid increase in the population of Europe leading to a series of
mass migrations to other continents (Foucault 1991a: 98; Worster
1987b: 92-5), and the development of an international capitalist
market (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 135; Rabinow 1984: 17-18;
Worster 1987b: 92-5). Environmental historians such as Worster
note the importance of the interaction between these three factors
in the period pointed to by Foucault's work on the emergence of
biopolitics. Foucault identified 'the deep historical link' between the
rise of modern biopolitics and the emergence of the population-
resources problem. His focus was on the processes which isolated
'the economy as a specific sector of reality and political economy
as the science and technique of intervention of government in
that f-ield of reality' (Foucault 1991a: 102). Worster has linked the
52 Paul Rutherford
development of the 'two great global forces' of population growth
and world markets in the nineteenth century with an 'environ-
mental upheaval' that remade nature 'with geological effectiveness'
(Worster 1987b: 95-7). Similarly, Richard Grove has claimed that
the techniques of colonial environmental management (1670 to
the mid-1950s), involving forestry, irrigation and soil conserva-
tion, in shaping environmental perceptions ultimately had a more
profound impact on the development of the modern world than
other more 'conspicuous and dramatic aspects of colonial rule'
(Grove 1990: 17; see also Crosby 1986).
The population-resources problem can thus be seen as one of
the central themes of nineteenth-century environmental discourse.
It is also taken up in contemporary discourse on ecological crises.
Many of the most important popular writings in the environmental
debate of the last three decades have as their central focus the
notion of the carrying capacity of the Earth, which is seen as a
biological law with a profound influence for contemporary environ-
mental and population-resources problems. While the emphasis
and political implications stemming from this idea vary, most see
population growth as a fundamental factor in ecological crisis.
Well-known examples of this approach include Hardin 1968;
Ehrlich 1968; Goldsmith et al. 1972; Meadows et al. 1972; and
governmental reports (Council on Environmental Quality 1981).
Other influential works have placed less emphasis on absolute
population levels as the cause of environmental degradation, and
instead have focused on the problem of global pollution, and the
mode and intensity of resource exploitation, which in turn were
seen as related to population levels, and industrialism (and con-
sumerism) as a system of production. Here the central concern
was the impact of new forms of technology which have prolifer-
ated in the post-World War II period,
13
and which are character-
ized by the extensive manufacture and use of synthetic, toxic
chemicals. (Bookchin 1962; Carson 1962; and Commoner 1971
were important examples of this work.)
These and numerous similar works have several important
features in common. Each problematizes the environment as the
previously taken for granted biological basis for human life, and
constitutes it as a domain of social concern and potential political
conflict (Cramer et al. 1989: 96). Each seeks to locate its claims to
authority within the overall framework of a global ecosystems
approach to ecology,
14
whether it be Hardin's and Ehrlich's
biological law of carrying capacity, Commoner's four laws of
. I he tntry ot L1te IntO HIStory
ecology,
15
or the Club of Rome's complex computer modelling
of the limits to growth.
16
Central to each is the view that
human populations are constrained by the operation of ecolo-
gical laws that are biological, and therefore both natural and non-
anthropocentric. These ecological laws are understood as having
significant economic and political consequences, and are frequently
expressed in the economic form of externalities impacting on eco-
logically defined public goods. The concern of this contemporary
discourse is how to manage populations and resources in relation
to their natural environments. This focus remains central to current
environmental discourses; it is, for example, a clear theme in the
Brundtland report to the United Nations (Brundtland 1987) and
the ongoing international debate on sustainable development since
the publication of that report, and continues to be manifest in the
1992 United Nations Earth Summit (Brown et al. 1990; MacNeill
et al. 1991) and its establishment of the UN Sustainable Develop-
ment Commission and the 1994 UN Population Conference.
Scientific expertise has been fundamental in defining environ-
mental problems.
17
1t is therefore necessary to consider the role of
scientific ecology in providing the conceptual framework employed
in the contemporary definition of environmental problems. In its
modern form, ecology emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, and is
based on an 'energy-economic model of the environment' in which
the essential feature is the flow of energy through ecosystems
(Jamison 1993: 189; Worster 1987a: 311, 339). This bio-economic
paradigm, or systems ecology, is a product of twentieth-century
science, a distinctly transnational enterprise drawing upon Euro-
pean and US national scientific traditions, but appearing in its
contemporary form in the USA in the period since World War II.
(Jamison 1993: 193). Despite the popularizing of nature in holisti...:,
and sometimes organicist terms, the bio-economic model at its ..:ore
expressed an 'agronomic attitude toward nature' which sought to
provide the 'analytic tools' needed to 'intensively farm' the Earth's
resources. The language of modern systems ecology reflects this,
abounding with agronomic and economic terms such as produ-
cers, consumers, total energy income, yield, crop, gross and net
productivity, nutrient capital, competitive exclusion, energy budget,
efficiency, etc. (Worster 1987a: 311). Modern scientific ecology,
says Worster, from the 1940s came to see itself as 'the science
of natural economics', in which nature became a 'a modernised
e...:onomic system, ... a corporate state, a chain of factories, and
assembly line'. 'Conflict', Worster continues, 'can have little place
54 Paul Rutherford
in such a well-regulated economy' (ibid. 311-13 ). Ecology then,
appears as the rationale behind a new form of political economy.
The rise of the systems approach to ecology occurred in a very
specific historical and cultural context. In a general sense systems
ecology appears as one of the consequences of the industrializa-
tion of science -that is, with the emergence of 'big science' during
and after World War II, which saw the organization of scientific
research in the USA along large-scale, capital-intensive, corporate
lines, where research output increasingly became an important
contributor to economic growth and national power. Applied sys-
tems ecology in this period gained significant impetus from work
conducted by the US Atomic Energy Commission, originating in
the Manhattan Project, into the problems of nuclear waste and
radiation ecology (Kwa 1993). Jamison points to three ways in
which the post-war development of modern systems ecology was
shaped by the US institutional and cultural context in which it
emerged. First, as mentioned above, the industrialization of science
and the influence of this new industrial setting generated the
view of ecology as 'a powerful technique of social engineering ...
(which could potentially) ... regulate and control the flows of
pollutants and other human interventions through large-scale
ecosystems' (Jamison 1993: 197-8). Second, the availability and
popularity in the USA of powerful computer technology allowed
the unparalleled application of mathematical models to natural
processes. This was a direct extension of the conceptualization
of ecological interactions as cybernetic, 'self-regulating, feedback
systems' that had emerged originally from the use of computers in
the Manhattan Project for the development of weapons guidance
systems. Third, an American tradition combining the influence of
a utilitarian Progressive-era conservation philosophy with the legacy
of pragmatic regional planning programmes of the 1930s facilit-
ated the development of an approach to ecology that lent itself to
large-scale environmental control and management (ibid. 1993:
194-8; Worster 1987a: 312). While the industrialization of science,
including ecology, in the USA started towards the end of World
War II and grew during the 1950s, environmental concerns
throughout the 1950s and early 1960s tended to continue to
reflect the professional interests of scientists (Cramer et al. 1989:
96-7). These professional research interests played a significant
role in the development of a coherent, science-based environment-
alism through the International Geophysical Year (1957-8) and
the International Biological Programme (1964-74) (Rocking 1995;
I he t:ntry ot Lite mto History
Caldwell 1991: 261; Egerton 1983; Golley 1993: 109-66; Kwa
1987; Mcintosh 1985: 213-41). The IBP in particular was ;::
massive transnational enterprise involving research in 97 coun-
tries directed towards the understanding of the biological basis of
productivity and human welfare, where these were 'calculated to
benefit from international collaboration, and were (regarded as)
urgent because of the rapid rate of changes taking place in all
environments throughout the world'. The focus of the IBP was
distinctly ecological, directed towards understanding 'organic
production ... and the potentialities and uses of new and existing
natural resources, ... (as well as) human adaptability to change'
(Worthington 1983: 165).
Regulatory Science and Ecological
Govern mentality
The sorts of extensive, transnational research programmes on eco-
logical issues mentioned above came increasingly to characterize
scientific and political discourse on the environment throughout
the 1960s and 1970s. From the end of the 1960s, through the
establishment of a wide range of environmental legislation and
enforcement agencies, the advanced industrialized countries ex-
perienced a rapid growth in state intervention directed at environ-
mental regulation and planning. Ecological and environmental
research in the 1970s thus laid the foundation for public policies
of significant economic and political impact, particularly in terms
of the regulatory intervention in the activities of industry. In fin-
ancial terms alone these are important for example, the direct cost
of complying with US pollution control regulations is estimated
to be in excess of US$100 billion per year (Jasanoff 1992: 195).
However, of more general importance, the period since the early
1970s has seen the significant institutionalization of new forms of
ecological governmentality. Two important aspects of this have
been the growth of regulatory science and the international spread
of procedures for environmental impact assessment (EIA).
The notion of regulatory science refers to the widespread reli-
ance by the state on extensive systems of scientific advisory struc-
tures which have become an integral feature of environmental
(and health) policy making in industrialized societies (Beck 1992a;
Jasanoff 1990). These expert advisory groups serve not only a
56 Paul Rutherford
role of political legitimation, but more importantly a role of
epistemic policing, both by framing the definition of ecological
risks and by certifying what is to count as scientifically acceptable
knowledge of the natural world. The complexities thrown up by
attempts to define environmental-societal interrelationships in terms
of a global systems ecology produces a high level of 'technical'
uncertainty and potential social conflict.
The rapid expansion of social regulation associated with the
growth of the discourse on ecological problems from the 1970s
produced a whole new domain for the biopolitical administration
of life. The population became the target for a new form of eco-
logical security and welfare, in which environmental agencies and
the professional disciplines required by them set about the task
of protecting the public against hazardous and environmentally
damaging technologies, demanding 'ever more complex predictive
analyses of the risks and benefits of regulation' (Jasanoff 1990: 3).
As Brian Wynne bas noted, the regulatory 'turn to science', as an
attempt to provide greater stability and legitimacy in environmental
policy, 'also in important respects ... defined society, by tacitly
defining the scope and nature of social intervention in public policy
risk decisions' (Wynne 1992: 746-8). The increasing importance
of regulatory ecological science is therefore a particularly signific-
ant articulation of the biopolitical character of modern govern-
mental rationaliry. It is clearly linked to the growth of big science.
Indeed, a notable feature of regulatory science is the role of the
state and industrial interests (especially transnational corporations)
in the manufacture, negotiation and certification of knowledge:
that is, the central role these institutions play in the normative con-
stitution of ecological knowledge (ibid. 754). Regulatory ecolo-
gical science does not so much describe the environment as both
actively constitute it as an object of knowledge and, through various
modes of positive intervention, manage and police it.
As Foucault has suggested, it is often in the mundane and hum-
ble procedures of examination and assessment at the micro-level
that we can discern the operation of biopower. In this context the
environmental impact assessment (EIA) process provides a useful
illustration of one aspect of ecological governmentality. As noted
above, a major element in the response to environmental problems
from the 1960s onwards has involved substantive legislation aimed
at regulating particular pollutants. However, the 1969 US National
Environment Policy Act (NEPA) marked an important departure
from this traditional legal-juridical path. The NEPA adopted a
I he tntry ot L1te mto History !JI
procedural approach to environment protection requmng the
preparation of detailed environmental impact statements for major
development projects which had the potential to significantly affect
the environment. By the 1980s the US EIA process had been
adapted and implemented in one form or another in many other
industrialized countries. EIA sets out statutory criteria for ecolo-
gical assessment requiring government agencies to take account of
these criteria in their decision making.
However, EIA goes beyond legislating for a science-based,
'rational-comprehensive' assessment and decision-making pro-
cess. While studies do point to the capacity of EIA to improve the
effectiveness, co-ordination and legitimacy of environmental plan-
ning decisions, others suggest that these legal-formal mechanisms
also utilize a range of 'powerful, informal incentives' within gov-
ernment to 'produce agencies that continuously and progressively
think about environmental values' (Wandesforde-Smith, cited in
Bartlett 1990: 90). From this perspective EIA can be understood
as operating in a highly flexible, self-regulating manner, involving
continuous mediation between the internal formation of environ-
mental programmes and objectives within organizations (not just
state agencies but also non-governmental organizatins and priv-
ate corporations) and the external political and economic con-
text within which these operate. This suggests that EIA promotes
the implementation of environmental management programmes
not simply through direct coercion, but through a governmental
rationality that establishes norms and procedures which channel
problem solving in a particular direction, and which stimulate
administrative agencies and other social actors to be both innovat-
ive and effective in the implementation of ecological goals (Bartlett
1990).
Bartlett argues that where EIA is successful - that is, where it
substantively influences the direction and outcome of environ-
mental planning and economic activity - it does so 'by changing,
formally and informally, the premises and rules for arriving at
legitimate decisions' (ibid. 91). Thus he argues that EIA creates an
'insidious' mechanism for embedding ecological modes of thought
and environmental values into the actions of organizations and
individuals.
By establishing, continuously reaffirming and progressively legitimat-
ing environmental values and ecological criteria as standards by
which individual actions are to he structured, chosen, and evaluated,
58 Paul Rutherford
EIA institutionalises substantive ecological rationality .... It changes
patterns of relationships among organisations and among individuals
inside and outside organisations. It creates powerful incentives,
formal and informal, that thereafter force a great deal of learning and
self-regulation upon individual and organisational actors. And it
provides opportunities for individuals to develop and affirm envir-
onmental values and to press for innovative adaptation of struc-
tures and processes to a changing political world. (Ibid. 91-2)
The particular strength of EIA, and that which separates it from
the simple legislative imposition of controls (such as permissible
discharge levels for pollutants), is that it structures the institu-
tional and normative fields in which actions and governmental
programmes take place without specifying final outcomes. It
establishes a governmental technology which simultaneously guides
and problematizes actions in relation to the environment in which
juridical techniques are subsumed under the 'effectivity of the
norm'. These sorts of techniques also incorporate what Foucault
described as a 'pastoral' attitude, where government is understood
in terms of the meta ph or of 'the shepherd and his flock'. Such a
view sees the goal of government as the promotion of 'the well-
being of its subjects' by means of an intimate and continuous regula-
tion of behaviour, and is thus more concerned with the welfare or
security of subjects than is the liberal concern with autonomy
(Hindess 1996: 118-23)_18 This is a basic normative perspective
which is deeply embedded in almost all schools of environmental
thought - the notion of wise stewardship as fundamental to the
management of all-encompassing ecological relationships.
A criticism sometimes made of EIA and the environmental man-
agement techniques it promotes, such as scientific environmental
impact studies, is that these are usually conducted by the pro-
ponents of development projects, and as a consequence frequently
suffer from 'technical flaws' and 'incomplete presentation of
information', and therefore cannot be regarded as a substitute
for 'overall planning' (Walker 1989: 33). Such an argument misses
the point,
19
for it is precisely by incorporating the developer and
other non-environmental state agencies into the process of problem
definition that EIA internalizes and normalizes ecological analysis
and behaviour within individual and organizational actors. This
of course is not to suggest that such techniques cannot become
co-opted to immediate, short-term political manoeuvring by politi-
cians and governments - clearly, they frequently are.
'The Entry of Life into History' 59
None the less, at the broader strategic level of political ration-
alities, EIA can be described as an attempt at institutionalizing
ecological rationality in governmental and social choice mechanisms
(Bartlett 1990: 88-9). EIA is of course a regulatory mechanism
in the legal-juridical sense, but it is more than this. It attempts to
enhance the effectiveness of government (in the Foucauldian sense)
in regulating the complex and multiple materiality of the species
body, both by institutionalizing a scientized form of administrative
apparatus and, more importantly perhaps, by opening up the spe-
cies body (population) in a new way to that generalized 'modality
of intervention' characterized by Foucault as panopticism. Hence,
a fundamental feature of EIA is that it also functions as a normaliz-
ing strategy; that is, it does not mandate specific outcomes from
the centre, but sets up a framework for rationalizing behaviour in
particular ways. In other words, EIA brings into being new relations
of power through an interpenetrating cluster of positive norms of
internal self-control and external regulation that effect a policing
of specific practices of the population, both at a general institu-
tional level and through what Foucault describes as a 'positive
intervention in the behaviour of individuals' (Foucault 1988c: 159).
Systems ecology and the highly mathematized natural sciences
(such as atmospheric chemistry and physics) involved in global
ecosystem modelling exert a powerful influence across a wide
range of environmental policy and social planning areas. The eco-
logical sciences are fundamental to key aspects of contemporary
biopolitics: ecological discourse both problematizes numerous areas
of life and at the same time elaborates programmes of environ-
mental intervention aimed at normalizing the social relation to
nature in particular, ecologically benign ways. The contemporary
notion of the environment is constituted as inherently problematic
by the development of specialized scientific (as well as legal and
moral) discourse on ecology. This specialized discourse provides
what Rose and Miller (1992) have described as 'the intellectual
machinery of government', whereby social relations with nature
are thematized and brought into the domain of 'conscious polit-
ical calculation' through the formation of programmes of govern-
ment. Such programmes
presuppose that the real is programmable, that it is a domain
subject to certain determinants, rules, norms and processes that
can be acted upon and improved by authorities. They make the
objects of government thinkable in such a way that their ills appear
60 Paul Rutherford
susceptible to diagnosis, prescription and cure by calculating and
normalising intervention. (Ibid. 182)
Central to these activities is the production and use of knowledge
by experts. The formation of ecological programmes of govern-
ment occurs to a significant degree within the institutional context
of regulatory science, in which environmental experts simultane-
ously provide scientifically authoritative technical judgements and
politically legitimized policies. Programmes of government there-
fore embody knowledgeable accounts of what are considered
legitimate problems, and the goals and objectives to be pursued
in addressing them. However, programmes must be capable of
being deployed on the population, brought to bear on the 'species
body' through a range of interventions and regulatory instruments.
The means of making programmes operable can be considered the
technologies of government (ibid. 175). I have suggested that
the technique of environmental impact assessment can be thought
of as an example of such a technology of government which
expresses most clearly the sorts of productive relations of power
that Foucault calls 'biopolitics'. In a similar vein Eric Darier's
( 1 996a) study of Canada's Green Plan provides an illuminat-
ing example, in the ecological domain, of what Rose and Miller
describe as a programme of government.
It is important to emphasize that what is being argued here is
not that ecological governmentality is part of some simple, uni-
directional, generalized extension of state domination of society,
much less an expression of Adorno's totally administered society.
Rather, the developments described here reflect what Foucault
referred to as 'the "governmentalisation" of the state' (Foucault
1991a). Government, understood as the attempt to implement all
those more or less formally articulated plans, projects and prac-
tices which seek to systematically shape the conduct of individuals,
groups and populations, is not the exclusive domain of the state.
Indeed, the complexity of modern society appears to engender
an increasing reliance on liberal techniques of government which
depend on governing at a distance, 'seeking to create locales,
entities and persons able to operate a regulated autonomy' (Rose
and Miller 1992: 173 ). Thus, as suggested above, non-state actors,
particularly professionals, academics and social movements, con-
tribute to the governmentalization of life by entering into complex,
potentially unstable relations with state agencies, other institutions
and political forces.
'I he !:ntry ot Lite into History' 61
Notes
1 See e.g. Cheney 1989; Darier 1996a, 1996b; Luke 1988; Peace
1996; Quigley 1992; Rutherford 1993, 1994a, 1994b, 1996.
2 In this attempt to deal directly with the relationship between the
microphysics of power and the broader institutional power struc-
tures, we can see a parallel between Foucault's concerns and some
of the ecological concerns of contemporary (largely German) social
theory. For a discussion of this, see ch. 5 below.
3 Foucault is referring to the work of police theorists, particularly von
Justi, who appropriated to political-administrative thought the new
demographic knowledge. Here, as elsewhere, Foucault appears to
refer to the 'environment' as the totality of natural resources and
physical living conditions of human populations.
4 '[W]hat government has to do with is nor territory but rather a
complex composed of men and things. The things with which this
sense of government is concerned are in fact men, but men in their
relations, their links, their imbrications with those other things which
are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its
specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc.; men in their rela-
tions to that other kind of things, customs, habits, ways of acting
and thinking, etc.; lastly, men in their relations to that other kind of
things, accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death,
etc.' (Foucault 1991a: 93). See also Foucault 198la: 238; 1988c: 104.
5 This is an argument mounted by Habermas and Honneth. See
Habermas 1985; Honneth 1991.
6 Foucault's use of 'modernity' at other times (e.g. Foucault 1991b) is
different.
7 Notwithstanding my suggestion above that Foucault hints at a
continuity between biopower and ecological risk, I think there are
two reasons for his not developing this link. The first is that he is
principally concerned with the development of the social sciences
and their relation to the formation of modern power. But second,
it can also be argued that Foucault's attitude towards the natural
sciences was not developed in a manner fully consistent with his own
analysis of the relation between power and knowledge. For a cri-
tique of Foucault's approach to the natural sciences see Rouse 1993:
137-62; 1987: ch. 7; Rutherford 1994a).
H The term social body can be regarded as a metaphor for 'the collect-
ive embodiment of the targets of power, the body as species, whether
in the form of an entire population or a specific group of prisoners,
school children, the insane and so forth, who are subject to specific
types of administration and regulation' (Hewitt 1983: 71 ). Foucault,
however, says that the term is not simply a metaphor: it refers to a
llhllcri,llity. The police 'take charge of the physical element of the
62 Paul Rutherford
social body'; the object of the police is first and foremost the com-
plete regulation or 'whole management' of the 'complex and multiple
materiality' of the social body, the species body. The police is both
an 'institutional grouping' - i.e. a specific set of social apparatuses
and administrative structures - and a 'modality of intervention'
[Foucault eta!., quoted in Barret-Kriegal1992: 194]- i.e. a general-
ized type of political technology, a 'diagram' or 'schema', 'panopticism'.
For a discussion of Foucault's 'ambiguous' use of these two aspects
of his notion of biopower, see Donnelly 1992: 199-203.
9 For a discussion of how environmental education and environmental
drills are combined, in the case of the Canadian Green Plan, to instil
new ecological disciplinary practices in the daily lives of individuals
see Darier 1996a and ch. 8 below.
10 For discussion of Foucault's analysis of liberalism see Burchell 1991;
Gordon 1991: 27.
11 It is also worth noting that 1865 saw the establishment of the first
national environmental group in Britain (the Commons, Open Spaces
and Footpaths Preservation Society). The US Sierra Club was formed
in 1892. See Pepper 1984: 14. It is also worth noting the proliferation
of colonial geographic and conservation societies during this period.
See Schneider 1990; Grove 1990.
12 See Worster 1987a; Pepper 1984: 100-3. Worster notes that the bio-
economic approach of post-World War II systems ecology displays
a diminished reliance on earlier Darwinian evolutionary influences
(Worster 1987a: 331). See also Grove 1992.
13 It is these sorts of developments and their effects that Beck focuses
on as a key distinguishing feature of the 'risk society'.
14 For further discussion of the significance of global ecosystem model-
ling for a biopolitics of the environment, see Rutherford 1996.
15 Commoner's laws: (1) everything is connected to everything else; (2)
everything must go somewhere; (3) nature knows best; and (4) there
is no such thing as a free lunch (Commoner 1971: 33-46).
16 These limits are presented as the interaction between 'world popu-
lation, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource
depletion'. See Meadows et a!. 1972: 29.
17 This is particularly evident when one considers the importance
of complex mathematical modelling of the global environment
(popularized by The Limits to Growth, first published in 1968). The
current approach to global warming is a far more sophisticated,
and more politically influential, response involving more complex
computer modelling of global phenomena than that of Limits to
Growth two decades ago (Butte! and Taylor 1992: 218, 221-2). See
Rutherford 1996.
18 Foucault saw the practice of police science as a clear example of this
pastoral attitude. See Foucault 1981 c.
19 See also Rutherford 1994c.
The Construction of
Environmental 'Awareness'
Isabelle Lanthier and Lawrence Olivier,
translated by Martine Eloy
A revolution is truly needed- in our values, outlook and economic
organization. For the crisis of our environment stems from a legacy
of economic and technical premises which have been pursued in
the absence of ecological knowledge. That other revolution, the
industrial one that is turning sour, needs to be replaced by a revolu-
tion of new attitudes towards growth, goods, space and living things.
-McCloskey
Introduction
Not a day goes by without the media, governments or the busi-
ness community referring to the environment. Whether the issue
is an ecological disaster, an environmental impact study requested
by a citizens' group for an industrial or scientific project, the re-
cycling of household waste or public health, the environment has
become an important concern in our society. At the political level,
individuals are organizing into interest groups or political parties
to promote and defend the cause of the environment. In Europe,
the environmental movement is present on the public scene as a
political party. In the United States, although there is no environ-
mental party as such at the federal level, the environmental move-
ment is nevertheless very active through interest groups or political
organizing. In every case, people are fighting to win respect for the
environment, against economic development based on the exploita-
tion of nature. Many other examples could be given to show that
there is today a true concern for the environment, at least for
64 Isabelle Lanthier and Lawrence Olivier
some of the population in Western societies. Where does such an
interest in the environment, important enough to affect our habits
and in behaviour as citizens, come from? How did an environ-
mental awareness appear, and impose itself?
Certainly, concern for the environment has become a reality.
What is less clear, however, is why an individual or groups of indi-
viduals grant such importance to the environment, and struggle
to conserve it. Some will credit the emergence of an environmental
awareness to the destruction of the environment by a system of
production based on exploitation and its consequences for life on
Earth or for the survival of the planet. Such an explanation is
not, in our opinion, convincing: first, because it assumes from the
outset what needs to be explained, the emergence of environmental
awareness. It is not enough to draw attention to certain environ-
mental problems in order for awareness of problems to emerge.
This would suppose that humans have, a priori, a consciousness
that needs only to be awakened.
1
It also supposes a form of altruism
which is not as universal as we would like to believe. We are
more concerned with what happens to us, with our present reality,
than with what could happen, even if the latter is disastrous
or apocalyptic.
2
We must therefore envisage the development of
environmental awareness differently.
Ecology is a science, a branch of biology which studies the
relationship of living beings to their environment, whereas environ-
mentalism refers to a broader field of knowledge that seeks to
rethink our relationship to nature and to take action to transform
the system of values on which this relationship has been based
for a long time. According to Waechter, one of the pioneers of
the militant environmental movement in France, environmentalist
thought entails 'the need to limit one's control over the world,
the need to master own's own power. In short, it is a demand to
exercise our responsibility as a thinking species, capable of ana-
lyzing the past and, consequently, the future' (Waechter 1993: 44).
This means that environmentalism is not only a science, an attempt
to epistemologize a problem so as to transform it into a scientific
subject; it is also a field of knowledge. Before constituting a science,
before determining the types of issues that would belong to such
a science, before defining research strategies, a society has to be
concerned enough about something to make it the object of scient-
ific investigation.
How can we account for the development of this field of know-
ledge, or rather, how is it that society has turned the environment
The Construction of Environmental Awareness 65
into an issue? This question concerns a process that we must now
specify. (1) What are the conditions that made possible what
we now call 'environmental awareness' or 'environmentalism'?
We must identify the elements and events which, when combined,
made it possible for the environment to break away from nature
and appear little by little as an important reality for a large number
of individuals in a society. We will therefore look for the origin
(Foucault 1977: 144-52) of this environmental awareness in vari-
ous movements and social groups - scientific circles, social and
political critiques, ideological and philosophical protest - that we
find in contemporary Western societies. (2) It is not enough that a
combination of favourable conditions exist for a society to make
a problem into an important concern. For environmentalism to
take hold, it had to develop a legitimizing system of values. Thus,
in addition to studying the origin of a field of knowledge, we
must study what give rise the conditions for its emergence in a
given society (ibid.). No discursive system can impose itself by the
mere force of its constitutive elements; at the very moment when
they intersect, conflict, interpenetrate - that is, at the time they
make a representation of reality possible - a system of values will
emerge that will facilitate that representation of reality taking
hold in a society. It is here that medical discourse plays an import-
ant role, in the creation of a new system of values that obliges the
individual to be concerned about his or her environment. Medical
discourse relates the health of the individual to an increasingly im-
portant condition: a healthy environment. An archeo-genealogical
Foucauldian approach will help us to address these issues.
From Cosmology to Spiritual Cosmology
We will begin by identifying the origin of the environmentalist
discourse that is, the set of conditions that promoted the con-
struction of a new way of seeing the relationship of humans to
nature. This other relationship to nature, which seems to be the
fundamental object of all environmental struggles, is based on a
knowledge as old as the Earth: cosmology. The new cosmology
calls for the reintroduction of humans within nature as full-fledged
members. This representation of the world as a whole is based on
a specific criterion: the cosmology depends on the components of
the cosmos only to the extent that they are related one to the
other and each is related to the whole. Capra speaks of a holistic
66 Isabelle Lanthier and Lawrence Olivier
vision with reference to the interdependence of all physical, bio-
logical, social and cultural elements. He points out that all the
components of the social environment must be considered on an
equal footing, each having the same importance in relation to the
whole. Moreover, these components develop a relationship of
mutualism among themselves. 'None of the new social institutions
will be superior to or more important than any of the others, and
all of them will have to be aware of and communicate and cooper-
ate with one another' (Capra 1982: 265). The concern of cosmology
for the particular is based on the idea that each element of the
cosmos, as well as the environment as a whole, exercises a recip-
rocal influence on every other element. In fact, this cosmology
addresses the interrelationships between the components themselves
and their relationships with the whole, resituating mankind in a
new relationship to nature that is, in a relationship of respons-
ibility and accountability vis-a-vis the environment. In fact, Capra
adds that this holistic vision, characteristic of cosmology, becomes
more than a mere system of analysis of our relationship to the
world. Cosmology appears as a self-organizing, transcendental and
even spiritual system (ibid. 285), from which our way of thinking,
our conception of the world, our way of behaving, etc. develop.
When it serves as a guide, cosmology takes on a sacred aspect. It
replaces, in a way, the divine model. Henceforth, individuals must
organize their thinking according to a macrocosmic vision of the
world. They must become conscious of the effects of their actions
on the environment as a whole, which now extends to the entire
planet.
According to Berman, economy and quantification are examples
of globalizing methods that enable us to grasp the cosmos in its
entirety.
The same class that came to power through the new economy, that
glorified the effort of the individual, and that began to see in
financial calculation a way of comprehending the entire cosmos,
came to regard quantification as the key to personal success because
quantification alone was thought to enable mastery over nature by
a rational understanding of its laws. (Berman 1981: 55-6)
As opposed to the tenets of the Cartesian system, nature is no
longer seen in a number of modern scientific, social and activist
discourses as an inert resource to be exploited for human benefit.
It is no longer a manageable, manipulable object, to be insensit-
ively subjected to the craziest wishes of human beings. On the
1 ne 1...onsrrucnon or tnv1ronmenra1 Awareness 0/
contrary, with the return of cosmology, it appears as an entity
that also has the right to be defended and respected in its integ-
rity. It becomes matter that also suffers in the face of the threat of
death. It is still central to the project for the well-being of indi-
viduals. However, the heedless exploitation of nature is now a
source of calamity for mankind. Nature is therefore no longer a
good, abundant, renewable commodity.
What has made possible such a turn-about in the conception
of mankind's relationship to nature - that is, the passage from
inoffensive object in the service of humans to fragile entity entitled
to respect? What has given rise to the radical critique of the Carte-
sian concept of nature? In other words, what are the conditions
that led to the emergence of a new human/nature relationship, a
relationship that places the exploiter in a new position of respons-
ibility towards the victim?
Rejection of the death culture
In the seventeenth century, in the Discourse on Method, Descartes
defined humans 'as lords and possessors of nature' (1957: 49). In
fact, Descartes discarded any idea that mystifies nature and finds
an order in spirituality. For Descartes, nature does not rest on
esoteric, arbitrary, undefinable and unjustified laws. On the con-
trary, nature, which is outside mankind and understood as part of
a chaotic whole, obeys physical laws whose mathematical logic
we need to discover in order to restore its meaning (Bowler 1993;
Popelard 1992). The world is viewed solely as space. It is without
movement, deprived of everything: life or soul. The universe is
therefore entirely comprehensible to the human mind, a simple
mechanics of objects (Ferry 1995). Therefore, knowledge of these
constitutive laws of the environment allow us to become aware of
the wealth and weaknesses of the environment. Better still, it
enables us to organize the exploitation of our natural resources in
a logical, productive way, thus best contributing to the develop-
ment of the health and well-being of individuals (Descartes 1957).
The environmentalist discourse originates in the environmental
and human disasters provoked by technology. It is rooted in the
critique of positivism: namely, that mastery over matter does not
have only beneficial effects, and in the critique of instrumentalism
which maintains that, at a certain point, manipulation of nature
gives rise to unpredictable counter-productive effects. These cri-
tiques reached a culminating point in the first half of the twentieth
68 Isabelle Lanthier and Lawrence Olivier
century, due, among other things, to the eruption of different tech-
nologies. The race to discover the physics of splitting the atom,
as part of the effort to build the atomic bomb, is but one strik-
ing example of unbridled ambition to totally control matter. The
nuclear arms race, started by the United States and Germany,
reflects the image of the crazy, unconscious scientist, unconcerned
about the repercussions of his work. Albert Einstein was asked
about the possible practical application of the theory of relativity
which he had discovered. He replied that the baby was born, and
what would it become? A few years later, it became disturbingly
evident that this scientific revolution had given birth to the atomic
bomb. Following the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Oppenheimer, the main physicist involved in the American scient-
ific research, was blamed by the scientific community for having
participated in such a deadly project. He was criticized for his
pretended neutrality, his lack of ethics or scruples with regard to
the atomic project. Oppenheimer gave the following reply: 'When
you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do
it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have
had your technical success' (Oppenheimer 1954: 81). It is precisely
this conception of a scientist obsessed by a single idea discovery
that is called into question by a part of the scientific community
itself and by different social groups.
The importance of the environmentalist discourse lies in the
idea that we have to protect, on the one hand, the sorcerer's
apprentice from himself and, on the other hand, the environment
from human exploits. This critique of Cartesianism is echoed in
the scientific community, the very community which sees the idea
of objectivity and neutrality as essential to its approach. It has
contributed considerably to scientists becoming aware of their
own responsibility. Oppenheimer and Einstein later became fierce
opponents of the military use of nuclear energy.
In the early sixties, other social groups pacifists, counter-
cultural groups, etc. - challenged the general anthropocentric con-
ception of mankind as exploiter of nature. The environmentalist
discourse is based on the attempt to put nature back at the heart
of our concerns, and to restore an ethic of responsibility to the
frivolous magician. For humans are the architects of their habitat.
It is difficult to deny the fact that human beings have always
reorganized their living environments to suit their needs, even in
spaces as primitive as caves; but environmentalists believe that
this obliges human beings to act responsibly. In other words, the
1 he Lonstrucnon ot t:nv1ronmenta1 Awareness O't
actions of humans must be guided by this transcendental law that
environmentalist cosmology has become (Marty 1992: 31).
Yet, despite the fact that mankind is responsible for controlling
the environment, the environmentalist discourse struggles to change
the view of mankind as dominator of nature. Engels stated: 'we
by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign
people, like someone standing outside nature - but ... we, with
flesh, blood and brain belong to nature and exist in its midst'
(1972: 180). The militant environmentalist movement took
shape at the end of World War II, with the will to overthrow the
'death culture' (Moscovici 1993: 17) so dear to the modern eco-
nomicist paradigm. The death culture is characterized by the spirit
of domination where by the existence and power of one being
becomes effective with this of the other. In fact, this culture is part
of the political strategy of death characterized by the attitude which
consists of crushing the other to improve one's own life, of threat-
ening the other to preserve one's own gains. Science's obsession
with mastering nature, and even dominating it, is in line with the
death culture. However, environmentalism is not a radical cri-
tique of science. On the contrary, its discourse bases its legitimacy
on sctence.
Our choices, then, are not easy ones. Giving up bioengineering
means sacrificing a measure of control, mastery over the future.
Compromising our drive for total mastery over what lies ahead.
Making ourselves more vulnerable so that the rest of existence can
become more secure. Choosing to serve and nurture even though
we have it in our power to dominate and extract. These fly in the
face of the human experience to date. When it comes to securing
our future, we have never flinched from a total commitment. Over
and over again, we have fashioned new, more ingenious ways to
organize our future security. Each time nature sacrificed so that we
might triumph. And each time we constructed a new image of the
universe that glorified and sanctified our new extractive relation-
ship with the world around us. (Rifkin 1984: 253)
Environmentalism is part of a systemic framework. In fact, environ-
mentalists' main criticism of all scientific research is precisely that
it does not take into account its global effects on the environment.
In other words, environmentalists criticize scientists for having a
microcosmic vision rather than a holistic one.
While systemists respect recognized scientific standards, they
adopt a holistic framework of analysis, viewing the whole as in a
/U Isabelle Lanthier and Lawrence Olivier
state of constant 'unstable equilibrium' (homeostasis), because it
is subject to an aggregate of actions and reactions, adaptation and
creation (Capra 1982: 287). 'The systems view looks at the world
in terms of relationships and integration. Systems are integrated
wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller
units (ibid. 266).
Law and the new sciences
Environmentalism has also arisen with the end of colonialism.
More specifically, it is part of the movement to liberalize the
political sphere: that is, to include new elements in the tacit con-
tractual relationship between sovereign and subject. At the begin-
ning of the twentieth century there was a blossoming of legislation.
There were struggles for the rights of blacks, women, animals
(Ferry 1995), etc., and, much promulgated by environmentalists,
for nature as a whole. The idea was to define a new contract
between the component parts. The situation no longer involved a
social contract where in the interest of the contracting parties was
to set up a social order that would protect them from the chaos
and danger of nature, where, to paraphrase Hobbes, each person
becomes a wolf for the other. The natural contract means that
'nature will no longer be seen as an object of appropriation but
as a subject with rights. Man will no longer be responsible for,
but responsible to, nature' (Faes 1992: 126). The natural contract
thus places nature on an equal footing with humans. It reintro-
duces humans into nature as members of the same cosmos.
The environmentalist discourse is part of emerging fields of
knowledge. For example, the environment is becoming an import-
ant element of explanation in new areas of sociology, such as
comparative research on urban and rural settings, studies of the
impact of industrialization on the surroundings and on the quality
of life of citizens. To what extent do urbanization and industrializa-
tion contribute to the greater or lesser well-being of individuals?
To what extent do urbanization and industrialization render artifi-
cial and completely denaturalize human life? What are the con-
sequences of such an artificial construct for the very 'essence' of
nature and life? This kind of research certainly arouses, among
some individuals, doubts and questions about their relationship to
the environment.
Finally, the advent of genetics in the thirties marked another
important moment in the emergence of environmental awareness.
The Construction ot Environmental Awareness 71
Genetic research, today associated with medicine, represented an
important field of study in the development of modern armaments
such as bacteriological weapons. As a matter of fact, this field
expanded considerably during the thirties. It was also the basis
for studies of the repercussions of an atomic attack on organic
life. From another perspective, genetic research is also responsible
for a much more experimental type of medicine, one that goes
so far as to perform extraordinary grafts and to manipulate the
genetic code of living organisms. Modern medicine even produces
living beings in laboratories, as well as clones of living matter,
pushing itself almost to the point of reproducing human beings.
Finally, with yet another objective, modern medicine makes it
possible to conduct other types of comparative research on the
effects of the environment on the quality of individual health.
It clearly represents an instrument of prime importance in the
emergence of a critical discourse with regard to the will to use
extraordinary measures to create a better world. In other words,
modern medicine is an important element in the growing awareness
of the need to develop a new ethics of responsibility. This ethics
of responsibility will be interpreted by environmentalists as the
introduction of a new life culture - that is, a culture based on the
principles of spiritual cosmology (Berman 1981: 58-9).
Thus, we see that the environmentalist discourse was born with
the blossoming of legislation in a wide range of fields that have a
direct or indirect effect on the life of individuals. This discourse is
rooted in the aspiration for a better quality of life, better health,
better control over the immediate environment - in short, over
any phenomena that influence on our well-being. On the other
hand, the aspiration for quasi-total control over matter, pushed to
an extreme, leads individuals to create the death culture so justly
condemned by environmentalists.
The death culture represents a discourse that was strongly criti-
cized by a number of groups and scientific disciplines. It appears
in the imperialist political will, where oppression and exploita-
tion, assimilation and cultural genocide of subjected peoples, con-
stitute the golden rule of the powerful colonizing ruler. 'But more
than control over a territory, its subsoil or its wealth, it is a form
of cannibalism of values and works of art that devours a culture
with all its original creations' (Moscovici 1993: 19). The death
culture can therefore be understood in terms of what some envir-
onmentalists call genocide and, transposed to the environmental
scale, 'ecocide' (ibid. 20), as a mode of governmentality in which
Isabelle Lanthier and Lawrence Olivier
exploitation is the organizing principle of social life. Ecocide,
decried by environmentalists, is reflected in an absence of respect
for the environment, through the pollution of air and water and
the destruction of entire forests stemming from a fetishization of
concrete. Ecocide is the mutation of the environment by genetic
manipulation and cloning, by the nuclear experiment and its
production of radioactive waste. Many environmentalists claim
that it is the rule of market aesthetics (of ugliness), of waste and
of stench.
Work, Health and Citizenship
Knowing that environmentalism arises out of a cnt1que of
Cartesianism, productivism, exploitation and the death culture
does not explain the importance that it has today, or enable us to
grasp how it will impose obligations, restrictions and rights. For
such rules to be accepted, environmentalism requires a system of
values to establish its legitimacy and allow it to take hold as an
important preoccupation for individuals. We believe that this new
system of values is being developed by the medical discourse which,
by making human beings responsible for their health, forces them
to assign a new status to the environment.
The relationship between work and health:
the environment as enemy
To demonstrate this, we take the example of occupational medi-
cine to illustrate how the concept of a new relationship of mankind
to the environment has been legitimated through health problems.
We have known for a long time that the health of individuals is
conditioned by the external environment. Hippocrates spoke of how
health is shaped by elements like air, water and place (Wolf et al.
1978: 17).
3
In the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the
twentieth, the introduction of occupational medicine addressed
the conditioning of health by external elements in new terms. Work
is considered, by occupational medicine, as pathogenic (Abenhaim
1985: 763), and bad for the individual. The model of analysis is
relatively simple: there are several causes of stress that engender
health problems: chemical (asbestos - mesothelioma), physical
(noise deafness), mechanical (machinery amputation), psy-
chosocial (organization of work anxiety, depression), etc. (ihid.
The Construction of Environmental Awareness 73
765). As can easily be seen, occupational medicine is based on a
relatively crude causal analysis. For each cause or source of stress,
there is one health problem. What can we draw from this model?
Three things should be stressed.
First, work or the work environment is viewed in the same way
as nature. It has no special status or value, apart from being an
object that we must control and master because it is both the
source of problems and, in a certain way, an enemy against whom
we must struggle and from which we must protect ourselves. This
is a relatively negative conception of the work environment. More-
over, though occupational medicine definitely reflects certain major
social concerns in that it focuses on external conditions of health,
its emphasis on external conditions does not call into question
the individual/nature/environment relationship as conceived by the
capitalist system of production. The objective is not health as such,
but rather the protection of the worker as worker; the objective
is to keep the worker capable of performing the task. The aim is
not to draw attention to environmental problems as possible or
probable causes of a certain deterioration in public health. Finally
- and this is the third point to be stressed - occupational medicine
cannot be used as a system of values to legitimize environmental
awareness in our societies. There is, we believe, a fairly simple ex-
planation for this, besides the fact, of course, that it conveys a
negative conception of the environment.
Occupational medicine is part of a medical and legal system
that requires that the disease or physical incapacity be caused
directly by the work or the worker's occupational environment.
The role of the expert-doctor is to 'provide information to the
magistrates on the pathological consequences of an accident that
occurred "in the course or on the occasion of work"; in particu-
lar, the doctor must state if the observed injury is "directly and
immediately related" to the accident' (Robineau 1922: 160). One
assumes that this requirement is imposed on medicine by the
insurance companies responsible for the compensation of workers
(Ewald 1991). The consequence is that occupational medicine
focuses mainly on the link between working conditions and the
environment, on the one hand, and health. It is an internal rela-
tion between the individual and the work-place, turned in on
itself, that involves no modification of the conception of our rela-
tionship to nature. In fact, the health problems of workers are
related to unhealthy working conditions or to working habits or
behaviours that are damaging to their well-being.
74 Isabelle Lanthier and lawrence Olivier
Occupational medicine addresses these two questions in so far
as the expert-doctor is asked to determine the exact cause of a
health problem, to establish whether it is necessary to compensate
the workers affected. Prevention is also part of the expert-doctor's
role: prescribing new habits and new behaviours for workers,
because disease can come from the workers themselves (poor work
habits, refusal to protect themselves, or to follow protective meas-
ures, etc.). The doctor has an important role to play in prevention
programmes set up to protect the health and ensure the safety of
workers, and to improve productivity. This is not a matter of
protecting the environment, but rather of protecting workers from
themselves. For the relationship between health and the environ-
ment to change, the medical model that defined the relationship
between work and health had to change. Occupational medicine
introduced a new notion or, rather, a new concept: the living
environment, or life-style.
The living environment, or life-style
The term used varies, depending on the author. Some speak of life-
style, others of living environment or milieu. Whatever the term
used, it is increasingly evident that the causal model of occupa-
tional medicine has become ineffective. Furthermore, as Abenhaim
has demonstrated so well, the causal model was unable to explain
the glaring inequality of workers with regard to death (1985:
765-6). In recent years, it has become apparent that the death
rate varies enormously, depending on the living environment, and
that work does not have the same effect on all individuals (ibid.
766-8). Some workers are more affected by disease, are more
vulnerable than others. It is clear, for example, that life expectancy
varies according to one's position on the social ladder. The life
expectancy of unskilled workers is lower than that of people in
the liberal professions (ibid.). The notion of living environment
thus wins recognition as a more general explanatory model for
health, capable of accounting for the variable of work as well as
other sociological variables like economic and social differences
and linking them together. Indeed, our conception of health has
changed considerably since the beginning of the eighties.
4
Every
day, we are urged to take care of our health, to modify our life-
style. The Canadian and American government campaigns against
smoking and alcohol or to promote physical exercise should suffice
1 ne 1...onsrrucnon or t:nvronmemm Awareness I::J
to convince us that health has become an important concern. This
does not explain how the medical discourse on health has made
possible the emergence of an environmental awareness. To see
this, we must look deeper into this notion of life-style or living
environment that is increasingly present in medical discourse and
campaigns to promote health.
In the Cecil Textbook of Medicine, among the principles gov-
erning therapeutic practice, Stephen B. Hulley insists on the im-
portance of life-style (1992: 33). What is life-style exactly? Hulley
demonstrates that medicine must seek to change the behaviour
of individuals by explaining, among other things, the relation
between certain risk factors and the development of disease (1992).
When Hulley speaks of changing behaviour, he uses the expres-
sion 'life-style'. The term refers to more than a change of behavi-
our; it means behaving or acting according to one's values, or, to
put it differently, a way of being. More and more, we speak of
health rather than disease. The difference is important in so far as
it means a new way of seeing the relationship of humans to their
environment. Health has become one of the most important con-
cerns in our societies. Many discourses medical, psychological,
social, economic- speak of our health in a new way.
The first thing we must mention is the importance of the
environment in the new state of the individual. In fact, health
does not depend only on personal habits (smoking, alcohol, eat-
ing habits, exercise, etc.); it also depends on a healthy environ-
ment. The two cannot be separated, as we can see from the current
campaigns about the harmful effect of secondary smoke for non-
smokers.5 There is a lot of emphasis on the fact that the latter
suffer undesired ill effects, simply because cigarette smoke pollutes
the surrounding air and affects the health of non-smokers who
share the same space as smokers. Medical discourse increasingly
presents health as the outcome of a multitude of factors - the
environment, eating habits, smoking, life-style, etc. - which must
be taken into consideration. The medical model is no longer based
on direct causality. It is now based on a multi-factor approach
which takes into consideration a whole host of factors - profes-
sional, personal, social, economic, etc. - and the interaction of these
factors to maintain health. However, while the multi-factor
approach does not rely on the concept of ecosystem which underlies
the environmentalist discourse, it does makes it possible to envisage
the problem of health in a broader context, and to make the
environment an important concern for individuals.
10 Isabelle Lanthier and Lawrence Ullv1er
It is not surprising to see the importance of life-style in medical
discourse. While some might argue that this is nothing new, we
believe that it represents a very important change, first, in terms
of the explanatory model used by medical science, and second,
with regard to the individual's conception of his or her relation-
ship to the environment. It shows clearly the role of medical dis-
course in making the environment an issue in societies such as ours.
By linking health to issues such as the quality of air, water and
urban space, medicine has helped to make the environment an
important concern.
Above all, medicine has helped us rethink our relationship to
the environment. Unlike the early hygienists in the nineteenth
century (Farr 1975, 1977; Gould 1981), medical practitioners today
do not view health and the environment as opponents or enemies,
with the environment causing deterioration in health. Medicine
is no longer the occupational medicine that detects environmental
aggressors which create workers' diseases. Health is now seen as
a complex whole, as a balanced relationship between different
factors. It is not enough to say that a safe environment promotes
good health, because other factors come into play (food, exercise,
rest, relaxation, etc.), and health is always a result of a precarious
equilibrium among these various factors.
This notion of balance is extremely important in the new medical
model. Balance means maintaining a state of health by exercising
active control over the various factors that influence or determine
it. One can only be healthy by balancing the forces (environment,
eating habits, work-related stress, etc.) that influence health. For
example, if we cannot eat well at work, we must compensate for
the nutritional deficiency by eating more healthily at home. This will
be insufficient, however, if we live in a polluted environment
especially if our actions and behaviour help to destroy the environ-
ment. For by so behaving, we destroy, the equilibrium on which
health is based. This concept of life-style presupposes an individual's
agency in relation to him or herself, the recognition of a form
of competence, and especially responsibility, with regard to the
maintenance of health. This change is particularly important for our
argument: individuals have now come to see health as a complex
whole of which they are merely a component and in which each
element has an influence on the others. In short, while humans are
still thinking beings, they are also components of a complex whole
which depends for its existence on a fragile equilibrium for which
mankind is, in part, responsible. The life and health of individuals
The Construction of Environmentol Awareness 77
depend on harmonious relations with all the other elements of
the system. The needs of the individual are no longer opposed to
nature; reconciliation with the environment presupposes new
awareness, as Thomas Berry states (Berry 1988: 42).
Environmentalism
We now see that the medical discourse entails a new life-style and
the adoption of new values (Rosnay 1979: 197-220). This leads
to the following two statements: (1) new values are actually emer-
ging through the environmentalist discourse- the environment and
the harmony implied in 'life-style' that the medical discourse have
helped to make visible and impose in our societies. Several authors
speak of this new environmentalist ethic, designating thereby the
new emerging values aimed at modifying the behaviour and life
of humans (Killingsworth and Palmer 1992: 45-8); (2) these new
values define and determine the form of existence that is desired
and desirable. They impose a new identity based on environmental
awareness and new rules for individuals. An environmentalist is
characterized by a life-style that is in harmony with nature and
the environment in which he or she lives. But health is not the
only issue in the new ethics being introduced. We can speak of a
human way of being. Far from turning in on the individual, the
life-style being promoted here entails a different approach to living
together, based on harmony, co-operation and communication
between individuals. Exchange and consensus are substituted for
the traditional reference to authority. Environmentalism is not only
a struggle against a system of domination of nature: it involves a
true political project: a system of values whereby individuals govern
themselves and try to govern the universe. Today, the ethics of
responsibility, the care that must be given to the environment and
nature, dictate the rules by which individuals must abide, because,
environmentalists claim, our lives and the survival of our species
depend on this.
Conclusion
The new cosmology claims to introduce us to a universe with
radically different values (Rosnay 1979: 197-220). Consensus
and communication take the place of authority, tolerance replaces
78 Isabelle Lanthier and Lawrence Olivier
intransigence, and aggressiveness gradually gives way to co-
operation, enthusiasm and conviviality. In other words, a new set
of rules is developing and taking hold, which legitimates, in the
'new society', the way in which an individual can give meaning to
his or her existence, and which will become the norm for judging
conduct and the way of being in our societies. For a rule or a
norm does not seek to counter violence so much as to restrain or
legitimate its use. This is an age-old drama: the introduction of
'good' rules of conduct to which individuals must submit, the
redefinition of a single, unique way of being that is essential for
the happiness and well-being of individuals. In fact, this other,
environmentalist way of living, of transcendentalism, is simply
part of the endless quest to give a just meaning to life, to give
one's life a purpose. The environmentalist discourse is based on
hope as a palliative for an absurd, senseless human existence.
Notes
1 This idea of consciousness raising arose out of a form of political
practice that existed in the early 1960s. The aim of political struggle
was to develop workers' consciousness of their conditions of exploita-
tion, which would then result in major change. Today, the naivety of
such a concept of political struggle is apparent.
2 We do not deny that the apocalyptical argument plays an important
part in the development of environmental awareness; however, we do
not believe that it is as important as some people claim or believe. It
is true that catastrophic hypotheses are often used in political argu-
mentation, but this is not proof of their effectiveness.
3 The authors state that Hippocrates' work Airs, Waters and Places
(1969) was reproduced until the nineteenth century, and was used as
a practical guide by physicians.
4 In Canada, the idea of living environment appeared in political dis-
course in the middle of the 1970s, as can be seen in the document
produced by the Canadian Federal Health Minister Marc Lalonde
(1974); but it was only in the mid-1980s that the idea really took
hold.
5 This refers to the campaign of the Canadian government against the
cigarette.
Sex at the limits
Catriona Sandilands
Introduction: On Limits
As Andrew Ross so pithily put it in The Chicago Gangster Theory
of Life, 'unlike other social movements, ecology is commonly
perceived as the one that says no, the anti-pleasure voice that says
you're never gonna get it, so get used to doing without' (Ross
1994: 268). Think of the three R's: reduce, reuse, recycle. Think
of the austerity and earnestness of waste-talk, toxics-talk, ozone-
talk. It is not only that abundant pleasure is virtually absent in
(most) ecological discourse, but that it is often understood as
downright opposed to ecological principles; frugality and simpli-
city appear to act as antithetical principles to enjoyment or gen-
erosity. The message seems quite clear: we (whoever 'we' might be)
have had too much, and that 'having' has depleted the natural
world (and, on some accounts, our ecological selves, too); we
must now limit our 'having', even our 'being', so that nature can
be restored.
Ah, limits: the backbone of environmental discourse. The eco-
logical idea of limits is that they come from nature itself; it then
follows that nature, if we know how to assess its warning signs
(or listen to it, depending on your shade of green), is telling us
that we are (or are nearly) at the limits of growth, of affluence, of
consumption. Transgress, and face the consequences. Ross goes on:
In certain environmentalist circles, you do not have to look far
to see the principle of scarcity being regarded as a rudimentary
circumstance of nature. This applies as much to resource-minded
environmentalists {heirs of the conservatism of the Progressive era),
80 Cotriono Sondilonds
whose apocalyptic prognoses about 'limits to growth' are prag-
matically addressed to the managers of industry, as to biocentric
nature activists (heirs of preservationism), morally moved to con-
serve and redeem sacrosanct areas of wilderness from human
contamination .... [I]ndeed ... limitation is the cardinal principle
of ecological thought. (Ibid. 261, 264)
As I have argued elsewhere (Sandilands 1995), the 'limits' that
appear in ecology have far more to do with (particular) human,
social ideas of the real, the good and the possible than they do
with some inherent dividing line in nature beyond which we (again,
whoever 'we' might be) cannot go if the planet is to survive.
Understood as such, they lose a great deal of their normative
power; made visible, they can be negotiated. In this mode, as Ross
notes, they may hold a legitimate place in environmental dis-
course. But the fact remains that 'there are reasons to be care-
ful about the widespread popular deference to [the] criterion of
limitation, especially when it is advanced as a reason for regulation
of social and cultural life' (Ross 1994: 264 ).
In environmentalism, calls for limitation can be crude or subtle,
physically violent or juridico-political, coercive or normative.
Although it is quite clear that other modes of ensuring deference
to a notion of limits are in operation in contemporary environ-
mental struggles (economic coercion is common unfortunately), it
is normativity that especially concerns me in this chapter. For while
some (unfortunately not all) environmentalists see social justice as
a critical aspect of ecological politics, and thus tend to rail against
obviously coercive strategies of compliance, few speak of the ways
in which environmentalism is itself a normalizing discourse, and
thus produces specific power relations, rather than eliminates them,
in a (supposedly) transparent, common quest for natural harmony.
In particular, the organization of environmentalism around a cen-
tral notion of limitation, as if these limits were given in nature, tends
to produce a form of 'environmentality' that is entirely consistent
with the perpetuation of highly exploitative social relations.
Specifically, much contemporary environmentalism relies on a
discourse of self-limitation and self-denial. This discourse is omni-
present; it is apparent in everything from the 'voluntary simpli-
city' of deep ecologists to industrialized nations' (hypocritical) calls,
via the normative prescriptions of international eco-regimes, for
'Third World' governments to exercise self-restraint in their
'unruly', ecologically destructive aspirations. The point, it seems, is
~ x at the Lim1ts 81
to produce both individuals and nations as responsible eco-subjects,
not by overt repression or regulation, but by the invocation of a
notion of 'the common good' in which 'limit' is the primary dis-
cursive term around which people are to organize their ecological
practices, self-concepts and pleasures.
To the usual list of particular limits in this general constella-
tion (growth, consumption, affluence, etc.), I would like to add
'limits to sex'. In my view, one of the most disturbing sites of 'self-
limiting' ecological wisdom lies in discourses around population.
That discipline is inherent in population-talk is neither new nor
surprising; as Foucault wrote, 'one of the great innovations in
techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence
of "population" as an economic and political problem: popula-
tion as wealth, population as manpower [sic] or labor capacity,
population balanced between its own growth and the resources it
commanded' (Foucault 1976: 25). While the ecological invocation
of population discourse rests on a long tradition of regulatory
practice - there are few differences between Thomas Malthus and
Paul Ehrlich- its contemporary imbrication in North/South, gen-
dered, racialized and heterosexualized power dynamics suggests
a particular series of inflections.
Population-Talk 1: Biopower
As Foucault notes, the eighteenth century saw the rise of a mode
of government based on the perception of people as a population
'with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and
death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of
illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation' (1976: 25). While many
societies had long since been concerned with population as an
indicator of wealth and prosperity, as Foucault writes:
this was the first time that a society had affirmed, in a constant
way, that its future and its fortune were tied not only to the
number and the uprightness of its citizens, to their marriage rules
and family organizations, but to the manner in which each indi-
vidual made use of his [sic J sex .... There emerged the analysis of
modes of sexual conduct, their determinations and their effects, at
the boundary line of the biological and the economic domains.
There also appeared those systematic campaigns which ... tried to
transform the sexual conduct of couples into a concerted economic
and political behaviour. (Ibid. 26)
82 Catriona Sandilands
Population discourse was, and continues to be, a mode of regula-
tion, a series of practices of science in which sex is managed,
organized, aggregated and graphically compared across nation-
states.1 Of course, the new 'science' of population did not appear
simply as a statistical tool to predict and control the sexual beha-
viour of individual persons; it appeared as a series of truth-claims
about optimal health and well-being to which rational individuals
could be expected to orient themselves, and toward which the
developing institutions of social welfare (and social purity) were
oriented.
2
Population discourse was thus an archetypical expression
of modernity; the effective management of people, and especially
sex, signalled efficiency, progress, control over nature and enlighten-
ment. It was also, according to Foucault, 'without question an
indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter
would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of
bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the
phenomenon of population to economic processes' (ibid. 140-1).
Think of 'family planning', think of the progressive intrusion of a
sort of sexual Taylorism into the previously (supposedly) chaotic
and irrational desires of individual prospective parents.
As early as 1798, with the publication of Malthus's Essay on
the Principles of Population, a crucial component of this discourse
has been the possibility that there are, will be, or could be too many
people than is good for us. Part of population management thus
consists in limitation, and the achievement of modernity seems
to rest upon this practice. Indeed, there is a strong relationship
between the modern emergence of discourses of population limita-
tion and the centrality of an idea of scarcity to capitalism. As Linda
Singer writes, 'The notion of scarcity is crucial to capitalism -
both as its justification (there's not enough, especially now, of what
we need to survive; therefore, let's control it so that the maximum
number of people benefit from it ... and sometimes, at least, as
that for which capitalism is the remedy' (Singer 1993: 35). While
there are many facets to this relationship, what is important to note
here is that population, rationality and scarcity are inextricably
interwoven in the fabric of capitalism.
In this context, the very logic of population management is that
its goals cannot be reached merely through the external imposi-
tion of codes of appropriate behaviour. While optimal levels and
standards may be the terrain of expert negotiation and statistical
analysis, efficient management (of reproduction, of eroticism) is
really a question of normativity or, more precisely, the mobilization
Sex at the Limits 83
of individual pleasure to the goals of rationality and limitation.
As Singer puts it, 'capitalism works not by opposing itself to the
pleasure principle, but by finding strategic ways to mobilize it, a
form of control by incitement, not by ... repression but by the
perpetual promise of pleasure' (1993: 36). Population discourse
thus involves questions of organizing pleasure in particular ways.
As a form of biopower, producing and controlling the sexuality
of collective and individual human subject-bodies, it operates by
enticement, not just by repression; in the case of population limita-
tion, voices whisper a common articulatory thread: 'You will enjoy
your small(er) family; you will enjoy your new-found economic
prosperity; you will enjoy the process of controlling your fertility.'
This is not to say that population management efforts have
never been, or do not continue to be, repressive or coercive. Far
from it: one could speak of not-long-past trades of transistor
radios for vasectomies among Indian men; one could speak of
instances in which poor pregnant women in the USA have been
refused hospital obstetric treatment unless they give 'consent' for
post-partum sterilization; one could speak of countries in which
women are currently lured into trying Depo-Provera, and are re-
fused treatment to have the implants removed when side-effects
arise (Trombley 1988, 1996). Early population discourses, includ-
ing family planning, were overtly tied to eugenic strategies, which
resulted in the elimination of reproductive rights for many poor
women, women of colour, and women with disabilities (Davis 1981,
Mies and Shiva 1993 ). These and other gross injustices remain, and
are soundly condemned by many feminist and social justice activ-
ists, and even by some of the more enlightened environmentalists.
But what is perhaps more disturbing is the fact that population
management itself remains significantly unchallenged as a goal, a
discourse or a disciplinary practice. While some authors are crit-
ical of the attribution of singular or even primary causality to
population as a source of environmental degradation, even some
of the most militant critics of coercive population control meas-
ures seem relatively content with family planning education, de-
spite the fact that such normative 'planning' remains a significant
instrument of control, and bears the hallmarks of profoundly
gendered, racialized and heterosexualized normativity. In many
ways, contemporary family planning measures- education, health
promotion, access to birth control technologies, etc. - are much
more efficient bearers of specifically modern, rational and capital-
ist relations of reproduction than any bribery or threat could be,
84 Catriona Sandilands
at least in part because the power relations involved are largely
invisible.
Population-Talk II: Environ mentality
One of the most significant features of contemporary population
discourse is its intersection with particular ideas of 'nature'. While
for many environmentalists the link between population growth
and environmental degradation seems so obvious as to be a truism,
it must be remembered that the relationship between these two
terms is both historically recent and discursively specific. Indeed,
the population-environment nexus involves a form of what Timo-
thy Luke (1995) calls 'environmentality'. Of this general historical
creation, Luke suggests that '[a]s biological existence was [increas-
ingly] refracted through economic, political, and technological
existence, "the facts of life" passed into fields of control ... and
spheres of intervention' (1995: 67). 'The environment' emerged as
a significant arena for the play of biopolitics, as constructions of
the natural world became deeply imbricated in the globalizing
spread of capitalist productive (and reproductive) relations and
the regimes of truth/knowledge/power that generate and support
them. Luke writes, following Foucault, that in this context the
environment
emerges as a historical artifact that is openly constructed, not an
occluded reality that is difficult to comprehend. In this great net-
work, the simulation of spaces, the intensification of resources, the
incitement of discoveries, the formation of special knowledges, the
strengthening of controls, and the provocation of resistances can
all be linked to one another. (Ibid.)
Especially with the 1968 publication of Paul Ehrlich's The Popu-
lation Bomb, so-called overpopulation became a question not just
of people but of the planet. Wrote Ehrlich: 'the causal chain of
[environmental] deterioration ... is easily followed to its source ...
too many people' (ibid.). The erotic and reproductive bodies of
individuals became inserted not only into the discursive terrain of
human welfare (as had been the case in the commonly posited rela-
tionship between population and poverty), but into environmental-
ity. 'Too many people' became a problem for nature. Deforestation,
energy shortages, pollution and other problems were caused by
too many human, consuming bodies. 'Too many people' became
~ x at the L1m1ts
an aberration of nature, as we were going beyond our bounds.
Nature, via environmental science, must be harnessed to the task
of defining a more appropriate number of people for the planet,
for the good of both human and non-human life.
3
As the following excerpt from the 1986 UNFPA report shows
dramatically, population discourse posits that contemporary
human beings have, presumably with the aid of technology, come
perilously close to (or gone beyond) nature's limits. The narrative
reads like an epic (it occurs under the subtitle 'the march of the
billions', so that is probably not surprising). It is a grand tale
about humanity conquering nature but then finding that nature is
not to be toyed with lightly.
There have been many ups and downs in [population] growth
rates ... [that] by themselves have never guaranteed the means to
cope with their consequences. The margin of safety has always
been thin, and human groups were under constant threat. If they
succeeded in escaping famine and disease, their populations might
grow faster than their precarious resources and swiftly fall once
more .... It is only in this century that humans as a group have
effectively won control of their demographic fate. But the victory is
not final, and one of the factors may be the very weight of numbers
which their success has brought into being. (UNFPA 1986: 7-8)
Read: humans must manage themselves more effectively - that is,
in respect for nature's limits - if modernity is to be genuinely
achieved. It is not that nature should not be managed, but that
the management of human nature is now intimately tied to that of
resources. And the appropriate guide-lines for the measure of
both are to be found in ecological science, demography and, even
better, the emerging fields of risk and impact assessment.
Recent commentators are, as a whole, somewhat less essentialist,
somewhat less determined to posit overpopulation as the singular
cause of environmental degradation than the likes of Paul Ehrlich.
In general, there is a tacit recognition of complexity, and some sug-
gestion that poverty, consumption levels, and/or technology may
have a role to play in 'excessive' resource usage (few writers in
this vein speak about nature in any way other than as 'resources',
thus suggesting the strong, continuing influence of capitalist notions
of scarcity and management). But what seems to be moderation
actually serves to mystify the role that population does play in
environmental degradation. The above-quoted UNFPA report typic-
ally qualifies the contribution of population to environmental
86 Catriona Sandilands
degradation. '[P]opulation growth is not', it states, 'the only culprit
and no figures can be put on its contribution' (ibid. 19). But the
possibility that population has nothing to do with environmental
degradation (let alone the possibility that there are particular ideas
of nature involved in the definition of the problem in the first
place) is never considered. The line linking numbers of bodies,
numbers of mouths to feed, and numbers of acres of land deforested
for marginal agriculture is so firmly drawn through discursive
space that its impact is seldom questioned at all. UNFPA's argu-
ment? 'To demonstrate the threat in general terms, it is only
necessary to invoke the principle of entropy' (ibid. 18-19).
Leaving aside (for the moment only) some of the glaring con-
clusions that can be drawn about social inequality, there seem to
be a number of specific assumptions about human/nature rela-
tions going on in recent population-environment discourse. One
is that the only possible relationship between humans and non-
human nature is antagonistic, as nature exists only as a 'resource'
for human use; more people inevitably means more degradation.
Following from this, there are only two courses of action to 'save'
nature: reduce the number of people or reduce their consumption.
Either option signals the necessity of intervention; both imply the
invocation of specific notions of natural limits (carrying capacity,
etc.) as ways of drawing a line beyond which humans cannot go.
A second, related assumption is that nature's primary appear-
ance in human life is as a limit to human excess, including, poten-
tially, an excess of human freedom (especially in the context of a
crisis).
4
In the context of the fact that population discourse is also
concerned with the achievement of rationality and progress (both
of which are discursively opposed to nature in modernity), this
seems somewhat paradoxical. But the paradox is easily explained:
where the 'ideal' subject of population discourse is rational and
has proved capable of subordinating desire to the common good
of population control (normative self-limitation), it seems that
there are 'other' subjects not so willing or capable. In other words,
population discourse at this historical conjuncture relies on the
bifurcation of the world into two: 'good' ecological citizens, who
have listened to and understood the call for limits and do not
require (further) regulatory intervention, and unruly bodies, who
have not, might not, and/or do.
5
Numerous commentators have pointed to the fact that popula-
tion management strategies differ according to who it is that is
being managed. The discrepancy between white, middle-class North
;,ex at rne LimiTS tj/
American women, who are encouraged to utilize highly invasive
new reproductive technologies to conceive, and poor rural women
of countries such as Bangladesh, who are often sterilized without
their consent, is too glaring to ignore. The point is not only that
racism is a strong feature of population management (unsur-
prisingly, given the early linkages of family planning to eugenics).
The point is also, as authors such as Mies and Shiva allude to
(1993: 277-95), that all people (especially women) are in some way
or another accountable to the discourse, subject to its prescrip-
tions and prohibitions, made subjects through its normative inspira-
tions in the context of economic and political relations that
discriminate considerably among different kinds of subjects.
It is my contention that environmentalist discourse often works
to amplify both the normativity and the discrimination, by em-
phasizing the 'natural requirement' of population limitation - the
'natural requirement' of the subordination of human needs to an
abstract notion of 'carrying capacity' that passes as an ecological
common good. Combined with the fact that so much is absent
from population discourse, the patina of scientific legitimacy gives
the managerial imperative all the more power. And in so far as
environmental discourse understands itself to be a continuation of
rationalization and modernity,
6
management plus risk science plus
nature equals a very powerful normative imperative indeed.
Population-Talk Ill: Capital, Power and
Disappearances
That the mode of sexual subjectivity generated in, and borne by,
population-talk is intimately related to the economic and social
relations of (globalizing) late capitalism is not a stunning revela-
tion: at the level of physical technologies, of course, family plan-
ning and contraceptive development provide a fantastic new global
market for the provision of goods and services. But at the level of
cultural technologies as well, discourses of the self associated with
capitalist liberal individualism, and even particular family forms
associated with capitalist productive relations, are part of the
normative package sold by the global family planning movement.
As Irene Diamond illustrates, these technologies are strongly tied
together:
In order to create a disciplined market that would find West-
ern contraception desirable, family planning professionals utilised
88 Catriona Sandilands
enucmg media images that were most always supplemented by
monetary and non-monetary incentives. Women of the South were
told 'contraceptives are a woman's right'. And if in a particular dis-
trict an insufficient number of women became 'acceptors', zealous
recruiters, whose own survival within bureaucratic delivery systems
depended on achieving their target goal, did not stop at tricking or
compelling a woman to accept. (Diamond 1994: 73-4, emphasis
added)
What I would like to suggest is that contemporary population
discourses, acting largely (though never entirely) through normat-
ive prescriptions of a particular form of managed sexual subject-
ivity, are part of the increasing global reach of capitalist market
economic relations. Just as biopower was intimately involved
in the development of industrial capital in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, so too it is a foundational element in the
globalization of monopoly capital at the end of the twentieth.
At one end of the spectrum is international aid tied to the imple-
mentation of coercive birth control strategies; at the other is the
even more insidious discursive linkage of (economic) well-being
with small families through educational programmes sponsored by
international development agencies. Whereas the former is relatively
easy to condemn (if still, unfortunately, common in some places),
the latter is the dominant discourse of organizations such as the
United Nations, which are now beginning to speak the language
of liberal feminism and women's rights.
Contemporary population management strategies of educa-
tion and increasing women's 'rights' of access to contraception
effectively mask their imbrication in institutionalized discourses
of capitalist economic development under a layer of liberal femin-
ist concern for women's social position. This discourse suggests
a sort of reproductive structural adjustment; just as the politics
of debt and aid force particular economic relations on countries of
the South, so too the politics of population management, especially
given their transmission via particular reproductive technologies,
impose particular family and gender relations. In structural adjust-
ment, countries are to produce themselves according to a capital-
ist productive logic; in reproductive structural adjustment, women
and men are to produce themselves according to profoundly norm-
ative discourses about appropriate gender relations and family
structures.
It is certainly the case that many feminist organizations and
individuals are critical of the emphasis on population at the level
of international policy, citing instead the importance of women's
::,ex at the Limits
health (reproductive and otherwise), socio-economic conditions
and education levels to women's well-being.
7
But it is also the
case that almost nobody challenges the assumption that fertility
needs to be managed in the first place, or the assumption that 'pro-
viding universal access to information, education, and discussion
on sexuality, gender roles, reproduction, and birth control' (Mazur
1994: 269) is a necessary aspect of feminist political action
(talking about sex, of course, has never meant its liberation). Signi-
ficantly, it is also the case that the feminism most commonly cited
in population circles is inspired by a relatively liberal capitalist
enthusiasm for development, with its focus on 'prioritizing women's
education, job training, paid employment, access to credit, and the
right to own land and other property in social and economics
policies, and through equal rights legislation' (ibid. 270). The two
prongs of this feminist project- providing family planning informa-
tion and striving for equal access to economic development - are
seen to go together naturally; they coexist in a feminist discourse
centred on women's right to choose and the creation of condi-
tions in which women can make the greatest possible variety of
'informed' choices.
Of course, given the fact that all of this is, at some level, about
management, the only 'informed' choice that there is to be made
seems to be the choice to limit family size. Especially when one
takes into account the environmental degradation that is imping-
ing on women's subsistence and other activities in some parts of
the world (these are the scenarios that get talked about, never the
ones where standards of living actually rise - even if only tempor-
arily - due to increasing environmentally destructive activities),
what other choices could a 'rational' person make? Nafis Sadik, then
executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, makes
this narrative quite explicit; given the choice, women will have
smaller families. She writes:
Many women, especially in developing countries, have few choices
in life outside marriage and children. They tend to have large
families because that is expected of them. Investing in women means
widening their choice of strategies and reducing their dependence
on children for status and support. Family planning is one of the
most important investments because it represents the freedom from
which other freedoms flow. (Sadik 1994: 209)
So, under the apparently emancipatory guise of liberal feminism,
\.1.!1'\ll,"n 111111 in .. ,IJ,.,I ,1,.\/f'lnnino clrP ,nti,.,.,J tn
90 Catriona Sandilands
adopt managerial-capitalist modes of sexual subjectivity, as part
of their path toward well-being. Indeed, when this insight is also
viewed in light of the strong normativity of environmentalism, we
see that under the banner of 'our common future', ecological
discourses are co-opted to the task of producing women as self-
disciplining, ceo-capitalist subjects (Sadik suggests that women's
more acute experiences of environmental degradation only confirm
the necessity of their rational choice to limit child bearing). In my
view, this is the key narrative: most environmental discourses on
population are embedded in a normative sexuality that is intimately
involved in capitalist penetration. Population management is a
form of globalizing environmentality, and that environmentality
is inextricably linked to capital.
Notable in this environmentality is the fact that population
discourse, and even the feminisms that appear to be in dialogue
with it, mask their status as normative sexualities that accompany
liberal capitalism. As Foucault notes, 'power is tolerable only on
condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is
proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms' (Foucault
1976: 86). So it is no great surprise that it is through a series of
'disappearing tricks' that population discourse is made palatable.
In emphasizing (particular kinds of) education, freedom, health
care and standard of living, population discourse works to seduce,
to entice, and to create; these modes of subjectivation rely on hiding
their workings and the normative constraints that appear through-
out them.
The first disappearing trick lies in the complete absence of any
overt talk about sex whatsoever in most population discourse.
Foucault speaks about the regulation of sexuality through its pro-
duction in discourse (scientia sexualis), not its banishment from
discourse. I consider the absence of overt talk about sex (qua sex)
entirely consistent with this characterization, in so far as popula-
tion discourse does not operate by repressing sex but by rendering
it discursive in a particular way that conceals its location in the
realm of sexual activity. Sexuality is reduced to heterosexual re-
production; reproduction is reduced to the rational behaviours of
individuals in the context of complex expert negotiations around
regional and global 'carrying capacity', a very particular discurs-
ive existence indeed.
The second disappearing trick lies in the submergence of the pro-
found racism of population discourse in Western-derived assump-
tions about rational ecological behaviour. Population is a problem
Sex at the Limits 91
of the regulation of certain kinds of bodies, specifically exoticized,
racialized bodies that are figured as unruly, uncontrolled, and
incapable of submerging their desires to the common good of
sustainability. The notion of reproductive choice is not only con-
stituted according to a very particular definition of rational choice,
but is also produced according to racist, colonialist assumptions
about the self-regulatory abilities of particular bodies and hidden
under an apparently self-explanatory 'common good' of sustainabil-
ity in which all are to participate as willing subjects.
The final - and perhaps most complete - disappearing trick
involves the assumption of heterosexuality that constitutes the
entire discourse. Think of it this way: if the problem of popula-
tion is simply one of 'too many people', then why not encourage
a greater variety of non-heterosexual, non-reproductive sexual
practices? The fact that this is completely unthinkable in the minds
of most suggests that population discourse isn't about limiting
numbers of people on the planet, but about instituting a form of
ecological management through sexuality.
Conclusion: Sex, Nature and Resistance
All of these disappearances are part of an ecological disciplinary
discourse: in the face of natural limits, the appropriate, rational
action is self-control. The problematization of population as an
(for some, 'the') ecological question translates 'natural limits' into
'sexual limits' in a way that renders invisible the views of nature
underscoring the former, the views of bodies permeating the latter,
and the racialized, gendered and heterosexualized power relations
involved in both. That sexual asceticism is so strongly tied to ecolo-
gical subjectivity makes it almost impossible to argue that there
may be places where resistance to sexual regulation may be tied to
resistance to ecological degradation. But that is where resistance
must begin: in a non-fundamentalist environmental-sexual ethics.
As Eric Darier argues in the last chapter of this volume, 'if
environmentalism is to retain its radical and critical features, it
has to avoid becoming just another fundamentalism'. Certainly,
the power effects of population discourse show what happens when
'nature', in the guise of natural limit, is understood as the template
for human sexual conduct. The kind of sexual fundamentalism
that appears at the core of population-talk bears a rather discon-
certing resemblance to other profoundly conservative normative
92 Catriona Sandilands
(and frequently naturalized) sexualities. Sexuality is translated into
the erasure of sex as environmentalism includes yet another dimen-
sion into its 'just say no' campaigns. And this asceticism is particu-
larly acute in the absence of a countervailing ethical sexual practice.
Thus, to borrow again from Darier, this suggests the need for an
'environmental ethics a Ia Foucault [that] implies constant self-
reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, of transforming one's
life into an aesthetic of existence' in the realm of sexual and
environmental conduct.
For Darier, as for Foucault, 'resistance ... is an illustration of
the self-critical affirmation of ways of relating to the world rather
than an instrumental strategy for a teleological purpose'. The
point is not to create a series of sexual norms to 'save the Earth',
but to engage in practices of critical self-reflection against pre-
cisely such norms- here especially those that create unproblematic,
'natural' linkages among sex, knowledge and nature - in order
to 'become something different from what we were made'. Re-
sistance to eco-sexual normativity, then, begins in questioning
and discursive disruption, rather than in an easy acceptance of the
assumption that environmentalism requires 'saying no' to sex. It
begins in a process of discursive exposure: making visible the
workings of the racist, sexist and heterosexist inflections of popu-
lation discourse, making clear the assumptions of a particular sort
of rational subjectivity that accompany discourses of 'appropri-
ate' global ecological citizenship for individuals and nations alike.
It begins in a process of calling into question the 'naturalness' of
any sexual talk or practice, testing and shaking up the grounds of
both calcified and emergent articulations.
Tempting though it might be, resistance to eco-sexual normativity
is not a mere matter of 'just saying yes'. Nor is an ethics made
by finding or confessing one's 'true' sexuality beneath layers of
repression, environmentally induced or otherwise. It cannot be a
simple question of 'doing the right thing' according to an abstract
set of expert-derived principles. This uncertainty, this lack of a
strategic or normative ethics, makes the development of a collect-
ive response to eco-sexual normativity quite difficult. 'However,'
writes Darier, 'as any action is situated in a specific context of
power relations, it is possible to know if - strategically and at a
given time - a green act of resistance merely legitimizes the exist-
ing system of power relations or undermines it.' Although there
may be no easy answers, and although it may not be desirable to
replace an ascetic eco-sexual normativity with (say) a hedonistic
::>ex at the Limits
one, I do think that in this particular context a possible avenue
for resistance is in the reassertion of an overt sense of 'polymorph-
ous' pleasure into environmentalist discourses, toward a multi-
plicity of sexual and natural discursive articulations.
While it is clear that part of the success of population discourse
is its mobilization of pleasure in the relationship between reduc-
ing reproduction and increasing living standard, it is also clear
that this is a pleasure born of denial in the context of a series of
other denials, a reduction of multiple possibilities to one. So what
other pleasures are possible? I alluded above to a process of ques-
tioning reproductive heterosexual penetrative normativity as part
of a strategy of resistance to the assumption that population con-
trol equates with the limitation of all sexual activity. In this case,
both heterosexuality and ascetic ecological subjectivity are called
into question, separately and in their 'natural' articulation. Such
a questioning would create spaces for the exploration of others.
Further, it might be possible to consider some contemporary
Foucauldian-inspired queer analysis and politics - specifically that
which tries to 'denature' sexual identity as a site from which to
incorporate a variety of different understandings of nature in sexual
discourse. What might it be like to 'try on' different natures as
part of a process of pleasurable, creative self-understanding?
Or the reverse: what might it be like to 'try on' different sexualities
in the interpretation of nature for ecological discourses (e.g. Saudi-
lands 1994)? The point is not to arrive at some non-heterosexual
normative practice, but to mobilize resistances to heterosexuality
with resistances to eco-normativity as a way of using each to call
into question the 'naturalness' of the other.
Of course, this kind of anti-normative questioning does not
guarantee that the planet will be saved, in either the short or the
long term. Such a quest would result in precisely the kind of eco-
fundamentalism that has been generated by the articulation of
ecological with population discourses. What this type of process
of resistance does suggest is that space be made for the possibility
of a genuinely ethical self-transformative practice as part of the
point of the environmental movement itself. If environmentalism
is to go beyond 'just saying no', if it is to lead to something other
than a series of Draconian codes governing ever more intimate
aspects of individuals' lives, then spaces for exploration must be
allowed to flourish and proliferate. Polymorphous sexualities and
multiple natures are thus at the heart of green resistances. Where
population control, despite its claims to the contrary, fails to free
94 Cotriona Sondilands
humans and non-humans alike from normative constraints, self-
questioning and disruption may be more promising.
Notes
1 As Barbara Duden notes, the term population lost its specific refer-
ence to human beings in the early nineteenth century; it can refer as
much 'to mosquitoes as to humans', thus subordinating the lives of
individuals (both human and non-human) to statistics. See Sachs
1993: 148.
2 It should be pointed out that a conclusive relationship between popu-
lation (in and of itself) and poverty or health has never been shown.
3 There is some conflict in ecological circles about whether there are
already too many human beings on the planet, as some wilderness
advocates might argue, or whether there will be fairly soon, as might
be the position of resource management types. Complex calculations
of 'carrying capacity' aside, this confusion reinforces the idea that
'How many is too many?' is part of a discursive contestation about
what nature is supposed to look like.
4 In a recent article on population, among other things, in The Globe
and Mail of Toronto (Saturday 20 July 1996, Dl) eco-crisis manager
Thomas Homer-Dixon made this stance quite dear, stating that demo-
cracy might need to be sacrificed to ecology.
5 As Foucault notes, it is the so-called aberration that comes to define
the norm. Thus, the ideal subject of population-environment discourse
is only possible with the institution of the subject who needs to be
controlled, the proverbial 'population pervert'.
6 Not all environmentalisms can be understood in this way. Some, such
as deep ecology, are (arguably) anti-modern. In general, I am speaking
about mainstream environmentalism, which some have chosen to call
'resource managerial ism'. What is interesting to note, however, is that
on the issue of population, even some deep ecologists seem content to
accept population management strategies that derive from precisely
the 'shallow' ecological discourses to which they otherwise object.
7 See e.g. the 'Women's Declaration on Population Policies in Pre-
paration for the 1994 International Conference on Population and
Development' (Mazur 1994: 267-72).
Ecological Modernization and
Environmental Risk
Paul Rutherford
Introduction
Foucault did not develop his work on biopolitics into a considera-
tion of environmental problems, but rather focused on the role of
the social sciences in producing the human subject through the
discursive practices of medicine, psychiatry and so on. Nor did he
consider in detail the way in which the natural sciences have
contributed to the problematization of nature and the subsequent
extension of the techniques of modern biopower in shaping the
contemporary social relation to nature. In chapter 2 above I dis-
cussed how Foucault's work on biopolitics and governmentality
can be developed to understand what Eric Darier has described as
the 'historico-epistemological conditions of emergence' of the envir-
onment as an object of public policy, and the associated 'envir-
onmental mobilisation of the population' through those policies
(Darier 1996a). Elsewhere I have considered Foucault's reluctance
to extend his analysis of power relations to encompass the natural
sciences, and in particular the way in which ecological science
acts to discipline and control the 'action environment' (including
the alignment of the physical environment) of social agents
(Rutherford 1994a).
In this chapter I consider this Foucauldian perspective on eco-
logical problems in light of a discussion of the recent work of
German social theorists (Habermas, Eder, Beck and Luhmann)
who have sought to understand the connection between ecological
problems and the broader processes of societal modernization and
the ways in which the social relations with nature are influenced
by the link between power and knowledge in modern society.
96 Paul Rutherford
Such an approach is justified on two main grounds. First, these
German authors have produced some of the most significant works
in contemporary social theory dealing with environmental ques-
tions. In sociology, in Europe but also elsewhere, the work of Beck
is particularly influential. The second ground is that in developing
the notions of biopolitics and governmentality, it becomes evident
that Foucault's work engages many concerns similar to those raised
by Nietzsche, Weber and the Frankfurt school.
Foucault's Relation to the Critical Tradition
in Social Theory
Foucault described his intellectual project as involving the elabora-
tion of 'a history of rationality' that was not based on the 'founding
act of the rationalist subject' (Foucault 1983b: 198-201; 1984c;
1988e: 13). He saw this as part of a broader 'historical critique of
reason', represented in France by the history of science of Bachelard
and Canguilhem and in Germany by the 'Frankfurt School and
Lukacs, by way of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Max Weber'
(Foucault, cited in Foucault 1983b; Gutting 1989: 9-12).
Dreyfus and Rabinow have suggested that Foucault inherited
from Weber 'a concern with rationalisation and objectification as
the essential trend ... and most important problem' of modern
society (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 166).
1
Although Foucault
and Weber shared common intellectual concerns (such as ration-
alization, power and discipline), there were nevertheless import-
ant differences between them. Thus, whereas Weber tended to view
societal rationalization as a global, all-encompassing process,
Foucault was concerned with rationality in a much more specific
and relative sense, which denied any 'absolute form of rationality
against which specific forms might be compared or evaluated'
(Smart 1983: 126). In contrast to Weber, Foucault explicitly re-
jected casting rationalization in terms of any totalizing notion of
modern society or culture, and as a consequence held open the
possibility of resistance, whereas Weber succumbed to the fatal-
istic vision of the iron cage of bureaucratic domination and the
spread of instrumental reason.
2
Both Weber and Foucault dealt with questions of domination
and discipline. Weber's concept of power emphasized the import-
ance of the state and the intentionality of subjects, and saw power
as negative and prohibitive. Foucault regarded power as something
Ecological Modernization and Risk 97
which not only constrained individuals but also produced the
different modes of subjectivity and the social relations possible in
any particular historical milieu. Importantly, both emphasized an
understanding of societal rationalization as the disciplining of the
body, the origins of which are traced to the institutional practices
of the monastery and the army in medieval Europe.
3
Weber charac-
terized the rational disciplining of the body as a process in which
the 'natural rhythm' of humans as organisms is brought into 'line
with the demands of the work procedure, (and) ... is attuned to a
new rhythm through the functional specialisation of muscles and
through the creation of an optimal economy of physical effort'
(Weber 1968: 1156). This has clear similarities to Foucault's
description of biopower, or the 'anatomo-politics of the human
body', as a form of power that begins to emerge in the seven-
teenth century and which is 'centered on the body as a machine',
involving the disciplining of the body through 'the optimisation of
its capacities' so as to produce a 'parallel increase of its usefulness
and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and eco-
nomic controls' (Foucault 1976: 139). Like Weber, Foucault saw
this new form of discipline as indispensable to the development of
capitalism, which required the 'controlled insertion of bodies into
the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena
of population to economic processes' (ibid. 141 ). Colin Gordon has
suggested a link between Foucault's later work on governmentality
(and neo-liberalism), and a growing interest in the significance of
Weber's influence on recent intellectual history. In particular, he
points to Foucault's claim that \Veber provided a counter-focus,
in social theory, to Marxism by suggesting a historical under-
standing of the present in terms of processes of rationalization
which are 'multiple, specific and potentially discordant' (Gordon
1986: 79; 1987: 295-6).
The intellectual influence of Nietzsche and Weber on the Frank-
furt school of critical theory, including Jiirgen Habermas, has
been significant. Horkheimer and Adorno, in their treatment of
the dialectic of enlightenment, argued that Nietzsche was the first
to recognize the existence of a nihilistic 'anti-life force' inherent
within all rational thought. Their discussion of the domination of
nature as a universal feature of instrumental reason draws heavily
on the Nietzschean theme that knowledge operates as a tool of
the 'will to power' in which the drive to predict and master nature
serves the interests of self-preseruation (Adorno and Horkheimer
1 986). Similarly, key aspects of Weber's treatment of societal
98 Paul Rutherford
rationalization were appropriated by Adorno and Horkheimer
in their analysis of the domination of reason by instrumental
rationality and the rise of a bureaucratized, 'totally administered
society'. Habermas too bases central elements of his understanding
of societal rationalization and modernization on a particular read-
ing of Weber, arguing that Weber's analysis fails to appreciate the
'selectivity', or differentiation, exhibited in the processes of ration-
alization. According to Habermas, Weber could not adequately
explain the way in which, under conditions of capitalist modern-
ization, instrumental rationality 'surges beyond the bounds' of
the material reproduction of economy and state, distorting the
communicative reason necessary to the 'symbolic reproduction of
the life-world'. Hence, he argues that it is possible to overcome
Weberian pessimism (the iron cage) once social theory under-
stands that the 'colonisation' of life-world by instrumental rational-
ity is a pathological distortion of the modernity, rather than its
inevitable outcome. The progressive potential of modernity can be
realized provided social theory appreciates the different analytical
approaches appropriate to action within the separate social envir-
onments of life-world and system. The first requires a hermeneutic,
or 'action-theoretic', approach, while the latter demands a systems
theory (Habermas 1987: 303-1).
Similarities have also been drawn between the work of the early
Frankfurt school and Foucault. Honneth, for example, points to
several key features of critique common to Adorno and Foucault.
According to Honneth, both Adorno and Foucault understood
modernity as a process of technical or instrumental rationaliza-
tion that, under the cloak of moral emancipation and progress,
violently disciplines a 'pre-rational' dimension of the human body
to produce the 'modern, forcefully unified individual' (Honneth
1986: 56-8). Each finds the root of modernity in the intellectual
and political changes initiated by the European Enlightenment;
each works on the view that knowledge assures domination
behind the 'generalization of theoretical and moral validity claims'
and the growth of legal and constitutional structures. On this
view, both Adorno and Foucault understand instrumental ration-
ality as expressing a tendency towards the totalitarian control
of social life. Modernity, in other words, is characterized by the
regulative capacity to 'intervene like total institutions in the life con-
text of every single individual in order to make him a conforming
member of society through discipline and control, manipulation
and drilling'. Honneth, in agreement with Hahermas ( 1985), thus
tcologrcal Modermzatron and Krsk: 't't
sees Foucault as succumbing to a totalizing critique similar to
that which deprives Adorno and Horkheimer of a rational basis
for their critical social theory. While pointing to the different con-
ceptions of subjectivity that lead to these similarities, he nevertheless
claims that Foucault's social theory is in the end a 'version of the
Dialectic of Enlightenment reduced to systems theory' (Honneth
1986: 58).
4
Thomas McCarthy has also drawn out some broad affinities (as
well as differences) between Foucault and the Frankfurt school,
including Habermas. He argues that both Foucault and the Frank-
furt school assert the 'primacy of the practical over the theoretical'
by treating knowledge production as social practice and requiring
that 'epistemic practices' be understood within their broader prac-
tical context. Foucault concludes from this the impossibility of
knowledge or truth (at least in the human sciences
5
) that is outside
of relations of power, hence capable of grounding a theory of the
social totality, whereas the Frankfurt school does not give up the
attempt to find a universalizing truth-function for reason in the pro-
gressive realization of a totalized concept of social emancipation
(McCarthy 1990: 438-42). Following on from this, Foucault sees
a pervasive complicity of human science expertise in modern forms
of domination and discipline. Habermas, while critical of the role
played by the social sciences and social-scientific expertise in societal
rationalization, nevertheless seeks to distinguish between different
forms of social enquiry in a way that does not regard them all as
extensions of an instrumental rationality directed towards ever
more effective forms of domination. Despite the differences between
the two approaches to social theory, a key feature of each is the
use of 'functional accounts of how and why purportedly rational
practices came to be taken for granted'. Such accounts are central
to critique inasmuch as they problematize and destabilize the
apparently natural and necessary character of social and epistemic
practices by demonstrating how these are in fact the product of
'contingent relations of force and an arbitrary closing off of altern-
atives' (ibid. 439-40).
The Modernizing Rationality of Ecological
Movements: Eder contra Habermas
Environmental movements are often seen (particularly by them-
selves) as presenting an alternative understanding of environmental
100 Paul Rutherford
protection to that suggested by the highly expert, rationalized model
of modern science. It is thus not uncommon for ecological move-
ments to be seen as fundamentally anti-modernist. Habermas, for
example, characterizes ecological issues as concerning 'the grammar
of forms of life'. On this view, ecological problems arise within
the life-world (the areas of cultural reproduction, social integration
and socialization), but are provoked by the 'reification of com-
municative spheres of action' brought about by the intrusion of
functional, 'system-steering' media of money and power (Habermas
1981: 33). He suggests that ecological conflicts and environmental
movements should be understood as particularistic expressions of
resistance to pressures towards such colonization of the life-world.
He identifies the critique of economic growth and the 'self-
destructive consequences of the growth in (social) complexity' as
key unifying themes of the new social movements. However, while
he sees ecological problems as reactions to specific, tangible, envir-
onmental problems, he also argues that ecological problems are
'largely abstract and require technical and economic solutions that
must in turn be planned globally and implemented by administrat-
ive means' - that is, through instrumental rationality (ibid. 35).
Here he also characterizes ecological concerns as expressions of
resistance to the problems generated by the 'over complexity' of
the societal system of functional integration. Hence ecological
problems arise as systemic abstractions 'forced upon the life-world'
which can be properly dealt with only within a life-world that is
itself highly rationalized. At the same time, however, these systemic
'abstractions' cut across the boundaries between the different modes
of action co-ordination in advanced industrial societies. Ecological
conflicts and problems therefore 'arise at the seam between system
and life-world'.
A consequence of approaching ecological conflicts and problems
in this way is that they are seen as reflecting an unavoidable and
unending tension between communicatively derived cultural norms
specifying the acceptable limits to human appropriation of the
natural environment and the functionally defined, systemic imperat-
ives of the material reproduction of society. It is within this context
that Habermas adopts a pessimistic view of the 'emancipatory'
potential of new social movements, regarding any such potential
as subverted and obscured by the failure of these movements to
distinguish between the 'rationalisation of the life-world' and the
'increasing complexity of the social system', between the different
developmental logics of life-world and system (ibid. 36-7).
tco1og1ca1 Modern1zat1on and 1<1sk lUI
This theme of ecological problems as systemically induced also
plays a central role in the work of other important contemporary
social theorists, particularly Niklas Luhmann and Ulrich Beck,
whom I discuss further below. However before doing so, a further
comment on the relationship of ecological movements to modern-
ity may be useful. Ecological movements can be seen as reflect-
ing a cultural rejection of technological modernity, and this can
be variously evaluated, either positively (deep ecologists) or negat-
ively (Habermas). It is undeniable that a theme common to much
non-scientific ecological thinking is a marked ambivalence towards
'mainstream' or 'reductionist' science. There is no doubt that an
earlier (i.e. pre-World War II) romantic nature conservation senti-
ment played an important role in the development of the counter-
cultural side of contemporary environmentalism (Jamison and
Eyerman 1994; Worster 1987a). Nevertheless, it is also true that
since the 1970s environmental movements have tended to become
more scientized (and globalized in outlook), and more inclined to
embrace the potential positive uses of new 'clean' technologies
(Butte! and Taylor 1992; Cramer et al. 1989). Without denying
the importance of the counter-cultural element of much ecological
discourse, it remains the case, as Steven Yearley argues, that envir-
onmental movements are profoundly anchored in modern science,
even though the very epistemological and sociological nature of
scientific knowledge production conspires to make such a reliance
highly problematic, unstable and contested
6
(Yearley 1992: 529).
Even those ecocentric or deep ecology theorists most suspicious of
'reductionist' science and instrumental reason frequently do not
reject science per se, but, much to the annoyance of Habermas
(1982), advocate a holistic 'new science' capable of a communicat-
ive, rather than a purely technical-instrumental, relation with
nature (Eckersley 1992: 114-16; Fox 1990: 252-3; Mathews 1991:
48-50).
Klaus Eder has provided a useful way of viewing the relation-
ship between these often contrasted elements of contemporary
environmentalism: namely, a highly rationalized scientific ecology
and a romantic, moral-cultural attitude towards nature. Eder
identifies two competing cultural models of nature contributing
to Western modernity. He sees these as expressing contradictory
discourses: the justice perspective is the dominant cultural model
of nature in the West, finding its expression in the instrumentalist-
utilitarian tradition; while the purity perspective embodies a non-
utilitarian, romantic attitude which rejects the reduction of nature
102 Paul Ruthertord
to an object of theoretical reason. The 'cultural code' of modern
Western society consists of both of these discourses, so that the
history of modernity, including the social relation to nature, is to
be understood as the product of the interrelationship between
these two cultural discourses. The counter-tradition represented in
the purity perspective is thus not, as Habermas claims, irrational
or anti-modern, but a different form of rationality which seeks to
define an alternative modernity (Eder 1990b: 28-37).
Whereas Habermas tends to focus narrowly on those features
of the ecological movements that reflect this alternative purity
perspective, Eder argues that both models of nature shape con-
temporary ecological movements. There is within such movements
a much greater potential for ambivalence than is recognized by
Habermas, so that, while environmental movements often draw
on the romantic, counter-cultural tradition (as expressed in the
moralism of deep ecology), they also draw on the utilitarian per-
spective with its focus on efficiency. Eder correctly suggests that
in this way contemporary ecological thinking can be considered
'the most advanced version of the dominant utilitarian mind, a
radicalisation of modern economic ideology' (Eder 1990a: 75).
Such an argument is consistent with Foucault's claim that modern
political economy emerges in conjunction with biopolitics and its
focus on what he calls the 'population-riches problem'. Indeed,
contemporary ecological discourse is an articulation of biopolitics
and its problematization of population in relation to resources.
7
As Donald Worster has argued, scientific ecology, which emerged
in its modern form in the 1950s, understands nature in terms of a
bio-economic model, and conceives of itself as 'the science of
natural economics' (Worster 1987a: 311-13).
Eder claims that theorizing about modernity has largely centred
on the political and economic reproduction of society, but that
now the focus is shifting to include the problems of ecological
reproduction of society. Contra Habermas, Eder argues that the
problem of nature is not simply a technical problem of the func-
tional integration of the material needs of the modern social sys-
tem with its environment, but is also a cultural problem, in that it
questions the moral dimensions of the notion of progress, which
has itself begun to threaten the 'conditions of life' themselves
(Eder 1990b: 40-2).
Eder therefore rejects the false idealization implied in Habermas's
separation of life-world and system. While recognizing the valid-
ity of Habermas's concern for relating these 'two logics of social
Ecological Modernization and Risk 103
life', he argues that practical reasoning can never be separated
from the context of social systemic factors (power and money)
which it serves to reproduce (Eder 1988: 937-40). Habermas's
overly rigid analytical separation of system and life-world, with
its surrender of nature solely to the systemic realm of functional
reason, according to Eder, underestimates the interpenetration of
morality and technology in social life. What is more, it obscures
the fact that Western culture is the product of the interaction of
competing discourses on nature, of these two indissolubly linked
notions of progress and modernity. Eder suggests that as the rela-
tion between society and nature is symbolically mediated, this
necessitates reconstructing 'the theoretical idea of forces of pro-
duction as a cultural category, as a specifically defined cultural
form for appropriating nature. [We can] ... see the basic forms of
social life ... as being determined by specific cultural definitions
of that relation to nature' (Eder 1990a: 69). This approach to
environmental discourse has the potential to help accomplish what
Habermas has difficulty in doing: linking the problems of material
reproduction at the system level with actions of ecological move-
ments in a way that permits these to be understood as more than
simply reactive skirmishes at the interface of system and life-
world. It allows a more complex, sophisticated understanding of
the ways in which discourse on ecological problems contributes to
the historical production of contemporary society.
Ecological Hazards and Risk Society: Beck
Eder argues that the problematization of nature and progress is
related to fundamental changes in social structure brought about
by a global process of modernization and rationalization invol-
ving the emergence of post-industrial class conflicts. The main
feature of this new type of society is thus social conflict centred
on the 'problem of the exploitation of nature' and the pivotal role
played by social and cultural movements in 'determining the
direction of further "modernisation"' (Eder 1990b: 37-41 ). Ulrich
Beck, in his influential writings on risk society also argues that the
processes of global modernization have given rise to a phase of
modernity characterized by a new ecological field of conflict. For
Beck, late modernity is to be understood in terms of a system-
ically induced shift from problems of wealth distribution to those
of risk distribution. Thus contemporary Western societies are less
concerned with how to overcome scarcity than with how to limit
104 Paul Rutherford
and distribute the effects of a whole new category of systemically
produced 'latent side effects' that are the unintended, unforeseen
hazards caused by the success of science and technology in meet-
ing the material production needs of Western societies (Beck 1992b:
19-22). The benefits of science and technology in utilizing nature
are increasingly overshadowed by the political and economic costs
of managing the hazards thereby generated, which now threaten
the natural foundations of life.
As opposed to Habermas's view of ecological movements as
primarily anti-modern, Beck sees them as the result of a growing
critical-reflexive awareness of the risks produced by late modern-
ity itself. This awareness can be attributed to the increasing scient-
ization of risk and the expanding commerce in risks (ibid. 56).
The scientization of risk undermines a strict separation of system
and life-world, because risk is experienced in an already highly
scientized life-world: that is, the perception of modern ecological
hazards depends on 'a theoretical and hence a scientised con-
sciousness, even in the everyday consciousness of risks' (ibid. 28 ).
Because Beck sees the substantive production of risks as closely
tied to the development of expert scientific knowledge, he focuses
on the link between risk production and its 'cognitive agents'. The
latter comprise not only those experts who produce scientific know-
ledge and its technological applications, but also those counter-
experts (of the ecology movements, citizens' action groups, etc.)
who produce critiques of environmental degradation, technology
and so on. Advanced technological society thus displays a 'system-
immanent' capacity to endanger its ecological conditions of exist-
ence while at the same time producing a self-referential 'questioning
of itself through the multiplication and economic exploitation of
hazards' (ibid. 56-7). The current concern about ecological prob-
lems derives from the existence of these systemic contradictions
between the technological production and political administration
of risks, which become an object of public concern through the
activities of the 'counter-experts' of the ecology movement. Ecolo-
gical conflicts challenge some of the key premisses of industrial
society, such as the value of progress and economic growth, as
well as the character of scientific rationality itself. Beck suggests
(as does Eder) that ecological conflicts thus 'take on the character
of doctrinal struggles within civilisation over the proper road for
modernity' (Beck 1992b: 40; Eder 1993: 103-12). At the same time,
technologically induced risks create political and market opportun-
ities, in terms of such things as pollution control technology
Ecological Modernization and Risk 105
and expanded demand for professional expertise in areas of envir-
onmental management, assessment and administration (Christoff
1996; Weale 1992).
These tensions lead to 'definitional struggles over the scale,
degree and urgency of risks' (Beck 1992b: 46). On one level,
hazards appear as the creation of an autonomous process re-
sulting from a strictly instrumental use of technology in com-
modity production. However, hazards are defined and evaluated
not privately at the level of the firm, but through a matrix of
'quasi-governmental power positions' incorporating debate among
scientific experts, juridical interpretation in the courts, and com-
ment in the mass media. The unintended consequences of putative
private economic activities are transformed into socially defined
risks through scientific contests fought out by 'intellectual strat-
egies in intellectual milieux'. Thus the production and distribution
of knowledge is central to the functioning of late modern society
(Beck 1992a: 112-14).
Yet, while the definition of risks results from a series of more or
less deliberate decisions (and is therefore social in character), it is
not political in the sense of being defined by the decisions of formal
political institutions. The Western political system is premissed on
a differentiation of parliamentary politics from the 'non-politics'
of the techno-economic pursuit of interests through private invest-
ment decisions and scientific research agendas. But it is primarily
in these areas that the decisions which produce ecological risks
are made. It is in this sense that Beck speaks of social change as
the autonomized, latent side-effect of scientific and technological
decisions (Beck 1992b: 183-4). This is not a distortion of modern-
ity, but rather the result of the success of rationalization and
progress, and occurs in part through the equation of social with
economic progress assumed by Western utilitarian culture. Risk
society is thus shaped by two contradictory processes - the
institutionalization of representative democracy and the legitima-
tion of the supposed intrinsic value of progress in scientific and
technical knowledge - which lead to far-reaching social changes
under the guise of 'normalcy'. Scientific and economic development
in risk society thus take on the status of a sub-politics which,
while not subject to institutionalized political authorization and
legitimation, nevertheless constantly produces and shapes ecolo-
gical risks as the object of public discourse, over which governments
are called to act (Beck 1992a: 114-15; 1992b: 186-7). This scien-
tifically generated awareness of ecological and technological risks
106 Paul Rutherford
results in a thoroughgoing systemic transformation of politics in
risk society, expressed in three key areas: the breakdown of the
cultural consensus regarding the link between scientific-economic
development and progress; increased demands for political control
and accountability of processes that lie largely outside the public
sphere; and the breakdown of the notion of a political centre
capable of controlling the autonomous processes of technological-
economic change, simultaneously (and paradoxically) accompanied
by the extension of monitoring activity by the state to ever more
intimate levels of industrial management.
Functional DiHerentiation of Society and
Ecological Communication: Luhmann
The theme of the lack of a political 'centre' of contemporary
Western society also plays a central role in the work of Niklas
Luhmann. However, whereas Beck suggests that this leads to a
'reflexive modernity' with the potential to reinvent politics through
the 'self-criticism of risk society' (Beck 1992b: 183-236; 1994:
1-55), Luhmann is far more pessimistic about the possibility of a
rational co-ordination of societal responses to ecological problems
(Sciulli 1994: 44). Like Beck, Luhmann does not situate ecological
problems in nature, but within society. More specifically, he is
concerned with developing a systems-theoretical understanding of
the manner in which social systems become aware of, and com-
municate, the differences between themselves and their environ-
ment. The distinction between system and environment is one of
two key concepts in Luhmann's systems theory. Here the concept
of environment is understood at a very general level to refer to
the context in which the 'operationally closed', self-referential,
functional subsystems of society (the scientific, legal, political
and economic systems, etc.) operate as self-reproducing entities.
Luhmann defines these functional subsystems as autopoietic (a
concept taken from the work of Maturana and Varela in theoret-
ical biology), to indicate 'that the system is the product of its own
activity (work), and not simply self-sufficient activity as such'
(Sciulli 1994: 14 ). The autopoietic nature of functional subsystems
is determined not by external environmental influences, but by the
intrinsic primary goal of all such self-reproducing systems - 'the
continuation of autopoeisis without any concern for the environ-
ment' (Luhmann 1989: 14, emphasis added).
tcologtcal Moderntzatton and KtsK IU/
A second pivotal concept for Luhmann's theory is the sub-
stitution of 'communication' for 'action' as the most basic opera-
tion of functional systems, in which communication becomes
the medium through which self-referentiality is produced and
sustained. Communication is the process whereby social systems
constitute themselves by observing themselves. Hence, the environ-
ment for Luhmann is 'anything which social communication can
refer to' (Miller 1994: 104).
When Luhmann does specifically address problems of ecology,
his concern is to examine how modern societal subsystems react
to these types of problems and to explain why 'society' has diffi-
culty in perceiving and managing them appropriately (Luhmann
1989: 33-5). His approach to these questions is shaped by the
view of modern society as an assemblage of highly differentiated
functional subsystems, in which the key problem is the lack of
any central mechanism to control these subsystems, other than
the unco-ordinated reactions or autopoetic adjustments ('reson-
ance') of each to the interference of the others (Sciulli 1994: 47).
This is so because each of the subsystems is directed to perform-
ing a relatively limited social function: for example, the subsystem
of economy is narrowly concerned with prices and payments,
rather than with the broader environment. Luhmann argues that
subsystems operate with a set of binary codes which specify the
ways in which reality becomes the subject of communication.
Codes specify values and counter-values (in law legal/illegal, in
science true/false), and operate so as to exclude other possible
ways of ordering reality (Luhmann 1989: 44-5). Subsystems react
to their environments (which includes the other subsystems) only
in the terms set out by these binary codes. Furthermore, because it
is through such codes that systems self-referentially differentiate
themselves from their environment, and because functional sub-
systems can discern and respond to environmental disturbances
only in terms of their own internal codes and meanings, the pos-
sibility of resonance between different subsystems is severely lim-
ited. At a general societal level this means that resonance between
different subsystems is restricted to what can be communicated
across subsystems as meaningful; thus, 'each system has a different
access to itself than to its environment which it can only construct
internally' (Luhmann 1994: 14).
Several significant consequences flow from Luhmann's approach.
First, talk of exposure to ecological risks is possible only where
there is resonance, or reaction, by a social subsystem to events in
108 Paul Rutherford
its environment (which includes other subsystems). Given that
systems can respond only in accordance with their own particular
structures or codes, ecological risks can be perceived by society
only as exclusively internal phenomena. Physical and biological
'objective facts' have no social effect (resonance) unless they are the
subject of communication. Luhmann thus argues that society cannot
communicate directly with its environment, but instead can 'only
communicate about its environment' within itself (Luhmann 1989:
28-31 ). The key question that results from this, then, is how society
structures the way it deals with environmental information. Here
Luhmann points to an apparently insoluble paradox. Modern
society, as a highly differentiated set of function subsystems, struc-
tures communication about itself through binary codes, so that
resonance between society and its environment is always directed
through one of the function subsystems and their associated pro-
grammes (scientific theories, legal rules, etc.). The differentiation
of society is a result of its increasing complexity; yet the mechan-
isms for dealing with this complexity (function systems, coding,
etc.) operate by reducing information, by simplification (Luhmann
1994: 18-19).
Here Luhmann is pointing to the reductive character of modern
expert knowledge systems. He rejects those who (like Husser!)
criticize modernity on the basis of its tendency towards a one-
dimensional 'technicalisation (that) forgets the "lifeworld"' (ibid.
17). Such technicalization is a fundamental characteristic of mod-
ern science, and in a move similar to that adopted by Habermas,
Luhmann dismisses the critique of science (and technology) on
this basis as a futile exercise (Habermas 1982; Luhmann 1994:
18). In much the same way as Beck, Luhmann also rejects attempts
to base solutions to ecological problems on some new form of
environmental ethics (Beck 1992a; Luhmann 1989: xvii). Neither
can a solution be found in science, for, as a function subsystem, it
cannot provide 'meaningful' solutions that would be recognized
within other subsystems (politics, law, etc.). Paradoxically, the
complexity of modern society relies on the ability of science (and
other subsystems) to reduce the complexity of the world through
codification. Science and technology thus construct simplifications
that are then 'experimentally' reinserted into the world as a
'simplification that works' (Luhmann 1994: 18), but only within
their own subsystem domain.
Eder's criticism of Habermas's rigid separation of system and
life-world applies with even greater force to Luhmann's systems
Ecological Modernization and Risk 109
theory. Similarly, the approach of Beck's work that makes it most
useful, the elaboration of the connections between science and
politics, is systematically discounted by Luhmann, and along with
it, the ability of politics to offer any solutions to ecological prob-
lems. Habermas's relegation of ecological problems to the status
of skirmishes at the interface between system and life-world is
carried further by Luhmann, possibly even to the extent that such
'problems' amount to little more than system-generated 'noise'
that is incapable of providing a meaningful basis for co-ordinated
action across subsystems. In particular, Luhmann has little to say
about the ways in which individuals and social groups may be
involved in the complex interplay between the function subsys-
tems and an increasingly complex environment.
Ecological Modernization
One potentially fruitful way of connecting the macro-sociological
perspectives developed by theorists such as Beck and Eder with
institutionalization of specific regulatory practices and policies is
through the notion of ecological modernization. This term arises
out of recent attempts to analyse the changes that occurred during
the 1980s in the formulation and implementation of environmental
policy in Western Europe - especially in Germany, The Nether-
lands, Austria and the Scandinavian states. Peter Christoff sees
these changes as a response to the 'perceived limits of state regu-
latory intervention' in achieving improvement in environmental
management, and involving a whole range of policy approaches
and instruments aimed at the 'integrated management of "clean"
production'. These 'institutional transformations' are seen as re-
sulting in significant changes both in investment patterns and pro-
duction techniques (particularly in manufacturing and energy
production) and in the relationship between the state, industrial
interests and environmental groups (Christoff 1996).
The catalyst for these changes can be found in what Christoff
describes as the 'increasingly sophisticated forms of community
understanding and political mobilisation around environmental
issues'. Albert Weale argues that these changes can be understood
as a response to the increasing fragility (and declining effective-
ness), throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, of the earlier polit-
ical and policy coalitions in which environmental movements and
interests were involved (sec Cramer et al. 1989). According to
110 Paul Rutherford
Weale, it was from within the environmental movement that there
emerged a new category of discourse (that of 'ecological modern-
ization') which challenges the conventional view of an inherent
conflict between environmental protection and economic growth
per se. Instead, there is a reconceptualization of the relationship
between economics and environmental imperatives, in which the
maintenance of ecological health is increasingly seen as an essen-
tial pre-condition for long-term economic development (Weale
1992: 31). This change also formed the basis for the subsequent
discourse on sustainable development that by the late 1980s
had gained widespread international influence through the United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development process.
The UNCED report, Our Common Future (Brundtland 1987),
provides a particularly clear statement of how this new political
rationality is deeply embedded in the discourse on sustainable
development.
The meaning of 'ecological modernization' is, as Christoff notes,
open to a range of interpretations. At one end of the spectrum
there is a narrowly technocratic understanding consistent with
the 'traditional imperatives of capital' and the standard view of
modernization. Here the adoption of dean production technologies
and precautionary approaches to environmental protection in no
way impede the dynamics of the international economic system.
Indeed, these sorts of environmental measures often contribute
directly to the increased efficiency and profitability of the tech-
nically advanced industrial sectors, while also promoting other
benefits such as the rationalization of regulatory regimes across
states, increasing certainty for investment planning, and facilitating
international market penetration or dominance (Christoff 1996).
Further along the ecological modernization spectrum are applica-
tions of the environmental equivalent of the welfare state. Here
the state and markets influence economic activity in ways which
may not be directly favourable to the interests of particular cor-
porate actors, but instead seek to use a variety of regulatory and
economic instruments to force the incorporation of costs aris-
ing from environmental externalities. Associated with this is an
emphasis on what Christoff describes as the 'transformative impact
of environmental awareness', as a means of enhancing citizenship
and democratic participation through a revitalization of civil soci-
ety and the public sphere. Central to this is the suggestion (re-
miniscent of Beck) that the political issues raised by the ecological
modernization go beyond economic, and even narrowly ecological,
tcolog1cal Modernization and Risk lll
considerations. Thus Weale argues that ecological modernization
results in a
shift in focus reflected in the changing pattern of interest aggrega-
tion and interest articulation. Where once it was possible to con-
trast an economic feasibility coalition and a dean environment
coalition, ecological modernisation suggests a plural and variegated
set of interests, with competing and different interpretations of
what values are at stake in matters of environmental policy. These
changes ramify through the way that environmental policy is per-
ceived and they include changes in strategies of regulation, emer-
ging styles of public policy, alterations in patterns of international
relations, a changing relationship between science and policy and
ideological competition and debate. (Weale 1992: 32)
Nevertheless, much of this 'shift of focus' remains within a familiar
utilitarian perspective. Counterposed to this, according to Christoff,
is a more radical aspect to the ecological modernization discourse,
expressing a form of ecological critique that challenges the more
orthodox notions of industrial modernity, particularly the way in
which it defines the social relation to nature in instrumental terms.
Christoff's argument has some parallel with Eder's, in that he
understands ecological critique as embracing both an 'emergent
scientific understanding of ecological needs' and a 'normative
(re)evaluation of Nature' which draws on a nineteenth-century
romantic resistance to industrialization. Like Eder and Beck, he
emphasizes that ecological critique is itself a product of 'simple
modernity'. In effect, it is an immanent critique that 'makes radic-
ally problematic and contradictory the industrialising imperative
which lies at the heart of modernisation by redefining the cultural
and ecological limits to the instrumental domination of nature'
(Christoff 1996: ).
Conclusion: Political Rationalities and
Ecological Discourses
Space does not permit a more detailed comparison between the
theorists discussed above and Foucault. Nevertheless, a theme
common to Beck and Eder in particular, but also to Habermas
and Luhmann (albeit in a more theoretically abstract manner), is
the problem of the social relation to nature in contemporary West-
ern society, and the ways in which modern scientific knowledge
112 Paul Rutherford
and expertise shape the distribution of power. If the notions of
biopolitics and governmentality are developed so as to examine
the emergence of ecological discursive practices, Foucault's work
can be seen to open up new perspectives on these concerns. As
was argued at the beginning of this chapter, Foucault's interest in
developing a historical critique of specific rationalities has much
in common with the sociological tradition drawn on by authors
such as Beck and Habermas. Given the shared concern to under-
stand modern society as shaped by processes of rationalization,
consideration of insights drawn from the works considered here
may contribute to a more critical, sophisticated social-theoretical
understanding of environmental problems.
Foucault's insistence that we understand particular relations of
power and social institutions as the result of historically specific
political rationalities, rather than as the result of some generalized
or totalizing process of societal rationalization is an important
corrective to this tendency in theorists such as Beck and particu-
larly Habermas. Foucault's notion of biopolitics can be linked to
contemporary scientific ecology as a mode of regulatory science;
but this is not to suggest that contemporary environmental dis-
course is a unity, reflecting the triumph of technical or instrumental
rationality in general. Instead, the more limited suggestion is made
that systems ecology (and projects like the International Biological
Programme) can be understood as a form of political (or govern-
mental) rationality: that is, systems ecology is one such rationality
among a plurality of rationalities, even within the domain of
environmental discourse.
This approach, for example, when applied to Eder's work, sug-
gests that what he calls the 'purity model' of nature has been until
recently a marginalized rationality in Western culture. None the
less, it has interacted historically with, and influenced, the ex-
pression of the dominant rationality, the justice model of nature.
A roughly congruent move can be found in Beck's notion of a
sub-politics when he argues that a risk society produces increased
opportunities for shaping contemporary society from below. This
results from the inclusion of groups and individuals previously
not involved in 'the substantive technification and industrialisa-
tion process', such as social movements, counter-experts, and so
on (Beck 1994: 23). Here we can see a clear similarity to Foucault,
who argues that a power relation is an agonism, or 'permanent
provocation'
3
(Foucault 1982: 222). In Foucault's view, power re-
lationships are dynamic, and therefore always potentially unstable.
tcolog1cal Modernization and Risk 113
Consequently, under particular circumstances, even long-established
states of domination may be subject to reversal. Hence, in Foucault's
terms, Eder's purity model and some aspects of Beck's sub-polity
can be seen as resistance to the dominant understandings of nature,
what Foucault describes as 'an insurrection of subjugated know-
ledges', those 'naive', 'disqualified', localized, non-scientific dis-
courses which oppose the 'tyranny' of particular globalizing
scientific disciplines (Foucault 1980h: 81-5). The point in making
such a contrast is not to counterpose modern, rationalized know-
ledge to anti-modern, irrational forms of belief, which are thereby
devalued and excluded. Rather, Foucault saw this as a practical
genealogical task aimed at establishing 'a historical knowledge of
struggles' which could be made use of tactically in contemporary
political and social contests (ibid. 83 ).
However, a genealogy of environmental discourse cannot be
concerned solely with the struggle between scientific and non-
scientific rationalities. It would also need to encompass the com-
petition within the discourse of scientific ecology itself (i.e. between
systems and population ecology, community ecology, etc.), and to
consider how these apparently esoteric, technical debates influence
the historical formation of the regulatory sciences and ecological
programmes of government.
9
Thus, the development of scientific
ecology, particularly systems ecology, provided both a guiding pol-
itical rationality and the technical apparatus of calculation and
assessment that by the late 1960s began to make possible a form of
regulatory science that was capable of governmentalizing society-
environment relations, as argued in chapter 2.
The question can be asked as to whether the sorts of ecological
biopolitics suggested here could have been different. At issue is
the way in which specific forms of ecological governmentality
have been institutionalized, and this is very much an empirical
question. The role of the USA has been significant, inasmuch as it
was there that saw the emergence of contemporary industrialized
'big science'. This was initially very much influenced by national
characteristics. However, given the emerging transnational char-
acter of scientific research agendas (e.g. the International Biolo-
gical Programme) and the hegemony of US science in the post-war
period, we can discern a widespread (but by no means universal)
internationalization of techniques (e.g. Environmental Impact
Assessment) and ecological theories originating in the USA.
10
In
these circumstances, the possibility of the emergence of an altern-
ative understanding of environmental protection to the highly
1 14 Paul Ruthertord
'rationalized' model of scientific expertise represented in bodies
like the Environment Protection Agency must be regarded as re-
mote. The purity model of the social relation to nature was, and
is, largely a subjugated knowledge. To counterpose these two
cultural models as if they could be translated in a straightforward
manner into clearly diverging institutional structures ignores the
complexity of ties between the notions of modernity embodied in
the two discourses. At the same time it underestimates, in Foucault's
words, 'the effects of a power which the West since Medieval
times has attributed to science and has reserved for those engaged
in scientific discourse' (Foucault 1980h: 85). Indeed, modern bio-
politics, with its focus on the administration of life in a corporeal,
bodily sense, encompasses precisely all those political rationalities
and governmental technologies which are intrinsically coupled to
the growth of scientific knowledge and expertise. Meaningful dis-
cussion of the potential for alternative institutional approaches to
environmental management (or care) must recognize that what is
in question is an alternative set of power relations, in which the
relative strategic positions of the purity and justice perspectives
may be altered while none the less remaining inextricably linked.
The degree to which such a reversal of strategic relations is pos-
sible in ecological matters is dependent, however, on the highly
complex interaction of many social systemic factors - hence the
importance of considering the sorts of system integration and
coordination problems posed by the social theorists considered
above.
The re-characterization of Foucault's notion of biopolitics in
terms of ecological concerns focuses on the problem of governing
the conduct of populations and their relations with the natural
environment. At the same time, the political rationality of systems
ecology articulates these objects of government in relation to the
global ecosystem. Thus, while it is undoubtedly necessary to under-
stand the micro-relations of power (local technical practices of
laboratory and field-work, computer modelling, the production of
regulatory standards and environmental assessment techniques,
etc.) (Darier and Shackley 1998; Rutherford 1994a, 1994b) which
contribute to management of ecological relations, it is equally
important that this be linked to an analysis of biopolitics at the
macro-level of entire populations and societies. Such a move is of
course in keeping with Foucault's own theoretical development
(Dean 1994a: 174-93). It is none the less true that Foucault's
work (and that of his successors) has generally attempted to
Ecological Modernization and Risk 115
understand the practices of government within the context of
particular national societies, a move motivated in part by an
underlying concern with specific genealogies of power, as opposed
to the universalizing tendencies of much traditional political and
social theory.
While this motivation is to be endorsed, care should be taken
not to over-emphasize the nation-state and national cultures at
the expense of analysing the problematic of government in a way
that gives appropriate weight to the global (or at least transnational)
assemblages of forces and networks of authoritative judgement
that shape contemporary social relations. Included in this would
be consideration of the role of international non-governmental
organizations, the link between science and international environ-
mental policy (ozone depletion, climate change, etc.) as well as
other international agencies (such as the World Bank). As Mitchell
Dean has argued, the Foucauldian concern with the 'problematic
of government is not so much a solution to the paradoxical nature
of the state but a research agenda into the contingent trajectories
by which the state assumes its present and changing form' (ibid.
181). As ecological problems demonstrate, that form is increasingly
one in which national structures are overlaid by international
patterns of governance which embody processes of both marketiza-
tion and regulation, and which rely on expertise and knowledge
that is to a significant degree denationalized (if not globalized). In
the context of environmental problems, it is therefore import-
ant to try to unravel the relations between such denationalized
scientific expertise, on the one hand, and on the other, the political
rationalities and various governmental programmes for ecological
management conceived in terms of a global, systemic interdepend-
ence between society and nature.
A persistent theme in much of the theoretical work considered
in this chapter has been the tensions between the role played by
highly rationalized, often technocratic, scientific expertise and that
of counter-cultural, 'romantic', ecological movements. Authors such
as Beck, Eder and Christoff have sought to locate these appar-
ently contradictory tendencies as expressive of the tensions inher-
ent in what Beck describes as late or 'reflexive' modernity. These
apparently contradictory elements of environmental discourse
can be understood in terms of Foucault's notion of governmental
rationality, or governmentality. The recent work of Nikolas Rose
and Peter Miller identifies three key characteristics of govern-
mental rationalities. If the ecological modernization discourse is
116 Paul Rutherford
considered in the light of these three elements, we can move beyond
the general assertion that both the utilitarian and the counter-
cultural discourses are immanent in modernity, and instead begin
to consider how and why these elements fit together in contempor-
ary practices for governing the environment.
According to Rose and Miller (1992: 178-9), governmental (or
political) rationalities are characteristically moral, epistemological
and idiomatic. They are expressed in moral terms that elaborate
the ideals and principles with which government should properly
be concerned. Ecological governmentality is particularly concerned
with questions of justice and equity - questions such as inter-
generational equity, the relation between development and environ-
mental protection, and the relations between needs of human
society and biotic rights of non-human nature. Thus a significant
element in the environmental debate is the concern to develop
an environmental ethics. Governmental rationalities also have an
epistemological character; they are articulated in terms of a specific
knowledge of the objects and problems to be addressed (ibid. 179-
82). This epistemology is in large part derived from scientific
ecology, which, as I have argued in chapter 2, represents an essen-
tially economic model of nature. Thus it is scientific ecology that
provides the authoritative accounts of the sorts of entities which
government must manage: ecosystems, global climatic and atmos-
pheric processes, habitat and species diversity, population and
carrying capacity, and so forth. Finally, all governmental ration-
alities are expressed in their own distinctive idiom, which functions
as an intellectual means for making reality 'thinkable in such a
way that it is amenable to political deliberations' (ibid. 179). Hence
the relationship of society to the natural environment is conceived
in terms of the language of security and risk; ecological hazards
and insecurity must be addressed by putting in place behaviours
that minimize risk. The idiom of ecological rationality is paradig-
matically represented by the precautionary principle, which reverses
the onus of scientific proof to insist that practices and actions
cannot be deemed safe simply because the evidence of potential
environmental harm is not certain.
Rose and Miller argue that government in the sense used by
Foucault (i.e. 'the conduct of conduct')
11
is a problematizing
activity in which the 'articulation of government has been bound
to the constant identification of the difficulties and failures of
government' (ibid. 181-3 ). Ecological governmentality is such
a rationality inasmuch as it continuously seeks to improve the
CCOI091Cal /V\Oaermzanon ana 1\ISI<; I 1/
techniques for managing environmental problems. At the same
time, it also problematizes the social relation to nature at a basic
ontological level. In many respects ecological thought reflects the
fundamental philosophical dilemma of the dialectic of enlightenment
in which modernity, with its dependence on rational-instrumental,
scientific knowledge, embodies a self-destructive social relation to
nature. As I have argued, such a theme is common not only to
much recent social theory dealing with the ecological problem, but
also to Foucault. The works of Foucault, and others since his death,
on governmentality provide a useful, historically concrete frame-
work for analysis that, while cognizant of the macro-sociological
dimension of ecological biopolitics, also focuses attention on under-
standing specific, localized governmental programmes and tech-
nologies involved in governing the social relation to nature. The
work of Rose and Miller in particular emphasizes that programmes
of government emerge as means of establishing 'translatability
between the moralities, epistemologies and idioms of political
power, and the government of a specific problem space, (which)
establishes a mutuality between what is desirable and what can be
made possible through the calculated activities of political forces'
(ibid. 182). An important task for Foucault scholars who seek to
understand the relations of power and knowledge in contempor-
ary ecological discourse is the application of these insights to work
on an environmental 'history of the present'. Such work would
involve the meticulous, empirical study of the three dimensions of
governmental rationalities and the ways in which these are shaped
by the dynamic interactions of scientific knowledge and expertise,
ecological movements, state-based regulatory activities, and the
influence of global forces of marketization.
Notes
1 While Foucault clearly located his work within the same broad
problematic as Weber, he insisted that post-war French philosophical
thought 'knew absolutely nothing - or only vaguely, only very
indirectly - about the current of Weberian thought' (see Foucault
1983b: 200).
2 Colin Gordon, however, argues that 'Weber is as innocent as Foucault
of the so-called Weberianism that adopts a uniform, monolithic
conception of historical phenomena of rationalization' (see Gordon
1987: 293-4). Brian Turner suggests that while Smart's character-
ization of Weber is justified, it is important to note that Weber did
118 Paul Ruthertord
argue against postulating 'general laws of social development', and
to that extent Weber's work 'lacked internal consistency' (Turner
1987: 232-3).
3 Turner argues that while Weber's main focus is on the changes in
knowledge and consciousness brought about by rationalization and
the development of capitalism, this perspective also incorporates a
'general process whereby the body ceases to be a feature of religious
culture and is incorporated via medicalization into a topic within
scientific discourse'. Thus there is a shift to 'regulation of the body
and of populations' (Turner 1987: 224-6). See also Miller 1987:
5-9.
4 Elsewhere Honneth argues that the usefulness of Habermas's differ-
entiation of spheres of social action (symbolic and material) is under-
mined by the move (Habermas 1987) to a systems theory approach
dominated by a technocratically conceived understanding of two
fundamentally different modes of action co-ordination. Thus, Honneth
claims, despite his criticism of Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas
fails to extricate his own theoretical project from the technocratic
diagnosis of modernity laid out in Dialectic of Enlightenment. See
Honneth 1991; N. Smith 1993).
5 Foucault claims that while the nascent natural sciences were 'histor-
ically rooted' in investigatory practices of disciplinary power, they
were able to detach themselves from this 'politico-juridical model'
of power (Foucault 1975: 224-7). For more detailed discussion of
this see Rutherford 1994a, 1994b.
6 See also ch. 2 above.
7 See preceding note; also Rutherford 1994a, 1994b.
8 Gordon translates this as meaning a 'contest in which the opponents
develop a strategy of reaction and of mutual taunting' (1991: 46).
9 For some excellent historical studies of the conflicts within scientific
ecology in the post-World War II period, see Palliadino 1991; Mitman
1988; Taylor 1988.
10 For detailed discussion of the influence of US science on the growth
of contemporary ecological theories, see Colley 1993; Jamison 1993;
Mcintosh 1985). For detailed consideration of the political institu-
tionalization of environmental protection in the USA, see Jasanoff
1990 and Harris and Milkis 1989.
11 There are in fact several ways in which Foucault uses the term
'government'. For a detailed discussion, see Hindess 1996.
Part II
Environmentalities
Environmentality as Green
Govern mentality
Timothy W. Luke
In the USA, playing off stereotypes of 'the environmentalist', rang-
ing from the limousine liberal to the Sierra Club backpacker to
Earth First! monkey-wrenchers, 'wise use' anti-environmentalism
feeds on the self-evidence of mass media coverage on the environ-
ment. Because elitist do-gooders and wacko tree-sitters allegedly
agitate to trade off people's jobs against the survival of spotted
owls, snail darters, or desert tortoises, the Wise Use/Property Rights
movement in the USA pumps up these images from the six o'clock
news as its essential credo: environmental protection is costing
jobs and undermining the American economy. Therefore, it is
right to have moved, as one of its key organizers, Ron Arnold, puts
it, to declare a 'holy war against the new pagans who worship
trees and sacrifice people' (Helvarg 1994: 12). The self-evidence
of radical fringe environmentalists abridging fundamental property
rights to realize their foolish pagan fantasies of resource non-
use, as depicted in any network television send-up of such eco-
subversives, gives ordinary Americans causus belli to retaliate in
the name of economic rationality and sound governance.
Following Michel Foucault, this study comes out against the self-
evidence of the six o'clock news to breach the Wise Use/Property
Rights movement's invocation of such historical constants, obvious
prerogatives or basic rights as their justification for anti-environ-
mentalism. Rather than seeing mainstream or radical environment-
alism so self-evidently as a distemper of foolish resource non-use
when it comes to nature, this study provisionally suggests that most
environmentalist movements now operate as a basic manifestation
of governmentality. Indeed, this 'green governmentality', which the
Wise Usc/Property Rights movement occasionally decries, would
122 Timothy W. luke
seem to be the latest phase in a solid series of statist practices begin-
ning in the eighteenth century. Thus, this analysis is 'a breach of
self-evidence', and particularly 'of those self-evidences on which our
knowledges, acquiescences, and practices rest' (Foucault, in Burchell
et al. 1991: 76), during a time in which the US Speaker of the
House and the entire 1 04th Congress act as if they are Ron Arnold's
closest allies in the holy war against environmental protection.
As it is discursively constructed by contemporary technoscience,
the art of government now finds 'the principles of its rationality'
and 'the specific reality of the state' (Foucault 1991a: 97), like the
policy programmes of sustainable development, balanced growth
or ecological harmony for its many constituent populations of
human and non-human beings, in the systemic requirements of
ecology. Government comes into its own when it has the welfare
of a population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of
its wealth, longevity, health and so on, as its object. And ecology
gives rational governments all of life's biodiversity to reformat as
'endangered populations', needing various state ministrations as
objects of managerial control ignorant of what is being done
to them as part and parcel of 'a range of absolute new tactics
and techniques'(ibid. 100). Ecology simply crystallizes the latest
phase of the 'three movements: government, population, political
economy, which constitute ... a solid series, one which even today
has assuredly not been dissolved' (ibid. 102) in the formations
of green governmentality.
This chapter, then, collects together fragments of rhetoric with
shards of practice to probe a few green twists in the logic of
governmentality. Over the past generation, the time-space com-
pression of postmodern living has brought the bio-power of the
entire planet, not merely that of human beings, under the strategic
ambit of state power. The environment, particularly the goals of
its protection in terms of 'safety' or 'security', has become a key
theme of many political operations, economic interventions and
ideological campaigns to raise public standards of collective
morality, personal responsibility and collective vigour. Therefore,
this brief discussion follows Foucault by exploring how green
governmentality in the United States operates as 'a whole series of
different tactics that combined in varying proportions the object-
ive of disciplining the body and that of regulating populations'
(Foucault 1976: 146).
These interconnections become even more intriguing in the
aftermath of the Cold War. Having won the long twilight struggle
Environmentality as Green Governmentality 123
against Communist totalitarianism, the United States is governed
by leaders who now see 'Earth in the balance', arguing that global
ecologies incarnate what is best and worst in the human spirit.
On the one hand, economists, industrialists and political leaders
increasingly tend to represent the strategic terrain of the post-1991
world system as one on which all nations must compete ruthlessly
to control the future development of the world economy by develop-
ing new technologies, dominating more markets, and exploiting
every national economic asset. However, the phenomenon of 'failed
states', ranging from basket cases like Rwanda, Somalia or Angola
to crippled entities like Ukraine, Afghanistan or Kazakhstan, is
often attributed to the severe environmental frictions associated
with rapid economic growth (Kaplan 1996). Consequently, envir-
onmental protection issues, ranging from resource conservation
to sustainable development to ecosystem restoration, are getting
greater consideration in the name of creating jobs, maintaining
growth, or advancing technological development.
Therefore, the policy agendas of American superpower must
serve the nation and the planet by functioning as an 'environmental
protection agency' on a global scale, since so many of today's
transnational security threats are, according to the Clinton/Gore
administration, ecological in nature. To explore these curious
wrinkles in the order of things, this study retraces how a new
ordering of things has emerged out of some odd linkages between
sustainability theories, resource managerialist practices, diplomatic
communiques and polemical writings as they operate in the nor-
malizing tactics of America's current-day green governmentality.
This normalization project is a vast undertaking, and not all of its
implications have yet revealed themselves at this juncture. In this
chapter, then, I hope to explore a handful of elective affinities
which emerged together after the Cold War in combinations of
sustainability discourses, US foreign policy and green capitalism,
in order to elucidate what might be seen as green governmentality.
GeoPower in GeoEconomics/Geopolitics
A political, economic and technical incitement to talk about eco-
logy, environments, or nature first surfaced in the 1960s, but it has
become far more pronounced in the 1990s. Not much of this talk
takes the form of general theory, because its practices have instead
been steered toward analysis, stock-taking and classification in
124. Timothy W. Luke
quantitative, causal and humanistic studies. The project of 'sustain-
ability', whether one speaks of sustainable development, growth
or use in relation to Earth's ecologies, embodies this new respons-
ibility for the life processes in the American state's rationalized
harmonization of political economy with global ecology as a
form of green geopolitics. Taking 'ecology' into account creates
discourses on 'the environment' that derive not only from moral-
ity, but from rationality as well. Indeed, as humanity faced 'the
limits of growth', and heard 'the population bomb' ticking away,
ecologies and environments became more than something to be
judged morally; they became things the state must administer.
Ecology, then, has evolved into 'a public potential; it called for
management procedures; it had to be taken charge of by ana-
lytical discourses', as it was recognized in its environmentalized
manifestations to be 'a police matter' - 'not the repression of
disorder, but an ordered maximization of collective and individual
forces' (Foucault 1976: 24-5). After 1992, this geopolitics has
assumed many intriguingly green forms.
Discourses of 'geo-economics', as they have been expounded by
Robert Reich (1991), Lester Thurow (1992), Edward Luttwak
(1993) and others (Kennedy 1993; McLaughlin 1993; Oates 1989),
as well as rearticulations of geopolitics in an ecological register,
as they have been developed by President Bill Clinton or Vice-
President AI Gore (1992), both express new understandings of the
Earth's economic and political importance as a site for the orderly
maximization of many material resources. Geo-economics, for
example, transforms through military metaphors and strategic
analogies what hitherto were regarded as purely economic concerns
into national security issues of wise resource use and sovereign
property rights. Government manipulation of trade policy, state
support of major corporations, or public aid for retraining labour
all become vital instruments for 'the continuation of the ancient
rivalry of the nations by new industrial means' (Luttwak 1993:
34 ).
1
The relative success or failure of national economies in head-
to-head global competition is taken by geo-economics as the
definitive register of any one nation-state's waxing or waning
international power, as well as its rising or falling industrial com-
petitiveness, technological vitality and economic prowess. In this
context, many believe that ecological considerations can be ignored,
or at best given only meaningless symbolic responses, in the quest
to mobilize as many of the Earth's material resources as possible. In
the ongoing struggle over economic competitiveness, environmental
Environmentality as Green Governmentality 125
resistance can even be recast as a type of civil disobedience, which
endangers national security, expresses unpatriotic sentiments, or
embodies treasonous acts.
Geo-economic strategies have been a feature of public discourse
for at least two decades. The oil crises of the 1970s first recentred
elite and popular thinking about the tie between national economic
productivity, natural resources and nationalistic competitiveness
within a global economy. After 25 years of Cold War conflict, in
which virtually everything was organized around conducting an
East/West struggle between two military blocs centred on nuclear
deterrence, geopolitical manoeuvring and ideological confronta-
tion, many nation-states were caught short by the oil shocks of
1971, 1973 and 1979. For geo-economics, however, Japan's re-
sponse to this 'oil shokku' during the 1970s was highly prescient,
inasmuch as the Japanese state allegedly refined its geo-economic
strategizing: defining economic production as power creation,
market building as empire creation, technological innovation as
strategic initiative, natural resource extraction as national neces-
sity, and labour docility as patriotic discipline. Macro-economics
is here seen as war conducted by other means, and all natural
resources, then, become strategic geo-power assets to be mobilized,
not only for growth and wealth production, but also for market
domination and power creation. To resist growth is not only to
oppose economic prosperity, it is to subvert the political future,
national interest and collective security of the nation-state.
Arguing that 'whoever controls world resources controls the
world in a way that mere occupation of territory cannot match',
Barnet, for example, asked, first, if natural resource scarcities
were real, and second, if economic control over natural resources
was changing the global balance of power (Barnet 1980: 17).
After surveying the struggles to manipulate access to geo-power
assets like oil, minerals, water and food resources, he saw a new
geo-economic challenge as nation-states were being forced to
satisfy the rising material expectations of their populations in a
much more interdependent world system (ibid. 310-16). Ironic-
ally, the rhetorical pitch of Reich, Thurow and Luttwak in the
geo-economics debate of the 1990s mostly sticks with these terms
of analysis. Partly a response to global economic competition, and
partly a response to global ecological scarcities, today's geo-
economic reading of the Earth's political economy constructs the
attainment of national economic growth, security and prosperity
as a nro-sum game. Having more material wealth or economic
126 Timothy W. Luke
growth in one place, like a panicular nation-state, means not hav-
ing it in other places - namely, rival foreign nations. It also assumes
that material scarcity is a continual constraint; hence, all resources,
everywhere and at any time, must be subject to exploitation.
Geo-economics accepts the prevailing form of mass market con-
sumerism as it presently exists, defines its rationalizing managerial
benefits as the public ends that advanced economies ought to
seek, and then affirms the need for hard discipline in elaborate
programmes of productivism, only now couched within rhetorics
of highly politicized national competition, as the means for sus-
taining mass market consumer life-styles in nations like the United
States. Creating economic growth, and producing more of it than
other equally aggressive developed and developing countries, is
the sine qua non of 'national security' in the 1990s. As Richard
Darman, President Bush's chief of OMB declared after Earth Day
in 1990, 'Americans did not fight and win the wars of the twentieth
century to make the world safe for green vegetables' (Sale 1993:
77). However, not everyone sees environmentalism in this age
of geo-economics as tantamount to subversion of an entire way of
life tied to using increased levels of natural resources to accelerate
economic growth. These geo-economic readings have also sparked
new discourses of social responsibility into life, such as the green
geopolitics of the Clinton administration with its intriguing codes
of ecological reflexivity.
This presidential commitment to deploying American power as
an environmental protection agency has waxed and waned over
the past quarter-century, but in 1995 President Clinton made this
sort of green geopolitics an integral part of his global doctrine
of 'engagement'. Indeed, 'to reassert America's leadership in the
post-Cold War world', and in moving 'from the industrial to the
information age, from the Cold War world to the global village',
President Clinton asserted:
We know that abroad we have the responsibility to advance free-
dom and democracy - to advance prosperity and the preserva-
tion of our planet ... in a world where the dividing line between
domestic and foreign policy is increasingly blurred ... Our personal,
family, and national future is affected by our policies on the envir-
onment at home and abroad. The common good at home is simply
not separate from our efforts to advance the common good around
the world. They must be one and the same if we are to be truly
secure in the world of the 21st century. (Clinton 1995)
Environmentality as Green Governmentality 127
So it is through acting as an agency of environmental protection
on a global scale that the United States sees itself reasserting its
world leadership after the Cold War. As the world's leader, in
turn, America stipulates that it cannot advance economic prosper-
ity and ecological preservation without erasing the dividing lines
between domestic and foreign policy. In the blur of the coming
Information Age and its global villages, the United States cannot
separate America's common good from the common goods of the
larger world. To be truly secure in the twentieth century, each
American's personal, family and national stake in their collective
future must be served through the nation's environmental pol-
icies. Secretary of State Warren Christopher confirmed President
Clinton's engagement with the environment through domestic state-
craft and diplomatic action thus: 'protecting our fragile environ-
ment also has profound long-range importance for our country,
and in 1996 we will strive to fully integrate our environmental
goals into our diplomacy - something that has never been done
before' (Christopher 1996b: 12).
Because 'the nations of the world look to America as a source
of principled and reliable leadership', new leading principles and
reliable sources for this authority need to be discovered (ibid. 9).
And, to a certain extent, they can be derived from a tactics of nor-
malization rooted within the codes of geo-power, eco-knowledge
and enviro-discipline. From President Nixon's national launch of an
American Environmental Protection Agency to President Clinton's
global engagement of America as the world's leading agency of
environmental protection, one can see the growing importance of
a green governmentality in the state's efforts to steer, manage and
legitimate all of its various policies.
Repudiating 'the end of history' thesis, Secretary of State
Christopher announced at a major address hosted by the John F.
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University that the
Unites States must cope instead with 'history in fast-forward',
since it now faces 'threats from which no border can shield us -
terrorism, proliferation, crime, and damage to the environment'
(ibid. 11). Such 'new transnational security threats' endanger 'all
of us in our interdependent world' (ibid. 12), so the United States
will step forward in the post-Cold War era to combat these threats
as an integral part of its anti-isolationist policies. As it runs head-
long ahead on fast-forward, the United States now pledges through
its Secretary of State to reduce greenhouse gases, ratify biodiversity
conventions, and approve the Law of the Sea. Even so, President
128 Timothy W. Luke
Clinton, Vice-President AI Gore, and Secretary Christopher also
recognize 'how we can make greater use of environmental initi-
atives to promote larger strategic and economic goals ... helping
our environmental industrial sector capture a larger share of a
$400-billion global market' (ibid.).
Consequently, Secretary Christopher directed the staffs of
Global Affairs, Policy Planning and the New Bureau of Oceans,
International Environment and Scientific Affairs to identify
environmental, population and resource issues which affected key
US interests during February 1996. Along with naming a new
Assistant Secretary for Oceans, International Environment and
Scientific Affairs, Christopher also ordered that each American
embassy now have an environmental senior officer, and that all
bureau and mission planning have an environmental element
in their agenda (1996a). As he told the House International
Relations Committee, in 1996 things would change at the State
Department, because he was 'fully integrating environmental goals
into our daily diplomacy for the first time', and 'making greater
use of environmental initiatives to promote our larger strategic
and economic goals' (1996c: 160).
These efforts to link economic growth with ecological respons-
ibility, however, are stated most obviously in Vice-President Gore's
environmental musings. To ground his green geopolitics, Gore
argues that 'the task of restoring the natural balance of the Earth's
ecological system' could reaffirm America's long-standing 'inter-
est in social justice, democratic government, and free market eco-
nomics' (Gore 1992: 270). The geo-powers unlocked by this official
ecology might even be seen as bringing 'a renewed dedication to
what Jefferson believed were not merely American but universal
inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' (ibid.).
At another level, however, Gore takes his own spiritual-religious
opposition to geo-economics to new heights, arguing that America's
new strategic goals after the Cold War must re-establish 'a natural
and healthy relationship between human beings and the earth',
replacing the brutal exploitation of nature with an 'environmental-
ism of the spirit' (ibid. 218, 238).
He asserts confidently that industrial civilization, like all highly
organized cultures, depends upon 'a web of stories' to explain
what it is, where it is going, and why it exists. Capitalism's exist-
ing stories, however, are riddled with the geo-economic themes
of instrumental rationality, mindless growth and possessive indi-
vidualism. Hence, 'new stories about the meaning and purpose of
Environmentality as Green Governmentality 129
human civilization' must be devised (ibid. 216). To tell his new
story, however, Gore casts all those advanced industrial societies,
which are still hooked on geo-economics, as 'dysfunctional civil-
ization'. On his diagnosis, their dysfunctionality has many origins:
big science, instrumental rationality, capitalistic greed, industrial
alienation and growth mania. None the less, its most basic cause is
that worsening addiction to mass consumption. Because allegedly
'we' (meaning everyone in advanced industrial society) have lost
our direct everyday connections to the natural world, we are all
'addicted to the consumption of the earth itself' (ibid. 220). Lonely,
empty and obsessive, Gore argues, Americans attempt to fill this
void with the inauthentic surrogates of more consumer goods.
Thus, we become biosphere abusers. He does not, like the deep
ecology community, call for us to face down the addiction by
going cold turkey at the mall or by returning to a wild nature.
Like all addicted individuals or any dysfunctional family, he argues,
we are in denial. Still, we must, and fortunately can, heal ourselves.
Indeed, there is an easy way out of dysfunctionality through re-
sponsible stewardship of nature.
Gore argues that such absolutions 'can heal the wound and free
the victim from further enslavement' (ibid. 236-7). In healing talk
of self-condemnation, then, Gore finds the easy therapy for redeem-
ing both nature and humanity from industrial geo-economics.
Sensing the mass public's anxious need for such rough-and-ready
redemption, he labels us all 'dysfunctional deviants', identifies the
causes of our common neuroses, and provides the talking cure
needed to realize our collective salvation: namely, 'the new story
of what it means to be a steward of the earth' (ibid. 237).
Gore's new story, in turn, blames geo-economics upon the old
stories of materialism, instrumentalism and empiricism allegedly
given to us by Bacon, Descartes and Galileo. For redemption, he
turns to new pantheistic tales for a curative ontology, eschew-
ing old-fashioned scientific narrative in favour of New Age re-
enchantment: 'it is my own belief that the image of God can be
seen in every corner of creation, even in us, but only faintly. By
gathering in the mind's eye all of creation, one can perceive the
image of the Creator vividly' (ibid. 265). Gore is no medieval mystic
or woo-woo tree-bugger, seeking to glimpse God with the unaided
eye of pure ecological faith. On the contrary, his New Age epiphany
is hi-tech: God in his mind's eye can be seen very vividly as a
hologram. Just as 'when one looks not at a small portion but at
the entire hologram', there are 'thousands of tiny, faint images'
130 Timothy W. luke
that come together 'in the eye of the beholder as a single large,
vivid image', so too are 'the myriad slight strands from earth's web
of life - woven so distinctively into our essence - that make up
the "resistance pattern" that reflects the image of God, faintly. By
experiencing nature in its fullest our own and that of all creation
with our senses and with our spiritual imagination, we can
glimpse, bright shining as the sun, the infinite image of God' (ibid.).
Having gathered all creation into his mind's eye, Gore's spir-
itual imagination projects an environmental hologram whose bits
encode a well-known story in their multi-dimensional patterns.
This is a moral equivalent of war. Here, Gore's new story of
Earth stewardship takes an odd turn as he identifies the need for
a Global Marshall Plan to launch sustainable development as the
basis of his green geopolitics. In that historic programme, as Gore
notes, several nations joined together 'to reorganise an entire
region of the world and change its way of life' (ibid. 296). Like the
Marshall Plan, Gore's new Global Marshall Plan must (strangely
for a design dedicated to environmental spiritual renewal) 'focus
on strategic goals and emphasise actions and programs that are
likely to remove the bottlenecks presently inhibiting the healthy
functioning of the global economy ... to serve human needs and
promote sustained economic progress' (ibid. 297). Here, Gore's
new story of stewardship of the Earth gets to its punchline. The
green geopolitics of his Global Marshall Plan provides a global
agenda for advancing a Strategic Environmental Initiative. Adopt-
ing strategic environmentalizing initiatives as the central organiz-
ing principle 'means embarking on an all-out effort to use every
policy and program, every law and institution, every treary and
alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action
- to use, in short, every means to halt the destruction of the
environment and to preserve and nurture our ecological system'
(ibid. 274 ). Geo-economics is a predatory nationalistic attempt to
monopolize material wealth for only a few in a handful of nation-
states. Like President Clinton's theory of 'engagement', a green
geopolitics would recognize that our 'ecological system' is the
global business environment, as well as the world's natural envir-
onment. Both will be destroyed if we allow unchecked growth,
mindless consumption, dysfunctional development and obsessive
accumulation to continue. Both can be saved, however, if we plan
on a global scale for environmentally appropriate growth, mindful
consumption, sustainable development and careful accumulation
guided by an ethic of environmental stewardship.
Environmentality as Green Governmentality 131
Gore's blur of domestic and foreign policies then flows into a
six-point course of action that necessitates ( 1) stabilizing the world
population, (2) deploying appropriate technologies, (3) devising
techniques of ecological accounting to audit the production of all
economic 'goods' and ecological 'bads', (4) imposing new regu-
latory frameworks to make the plan a success, (5) re-educating
the global populace about environmental necessities, and, finally,
( 6) establishing models of sustainable development. Because there
are no other institutional entities - the UN, OECD or NATO -
with the muscle for performing the heavy lifting needed to manage
the global environment, according to Gore, 'the responsibility for
taking the initiative, for innovating, catalysing, and leading such
an effort, falls disproportionately on the United States' (ibid. 304).
At the end of the Cold War, we cannot simply show the inter-
ventionist central bureaucracies of the state the door; nor can we
allow them to remobilize society around geo-economic programmes
of mindless material development. On the contrary, we must bring
the state back in. Only now, the bureaucrats will be mindful of
what could be called 'the e-factor', or 'ecology' as efficiency and
economy (Makower 1993: 56).
The centrality of 'the e-factor' in some current strategies for
maintaining the environment and the economy is well illustrated by
Japan's 1990 sustainable development programme, which launched
a 100-year plan for developing new high-technology solutions to
the sustainability challenge. In part a stroke of symbolic politics
for the festivities associated with 1990's Earth Day celebrations, and
in part just another turn of national technology policy, Tokyo's
initiative established the Research Institute of Innovative Techno-
logy for the Earth (ibid.). This planned pursuit of ecological leader-
ship, in turn, follows the remarkable increases in overall industrial
efficiency attained in Japan as a by-product of its response to
the 1973 oil crisis. For every unit of GNP, Japan now uses only
50 per cent of the energy and raw materials consumed in the
United States (ibid.). And this level of manufacturing efficiency
already gives Japanese producers a 5 per cent cost advantage over
American firms on a number of their products (ibid. 56-7).
Japan's policy also indicates how sustainable development can
be turned away from the ends of preserving nature and toward
the goals of advancing national and corporate economic growth.
It begins to approach what Vice-President Gore means by 'stew-
ardship' as it transforms environmental sustainability into a multi-
pronged programme for corporate culture revitalization, national
132 Timothy W. Luke
efficiency maximization, and ecological regulation management
in the 1990s. Sustaining nature will be an important by-product,
but its immediate goals meet transnational security threats by
maintaining national competitiveness and making environmental
innovations. Ecological sustainability is remoulded as an economic
growth ideology, and Vice-President Gore sounds the alarm about
the Japanese challenge on the environmental front to American
business and society:
in almost every area of technology relevant to the environmental
crisis, Japan is boldly taking the lead. What is maddening to many
Americans ... is that almost all of the key discoveries that led to
these new technologies were made in the United States and then
ignored by industry and government alike. (Gore 1992: 335)
Japan, then, is eating America's lunch at the ecological products
counter just as it has done before at the consumer goods, steel,
electronics goods, automobile and optical goods tables. 'But', as
Gore asserts, 'all is not yet lost: what appears as still another
example of a serious deficiency in America's ability to compete may
actually be an ideal opportunity for the United States to address a
pervasive and persistent structural problem in its approach to
economic competition' (ibid.).
Sustaining nature by preserving ecosystems in this green geo-
politics now becomes just one more goal among many in a new
Strategic Environmental Initiative, focused on 'the development of
environmentally appropriate technologies' (ibid.). Unsustainable
development is largely caused, Gore suggests, by older, inappro-
priate, anti-environmental technologies. A global initiative is needed
to find substitutes for them, and the United States must lead this
campaign to heal its economy and, of course, the environment.
Gore says the right things about changing our economic assump-
tions about mindless consumption, but his bottom line for sus-
tainable development is found in sustaining American business,
industry and science. The Strategic Environmental Initiative is
primarily strategic, and only secondarily environmental, as it seeks
to centre America on a new collective economic purpose which
will demand the kind of determined effort that made the Apollo
Program so productive and inspiring. The new program could
reinvigorate our ability to excel at applied as well as basic research,
spur gains in productivity, lead to innovations, breakthroughs, and
spin offs in other fields of enquiry, and reestablish the United
States as the world's leader in applied technology. (Ibid .. B7)
Environmentality as Green Governmentality 133
As the world's leading capitalist economy, Gore concludes, 'the
United States has a special obligation to discover effective ways of
using the power of market forces to help save the global environ-
ment' (ibid. 34 7).
In the final analysis, ecologically sustainable development, as
Makower observes, boils down to a new form of economic
rationality. It is 'a search for the lowest-cost method of reducing
the greatest amount of pollution' in the turnover of production
processes (Makower 1993: 57). Almost magically, sustainable
development can become primarily an economic, not merely an
environmental, calculation. The initiatives taken by businesses to
prevent pollution, reduce waste, and maximize energy efficiencies
are to be supported. But even in taking these steps, businesses are
reaffirming most of the existing premisses of technology utiliza-
tion, managerial centralization, and profit generation now driving
advanced corporate capitalism.
This manoeuvre is done not just to preserve Nature, mollify
green consumers, or respect Mother Earth; it is also done to
enhance corporate profits, national productivity and state power,
because 'the e-factor' is not merely ecology - it also is efficiency,
excellence, education, empowerment, enforcement and economics.
As long as implementing ecological changes in business means imple-
menting an alternative array of instrumentally rational policies,
like finding lower-cost methods of energy use, supply management,
labour utilization, corporate communication, product generation
or pollution abatement, sustainable green development maintains
the economy. Gore's new stewardship through sustainable develop-
ment may not be strictly ecological, but it strives to cultivate the
image, at least, of being environmentally responsible (Piasecki and
Asmus 1990). This compromise allows one to work 'deliberately
and carefully, with an aim toward long-term cultural change,
always with an eye toward the bottom line, lest you get frustrated
and discouraged in the process', so that these 'environment-
ally responsible businesses can be both possible and profitable'
(Makower 1993: 228).
Eco-Knowledge as Theory /Practice
Geo-power in green geopolitics counters the logic of geo-economic
industrialism by moving liberal welfare states on to an ecological
footing, redeputizing some of their administrative personnel as
134 Timothy W. Luke
bureaucratic greens. Because most consumers are willing particip-
ants in a dysfunctional geo-economic civilization not yet subject to
full-blown green governance, they must be forced to be functional
in accord with the regulatory goals of geo-environmentalizing
bureaucracies. Entirely new identities built around new collective
ends, like survival or sustainability, can be elaborated by systems
of eco-knowledge.
Inasmuch as economic and governmental techniques are a cen-
tral focus of political struggle today, the complex interactions of
populations with their surroundings in political economies and
ecologies are forcing states to develop eco-knowledge in order to
redefine what is within their competence. co-knowledge codes
indicate that, to survive now, it is not enough for states merely
to maintain legal jurisdiction over their allegedly sovereign territ-
ories. As new limits to growth constantly are being discovered,
states are forced to guarantee their populations' productivity in
every environmental setting encompassed by the global political
economy (e.g. Hardin 1993).
Governmental discourses must methodically mobilize particular
assumptions, codes and procedures to enforce specific understand-
ings of the economy and society. Yet, as geo-powered ecological
ethics about Earth in the balance will show, eco-knowledges work
just fine at performing these same tasks. Indeed, they can generate
new administrative 'truths' or managerial 'knowledges' that will
denominate codes of power with significant reserves of popular
legitimacy. Inasmuch as they classify, organize and legitimate larger
understandings of ecological reality, such discourses can authorize
or invalidate the options for constructing particular institutions,
practices or concepts in society at large. They simultaneously frame
the emergence of new collective subjectivities - global ecologies
as dynamic bio-economic systems - and collections of subjects
individuals as bio-economic units in such global systems - to protect
the environment. Still, as the Wise Use/Property Rights movement
reveals, one must remember how extensively the meanings of eco-
logical subjectivity are still being contested on the Left and the
Right. Ecological subjectivity can be expressed in small-scale ex-
periments by autonomous human beings following their own local
political agendas in many bio-regional communities, or it may be
retooled in vast statist programmes for interacting within Global
Marshall Plans, depending upon which interpretations are em-
powered where (Foucault 1976: 143-4). Whether traditional
geo-economic or newer geopolitic discourses, articulated in the
tnv1ronmentallly as Green Governmentol1ly
Clinton/Gore register of green engagement with transnational
security threats and sustainable prosperity projects, prevail is still
to be determined by the political struggles of the 1990s. None the
less, sustainable development discourses remain a key form of
eco-knowledge on this embattled terrain.
Sustainable development discourse emerged at a historically
particular juncture in recent history: the early 1970s. At this time,
the popular fascination with ecology after the first Earth Day
celebrations in 1970, the elite preoccupation with resource scarcities
in the midst of OPEC's manipulation of oil prices and supplies
during 1971-3, and the apparent abatement of superpower com-
petition in US/USSR detente around 1972-5 allowed new global
agendas to be advanced above and beyond Cold War debates
fixed upon East/West rivalry. In these more North/South-centred
discussions, questions were raised about the survivability of con-
temporary industrial civilization in light of tremendous material
waste in the overdeveloped North's economies of affluence, as well
as pressing material shortages arising out of the underdeveloped
South's population explosions. Even though they are crudely formul-
ated, these preoccupations are captured in The Limits to Growth
report of The Club of Rome in 1972. Not anticipating any social
learning or systemic shocks that might change behaviour, The
Limits to Growth experts concluded:
If the present growth trends in world population, industrialisa-
tion, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue
unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached
sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable
result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both
population and industrial capacity. (Meadows et al. 1972: 27)
Such conclusions, despite all of their methodological murkiness,
drew attention. Sustainable development is one response to 'the
limits to growth' phenomenon, but it assumes that the limits to
growth are quite flexible. Indeed, sustainable growth is anti-
cipated by envisioning the creation of a much more complex
global system with many contradictory trends working simultane-
ously in favour of conservation and waste, ecological care and anti-
environmental neglect, social change and institutional inertia (e.g.
Brown et al. 1995). The advocates of sustainable development, in
turn, want to problematize these tendencies, while presenting new
tactics and values to mitigate or eliminate them.
136 Timothy W. Luke
The concept of sustainability grew in popularity during the
1980s with the publication of the World Conservation Strategy
(IUCN 1980). This programme asserted that the sound mainten-
ance of the world's ecology could be sustained only if three
objectives were met, namely: 'the utilisation of good cropland for
crops rather than cattle raising, the ecologically sound manage-
ment of crops, and the protection of watershed forests' (Redclift
1987: 21). Even now, however, few objectives identified by sus-
tainable development theory are being effectively realized, in either
developed or developing countries, because 'the environment' and
'development' have been treated for so long as two poles of an
unbreakable antimony. As the World Commission on Environment
and Development (also known as the Brundtland Commission)
noted in its 1987 report, economic growth advocates are often
not terribly interested in seeing more environmental regulations,
and the 'standard agenda' of policy making for many environ-
mental groups suffers from many errors and biases, including the
following.
First, it is usually the effects of environmental problems that are
addressed in public documents, as we have seen. Second, environ-
mental issues are usually separated from development issues and
frequently pigeon-holed under 'conservation'. Third, the Commis-
sion complains that critical issues, such as acid rain or pollution,
are usually discussed in isolation, rather as if solutions to these
problems can be found in discrete areas of policy. Fourth, the
Commission criticises what it sees as a narrow view of environ-
mental policy, which relegates the 'environment' to a secondary
status it is 'added on' to other, more important development
issues. (Brundtland 1985, cited in Redclift 1987: 14)
In addition to changing economic growth strategies in the North,
the goal of sustainable development discourses was to find a suc-
cessful strategy for underdeveloped Second, Third and Fourth
World countries to attain economic growth.
Given these goals, the definition of sustainable development
advanced by the World Commission on Environment and Devel-
opment in its 1987 report, Our Common Future, remains very
instructive:
Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable - to
ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromis-
ing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The
Environmentality as Green Governmentality 137
concept of sustainable development does imply limits - not abso-
lute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of techno-
logy and social organisation on environmental resources and by the
ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities ...
technology and social organisation can be both managed and im-
proved to make way for a new era of economic growth. (Brundtland
1987: 8)
With this declaration, one group of environmental experts, in
answering a call by the General Assembly of the United Nations,
used their special investigative powers to refocus the power/know-
ledge nexus in environmental affairs. As its chairperson, Gro
Harlem Brundtland declares in the report's foreword:
[T]he environment does not exist as a sphere separate from human
actions, ambitions, and needs, and attempts to define it in isolation
from human concerns have given the very word 'environment' a
connotation of naivete in some political circles ... but the 'envir-
onment' is where we all live; and 'development' is what we all do
in attempting to improve our lot within that abode. The two are
inseparable. (Ibid. ix)
In the ceo-knowledge shared by the Brundtland Commission, the
environment is not merely the realm of 'nature' somehow separ-
ate, distinct and autonomous from 'humanity'. Rather, the environ-
ment is where 'we all' (humanity) actually 'live', and development
is what 'we all do' (human activities, designs, organizations) to
'improve our lot' (material satisfactions of human needs) within
that abode (nature) (ibid.). Environment and development, then, are
inseparable. Deep ecologists, ceo-feminists, Buddhist economists,
bio-regionalists, and other nature preservationists might well argue
that material simplicity, or perhaps even poverty, is morally desir-
able for the Earth to survive. The Commission's ceo-knowledge,
to the contrary, holds that 'widespread poverty is no longer inevit-
able. Poverty is not only an evil in itself, but sustainable develop-
ment requires meeting the basic needs of all and extending to all
the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations for a better life. A world
in which poverty is endemic will always be prone to ecological
and other catastrophes' (ibid. 8). Humanity must not choose to
live in the poor-house, opting not to improve its economic lot
to preserve the Earth. Such moves would be evil themselves;
the world must instead, ironically, become more, not less, eco-
nomically developed to escape ecological disasters.
138 Timothy W. Luke
In advancing this agenda, the Brundtland Commission expresses
a central logic for eco-knowledge needed by any environmental
protection agency; it assumes that everything it stipulates can be
known - how to define aspirations for a better life, what con-
stitute basic needs, when to manage economic growth, why to
improve technology, where to organize environmental resources,
who is to judge the ability of of biosphere to absorb human pres-
sures - is known, or is, at least, knowable. And since these
eco-knowledges exist, all that existing state regimes need to do
is to mobilize the moral-political will needed to operationalize
this knowledge about how geo-power works: forcing the rich to
become frugal, transferring resources to the poor, enhancing citizen
participation in collective decision making, slowing population
growth everywhere, creating harmony between the ecology and
the economy of the environment where humanity lives. Like any
national environmental protection agency, the World Commission
concludes, sustainable development will never be reducible to
a steady state or harmonious balance, '[b]ut rather a process
of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of
investments, the orientation of technological development, and
institutional change are made consistent with future as well as
present needs ... in the final analysis, sustainable development
must rest on political will' (ibid. 9).
The institutional gaps in political will, which now prevent this
kind of change, are legion. Because existing national governments
are slow to respond, selfishly nationalistic in their response,
financially incapable of responding, or unable to compel those
responsible for ecological damage to respond to their directives,
new international bodies, like the World Commission on Environ-
ment and Development, must somehow intervene.
Nevertheless, what is 'eco-knowledge'? How does it come to be
known, and by whom, and about what? Is sustainable develop-
ment discourse anything more than an eco-knowledge of/by/for
the modern capitalist mode of production, which became fully
transnational in scope and impact only during the 1960s. As the
geo-power talk of the Clinton administration illustrates, it is the
sustainability of this capitalist order, working finally on a truly
transnational scale, which now preoccupies sustainable develop-
ment. A joint declaration of the International Union for the Con-
servation of Nature, the United Nations Environmental Programme,
and the World Wildlife Fund in 1991 defined sustainable develop-
ment as 'improving the quality of human life while living within
Environmentality as Green Governmentolity 139
the carrying capacity of the supporting ecosystems' (IUCN 1991).
This sort of statement, however, only shows how discourse can
acquire strange articulations in the talk of non-governmental
organization (NGO) environmental experts. Earth in this frame is
reduced to 'the supporting ecosystems of human life'. It has some
apparently determinable 'carrying capacity' with certain upper
limits, and these are to be set by techno-economic interventions
aimed at improving 'the quality of human life'. But, the geological
time-scale being evoked here also spurs one to ask: all or some
humans' lives, what kind of quality, which improvements, living
now within what carrying capacity, which supporting ecosystems?
Lest we be chronocentric, how do we know that early Neolithic
communities, late Pleistocene hunter clans, or the first Meso-
potamian cities are not what ought to be sustainably developed,
since they obviously lived most of the time within their ecosys-
temic limits? Already, ideological constructs like 'quality of life',
'standards of living' and 'improving human life' are poking
through discursive tropes to channel the identification of nature
as an ecological support system or carrying capacity which may
need continuous improvement.
One must wonder about eco-knowledge as 'sustainable devel-
opment'. Its articulation already begs its own definition inasmuch
as its first term always remains tacit. Some take sustainable devel-
opment to mean ecologically sustainable. Others just as rightly
see it as economically sustainable, technologically sustainable or
politically sustainable. Chambers of commerce and ministries of
industry in the 1990s glibly adopt sustainable development dis-
course as their own: this dam, that factory, these highways, those
power lines must be built to sustain, not nature, but job creation,
population growth, industrial output or service delivery. Such ele-
ments improve human life and enhance its ecosystems' carrying
capacities. This construction, however, clashes with ecological inter-
pretations in which humans allegedly are seeking 'social and mater-
ial progress within the constraints of sustainable resource use and
environmental management'; and, as a result, 'renewable resources
(plants, trees, animals and soil) will be used no faster than they are
generated; non-renewable resources (such as fossil fuels and metals)
will be used no faster than acceptable substitutes can be found;
and pollutants will be generated no faster than can be absorbed
and neutralised by the environment' (McMichael 1993: 309).
As a social goal, sustainability is fraught with unresolved
questions. Sustainable for how long: a generation, one century,
140 Timothy W. luke
a millennium, ten millennia? Sustainable at what level of human
appropriation: individual households, local villages, major cities,
entire nations, global economies? Sustainable for whom: all
humans alive now, all humans that will ever live, all living beings
living at this time, all living beings that will ever live? Sustainable
under what conditions: contemporary transnational capitalism,
low-impact Neolithic hunter-and-gather societies, some future
space-faring global empire? Sustainable development of what: per-
sonal income, social complexity, gross national product, material
frugality, individual consumption, ecological biodiversity? For the
most part, few of these questions are even being adequately con-
ceptualized, much less thoroughly addressed in the debates over
sustainable development.
To begin with, eco-knowledges often look to a planetary scale
for answers. How much more can human beings sustainably take
from nature? One can appraise this sustainability issue roughly in
terms of human impact on the planet's biosphere. Vitousek and
colleagues look at the biosphere's net product of photosynthesis,
seeing net primary production (NPP) as all energy transformed
via photosynthesis by primary producers (photosynthesizing life-
forms) minus energy they use to reproduce themselves (Vitousek
et al. 1986). By the mid-1980s, human beings were consuming
40 per cent of terrestrial NPP, and 25 per cent of total NPP {includ-
ing marine, aquatic and terrestrial sources). These figures, in turn,
reflect not only levels of direct resource utilization, but also levels
of indirect resource degradation due to anthropogenic causes (ibid.).
Two more doublings of human population, again assuming only a
1980s level of resource use, would mathematically exhaust all
NPP needed by all other life-forms (ibid.). While this event may
be one or two generations away, and it would obviously be the
ultimate catastrophe of sustainability, it seems apparent that
we are already at a critical juncture of sustainability. Rich com-
munities and powerful states still have the clout to buy and/or
force their way past some of the material constraints: this is 'the
e-factor' for Clinton and Gore. But there are millions living in
deforested, desertified, eroded and salinated zones of Africa, Latin
America, Asia and Europe Rwandans, Sudanese, Chadians,
Bolivians, Brazilians, Belizians, Cambodians, Bengalis, Kashimiris,
Ukrainians, Russians, Armenians - already suffering from eco-
logically unsustainable development in their territorial spaces. Soon,
unless nature is preserved, will everyone be a Rwandan, will every
place be in Aralsk, will everything be Love Canal? This is Secretary
Environmentolity as Green Governmentolity 141
of State Christopher's transnational security threat, so now the
CIA, DIA, State Department and Defense Department are develop-
ing 'early warning systems' to detect environmental catastrophes
(e.g. Greenhouse 1995).
Yet, eco-knowledge of nature is tenuous. By what rules can the
environment be somehow gauged as normal or at least subjected
to normalizing criteria that will reveal year-in, year-out predict-
able levels of rain, soil creation, timber growth, fish population,
agricultural output or human settlement. Once these factors have
been identified and tracked, ecological monitors may watch such
variables, and maybe manage the global ecosystem. But other
scientific analyses indicate that there may be incredible variations
in all these ecological factors from year to year or decade by
decade. Nature may well be far more chaotic, much less pre-
dictable, and not as normal as many scientists hitherto have
believed. As a result, technocratic efforts to capture its energies as
geo-power in normalizing models, which artlessly assume levels of
docile predictability and stable replicability in ecological dynamics,
may reduce any Strategic Environmental Initiative to administer
nature to complete meaninglessness.
In some sectors or at a few sites, ecologically more rational
participation in some global commodity chains may well occur as
a by-product of sustainable development. Over-logged tropical
forests might be saved for biodiversity-seeking genetic engineers;
over-fished reefs could be shifted over to ceo-tourist hotel destina-
tions; over-grazed prairies may see bison return as a meat industry
animal. In the time-space compression of postmodern informa-
tional capitalism, many businesses are more than willing to feed
these delusions with images of environmentally responsible trade,
green industrialization, or ecologically sustainable commerce, in
order to create fresh markets for new products.
None the less, do these policies contribute to ecologically sus-
tainable development? or do they simply shift commodity produc-
tion from one fast track to another slower one, while increasing
opportunities for more local people to gain additional income
to buy more commodities that further accelerate transnational
environmental degradation? or do they empower a new group of
outside experts following doctrines of engagement to intervene in
local communities and cultures so that their geo-power may serve
Global Marshall Plans, not unlike how it occurred over and over
again during Cold War-era experiments at inducing agricultural
development, industrial development, community development,
142 Timothy W. Luke
social development and technological development? Now that the
Cold War is over, as the Clinton/Gore green geopolitics suggests,
does the environment simply substitute for Communism as a source
and site of strategic contestation, justifying rich/powerful/indus-
trial states' intervention in poor/weak/agricultural regions to serve
the interests of outsiders who want to control how forests, rivers,
farms or wildlife are used?
Enviro-Discipline at Work
The ideas advanced by various exponents of sustainable devel-
opment discourse are intriguing. And, perhaps if they were
implemented in the spirit that their originators intended, the eco-
logical situation of the Earth might improve. Yet, even after two
decades of heeding the theory and practice of such eco-knowledge,
sustainable development mostly has not happened, and it most
likely will not happen, even though its advocates continue to be
celebrated as visionaries. Encircled by grids of ecological alarm,
sustainability discourse tells us that today's allegedly unsustainable
environments need to be disassembled, recombined and subjected
to the disciplinary designs of expert management. Enveloped in such
enviro-disciplinary frames, any environment could be redirected
to fulfil the ends of other economic scripts, managerial directives
and administrative writs denominated in sustainability values.
Sustainability, then, engenders its own forms of 'environmentality',
which would embed alternative instrumental rationalities beyond
those of pure market calculation in the policing of ecological spaces.
Initially, one can argue that the modern regime of bio-power
formation described by Foucault was not especially attentive to
the role of nature in the equations of biopolitics (Foucault 1976:
138-42). The controlled tactic of inserting human bodies into the
machineries of industrial and agricultural production as part and
parcel of strategically adjusting the growth of human popula-
tions to the development of industrial capitalism, however, did
generate systems of bio-power. Under such regimes, power/know-
ledge systems bring 'life and its mechanisms into the realm of
explicit calculations', making the manifold disciplines of knowledge
and discourses of power into new sorts of productive agency as
part of the 'transformation of human life' (ibid. 145 ). Once this
threshold was crossed, social experts began to recognize how the
tnv1ronmenta111y as Green l..:iovernmentahty 143
environmental interactions of human economics, politics and
technologies continually put all human beings' existence as living
beings in question.
Foucault divides the environmental realm into two separate but
interpenetrating spheres of action: the biological and the histor-
ical. For most of human history, the biological dimension, or forces
of nature acting through disease and famine, dominated human
existence, with the ever present menace of death. Developments in
agricultural technologies, as well as hygiene and health techniques,
however, gradually provided some relief from starvation and plague
by the end of the eighteenth century. As a result, the historical
dimension began to grow in importance, as 'the development of
the different fields of knowledge concerned with life in general,
the improvement of agricultural techniques, and the observations
and measures relative to man's life and survival contributed to
this relaxation: a relative control over life averted some of the
imminent risks of death' (ibid. 142). The historical then began to
envelop, circumscribe or surround the biological, creating inter-
locking disciplinary expanses for 'the environmental'. And these
environmentalized settings quickly came to dominate all forms of
concrete human reality: 'in the space of movement thus conquered,
and broadening and organising that space, methods of power and
knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and under-
took to control and modify them' (ibid.). While Foucault does not
explicitly define these spaces, methods and knowledges as 'envir-
onmental', these enviro-disciplinary manoeuvres are the origin of
many aspects of environmentalization. As biological life is refracted
through economic, political and technological existence, 'the facts of
life' pass into fields of control for any discipline of eco-knowledge
and spheres of intervention for the management of geo-power.
Foucault recognized how these shifts implicitly raised 'ecolo-
gical issues' to the extent that they disrupted and redistributed the
understandings provided by the classical episteme for defining
human interactions with nature. Living became environmentalized
as humans, or 'a specific living being, and specifically related to
other living beings' (ibid. 143 ), began to articulate their historical
and biological life in profoundly new ways from within artificial
cities and mechanical modes of production. Environmentalization
arose from 'this dual position of life that placed it at the same
time outside history, in its biological environment, and inside
human historicity, penetrated by the latter's techniques of know-
ledge and power' (ibid.). Strangely, even as he makes this linkage,
144 Timothy W. Luke
Foucault does not develop these ecological insights, suggesting
that 'there is no need to lay further stress on the proliferation of
political technologies that ensued, investing the body, health, modes
of subsistence and habitation, living conditions, the whole space
of existence' (ibid. 143-4).
Even so, Foucault here found the conjunction needed for 'the
environment' to emerge as an eco-knowledge formation and/or a
cluster of eco-power tactics for an enviro-discipline. As human
beings begin consciously to wager their life as a species on the
products of their biopolitical strategies and technological systems,
a few recognize that they are also wagering the lives of other, or
all, species as well. While Foucault regards this shift as just one
of many lacunae in his analysis, everything changes as human
bio-power systems interweave their operations in the biological
environment, penetrating the workings of many ecosystems with the
techniques of knowledge and power. Once human power/know-
ledge formations become the foundation of industrial society's
economic development, they also become a major factor in all
terrestrial life-forms' continued physical survival. Eco-knowledge
about geo-power thus becomes through enviro-disciplines a stra-
tegic technology that reinvests human bodies their means of
health, modes of subsistence, and styles of habitation integrating
the whole space of existence - with bio-historical significance. It
then reframes them within their bio-physical environments, which
are now also filled with various animal and plant bodies posi-
tioned in geo-physical settings, as essential elements in managing
the health of any human ecosystem's carrying capacity.
As Foucault portrays the arts of government, they are essen-
tially concerned with how to introduce rational economy in the
management of things into the political practices of the state.
Government becomes in the eighteenth century the designation of
a 'level of reality, a field of intervention, through a series of
complex processes' in which 'government is the right disposition
of things' (Foucault 199la: 93). It evolves as an elaborate social
formation, or 'a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government, which
has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechan-
ism the apparatuses of security' (ibid. 102). Most significantly,
Foucault sees state authorities mobilizing governmentality to bring
about 'the emergence of population as a datum, as a field of inter-
vention and as an objective of governmental techniques, and the
process which isolates the economy as a specific sector of reality'
(ibid.), so that now 'the population is the object that government
tnv1ronmenta111y as l?reen l?overnmentallly 4 ~
must take into account in all its observations and savoirs, in
order to be able to govern effectively in a rational and conscious
manner' (ibid. 100). The networks of continuous, multiple, complex
interaction between populations (their increase, longevity, health,
etc.), territory (its expanse, resources, control, etc.) and wealth
(its creation, productivity, distribution, etc.) are sites of govern-
mentalizing rationality to manage the productive interaction of
these forces.
2
Individuals and groups are enmeshed within the tactics and
strategies of more complex forms of power, whose institutions, pro-
cedures, analyses and techniques loosely manage mass populations
and their surroundings in a highly politicized symbolic and material
economy. While it is still an inexact set of bearings, Foucault
asserts that 'it is the tactics of government which make possible
the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the
competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the
private, and so on; thus the state can only be understood in its
survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of govern-
mentality' (ibid. 103).
Because governmental techniques are always the central focus
of political struggle and contestation, the interactions of populations
with their natural surroundings in highly politicized economies
compel regimes to constantly redefine what is within their com-
petence throughout the modernizing process (Luke 1994a, 1994b).
To survive in the fast capitalist world of the 1990s, it is not enough
for territorial states merely to maintain legal jurisdiction over
their allegedly sovereign territories - a fact that geo-economics
aggressively celebrates. As ecological limits to growth are either
discovered or defined in sustainability discourses, states are forced
to make good upon an almost impossible obligation: namely, guar-
anteeing their populations' fecundity and productivity in the total
setting of a global political economy by becoming 'environmental
protection agencies'. To develop these protected environments
and their increasing populations, as the Clinton/Gore vision of
green governmentality shows, economic growth must not be
limited, but rather become sustainable (Brown et al. 1991).
Enviro-discipline, then, must methodically mobilize particular
assumptions, codes and procedures to enforce specific understandings
of the economy and society. They generate eco-knowledges, like
those embedded in notions of sustainability or development, that
also constitute significant reserves of legitimacy and effectiveness.'
Inasmuch as they classify, organize, and vet larger understandings
146 Timothy W. Luke
of reality, such discourses can authorize or invalidate the pos-
sibilities for constructing particular institutions, practices or goods
in society at large. They simultaneously frame the emergence of
collective subjectivities - nations as dynamic populations - and
collections of subjects - individuals as units in such nations (Luke
1993a). The parameters of enviro-discipline, in turn, can be re-
evaluated as 'the element in which are articulated the effects of a
certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of know-
ledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to
a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and
reinforces the effects of this power' (Foucault 1975: 29). In green
governmentality, the disciplinary articulations of sustainability and
development centre on establishing and enforcing 'the right dis-
position of things' between humans and their environment.
The application of enviro-discipline expresses the authority of
eco-knowledgeable, geo-powered forces to police the fitness of all
biological organisms and the health of their natural environments.
Master concepts, like 'survival' or 'sustainability' for species and
their habitats, empower these masterful conceptualizers to inscribe
the biological/cultural/economic order of the Earth's many territ-
ories as an elaborate array of environments, requiring continu-
ous enviro-discipline to guarantee ecological fitness. The survival
agenda, as Oates argues, 'applies simultaneously to individuals,
populations, communities, and ecosystems; and it applies simulta-
neously to the present and the future' (Oates 1989: 148).
When approached through this mind-set, the planet Earth
becomes an immense engine, or the human race's 'ecological
life-support system', which has 'with only occasional localised
failures' provided 'services upon which human society depends
consistently and without charge' (Cairns 1995). As this environ-
mentalized engine, the Earth then generates 'ecosystem services',
or those derivative products and functions of natural systems that
human societies perceive as valuable (Westmen 1978). This complex
is what must survive; human life will continue if such survival-
promoting services continue. They include the generation of soils,
the regeneration of plant nutrients, capture of solar energy, con-
version of solar energy into biomass, accumulation/purification/
distribution of water, control of pests, provision of a genetic library,
maintenance of breathable air, control of micro- and macro-
climates, pollination of plants, diversification of animal species,
development of buffering mechanisms in catastrophes and aes-
thetic enrichment (Cairns 1995). As an environmental engine, the
cnv1ronmenraury as l..:>reen l..:>overnmenraury 14/
planet's ecology requires ceo-engineers to guide its sustainable use,
and systems of green governmentality must be adduced to monitor
and manage the system of systems which produce all these robust
services. Just as the sustained use of technology 'requires that it be
maintained, updated and changed periodically', so too does the
'sustainable use of the planet require that we not destroy our
ecological capital, such as old-growth forests, streams and rivers
(with their associated biota), and other natural amenities' (ibid.
3). Survival is the key value.
This command to go anywhere at anytime to defend the cause
of survival may direct enviro-discipline to pursue other equally
problematic values on a global level with the full force of state
power and positive science: namely, stability, diversity and inter-
dependence. A powerful nation-state is no longer empowered
simply to defend its territory to protect its population. As Clinton
and Gore claim, it must now also identify and police the sur-
roundings in all of its many operational environments, to guar-
antee ecological stability, biological diversity and environmental
interdependence. Because some states are more sustainable than
others, their survival imperatives may become guide-lines for envir-
onmental colonialism. In order to survive, the state may choose to
impose the status of a green belt, forest preserve, nature reserva-
tion or environmental refuge upon other societies as part of its
Strategic Environmental Initiatives.
To serve and protect the values of the ecosystem, Oates claims
that the ecological ethic of stability as 'a steady state' will not
result in 'stagnation'. Such an outcome would, of course, offend
the growth fixations of consumers and citizens living in liberal
capitalist democracies. On the contrary, he believes that it would
mean 'directing growth and change in nondestructive ways, gen-
erated within the standing pattern that supports life' (Oates 1989:
152). But who directs growth and change for whom? Is there a
standing pattern that directs life? Does anyone really know enough
about it to direct growth in accord with it? In practice, Global
Marshall Planners in Washington could use ecological criteria to
impose their sustainable development of economic growth at home
as they also force an ecological steady state upon others abroad.
If India's hundred millions stay on foot or bicycles, then Germany's
tens of millions would stay in their cars. If Indonesia keeps growing
trees, then Japan can keep consuming lumber. And if Brazil's
ranchers keep turning rain forest into cattle ranges, then America's
suburbanites will get their cheeseburgers.
148 Timothy W. Luke
Obviously, an enviro-disciplinary 'steadying state', designed
and managed by green bureaucrats, will be needed to enforce
environmentalized stable states of dynamic ecological equilibrium,
which Oates identifies as the sine qua non of stability. Ironically,
then, this green governmentality, as it stabilizes everyone's fitness
and health, should restructure 'populations and growth' by plan-
ning for sustainable patterns in timber harvesting, oil production,
agricultural output, land use and consumer marketing, to contain
but not end the growth fetishism of mass consumption capital-
ism. Oates concurs with Gore that all geo-economic national mar-
kets run on a paradox: 'whatever is achieved instantly becomes
inadequate when measured against the ethic of continual con-
sumption. Satisfaction only creates dissatisfaction, in an accelerat-
ing cycle. "More" is an unrealisable goal' (ibid. 155). Since these
consumerist values cause more and more damage, the ecological
strategies of enviro-discipline countries must enforce a new social
commitment to their opposites: namely, the willing acceptance of
'less' as the moral basis for new ecological values on a social and
an individual level. For survival's sake, 'the ethical consciousness
of earth's human population must therefore be as ecologically
well regulated as the size of the earth's population' (ibid. 154 ).
Protecting the whole, in the practices of enviro-discipline, might
also follow the strange credo of biophilia, or love of life, in a
framework of biocentrism, or placing earth-life-nature beyond
anthropocentrism at the core of green thought and bureaucratic
practice. If environments are to be protected, then all the life
within them would, of course, anchor the practical forms of human
engagement with the world. Yet, this emotional commitment
to 'Life', or life seen as the super-organism of all life on Earth,
might entail condemning large groups of humanity in acts of clear
misanthropy by containing, destroying or limiting traditional forms
of human living to guarantee ecological survival. It is not that
enviro-disciplinarians love their lives less, but that they love all
other animal and plant life more - so they must reason as they
prevent all human communities from developing to enhance envir-
onmental survivability. This contradiction actually makes sense,
because it places limits on geo-economic excesses whenever the
survivalist steady state operatives see everyday policies threaten-
ing non-human life's survival and stability. 'Where survival of the
whole seems threatened', Oates concludes, 'as in issues of extinc-
tion and pollution, then the basic ethos of protecting the whole
predominates' (ibid. 192).
tnv1ronmentollfy as (.;reen (jovernmentohty 14Y
Conclusion
Foucault is correct about the modern state. It is not 'an entity
which was developed above individuals, ignoring what they are
and even their very existence', because it has indeed evolved 'as a
very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integ-
rated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped
in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific patterns'
(Foucault 1982: 214-15). Producing discourses of ecological
living, articulating designs of sustainable development, and pro-
pagating definitions of environmental literacy for contemporary
individuals simply adds new twists to the 'very specific patterns'
by which the state formation constitutes 'a modern matrix of
individualisation' (ibid. 215). The regime of bio-power, in turn,
operates through ethical systems of identity as much as it does
in the policy machinations of governmental bureaus within any
discretely bordered territory. Ecology merely echoes the effects
from 'one of the great innovations in the techniques of power in
the eighteenth century': namely, 'the emergence of "population"
as an economic and political problem' (Foucault 1976: 25).
Once demography emerges as a science of statist administration,
its statistical attitudes can diffuse into the numerical surveillance
of nature, or Earth and its non-human inhabitants, as well as the
study of culture, or society and its human members.
4
Government
and now, most importantly, statist ecology preoccupy themselves
with 'the conduct of conduct'. Previously, the ethical concerns
of family, community and nation guided how conduct was to be
conducted; but at this juncture, environment emerges as a ground
for normalizing individual behaviour. Environments are spaces
under police supervision, expert management or technocratic
control; hence, by taking environmentalistic agendas into the heart
of state policy, one finds the ultimate meaning of the police state
fulfilled. If the police, as they bind and observe space, are em-
powered to watch over religion, morals, health, supplies, roads,
town buildings, public safety, liberal arts, trade, factories, labour
supplies and the poor, then why not add ecology or the inter-
actions of organisms and their surroundings to the police zones of
the state? Here, the conduct of any person's envir01amental con-
duct becomes the initial limit on others' ecological enjoyments; so
too does the conduct of the social body's conduct require that the
state always be an effective 'environmental protection agency'.
150 Timothy W. Luke
The ecological domain is the ultimate domain of being, with the
most critical forms of life that states must now produce, protect
and police in eliciting bio-power: it is the centre of their enviro-
discipline, eco-knowledge, geo-power (Luke 1994a, 1994b).
Mobilizing biological power, then, accelerated after the 1970s,
along with global fast capitalism. Ecology became that formalized
disciplinary mode of paying systematic 'attention to the processes
of life ... to invest life through and through' (Foucault 1976:
139), in order to transform all living things into biological popu-
lations, so to develop transnational commerce. The tremendous
explosion of material prosperity on a global scale after 1973 would
not have been possible without ecology to guide 'the controlled
insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjust-
ment of the phenomena of population to economic processes' (ibid.
141 ). An anatomo-politics of all plants and animals emerges out of
ecology, through which environmentalizing resource managerial-
ists acquire 'the methods of power capable of optimising forces,
aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making
them more difficult to govern' (ibid.).
To move another step beyond Foucault's vision of human bio-
power, adjustment of the accumulation of environmentalized plants
and animals to that of capital is necessary to check unsustainable
growth. Yet, in becoming an essential sub-assembly for trans-
national economic development, ecological techniques of power
rationalize conjoining 'the growth of human groups to the expan-
sion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit',
inasmuch as population ecology, environmental science and range
management are now, in part, 'the exercise of bio-power in its many
forms and modes of application' (ibid.). Indeed, a postmodern con-
dition is perhaps reached when the life of all species is now wagered
in all of humanity's economic and political strategies. Ecology
emerges out of bio-history, circulating within 'the space for move-
ment thus conquered, and broadening and organising that space,
methods of power and knowledge' needed for enviro-disciplinary
interventions as the state 'assumed responsibility for the life pro-
cesses and undertook to control and modify them' (ibid. 101).
This chapter has explored only one path through the order of
things embedded in contemporary mainstream environmentalism.
Ultimately, it suggests that we cannot adequately understand gov-
ernmentality in present-day regimes, like the United States of
America, without seeing how many of its tactics, calculi or institu-
tions assume 'environmentalized' modes of operation as part and
r:::nv1ronmenramy a!> \..:7reen \..:7overnmenramy
1;:)1
parcel of ordinary practices of governance. Strategic Environmental
Initiatives are now standard operating procedures. To preserve
the political economy of high-technology production, many offices
of the American state must function as 'environmental protection
agencies', inasmuch as they continue to fuse a politics of national
security with an economics of continual growth, to sustain exist-
ing industrial ecologies of mass consumption with the wise use
of nature through private property rights. Conservationist ethics,
resource managerialism and green rhetorics, then, congeal as an
unusually cohesive power/knowledge formation, whose actions are
an integral element of this order's regime of normalization.
Notes
1 James Fallows (1989) pursues a similar line of argument.
2 The statistical surveillance regime of states, as Foucault maintains,
emerges alongside monarchical absolutism during the late seventeenth
century. Intellectual disciplines, ranging from geography and carto-
graphy to statistics and civil engineering, are mobilized to inventory
and organize the wealth of populations in territories by the state. For
additional discussion, see Burchell et al. 1991: 1-48. A very useful
example of sustainability thinking conjoined with professional-tech-
nical environmentality can be found in Trzyna 1995.
3 For a typical expression of sustainability discourse as a legitimation
code, see Young 1990.
4 For more elaboration of why state power must guarantee environ-
mental security, see Myers 1993.
Art and Foucauldian Heterotopias
Thomas Heyd
Introduction
An invisible grid with aboriginal boulder structures at its crossing
points is laid over the Northern Plains of North America. These
structures are aesthetically interesting arrangements of glacial
boulders that often call to mind wheels, and have been called
'medicine wheels'.
In the following I describe these structures and explain the
difficulties involved in their interpretation. In the process of clari-
fying their meaning for contemporary non-natives, I propose that
they be considered as art. In this connection, I briefly discuss,
Michel Foucault's paper 'Of Other Spaces' and the notion of
'heterotopia', and propose that these aboriginal boulder struc-
tures function as heterotopias. That is, in so far as these structures
are exquisitely suited to their places, they effectively question, and
even interrogate, all other sites located in the natural environment
of the Northern Plains.
Foucault introduces the expression 'heterotopia' in a little-known
text called 'Of Other Spaces', a translation of 'Des Espaces autres'
published in Architecture-Mouvement-Corztinuite in 1984, and
based on a lecture on architectural studies given in March 1967
(Foucault 1986). Although this paper is not pivotal in Foucault's
corpus, I suggest that its approach is consistent with his other works,
inasmuch as the notion of heterotopias developed there represents
resistance in the face of apparently overwhelming homogeniza-
tion. I claim that, in so far as these boulder structures are hetero-
topias, Foucault's conception can facilitate a new understanding
of them as well as of contemporary industrial interventions in
the land.
Art and t-oucauldian Heterotopias
Plains Boulder Structures: Medicine Wheels
'Medicine wheel' is the name given, since the late 1800s, to a kind
of boulder structure found in the Northern Plains of North Amer-
ica. The name has been applied in a generic manner to boulder
structures that are relatively similar to the Bighorn Wheel on Medi-
cine Mountain in the American state of Wyoming, in distinction
to smaller, less complex stone circle structures such as those often
called 'teepee rings'. Significantly, the name 'wheel', although used
in contemporary classification, is misleading if considered as an
indication of the image that its original builders may have had,
because wheels were probably unknown in the Americas before
the arrival of Europeans.
Medicine wheels, furthermore, are usually not completely cir-
cular; instead of radial symmetry, some of these structures have a
tendency towards bilateral symmetry a feature common to all
the vertebrates that were known to the Plains Indians (Wilson
1981: 346-7). After a careful survey of the diverse structures
usually called 'medicine wheels', John H. Brumley has offered the
following definition:
All medicine wheels consist of a combination of at least two of
the following three primary components: (a) a prominent centrally
located stone cairn of varying size; (b) one or more concentric
stone rings of generally, circular shape; and/or (c) two or more stone
lines radiating outward from a central origin point, central cairn or
the margins of a stone ring. (Brumley 1988: 3)
1
Medicine wheels are often situated on knolls overlooking the
prairie, and are mostly found in Alberta and Saskatchewan (both in
Canada), and less frequently in Montana and northern Wyoming.
The majority are probably accretional, having achieved their present
shapes through additions over a long period of time. Although
some medicine wheels are of very recent origin - at least one is
from this century - others are of great age; the original installa-
tion of the Majorville wheel in southern Alberta, for example,
seems to date back 5,000 years.
There is great diversity of form among the 67 structures exam-
ined by Brumley. Although generally not discussed in these terms,
medicine wheels often have considerable aesthetic interest. Some
of them are shaped like turtles, many resemble nerve-cells, and
154 Thomas Heyd
some seem fashioned on the model of sea-urchins. Much as in
non-figurative painting, values such as rhythm in the patterns and
spatial relations among the various elements contribute to their
aesthetic effect.
Considerable effort has been exerted to determine the meaning
and function of these structures. In some cases it has been pos-
sible to learn of the meaning they hold for the First Nations
people of the area. We know, for example, that the medicine
wheel of Steel (his full name was Ski-matsis: that is, Fire Steel), a
great Blood warrior, was built on the Blood Indian Reserve in
southern Alberta as a memorial in 1940 (Dempsey 1956). More-
over, reports from native consultants indicate that the Bighorn
Wheel may have been used for vision quests (Wilson 1981: 337-
8). None the less, the great age of many of these structures, and
the fact that there is considerable uncertainty about the identity of
the inhabitants of North American prairies at various points in
historic and prehistoric times (Forbis 1963), leaves the determina-
tion of the original meaning and function of the structures quite
unsettled.
The hypotheses posited range from the supposition that the
wheels served as 'stone age calendars' to the view that they had a
role in the periodic thirst dance, also called sun dance.
2
It is, of
course, quite possible that, given the variety of peoples with quite
diverse cultures who may have participated in the installation and
use of these structures, each wheel may have had multiple func-
tions (Wilson 1981: 336).
3
The combined picture created by the testimony of contem-
porary native people about the meaning of these structures for
them and by archeological research about their original functions
certainly contributes to the appreciation of these installations as
meaningfully inscribed, culturally structured entities; it saves us
from the ethnocentric supposition that the Northern Plains were
cultural wastelands, patiently awaiting their violent branding by
contemporary, maximum-yield, industrial ranching and farming
practices. None the less, neither native nor archeological accounts
fully plumb the significance of these sites for contemporary non-
native peoples in the region. Without reflection, such accounts,
moreover, are absorbed much too easily by the dominant culture
as entertaining but emasculated folklore. I propose that, from the
point of view of non-native Canadian and US culture, these struc-
tures should be considered as art.
Art and toucauldlan Meterotop1as
Plains Boulder Structures: Art
Prehistoric pictographs and petroglyphs generally are referred to as
'rock art', despite the general reluctance of archeologists to engage
themselves in their interpretation.
4
For example, while urging, in a
recent paper, a certain degree of caution in the interpretation of
the petroglyphs and pictographs found at Writing-On-Stone in
southern Alberta, Martin P.R. Magne and Michael Klassen (1991)
freely and repeatedly referred to these cultural manifestations in
terms of 'rock art'. Similarly, in a recent paper on southern African
pictographs J. F. Thackeray (1990) frequently refers to the mani-
festations in question as 'rock art'. Thackeray even notes that
'[t]he art has been referred to as "The San artistic achievement"',
without finding it necessary to raise the question as to whether
these cultural manifestations should be called 'art' (Thackeray
1990: 139).
It seems that the appropriateness of calling prehistoric cultural
manifestations 'art' becomes subject to examination only when
something other than pictographs and petroglyphs is under con-
sideration. Paul S. C. Tac;on (1991), for example, does consider
the legitimacy of calling certain prehistoric, Australian stone tools
'art'. He notes that the reluctance to consider these items as art
arises partially from the lack of 'a cross-cultural, non-biased de-
finition of art' (Tac;on 1991: 192). Without claiming to develop
limiting criteria for art, he suggests, none the less, that 'many forms
of stone tools produced over the past 6000 years in western Arnhem
Land' (Northern Territory, Australia) be considered as art, because
these tools 'have both aesthetic and symbolic value which influenced
their manufacture' (ibid. 194 ).
The literature dealing with the definition of art is large (Davies
1991; Sparshott 1982). Prima facie the range of options among
limiting criteria is great. For instance, some only admit as artworks
items created with the intention of making art; others require an
art-making tradition as a prerequisite for something to be a candid-
ate artwork. Presumably, if one settled on a particular definition,
one could reach a decision about whether the boulder structures
called medicine wheels should be considered art. Given the ongo-
ing debate regarding the nature of art, having to settle that ques-
tion would take us too far afield from our purpose. Here I would
like to side-step that debate and limit myself to the observation
that, given their aesthetic qualities and their potential for symbolic
156 Thomas Heyd
interpretation, there is as much reason to consider medicine wheels
'boulder art' as there is to call pictographs and petroglyphs 'rock
art'. Medicine wheels, moreover, share crucial family resemblances
with certain contemporary artworks in the category 'earthworks'
or 'land art', which lends further credibility to the proposal that
medicine wheels be considered art.
Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria and Richard
Long have made artworks that in various respects resemble medi-
cine wheels. Heizer's Five Conic Displacements, Double Negative
and Complex One, de Maria's Lightning Field, as well as Smith-
son's Spiral Jetty and Amarillo Ramp, are all located in remote,
relatively inaccessible locations in the American south-west. Like
medicine wheels, these works introduce marks into the landscape
which turn the surrounding land and sky into an all-encompassing
stage and mute audience. Some earthworks have more affinities
with medicine wheels than others, though. As has been noted in
the art-historical literature, works such as Heizer's and Smithson's
are best seen as extensions of minimalism and conceptual art.
Notably, when asked about the role of landscape in his decision
to move out of his New York studio into the Nevada desert,
Heizer replied that he had 'no interest in landscape in terms of
art ... American landscape art is one thing, but my work doesn't
have anything to do with that, it has to do with materials. I
went to those places for material' (Heizer and Brown 1984: 11).
Indeed, Complex One, the monumental Nevada earthwork re-
sembling Mayan pyramids, has been fitted with a 'plaza', located
in an excavated depression, intended to delete from view the
surrounding mountain ranges.
Richard Long's land art, by contrast, seeks integration with the
place in which it is situated. Besides considering his programmed
walks as art (sometimes he walks straight lines over hills and
creeks; sometimes he walks all the roads within a certain peri-
meter), he also builds stone circles and stone lines in remote loca-
tions. He says of these structures: 'These works are made of the
place, they are a re-arrangement of it and in time will be re-
absorbed by it' (Long 1986: 236). Like Heizer's works, his stone
circles and stone lines depend on local materials; but unlike Heizer's
works, Long's land art also achieves its standing from the char-
acter of the pre-existing place. Long does not attempt to separate
his pieces from the rest of the place, as Heizer does by excavating
and building obstacles to a clear view. Long builds his pieces with
the help of, and into, the place. In Long's works one indeed finds
Art and Foucauldian Heterotopias 157
strong resemblances to medicine wheels, which are also made
from the materials of the place, and which seem to be carefully
located so as to suit the pre-existing place.
My argument so far has been that it is reasonable to consider
medicine wheels as art. Recently, however, the interpretation by
non-native people of native or tribal artefacts as art has been
subjected to severe critique (Clifford 1988). For example, with
regard to the New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition
'"Primitivism" in Twentieth-Century Art' it has been argued that
the categorization of native or tribal artefacts as art is equivalent
to a co-optation of non-European cultures. The co-optation occurs
through a process of decontextualization that 'transforms cultural
objects into contentless forms that can be recontextualised by
another culture' (Traugott 1992: 42). James Clifford points out
that '[s]ince 1900 non-Western objects have generally been classi-
fied either as primitive art or ethnographic specimens' (Clifford
1988: 198). Either form of 'cultural salvage' fragments the integ-
rity of the artefacts in question.
The problem at hand seems to be related to the problem of
'Understanding a Primitive Society' debated nearly 30 years ago
by Peter Winch (1970) and Alasdair Macintyre (1970). The issue
in that debate concerned the manner in which the anthropologist
is to proceed if, once she has understood something in the host
culture's terms, she hopes to make it understood in her home
culture's terms. If, as is likely, there are concepts in one culture
that the other one fails to have, then some kind of 'salvage' opera-
tion seems inevitable. This is why it may have been tempting to
understand tribal artefacts 'either as primitive art or ethnographic
specimens'. The issue of interpretation (and 'salvage'), how-
ever, cannot be avoided once the existence of artefacts from
other cultures has been recognized. Clifford suggests that a non-
ethnocentric approach may consist in giving equal importance
to the contextual meaning that such artefacts have within the
host's, and the interpreter's cultural milieu.
Applied to our encounter with these boulder structures, Clifford's
suggestion implies that one should pursue both the contemporary
native and the original native meanings of these structures, and
also their significance to contemporary non-native peoples. The
native meanings may be established through consultation with
First Nations people and through the assessment of the archeolo-
gical records. I propose that, for a first approximation to the con-
temporary non-native significance of these structures, the exemplary
158 Thomas Heyd
integration in the landscape of these structures (which contrasts so
notably with most of the interventions in land of contemporary
industrial, exploitation-oriented users) should be taken into account.
I suggest that full recognition of these structures' integration
into the land may be facilitated by our recognition of them as
art. On the one hand, recognition as art should counteract the
obfuscating tendency to view these structures merely as quaint
'mysteries', and, on the other hand, undermine the temptation
to view them in a sterile manner as objects of merely 'empirical'
scientific investigation.
Plains Boulder Structures: Heterotopias
'Of Other Spaces'
Michel Foucault is primarily known for his work on the inter-
sections of power, knowledge and subjectivity. Very little of his
work directly addresses the notion of space (but see Foucault
1980f, 1984e). When questioned on this matter, Foucault at times
turned almost hostile to wards his interlocutors, although he later
admitted that these issues were quite relevant to his \\;'Ork (Foucault
1980f).
The role of space in the distribution of power becomes a topic
for Foucault mostly in the context of the panopticon, Jeremy
Bentham's architectural invention which makes possible the com-
plete surveillance of inmate populations (Foucault 1980b). Foucault
resists, however, suggestions that the architectural or geographical
arrangement of space may (pre)determine effects such as the oppres-
sion or liberation of individuals. At most, he concedes that spatial
arrangements may be considered co-determinants of any perceived
conditions; rather, he emphasizes that practices and institutions
should occupy the central place in the analyses of society (Foucault
1984e). Given this situation, the text 'Of Other Spaces' stands out,
since it directly focuses on space and place (Foucault 1986).
The connection between 'Of Other Spaces' and Foucault's other
writings may not be apparent at first, since it is not directly con-
cerned with the topics of power, knowledge or subjectivity. None
the less, 'Of Other Spaces' obliquely contributes to Foucault's
arguments for the residual potential for resistance inherent in every
situation, even in the face of apparently overwhelming - explicit
or tacit - structures of control. This is evident from the fact that
Art and Foucauldian Heterotopias 159
Foucault's initial conclusion, that 'the anxiety of our era has to do
fundamentally with space', is followed by his claim that 'despite all
the techniques of appropriating space, despite the whole network
of knowledge to delimit or formalise it, contemporary space is per-
haps still not entirely desanctified' (ibid. 23), where 'desanctification'
refers to the normalization or homogenization of space.
Foucault's discussion of not-yet-desanctified space might sug-
gest some kind of quasi-romantic allegiance to a 'formerly better
time'. But such a conception is vigorously rejected by Foucault
elsewhere (Foucault 1984e: 249). A reading of this text more con-
sistent with his other texts, however, is that he conceives of these
'disturbing' differentiations of space (i.e. un-'desanctified' space)
as ruptures or discontinuities that constitute counter-examples to
the supposition that the fabric of power and knowledge is seamless.
It is in this context that Foucault introduces and discusses the
notion of heterotopia - literally 'other place'.
Heterotopias
Desanctification of space comes down to a reductive conceptual-
ization of inherently significant places into sites merely 'defined by
relations of proximity between points or elements; formally we can
describe these relations as series, trees, or grids' (Foucault 1986:
23 ). Indeed, the notion of place is becoming largely lost in a society
that actively supports the proliferation of establishments such as
identical-looking fast food outlets, gas bars and malls, and that
(dis-?)orients itself to a large extent by images from anywhere,
which in turn are reproduced anywhere else, on ubiquitous televi-
sion screens. Foucault supposes, however, that
perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of opposi-
tions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices
have not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we
regard as simple givens: for example between private space and
public space, between family space and social space, between cul-
tural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that
of work. (Ibid.)
Moreover, in Foucault's view '[t]he space in which we live ... is
also, in itself, a heterogeneous space .... we live inside a set of
relations that delineates sires which arc irreducible to one another
160 Thomas Heyd
and absolutely not superimposable on one another' (ibid.). The
heterogeneity of space may be described according to the relations
between sites; hence, he suggests that one may speak of places of
transportation, places of temporary relaxation, and so on.
Foucault uses the term 'heterotopia' to indicate a kind of place
somewhat similar to those called 'utopias'.
5
Heterotopias and
utopias share 'the curious property of being in relation with all
other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralise, or invert
the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect'
(ibid.). Whereas '[u]topias are sites with no real place', heterotopias
'do exist and ... are formed in the very founding of society -
[they] are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted
utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites which can be
found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, con-
tested and inverted' (ibid.).
Foucault gives a list of six 'principles', or typical features, of
heterotopias. Heterotopias (1) are probably constituted by all cul-
tures (though they exhibit varied forms); (2) over time may serve
various functions within a given society; (3) are 'capable of juxta-
posing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in
themselves incompatible' (ibid. 25); (4) 'are most often linked to
slices in time' - that is, to breaks in the perception of ordinary
time; (5) 'presuppose a system of opening and closing that both
isolates them and makes them penetrable' (ibid.); and (6) have a
function, lying between two poles, with respect to all other spaces:
Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every
real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as
still more illusory .... Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create
a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous,
as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.
(Ibid. 27)
In contemporary societies the theatre, the cinema, the garden,
the museum, the library and the barracks, among other things, func-
tion as heterotopias. The cinema, for example, literally creates illu-
sions that may make us question our apprehension of supposedly
real spaces. By contrast, museums and gardens create real spaces
that in their 'perfect' order of things may cause dislocations in,
and reconsiderations of, our perception of ordinary spaces. Fur-
thermore, it would seem that certain artworks are also examples
of heterotopias.
Art and Foucauldian Heterotopias 161
Cubist paintings, such as Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, may
create illusions that denounce as illusory our apprehension of real
space in terms of orderly, frontally perceived single images (as
Renaissance perspective had suggested). Alternatively, rigorously
planned Renaissance city squares are real spaces that in their
designed perfection recall and highlight the messy, ill-constructed
spaces in which most of us actually live. In other words, hetero-
topias serve as places of disturbance; their existence unsettles the
regular categorizations of our living space.
Boulder structures
Aboriginal medicine wheel boulder structures may be seen as
heterotopias - that is, as counter-sites - because, although they
are located in the 'productive' spaces of industrial agriculture of
the prairies, they 'suspect' and interrogate those spaces and the
concomitant, violently interventionist practices. These boulder
structures juxtapose incompatible sites by bringing together a
perspective on land of its original inhabitants and a perspective
on land of its present exploitation-oriented users. In so far as the
origin of these sites points to times receding indefinitely far into
the past, reflection on them constitutes a slice or break in the
ordinary perception of time. In so far as they remain recalcitrant
to interpretation, they make evident that 'opening' knowledge
may be required for their comprehension; in fact, their cryptic
nature makes them places 'outside of all places' (ibid. 24).
In their resistance to interpretation, these boulder structures
return our gaze to the prairies, turned into denatured, overgrazed
cattle pastures, and to the once verdant river valleys, turned into
flooded, mega-project water reservoirs. In so far as medicine wheels
are structures built not against the land, as are most of our con-
temporary users' interventions in the prairie landscape, but with
and into the land, they constitute 'a kind of effectively enacted
utopia'.
Notes
But see Nikiforuk 1992: 54, which quotes Michael Wilson as saying
that Brumley's definition 'leaves out a whole variety of closely related
stone spokes, circles and simple cairns'.
162 Thomas Heyd
2 It is to be noted that deconstructionist theory has thrown into ques-
tion the very idea that the intentionality of the builders and users of
prehistoric sites is something stable that can be found or recon-
structed: see e.g. Davis 1992. See also Wilson (1981: 336), who notes
that 'we cannot dig up ideas'. We may assume, however, that we are
on relatively safe ground as long as we seek only functions of items,
not intentions of individuals.
3 See also Bednarik (1991-2: 14), who argues that 'the older rock arts
were ... integrated into [newerl belief systems, [and] reinterpreted'.
4 But see e.g. Tilley (1991), who is willing to interpret them. Regarding
the willingness to speak of 'Ancient Amerindian Art', and to call
'artists' those who fashioned paintings, sculptures, etc. in the early
Americas, see e.g. Kubler 1991.
5 Recently the term 'heterotopia' has been popularized by Vattimo
(1992). He uses it in a different sense, however. Vattimo traces what
he sees as a transition from the idea of utopia to the idea of heterotopia
as the movement from monolithic to pluralistic conceptions of the
good life and the good society.
Nature Writing as Self-Technology
Sylvia Bowerbank
In caring for the earth and its creatures we must also learn to care
for ourselves, because taming nature with respect and love means
taming ourselves as well.
-Cronan (1993)
Since Nietzsche, no one has done more than Michel Foucault to
unmask the modern soul. In his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche
asks: 'Would anyone care to learn something about the way in
which ideals are manufactured? Does anyone have the nerve?'
(1956: 180). In the same spirit of relentless critique, Foucault's
later writings take up the task of writing a genealogy of ethics. He
interrogates the past, not in order to rehearse once more a history
of beliefs, but to reconstruct a history of real practices. In the
process, he develops a theoretical framework for understanding
the production of the subject as an effect of 'practical rationality
governed by a conscious goal' (Foucault 1984e: 255; Cook 1993).
He analyses technologies of the self and their interactions with the
other technologies of practical reason: technologies of production,
of sign systems and of power. 'Technologies of the self', as Foucault
defines them, 'permit individuals to effect by their own means or
with the help of others a certain number of operations on their
own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so
as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of
happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality' (1988c: 18).
Across the historical board, cultivation of the self is a painstaking
labour of self-vigilance, assessment, correction and transforma-
tion. In 'On the Genealogy of Ethics', Foucault points out that
technologies of the self have been deliberately elaborated for at
164 Sylvia Bowerbank
least 2,000 years, though not necessarily in exactly the same way.
The history of the cultivation of the self, therefore, provides a
'general and very rich framework' for interpreting all auto-
biographical texts, all the 'so-called literature of the self' ( 1984d:
369). Taking this cue from Foucault, in this essay I analyse recent
nature writings in order to understand the practices used to define
and to change the self in light of ecological principles. Given the
subtle, often hidden linkages between self and social technologies,
a critique, based on the historical constitution of the subject,
needs to be brought to bear on new self-technologies advanced in
the name of ecological responsibility and well-being. Of particular
interest here is the nature journal, the notebook deployed to con-
struct and to narrativize green subjectivity.
During the past decade, an increased proliferation of nature
writings has marked the emergence of an important cultural phe-
nomenon, at least in North America. According to John A. Murray,
editor of New Nature's Voices, several thousand titles of nature
writings are listed in Books in Print, and even more are being
published (1992: xxiv).
1
At the same time, both the reading and
writing of nature are increasingly taught in the classroom as
ecological practices.
2
Mitchell Thomashow, like many other
educators, recommends keeping 'an ecological identity journal' as
a way of nourishing oneself as an active environmentalist (1995:
15). Countless people are keeping private nature journals, describ-
ing and puzzling out the meaning of their wild encounters with
desert and tundra, with wolverine and bear.
3
Certainly, it seems,
writing about such wilderness experiences is becoming almost as
meaningful as having them.
What, then, is to be understood by all this recent activity of
nature writing? Why do so many summer canoeists bear their
water-logged journals down Canada's French River? What kind
of subject production do these practices suggest? And, more
generally, how are personal nature writings linked to public
discourses of environmental knowledge and policy making? By
convention, according to Finch and Elder, nature writing as a
literary form is characterized by a 'filtering' of the experience of
nature 'through an individual sensibility' ( 1990: 26). It requires
that the writer not only reproduce direct knowledge of a specific
environment, but also exhibit a personal acquisition of natural
wisdom. As Barry Lopez writes in Arctic Dreams: 'The land urges
us to come around to an understanding of ourselves' ( 1986: 24 7).
As this essay argues, contemporary nature writing, at its most
Nature Writing as Selt-Technology 165
innovative, is now taking on a more politicized, urgent edge. It is
being used strategically to inscribe new self-technologies for estab-
lishing, monitoring and sustaining an individual's ecological com-
mitments and habits. Thus, the study of these ecological testimonies
and their public effects may prove very instructive indeed. Given
that the key words used in these writings - 'subject', 'nature' and
'ecology' - are all notoriously difficult, contested terms, certain
questions need to be kept in mind. What construction of 'nature'
is being inscribed? What notion of 'ecology' is being assumed or
advocated? What 'subject' is inscribing and speaking for nature
and ecology?
Foucault's historical writings uncover the often obscure link-
ages between technologies of the self and technologies of domina-
tion, for example, in Western systems of punishment, psychology
and sexuality. In light of Foucault's critique of earlier constitu-
tions of the self, as John Rajchman points out, 'the job of thought'
is to undertake 'an unceasing questioning of historical bestowals
of identity' (1992: 222). The bestowal of green identity is no
exception. In 'The Greening of the Self', Joanna Macy claims that
a great historical shift is now taking place: the modern construct
of the subject- 'the prison-self of separate ego' - is being cast off
and a new green subject is awakening to its true affiliation with
the earth:
The conventional notion of the self ... is being undermined ... is
being unhinged, peeled off. It is being replaced by wider constructs
of identity and self-interest - by what you might call the ecological
self or the eco-self, coextensive with other beings and the life of
our planet. It is what I will call 'the greening of the self'. (Macy
1991: 184)
In Macy's description, the process of greening occurs as a some-
what mysterious, almost spontaneous development in which the
self-directed modern subject is being replaced by a receptive sub-
ject caught up in a moment of change: 'Oh, the sweetness of being
able to realise: I am my experience. I am this breathing. I am this
moment, and it is changing, continually arising in the fountain of
life' (ibid. 190). Macy's understanding of the greening of the self
is based on a sharp demarcation between a modern self (as a
construct, a metaphor and a falsehood) and a green self which is
unprohlematically a true and natural self. Macy is certainly not
alone in this way of thinking: As Max Oelschlaeger writes, 'The
166 Sylvia Bowerbank
modern concept of the subject - Man-who-would-manage-the-
planet' is often seen as a mere artifice, a veneer, a contingency, 'a
cultural accretion that overlays a wild nature, a first nature' (1994:
134). In the greening process, claims Joanna Macy, 'you become
more yourself' (1991: 189).
To consider the greening of the self in light of Foucault's body
of writings is to understand the process as a complex, deliberate
and perhaps ironic historical labour. In his essay 'Practising Criti-
cism', Foucault argues that deep transformations must take place
in a 'free atmosphere' of critique. Thus, far from denying the
potential for liberating change, Foucault's method of making
'facile gestures difficult' makes real change possible (1988f: 155).
Joanna Macy's description of the greening of the self not only
assumes a rhapsodic recovery of a true self, but also obscures the
connections between the modern and the would-be green subject.
Yet, it is that very modern subject that invents and undertakes
appropriate self-technologies for the greening process. 'To be
modern', writes Foucault, 'is to take oneself as a complex and
difficult elaboration' (1984h: 41). It is Macy who chooses to adapt
Buddhist practice and systems theory to her own project of the
greening of the self. As Chaloupka and Cawley argue, the sub-
ject undertaking self-transformation in the name of nature is the
same self-improving, driven and resourceful modern subject we
know so well: 'Carrying our communicating, disciplined selves
out to a wilderness escape, we find functions and roles, even there.
We find assignments, too; we are there to relax, to recuperate, to
report back that nature still exists, that it still teaches lessons'
(Chaloupka and Cawley 1993: 15).
In Foucault's work, the subject is defined historically and is
disciplined by its own self-constituting practices. This way of con-
structing subjectivity reconceptualizes the production, in this case,
of a green subject into a historical development of appropriate
self-technologies. In 'An Aesthetics of Existence', Foucault makes
this telling comment: 'I believe ... that the subject is constituted
through practices of subjection, or in a more autonomous way,
through practices of liberation, of liberty, as in Antiquity on the
basis, of course, of a number of rules, styles, inventions to be
found in the cultural environment' (1988a: 51-2). Thus, by making
the constitution of the subject a matter of deploying appropriate
self-technologies, Foucault's writings open up the possibility of
what John Rajchman calls 'a practical freedom'. It is a freedom
'not of action, nor of intentions or desires, but of a choice of a
mode of being' 11992: 219).
Nature Writing as Selt-Technology 167
In general, as I argue elsewhere, the term 'greening' refers to the
voluntary process of transforming the fundamental political and
social systems, as well as the personal habits and sensibilities, of
the peoples of industrialized societies in light of emerging ecolo-
gical knowledges (Bowerbank 1995: 443). Greening is 'a voluntary
process', because its practitioners deliberately seek appropriate tech-
nologies - whether material, symbolic, social or self-technologies
- in order to effect fundamental change. As Raymond Williams
points out in Keywords, the common usage of the word ecology
now extends well beyond its strict scientific meaning (i.e. 'the study
of the relations of plants and animals with each other and with
their habitat') to include 'a central concern with human relations
to the physical world as the necessary basis for social and eco-
nomic policy' (Williams 1976: 111, my emphasis). The use of the
term greening pushes this 'concern' a step further by deliberately
conceptualizing ecology as an ongoing labour. Thus, greening
moves ecology into the realm of practical reason; ideals can be
transformed into activities. Accordingly, Mitchell Thomashow, for
example, constructs the self-transformative process as 'ecological
identity work': 'Ecological identity work yields a rich substrate
... which allows people to bring their perceptions of nature to
the foreground of awareness and to orient their actions based on
their ecological world view' (Thomashow 1995: 23).
Here I will examine some of the practices that constitute green
subjectivity. I do so in light of the question raised so chillingly by
Foucault's writings: do disciplinary practices have the potential
for a positive, as well as a self-sacrificing, effect on the subject?
Mitchell Thomashow's Ecological Identity: Becoming a Reflex-
ive Environmentalist ( 199 5) is a good place to begin, because it
explicitly names and normalizes many of the self-technologies arti-
culated in nature writings. Thomashow and his students do not
just sit in the classroom reading the writings of Henry Thoreau,
John Muir or Rachel Carson; they carry out 'ecological identity
work' on themselves by means of such activities as natural history
excursions, disturbed-place recollections, catalogues of personal
property, sense-of-place maps and ecological identity journals.
Written in a generous, inventive spirit, Ecological Identity is, in
many ways, an admirable book, but it demonstrates little concern
that the practices it recommends have long histories as disciplin-
ary practices. To illustrate the need for critique, as well as inven-
tion, I shall analyse one of the activities devised by Thomashow
to aid himself and his students (and now his readers) in their
168 Sylvia Bowerbank
on is one Thomashow calls the 'eco-confessional', in which the
practitioner tells a personal story of ecological irresponsibility
(1995: 153). Obviously, the relevance of Foucault's historical work
on the confession is immediately suggested. The confession was,
and remains, as Foucault shows, 'one of the West's most highly
valued techniques for producing truth' (Foucault 1976: 59).
In a lengthy section of Ecological Identity, Thomashow con-
fesses to an ecological crime: some years ago, while on vacation
on a remote island off the Maine coast, he threw two large gar-
bage bags, filled with disposable nappies, into the 'pristine waters'
of the Gulf of Maine (1995: 152-60). There were extenuating
circumstances: the house his family had rented was rustic, and
therefore without electricity and hot water; washing had to be
done by hand, making it difficult to use cloth nappies for his
infant daughter. Thomashow knew that if they were going to use
'disposables', they should carry them back to the mainland when
they left the island. There was no garbage pick-up or recycling on
the island. Even so, knowing that other people made a habit of
throwing their garbage into the ocean, in the end, against his
better judgement, he chose what seemed the 'easy and lazy method'
of disposal:
I was hoping for a windy day, so the bag would quickly float out
to sea and then become submerged so it couldn't be seen. But the
ocean was unusually calm the day of our departure .... Several min-
utes later, seagulls pecked open the bags, scavenging my daughter's
fecal matter. Before long, dozens of diapers were floating across
this beautiful harbour, forming a white path of plastic waste. They
were like white buoys on the water, meandering in the calm harbour,
slowly spreading out, marking a trail of neglect. (Ibid. 153)
What is remarkable about Thomashow's reconstruction of this
incident is that his motivations and actions are interrogated and
elaborated in scrupulous detail. Tremendous labour is put into
confessing. His sense of culpability is intensified precisely because
of his high degree of ecological literacy, and because of his affec-
tion for the island's familiar, spectacular landscape. His annual
visits, he writes, are 'intrinsic to my ecological identity' (ibid.).
His rationale for confessing is both therapeutic and pedagogical.
On the one hand, he gives evidence against himself in order to
raise the issue of personal blame for ecological deterioration. At
the same time, he invites his students to write their own eco-
confessional narratives in order to personalize the environmental
Nature Writing as Self-Technology 169
crisis. The effect of their confessions, he says, is that they suddenly
realize that 'it is their culture, legacy, habits, and lifestyle that is
at fault. This mess is their responsibility too' (ibid. 157). Mea culpa.
Thomashow does show some twinges of uneasiness regarding
possible negative effects of the confessional mode; however, he
claims that if his students are mature and don't take themselves
too seriously, the activity will lead not to depression and guilt,
but to compassion and action. After all, he writes, '[t]he pur-
pose is not flagellation, but insight' (ibid. 153 ). If the intention is
good, it seems, the practice itself need not be scrutinized. Yet,
the confession is well entrenched in Western culture as a dis-
ciplinary mode of self-reformation. It has a history, as they say.
In Thomashow's narrative of scrupulous self-examination, the dis-
ciplinary pattern of the confession is instantly recognizable, espe-
cially by those of us raised as Catholics or familiar with Foucault's
work. While it is true that nowadays the confession as a ritualized
discourse has lost most of its formality and localization, it con-
tinues to be reproduced in all sorts of modern settings in which
we voluntarily keep detailed dossiers on ourselves. 'The obligation
to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so
deeply ingrained in us,' writes Foucault, 'that we no longer per-
ceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us' (1976: 60).
Throughout his eco-confessional narrative, Thomashow structures
his experience as both a private and a public event. In the original
incident of the nappy dumping, Thomashow tried to hide his
dirty deed. At the same time, he knew that community complicity
would allow him to get away with the dumping of anonymous
bags in the ocean. Once the nappies were floating in the harbour
(as everyone knew, no one else had an infant on the island), the
game was up. Nature had retaliated, in the guise of the sea-gulls,
exposing the evidence and making Thomashow into a public spec-
tacle. He was forced to own up. Most important, as he presents
it, confessing does him good - no doubt as it has done many
others in the past. Foucault's words surely would not be mis-
placed here: in a confession, 'the expression alone, independently
of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in
the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies
him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises
him salvation' (Foucault 1976: 62).
Both in the classroom and in his book, Thomashow teaches
eco-confession unproblematically as a beneficial social practice.
Surprisingly, for such an experienced teacher, Thomashow does
170 Sylvia Bowerbank
not seem to worry about the power dynamics of a classroom in
which students are asked to confess their ecological sins. In his
narrative re-enactment of the original deed, Thomashow not only
reinscribes the details of his sloth, shame and hypocrisy, but also
ritualizes his self-interrogating process as an ecological practice
with the potential to transform guilt into individual healing and
social action. Thomashow's eco-confessional reproduces a struc-
ture of feeling that is already well established in ecological con-
sciousness. An old Pogo cartoon put it quite simply: 'We have
caught sight of the enemy and they is us.' Thomashow claims that
the eco-confessional can be the first step toward the production of
better alternatives (1995: 158). Maybe so. The greening of the self
does entail the self-imposition of ecologically sound habits and
attitudes, but how does the eco-confession contribute effectively
to that end? It is questionable whether a guilty conscience necessar-
ily leads to reformed habits. Ladell McWhorter argues that guilt
itself is a form of power which protects the guilty: 'Guilt is one
of the modern managerial self's manoeuvres of self-defence ....
Guilt is a standard defence against the call for change as it takes
root within us' (McWhorter 1992: 7-8). Before confessing our
ecological sins, then, we need to understand the nature and history
of the self-technology we employ. As Foucault writes with con-
siderable scorn:
One has to be completely taken in by this internal ruse of con-
fession ... to believe that all these voices which have spoken so long
in our civilisation- repeating the formidable injunction to tell what
one is and what one does, what one recollects and what one has for-
gotten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not thinking
- are speaking to us of freedom. An immense labor to which the
West has submitted generations in order to produce ... men's sub-
jection, their constitution as subjects in both senses of the word.
(Foucault 1976: 60)
The efficacy and desirability of the eco-confession, as well as other
techniques of the production of 'ecological identity', cannot be
taken for granted. Mindful of the generations of people who have
undertaken to improve human nature using similar techniques and
have not, so far, achieved desirable results, we need to be cautious
about our self-constituting practices. At the very least, the question
needs to be raised: after centuries of association with technologies
of dominance, can technologies of the self from the past - such as
Nature Writing as Self-Technology 171
confession - be rehabilitated in a different era to achieve eco-
logical well-being?
I now consider two interconnected practices used in the consti-
tution of the green subject: the wilderness retreat and the nature
journal, in its various private and published forms. Both these
self-technologies have long histories as disciplinary practices which
must be taken into account by the green practitioner. Politicized
by urgent environmental concerns, the nature journal in the 1990s
is clearly an advantageous site for taking up the task of cultivat-
ing a new green subjectivity. The keeping of a journal on oneself
has been used since ancient times as an exercise by which, as
Foucault writes, the self trains the self (Foucault 1984d: 364).
Like other journals, the nature journal is an exercise book for
self-transformation: one takes stock, monitors, observes, regulates,
reformulates and reorients the self. The very act of keeping a
journal 'effects subtle changes in the keeper' (Hinchman 1991:
138). The journal also provides a storehouse f.or the raw mater-
ials to be used in one's self-fashioning projects: one jots down
agreeable or provocative quotations, accumulates memories of
encounters with wild animals and birds, examines one's feelings
and behaviour, and translates one's desires into activities. Whether
intended for publication or not, nature writings record the author's
struggles and accomplishments in harmonious self-composure.
Thus, when Alan Drengson recently reflected on his 45 years of
working to attune himself to his sacred place, the Olympic Penin-
sula, he took stock of his progress: 'Am I still an exotic being
naturalised or have I become an indigenous dweller on the land?'
(1994: 83).
In order to negotiate and to narrativize green identity, contem-
porary nature writing uses a distinctive narrative mode, which
I would characterize as 'eco-pastoral'. 'Pastoral' is used here in
the specialized sense of a book written to cure the soul, as in
St Gregory's Cura Pastoralis. As Foucault writes, the pastoral mode
constructs its preferred way of living 'under the theme of the care
of oneself' (1984a: 45). The prefix eco, as Raymond Williams
points out, clarifies, the fact that the discourse (logos) of 'ecology'
is rooted in habitat (eco) (1976: 110-11). In eco-pastoral texts,
the care of the self is reconfigured to make care of place essential
to its meaning. The abstract principle of caring for the earth is
localized and distributed among manageable projects undertaken
in specific, personally meaningful places. However private, nature
writings are much more than sites of pure subjectivity. Although
172 Sylvia Bowerbank
nature writers may write alone, for personal benefit, the habit of
good government over their affections is calculated to manifest
itself in the public performance of ecologically sound behaviour.
Thus, eco-pastoral writings are not just expressions of solitary or
free feelings; they struggle towards a collective change in values
and behaviour. In Foucault's terms, they constitute 'a true social
practice' (1984a: 51). Understood as a collective phenomenon,
eco-pastoral writings create a new cultural repertoire of appro-
priate emotions and habits, articulated in light of the ecological
knowledge that is only now being constructed at the material and
social levels. Good relations with nature are translated into a
myriad of appropriate feelings and activities, subtly connected to
the creation, maintenance and justification of the practitioner's
superior ecological consciousness and stewardship.
The most common practice of self-care narrated in nature writ-
ings is the account of a wilderness retreat. Considered the fore-
most 'practice of the wild', to use Gary Snyder's (1990) apt phrase,
wandering in the wilderness is a self-technology used to inculcate
in oneself elective connectivity to non-human nature. The retreat
from the world (into the desert, the forest or the country) is, of
course, a well-established self-technology in Western history and,
as such, it carries considerable cultural baggage, both good and
bad. How could it be otherwise? In general, the wilderness retreat
is a form of self-training undertaken, in various past cultures, to
liberate oneself from the luxuries and corruptions of society. In
The Care of Self, the third volume of The History of Sexuality,
Foucault analyses the retreat as one of the techniques of self-
governance undertaken by certain cultivated men- such as Marcus
Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca - of the first two centuries of the
Roman Empire, a period which Foucault calls 'a kind of golden
age in the cultivation of the self' (1984a: 45). It was a time when
these few men - 'bearers of culture', as Foucault calls them -
converted their Stoical philosophical preoccupations into 'a whole
set of occupations', into the labour of the care of the self. The
retreat, in particular, was an austere practice whereby the practi-
tioner submitted to a state of 'fancied poverty' (to use Seneca's
phrase); the practice included sleeping on straw, abstaining from
food and drink, or eating only poor quality of food, in order to
achieve superior detachment from the desires and vicissitudes of
the world (ibid. 60).
The wilderness retreat, in the late twentieth century, has cer-
tain resemblances to earlier modes of austere retreat, as well as
Nature Writing as Selt-T echnolagy 173
important differences. A wilderness retreat is often undertaken
as a strategic withdrawal from distracting luxuries in order to
cultivate a more 'natural' and necessary way of being. In fact,
the quality and authenticity of the experience are measured by its
degree of detachment from modern conveniences that is, by its
degree of voluntary hardship. The wilderness sojourner elects to
live (temporarily) under a self-imposed regimen of constraints,
privations, prohibitions and prescriptions. Even as the spirit soars
in the presence of the wilderness, the body is made to carry all its
necessities on its back, to sleep on the ground, to eat hard tack,
muesli and glop, and to suffer the assaults of mosquitoes, black
flies and tent-destroying bears, as well as the indignities of rash,
diarrhoea, blisters and dampness to the bone. I intend no parody
or exaggeration here, but merely describe my own practice. Well
might a cynic say, with Foucault: indeed 'the soul is the prison of
the body' (Foucault 1975: 30). Yet, as one wanders, the joys of
the wild are manifold: the body falls into a new rhythm; the
subject is at large; change is afoot. And why should one rejoicing
in wild and free wanderings abandon a rhapsodic mode for a
sobering self-critical mode?
The nature journal as a self-technology deliberately cultivates a
certain structure of feeling, a reciprocity between the narrating
subject and wild nature. Based on his study of Thoreau's practice,
Scott Slovic shows that a nature journal is kept in order to line up
one's 'internal rhythms with those of external nature', and to
maximize those moments when the processes of the mind 'coin-
cide intermittently with those of the natural world' (Slovic 1992:
6, 22). Nature writing is a distinctive form of testimony in which
the subject bears witness to mutuality between the subject and
self-willing nature. An intense moment of ecstatic mutuality with
wild otherness is structured as an epiphany, as a rhetorical and
spiritual high point in the text. It is a convention that is easy to
poke fun at. In 'A Light Green Baroque', D. L. Rawlings critiques
the artifice and the hypocrisy of the practice:
The structural epiphany involves a kind of luminous hindsight:
Sitting at the desk with PowerBook, herb tea, and a stack of index
cards, one suddenly realises that upon reaching that fartherest,
highest peak, instead of eating a sandwich one in fact saw God.
Bad writers botch this, but the good ones always get away with it,
mostly because (as in hardcore porn) we want them to. (Rawlings
1996: 12)
174 Sylvia Bowerbank
But, as Rawlings admits, poststructuralist nature writers, such as
himself, have not yet found appropriate rhetorical structures for
the profound feeling of coextension with wild nature; they merely
plug in, what Rawlings calls, a 'negative epiphany':
Having reached the peak, we're guardedly ecstatic about not seeing
God .... The negative epiphany demonstrates one's, uhhh ...
difficult, irresolute, yet also wildly, apperceptive grace, vis-a-vis the
inescapable, meta-obdurate lithicity of ... ummm: our sub/pre/post
(or perhaps, in the broadest terms) anti-linguistic earth. (Ibid.)
Nature writing has a sense of itself as 'nature's genre', to use
Lawrence Buell's phrase (1995: 397). Often, the concept of 'nature'
that is inscribed is supposedly outside culture. Accordingly, the
practice of the wild is constituted as a via negativa, a casting off
of all things modern in order to enable one to become a true sub-
ject of nature's will. Terry Tempest Williams begins her story 'The
Bowl' with a classic opening to a wilderness retreat: in order to
save her soul, the individual flees decisively and absolutely from
the city of destruction:
There was a woman who left the city, left her husband, and her
children, left everything behind to retrieve her soul. She came to
the desert after seeing her gaunt face in the mirror, the pallor that
comes when everything is going out and nothing is coming in. She
had noticed for the first time the furrows under her eyes that had
been eroded by tears. She did not know the woman in the mirror.
She took off her apron, folded it neatly in the drawer, left a note
for her family, and closed the door behind her. (Williams 1992a:
218)
In such narratives of the wild self, all civilized structures are,
rhetorically speaking, cast off. Material technologies are cast off:
if you want to get in touch with the 'beguiling nooks and cran-
nies' of the earth, writes Wendell Berry, 'you will have to get out
of your space vehicle, out of your car, off your horse, and walk
over the ground' (1995: 698). House and home are cast off. To
live suitably, Sue Hubbell writes: 'I slept outdoors ... because I
could not bear to go in. I wonder if I am becoming feral' (1986:
194-5). Ultimately, all cultural accretions must go. In Arctic
Dreams, Barry Lopez's practice of wild reciprocity at its narrat-
ive height on the tip of Saint Lawrence Island on the Bering Sea -
leads him to abandon even the English language. Not knowing
Nature Wntmg as ;,elt-lechnology 11o
the local Eskimo language, as he says, he improvises an indigen-
ous language, starting from scratch, by resorting to the elemental
gestures of breathing and bowing:
I took to bowing on these evening walks. I would bow slightly
with my hands in my pockets, towards the birds and the evidence
of life in their nests- because of their fecundity, unexpected in this
remote region, and because of the serene arctic light that came
down over the land like breath, like breathing .... I bowed. (Lopez
1986:
I bowed to what knows no deliberating legislature or parliament,
no religion, no competing theories of economics, and expression of
allegiance with the mystery of life. (Lopez ibid. 414; my emphasis)
With the same double gesture of negating and bowing, Lopez
sheds the modern managerial self: 'I held the bow until my back
ached, and my mind was emptied of its categories and designs, its
plans and speculations' (ibid. 414). Even such an environmentally
committed and well-crafted book as Lopez's Arctic Dreams not
only avoids critique of its own practice, but excludes problematic
details that would inevitably provoke such a critique. In an astute
review of Arctic Dreams, Edward Hoagland criticizes Lopez for
two important gaps in his text. First, Lopez leaves out what 'he
must have seen' of the malaise and suffering of the people of the
Arctic, the 'stress-chewed, haunted-looking, self-dramatising white
men and furious, sometimes suicidal or homicidal Eskimos' that
inhabit the stark landscape. Second, Lopez is silent regarding the
compromising material and social realities that support his own
successful practice as an environmental writer:
Mr. Lopez appears to have travelled extravagantly ... [but] he sel-
dom specifies how much or with whose help. The Arctic is fero-
ciously expensive and difficult to travel in, and even if a freelance
writer were able to hire an airplane to go beyond where the mail
planes reach, many landing sites are controlled by oil and mining
companies or government agencies, so that he is likely to find
himself wheedling rides above the Arctic Circle with oilmen or
research scientists after having been vetted wittily for his political
opinions beforehand by clever public-relations officials. (Hoagland
1986: 3)
These strategic omtsstons are typical of the way tn which the
conventional structures of nature writing disguise the narrating
176 Sylvia Bowerbank
subject's dependencies and connections to modern society. 'The
trouble with wilderness', as William Cronan writes in his superb
essay of that title, is that it lets us pretend that we are not subjects
of modern culture: 'we benefit from the intricate and all too invis-
ible networks with which it shelters us, all the while pretending that
these things are not an essential part of who we are' ( 199 5: 81 ).
To frame the wilderness retreat within the history of the con-
stitution of the subject no doubt goes against the grain of many
of its privileged practitioners, myself included. One desires to
know oneself as something other that a subject of technique. The
wilderness is, accordingly, often constructed as a place free from
man's schemes for mastery, a place where nature is following its
own will. In fact, in its etymological roots, the word 'wilderness'
refers to self-willing land (Vest 1985). In narrative accounts of the
practice of the wild, the wilderness is briefly made to speak its
will or, at least, to have its way with the narrating subject. This is
how Terry Tempest Williams describes her solitary wanderings on
the salt lands north of Great Salt Lake:
I am never entirely at ease because I am aware of its will. Its mood
can change in minutes. The heat alone reflecting off the salt is
enough to drive me mad, but it is the glare that immobilises me.
Without sunglasses, I am blinded. My eyes quickly burn on Salt
Well Flats. It occurs to me that I will return home with my green
irises bleached white. If I return at all. (Williams 1992b: 148)
The wilderness is also constituted as an open space where the
subject is released into an alternative economy of freedom; the
subject can, therefore, exercise and expand its self into what is
referred to variously as 'the ecological self', or 'the trans personal
self' (Drengson 1994; Fox 1990). In response to 'the spontaneous
power of nature', it is supposed that the subject can change, not
through its own manipulations, but 'through the reciprocal com-
munal activities of myriad beings within the physical realities
of the place' (Drengson 1994: 76). As William Cronan writes,
'Wilderness is the place where, symbolically at least, we try to
withhold our power to dominate' (1995: 87).
In 'Wings of the Eagle', Marie Wilson of the Gitksan-
Wet'suwet'en tribe of British Columbia makes a startling comment
about the practice of wilderness retreat: 'The environmentalists
want these beautiful places kept in a state of perfection: to not
touch it, rather to keep it pure. So that we can leave our jobs and
for two weeks we can venture in wilderness and enjoy this ship in
Nature Writing as 1//
a bottle' (Wilson 1989: 217). This comment reveals the sharp
difference between what wilderness trippers imagine they are
doing (following indigenous ways of living on the land, however
briefly) and their actual practice- dropping by for two weeks (or
two months) to enjoy 'this ship in a bottle'. Those two weeks in
the wilderness may be more precious to us than the other fifty;
however, given our daily practices, do they constitute who we
really are as subjects? As Marie Wilson says, 'I have had the
awful feeling that when we are finished dealing with the courts and
our land claims, we will then have to battle the environmentalists
and they will not understand why' (ibid.). Right from the begin-
ning of Euro-American settlement, the seemingly oppositional prac-
tices of the wild expansionary conquest and reverential sojourns
- have coexisted in a strange symbiosis. The wilderness retreat,
at least as it has been practised, is a luxury product of the very
culture the practitioner learns to despise.
To say this is not to suggest that we abandon the wilderness re-
treat or the nature journal as green practices. It is to acknowledge
how arduous and inconclusive even our best efforts at greening are.
Why should this discourage us? Quick fixes and big transforma-
tions- in the name of an 'ecological world order' -are no doubt
dangerous and undesirable (Ferry 1995). What Foucault writes
of recent little improvements in the quality of Western culture
applies equally well to environmental matters: 'I prefer even these
partial transformations that have been made in the correlation
of historical analysis and the practical attitude, to the programs
for a new man that the worst political systems have repeated
throughout the twentieth century' (1984b: 46-7).
In Foucault's terms, deep transformations of the self, as of
material and social reality, can take place only in a free atmo-
sphere of criticism. Transformation and critique, far from being
contrary modes, work together toward slow, authentic change. As
Foucault argues, a 'permanent reactivation' of critique is, at present,
our only procedure for determining 'what is not or is no longer
indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous
subjects' (ibid. 42-3). Seen in the light of Foucault's work, the
self-cultivation of the green subject is a long, difficult historical
endeavour with an uncertain result. The greening of the subject
becomes a case of 'working on our limits'; it is 'a patient labor
giving form to our impatience for liberty' (ibid. 50). To under-
stand the positive implications of Foucault's writings is to be
encouraged by these ironic words.
178 Sylvia Bowerbank
Notes
1 Other anthologies of nature writing published in the 1990s include
Anderson 1991; Burks 1994; Finch and Elder 1990; Willers 1991.
2 Since the publication of Waage 1985, there has been tremendous
expansion in this field; two very recent anthologies intended for class-
room use are Anderson and Runciman 1995 and Ross 1995. See also
Glotfelty 1993.
3 Hannah Hinchman's popular A Life in Hand: Creating the Illumin-
ated Journal ( 1991} packages two texts together: the first is Hinch-
man's own nature journal, the second a blank book, inviting readers
to go forth and create their own nature journals.
Part Ill
Resistances
Nature as Dangerous Space
Peter Quigley
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
Nature's Nation
You rapturously pose as deriving your law from nature, you want
something quite the reverse of that, you strange actors and self-
deceivers.
-Nietzsche
Custom is a second nature, which destroys the first one. But what
is nature? Why is custom not natural? I greatly fear that nature
may in itself be but a first custom, as custom is a second nature.
Pascal
I took a walk through the woods today, cherishing the pinion,
juniper and ponderosa of the high chaparral, angered at the sys-
temic attack being levelled against this community that nurtures
us and exudes health and energy. I also began to reflect upon the
fact that the academic environmental community has, of late,
been struggling with the challenges posed by poststructural think-
ing. As much as I would like to once again embrace a unified
sense of 'nature', that sacred fount of wisdom, joy and life, a
1960s sense of purpose and alternative life-style, a rallying point
of righteous opposition to power, I can in no way deny the prob-
lematic state that such concepts have fallen prey to, and the de-
gree to which it seems increasingly impossible 'to go home' to
such ideas. Terry Eagleton once suggested that these jaded
perturbations are the result of the collapse of the radical move-
ment of the 1960s, of a bitter turn inward after Paris 1968.
Others, writing in a less politically committed American scene, see
182 Peter Quigley
the wallowing in ambiguity as the product of jaded boomers,
middle age, First World affluent cynics and global capitalism. My
position is that there is more vigour and less retreat in poststructural
theory than those nostalgic for unquestioned assumptions and
causes credit it with. Its essential insight regarding nature, and the
point of departure for this chapter, is summarized by Eagleton:
Ideology seeks to convert culture into nature, and the 'natural' sign
is one of its weapons. Saluting a flag, or agreeing that Western demo-
cracy represents the true meaning of the word 'freedom', become
the most obvious, spontaneous responses in the world. Ideology, in
this sense, is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has
purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility. (Eagleton
1983: 135)
The Sophists bear witness to the fact that undermining sacred,
transparent, foundational common sense has a long and noble
tradition. All kinds of mannerists, impressionists, surrealists,
Gongorists and anarchists are vindicated under the sign of the
postmodern and the poststructural. These movements are always
reminding us of perspective- critical perspective where classical
techniques tend towards the transparently seductive. And what
concept is more ripe and appropriate for such questioning than
'the natural'? More recently in the field of language and social
science, this tradition of problematizing perspective has been ex-
tended by, among others, Nietzsche, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault.
As much as I wish it were otherwise, the fact is that after post-
structuralism, it is impossible to take a term like nature at face
value; it is impossible not to see the fissures of contradiction and
the fault-lines of history that criss-cross the term. In short,
it is impossible not to see human bias and self-reflexive anthropo-
centrism in the term. As Chaloupka and Cawley have recently
stated, 'nature, like everything else we talk about, is first and fore-
most an artifact of language ... It can be anything but direct and
literal' (Chaloupka and Cawley 1993: 5). The academic environ-
mental community in the USA has done a poor job of responding
to the challenge of poststructuralism. In articles, books and con-
ferences, the eco-lit community, in the USA at least, continues to
side-step (in fact takes on reactionary postures) the power of the
essential questions posed by poststructural thinking.
In this chapter I plan to show how a vital and politically vigor-
ous poststructural nature is possible - is, in fact, crucial - for the
Nature as LJangerous ~ p c e
politics of environmentalism, if not also for the intellectual cul-
ture of the USA. I also plan to discuss the various ways in which
the eco-lit critical community is refusing to theorize from the
poststructural perspective, as well as how this same community is
labouring under a horribly distorted sense of what, for example, a
Foucauldian intervention into nature means.
Recent texts, articles and conferences have demonstrated that
there is, in much environmental discourse, a reactionary response
to poststructural thinking and a rearguard attempt to sweep away
its sceptical and progressive potential. At a recent conference,
'The Ends of Nature', at Kansas State, in addition to a few pre-
sentations that examined narratives of female bodies and foetuses,
an issue handled particularly well by Carol Stabile, there was a
general tendency to scoff at, deflect and generally seek consensus
regarding the mischievous nuisances created by that unknowing
urbanite, and European import, poststructuralism.
Bolstered by examples of eviscerated versions of poststructural
practice,
1
many participants seemed confident that such assaults
were exhausted, and exposed, and that those who indulged in
such approaches didn't get it, were harming the cause, and were
basically fouling the good work done by true nature lovers.
The keynote speaker, Carol Stabile, offers some energy for this
approach in her featured text, Feminism and the Technological Fix
(1994). There she castigates a monolithically characterized poststruc-
turalism (we get no indication of variety) for its lack of politics, its
reduction of the social to language, and its capitulating ambiguity.
Challenging Marxism
It is interesting that, like romantic ecologists, some Marxists too
are 'fighting back', or resisting the position which claims that
there is no privileged position. Throughout her work is a resist-
ance to the social being construed as the linguistic, to ignoring
the 'material circumstances surrounding ... production', the 'frag-
mentation of consciousness' (Stabile 1994: 148), 'political passivity'
(ibid. 151) and non-representation (ibid. 140). No mention is
made of critics like Michael Ryan (1982) or Mark Poster (1987)
who have examined the Marxist qualities inherent in decon-
struction, or Linda Hutcheon (1989) who takes on this negative
definition of the postmodern: 'This misconception shows the danger
of defining the postmodern in terms of (French or American)
184 Peter Quigley
anti-representational late modernism, as so many do ... there is no
dissolution of representation; but there is a problematising of it'
(Hutcheon 1989: 50). Without taking on the arguments that have
complicated a Marxist materialist position, Stabile asserts this
foundational position against the perceived weaknesses of post-
structural ambiguities. Tagged on to this is the assertion that too
many avant-garde movements have been so 'in form only' (Stabile
1994: 145), suggesting the ability to deep-read the times from a
privileged perspective.
Another recent Marxist approach to environmental issues also
finds poststructurallmodernism wanting. Arran Gare's Post-
modernism and the Environmental Crisis (1995) puts forth what
might be considered the most lucid litany of problems plaguing
Western civilization in particular, and global life in general: the
demise of a stable economy, the demise of a stable social or psy-
chological base, the wholesale attack on the environment, the rise
of a trash culture, especially in the USA, and so forth. Most of
these complaints, accurate as they may be, are thinly veiled stock
concerns of traditional Marxism. The desire for unity, the fear of
the masses and their popular tastes, the desire for coherence and
order, all hover around an apparent concern for the environment.
Interestingly enough, this critique is carried on with the aid of
poststructural analyses, even though the thrust of Gare's text is
dismissive of poststructuralism on account of its lack of political
force. In the 'Introduction', for example, we are told that post-
structural thinkers 'are totally inadequate as guides for political
action' (Gare 1995: 2). Nevertheless, he admits that poststructural
critiques
have furthered the analyses revealing the drive to domination ... and
thereby have helped to legitimate discourses, suppressed by the
dominant discourses of science and by Marxism, which are not
oriented towards domination of the world and which accord more
with a way of dwelling within the world which lets things be. They
have also gone beyond language as such to investigate the institu-
tional context of discourses. (Ibid. 90-l)
For all of this, Gare is not satisfied with poststructural theory.
Primarily, the cause of his dissatisfaction seems to be the post-
structural questioning of reason, which removes the ground from
which Gare can orchestrate a more realistic, to his way of think-
ing, way of living. All through his text he laments the lack of
unity, the fragmentation, brought on by poststructural thought.
Nature as Dangerous Space 185
Certainly, this is one of the oldest Marxist complaints about capital-
ism: the fact that it destroys some imagined sense of seamless,
homogenous social and psychological reality. He is concerned
with poststructuralism's concern with language instead of real
things presumably, because this fuels the consumption of images.
Once again one sees the Marxist concern with alienation, reification
and fetishization. The problem with this analysis, as with tradi-
tional Marxism, is the haunting sense of the positing of unmediated
realities. Gare does not pause to consider that poststructuralists
like Baudrillard do not applaud the world of images;
2
they simply
suggest that it is where we are, and, further, that we are implic-
ated, and there isn't a firm or disinterested position from which to
start. And, of course, Gare wants to do something. His impati-
ence with the complications that poststructuralism has thrown
into the zealousness of the righteous opposition is everywhere
apparent. He calls for a 'realistic alternative' (ibid. 32). He laments
that '[o]riginal artists ... are no longer necessary, or even useful'
(ibid. 32). He decries the loss of 'grand narratives', 'genuine praxis'
and 'action' (ibid. 33 }. 'Once originality was regarded as import-
ant' (ibid. 29). 'Most improvements', the reader learns, 'have been
brought about by the pressure of direct action' (ibid. 78, my
emphasis). All these terms come from the confidence of the Enlight-
enment position. Later he calls for a return to thinking in totalit-
ies and nationalism, of all things. With the confidence of an
old historical materialism, Gare suggests that the current direction
of things - that is, the dominance of global capitalism - is
'irrational', and has 'the tendency to undermine the conditions of
its own existence' (ibid. 80).
3
Insinuating that the localized focus
of poststructural discourse is inadequate to the task, he feels it is
legitimate to assert the need for totalizing narratives. Gare seems
to have missed the discussion regarding how poststructural theory
is quite interested and capable of moving back and forth between
the local and the global. As Andrew Ross pointed out:
The comforts provided by the totalising, explanatory power of
Marxist categories are no longer enough to help us make sense of
the fragmented and various ways in which people live and negoti-
ate the everyday life of consumer explanation or without signific-
ance. On the contrary, it is to say that such an explanation cannot
in itself account for the complex ideological processes through
which our various local insertions into the global economy are
represented and reproduced. (Ross 1988: xv)
186 Peter Quigley
Here Ross is addressing and answering, in 1988, the concerns
that Gare seems to have just discovered in 1995 concerning
poststructural method. Ross makes it quite clear that the aim of a
political poststructuralism is not an amputated, myopic examina-
tion of only what is immediate. And, of course, the issue of whether
poststructuralism is ultimately a subversive challenge to capital-
ism or whether it capitulates in the demise of any opposition to
capitalism has been argued for some time.
Although Gare berates current theory for its lack of serious-
ness, its play and its willingness to embrace contradiction and
complexity, this seems hardly to take the power and complexity
of the current state of affairs quite seriously enough. In other
words, postmodern methodology seems to be constructing itself
in a new way to meet a set of new situations. Finally, therefore,
Gare offers a rearguard turn towards the brave days of modem-
ism and reason, when 'passionate engagement' was embraced by
'individuals who refused to compromise their convictions' (Gare
1995: 34). Postmodernists are, on the other hand, those who
value the 'cool detachment of cynical opportunists' (ibid.}. First of
all, it is typical of Gare to treat postmodernism as a monolithic
block. Secondly, characterizing postmodernists this way, a tech-
nique that amounts to name calling, in no way solves the problem
regarding scepticism that postmodernists have thrown before us.
In short, the desire for rationality, coherence, brave comrades, a
noble cause uncomplicated by complicity, doctrinaire convictions,
does not obligate philosophy, or current historical conditions, to
deliver them. It is clear that Gare is critical of what he sees as the
celebration of disorientation, 'the absence of any fixed reference
points, the impossibility of representing the world ... the absence
of authenticity' (ibid.). Not liking some of these possible charac-
terizations of postmodernism does not make them any less com-
pelling. Instead of engaging these issues, Gare pursues a nostalgic
trajectory towards reason, discipline and truth. He, in fact, sounds
curiously conservative, and not the proponent of a reformed,
'radicalised Marxism' (ibid. 100) he wishes to be. He complains
that the new social movements (which he incorrectly labels as
poststructural and postmodern) have allowed for the deperson-
alizing of the social, for the loss of a unique identity, an individual
as he stated above: 'In the postmodern period personal identity
has become fluid' (ibid. 19). There are two issues here. First, post-
modernism is often confused as both the creator of a condition
and a reaction to a condition; it is often treated in the same essay
Nature as Dangerous Space 187
as being both. (2) Gare, like Jameson and Marxists in general,
cannot let go of the notion that there was some pre-ideological
harmony, some solid self and solid reality that existed before
capitalism melted all that was solid. In this spirit, Gare decries the
emergence of a 'popular culture' that 'changes so quickly' (ibid.
29) and has also caused a crisis in the humanities, where one can
no longer 'privilege one form of writing over another' (ibid. 23).
Postmodernism simply points up the idea that a longing for a
golden age is inferred by these criticisms, and also suggests that
nostalgia for a past or, worse, a demand for a past that is gone, is
irrational. In addition, poststructuralism relentlessly undermines
the attempt to order narratives in a hierarchical arrangement.
Gare sounds conservative in other ways. He laments, with
Daniel Bell, changes that modified the Protestant work ethic. Move-
ment away from small town conformity, made possible by cars
and other technological developments, as well as television's ability
to create a mass audience, have 'dissolved local cultures and created
a common culture committed to social and personal transforma-
tion' (ibid. 15). This interest in transformation is the fluidity he
laments above. Gare really seems to show his conservative Marxist
colours in the next line. 'The virtues endorsed by Protestantism
had no place within this common culture which was concerned not
with how to work and achieve, but how to spend and enjoy' (ibid.).
Tainted by this direction, the New Left failed because it advocated
'a life of hedonism and self-indulgence' (ibid. 17, my emphasis).
As in previously cited comments regarding a fluid, irrational, irre-
sponsible self, Gare shows himself to be quite sure about what
poststructuralism and modern society lack. In the end, he wants a
return to a vigorous nationalism and grand narratives. How such
narratives come about and by what authority is left vague.
Although the text is a marvellous vehicle for focusing a dis-
cussion on the way in which Marxism, postmodernism and the
environment are intellectually interrelated, it is typical of many
texts I consider here which strive to dismiss poststructuralism
without adhering to and flowing with the radical paradigm it offers.
The messenger, it seems, is often blamed. In addition, Gare's simpli-
fication of the nature of power and struggle is evident in his last
chapter, which describes the new, nationalistic world order. What
this approach fails to consider is the sense that the solutions he
offers, updated though they may be, are considered by poststructur-
alists to be things of the past, and they have the feeling of the past
about them.
188 Peter Quigley
Revealing is the connection between what he fails to quote
from one of my articles which he cites and the direction he points
to at the end of his text. Gare cites my article, 'Rethinking Re-
sistance' (Quigley 1995), pointing to its concern with the way
current resistance movements have failed. In other words, he took
the part of the article that supported his thesis that essentialist
postmodern movements provide the seed of their own undoing.
What he ignores in this article, and in poststructural theory, is the
degree to which poststructural theory can provide political guid-
ance. Gare believes that the self, history and other 'substantial
elements' must be put back into the game before significant steps
forward can be taken. In my article, drawing on Nietzsche, LeGuin,
Mouffe, Derrida and others, I suggest that forward action means
working through the difficulties presented by poststructuralism,
not shoving them aside. Indeed, I suggest that poststructuralism
provided a view of the future that sees Gare's 'derealisation' and
'disorientation' as opportunity and challenge. I proposed that these
were but the initial reactions to a new theoretical horizon. It is
possible, I argued, to imagine a society that was non-exploitive,
non-aggressive, non-discriminating, without recourse to grand
narratives, foundations (albeit regional ones), political indoctrination
and nationalism, all of which are indicated by Gare's proposal.
4
It is further revealing that, after quoting from my piece, Gare
goes on to champion Jim Cheney, the target of my article. Either
Gare didn't finish my piece, didn't think it significant, chose not
to include the concerns I raised about Cheney's 'Postmodern Nar-
rative', or found the anarchist trajectory of my take on poststruc-
turalism distracting. It is, nevertheless, interesting how reference
to my article immediately precedes Cheney in Gare's discussion,
but my criticisms are omitted. Cheney is important to Gare's argu-
ment,5 because he claims to allow difference and narrative coher-
ence to exist simultaneously, a feature of Gare's reformed Marxism
and his sense of the new nationalism: 'Nationalism can then be
redefined as the commitment by a regional community, through
the stories by which it defines itself, to justice within the region,
where justice is understood as the appropriate' (Gare 1995: 152,
my emphasis). The heavily qualified conditionals go on from here.
In short, Gare uses Cheney's local narratives on a larger scale,
and runs into the same problems I identified regarding Cheney.
First is the issue of an untheorized vision of how power shapes
these new narratives and nation-states. Second is still the issue of
what is being said in these narratives and how such discourses arc
Nature as Dangerous Space 189
passed on, especially if fluid transformations are to be eschewed.
The concern which Foucault brings up about discourse and institu-
tional power structures is dismissed here, for these are, apparently,
reasonable, good narratives, not subordinating, deceptive ones.
Cheney, like Gare, advocates a kind of special discourse that
percolates out of a particular region. The humans of that region
become, as a result of a kind of listening, stewards of that region.
My article takes issue with the apparent mysticism that translates
itself into prescribed social practice: a good Marxist response, one
might say. Finally, Gare's use of Cheney strikes me as an unsuit-
able resolution of the issues raised by poststructural theory. Gare's
attraction to originality, regionality, reason and the unified indi-
vidual all drive him towards a less than satisfying response to the
problems put forward by poststructuralism and the postmodern
world. An anarchist sense of justice - in other words, a postmodern
one - would not insist on new narratives, but would come from
the humility and gentleness which result from a deconstruction
of power, knowledge and authority. As I will argue later, nature,
understood from a poststructural perspective, can offer such a
political atmosphere. It is clear that Gare's attempt to link post-
modern philosophy with New Age eco movements is shaky at
best. The postmodern may accept New Age movements, but to
identify the postmodern with the New Age, as Gare does, is tricky.
Challenging Mysticism
At the heart of the postmodernlpoststructural is a rejection of
unmediated foundations. In States of Grace: The Recovery of
Meaning in the Postmodern Age (1991), for example, Charlene
Spretnak both dismisses and appropriates the postmodern for her
own spiritually vague trajectory. By casting vague aspersions on
poststructural methodology, she moves quickly towards appropri-
ating the term 'ecological postmodernism' for her own argument.
I agree with her claim that there is a reconstructive energy
residing within the initial deconstructive energy of poststructural
thinking. Spretnak's ecological postmodernism moves beyond, she
says, the 'nihilistic disintegration of all values' (Spretnak 1991:
19). However, her move is to fill out the terms of her spiritual
rhetoric of mystic interconnectedness by suggesting that her spir-
itual mysticism is a kind of postmodernism. In fact, the attack on
various theories by poststructuralism opens up the spiritual space
190 Peter Quigley
for Spretnak: 'Our cultural interpretations of reality ... are sorely
impoverished if they operate in isolation from the larger context'
(ibid. 20). Which larger context? The larger context is the inter-
connectedness suggested by postmodernism. The larger context
gains validity by asserting that there has been a 'widespread, cross-
cultural occurrence of the perception of interconnectedness' (ibid.
18). The interest in and construction of this larger context are not
objects for scrutiny. How one perceives and knows this larger
context remains fuzzy, of course, and the theoretical justification
for seeing postmodernism in this is similarly undocumented.
Two more examples will have to serve as testimony to the
problems here. Spretnak dramatizes the weaknesses she sees in
postmodern thought by doing gentle battle with a graduate stu-
dent who is polluted by sceptical language theory. In her spiritual
journey she confesses that she 'sometimes encounters this attitude'
(ibid. 16). When the student offers his sense of the postmodern,
she writes, 'I glanced quickly around the circle and met the eyes
of the two professors with whom I spent the afternoon. Those
split-second glances confirmed what each of us knew' (ibid.). What
seems most apparent here is the simple dynamic of power struc-
tures forming to meet the face of ironic opposition. The 'glance',
far from the spiritual union suggested by the 'circle', is more like
a conspiracy, a hanging party. With confidence and power and
arrogance gained from the 'glance', she constructs herself, with
the approval of those who invited her to speak at the college, as
the wise sage. In retort to the student's Foucauldian view of an
opposition that emerges and then submerges, Spretnak is correct-
ive in a sagely fashion: '"No", I replied gently. "That's not at all
what we're about"' (ibid., my emphasis).
The clearest demonstration of the weakness in methodology
that wants to insist on interconnectedness and mutual unspoken
awareness Pies in the following sentence: 'Although most decon-
structive postmodernists consider "nature", the "cosmos", and
the "health of the biosphere" to be merely "socially produced"
concepts, a collective awareness has gradually taken shape ... such
that we can no longer deny the pervasive force of a suicidal
disorientation' (ibid. 14 ). This non sequitur actually serves as an
argument! Although postmodern/poststructural theorists have
taken the position that experience is mediated, Spretnak says, it is
immaterial, because some people, collective awareness at a lunch
table, simply want things to be otherwise. This 'argument' does
not attempt to demonstrate the limits or problems associated with
Nature as Dangerous Space 191
poststructural thought; it is just asserted that 'collective' thinking
disregards it. This definition of 'collective awareness' is exactly
what constitutes racism, hangings, Auschwitz, gang rape and
homophobia, and is a technical discussion that those in pursuit of
their goal frequently don't slow down for. Spretnak actually claims
that it is theories like poststructuralism that bring about the
destructive forces that modern society exhibits, as it 'devour[s]
the sense of grounded, responsible being' (ibid. 15) needed for the
apprehension of 'truth, beauty, a love of life' (ibid.}. Indeed, there
is a certain kind of positioning that allows for a 'meaningful
moment' at a sunset. Poststructuralism has pointed out that such
positioning has the trace of history and the postcard on it. Those
'moments' are still possible, but what we are willing to claim,
and demand of others, because of them has been brought under
scrutiny. Poststructural method has denaturalized the romantic
posture, not erased it.
Recently there have been other, more sophisticated, dismissals
of poststructural thought in environmental circles. But all of them
misunderstand and distort in various ways the potential and the
practice of poststructural thought. Neil Evernden, in The Social
Creation of Nature (1992), provides the most developed example
of the rejection of poststructuralism fuelled by an odd but fatal
pre1msse.
First, it is important to note that, like Spretnak, Evernden refuses
to relinquish an unironic use of the term nature, regardless of the
recognition, and even admission, of the complexity, ambiguity
and even contradictory usages of the term. He also, like Spretnak,
longs for vague concepts, like 'lived experience' (Evernden 1992:
109), to counter sceptical philosophic positions with which he
disagrees. Since Evernden ultimately wants to make room for
transcendental experiences that escape the human, and therefore
are capable of fulfilling the lonely human self and the modern loss
of meaning, he must keep nature whole by seeing poststructuralism
as just another arrogant humanist attack. Evernden does, indeed,
seem to long for a unified experience. He describes the medieval
faith in miracles, in the unpredictability of nature, with admira-
tion (ibid. 41 ). Clearly unhappy with the sense of fluidity (which
comes with philosophical scepticism) that excites others, and sound-
ing like a mid-century existentialist, Evernden laments the 'lack of
purpose we all experience. That is, the absence of external author-
ity that makes possible this relativistic freedom also removes any
given end for the project of human existence' (ibid. 29).
192 Peter Quigley
Most disturbing is Evernden's claim that poststructuralism is a
humanist, arrogant intrusion into nature. Barthes's attack on the
natural, as well as his attack on philosophies like classic human-
ism that posit a natural and rational foundation, insists that his-
tory and ideas are formulated and hide in concepts of the natural,
and, therefore, that it is important (as Jameson later says) to
historicize nature. Evernden paraphrases Barthes 's position: 'If
nature is simply a human-made entity, then it must not be per-
mitted to be used as a safe house for social injustices' (ibid.
27). Strangely, instead of seeing this as an opportunity to move
deceivers out of the territory of the natural, he sees it as 'another
step in the conquest of nature' (ibid., 28, my emphasis). Barthes's
project was meant to liberate us from normalizing values dis-
guised as nature. Evernden mistakenly sees this act of exposure as
humanizing and domesticating a wild, transcendent nature. One
would think that this occupation of nature, this cultural embedding,
would, at the very least, intrigue ecologically minded people. But
it irritates ecological and spiritual foundationalists, as well as
Marxists.
In the same way that Barthes refuses nature as given, artists
in the sixteenth century opposed the seductive techniques of
Classicism, and began to draw attention to their technique, away
from the clear window of Classical deception. It is this interest in
the form as opposed to content, the medium rather than of the
message, that begins to dovetail more and more in recent cen-
turies, and define two very different kinds of thinkers. Actually, we
see a very condensed form of this in the 30 years that separate
impressionism from abstract expressionism.
Before proceeding, it is important to note that, as Gerald Graff
( 19 8 3) points out, there is nothing intrinsically politically defining
about the movement away from foundation to form. A concentra-
tion on form can produce Leninists, Bakhtinian carnival revellers,
as well as agrarian conservatives (American New Critics). Evernden,
however, chooses to see the rhetorical analysis of nature as the
overwhelming of substance by form: 'Barthesian thought-police
[are] at work weeding nature from our cultural gardens, all but
a few fragments have been domesticated' (Evernden 1992: 30).
Basically, Evernden complains that his 'nature' is being taken away
by speculative, abstract thinking. But even this complaint has the
obvious longing for a solidly unmediated reality. Evernden has
little to say about the value or object of Barthes's project. He, like
others, simply notes that it makes direct contact complicated, if
Nature as Dangerous Space 193
not impossible. He therefore insists, oddly enough, on connecting
the poststructural and postmodern moment with a long history of
human appropriation.
Embedded within Evernden's discourse is the typical romantic
longing for identification with nature, with the wild, a good old-
fashioned union with the object. One hears the lament in his voice
as he describes the movement from the medieval period to the
Renaissance: 'For the medievals ... to know an object means to
negate the distance between it and consciousness; it means in a
certain sense, to become one with the object. But as we have seen,
this changes with the Renaissance, when there is in effect a with-
drawal from the objects of nature and a denial of the propriety of
such empathy.' Evernden goes on to lament that truth was then
defined as the 'absence of human involvement' (ibid. 85).
Evernden performs his analysis of nature in a very odd, decept-
ive fashion. In addition to reversing or completely misunder-
standing the basis of a Foucauldian, Barthian or poststructural
position, claiming as he does that it is a usurping humanism,
he uses a constructivist approach when it's convenient, and
abandons it when he wants to privilege a 'correct' use of nature.
His use of Foucault amounts to three footnotes, but his comments
there in reveal why he used a constructivist approach in this odd
way. He says that Foucault is 'very useful to the study of the
transformation in the concept of nature, but those who have dipped
toes into his arcane waters will understand why I am reluctant
to pursue this topic beyond the fairly minimal level that seems
useful' (ibid. 142, n. 9).
Well, yes, I understand completely. To have used Foucault as
a poststructuralist instead of a structuralist would have meant
that Evernden would have had to apply constructivist and anti-
foundational methods in a more thorough going fashion. Not just
as a means to outline past cultures from a privileged vantage
point, showing for example where the Renaissance failed, Evernden
would have had to go beyond this, and abandon his own need for
an untheorized, unidealized wild: something he never does. His
main complaint about poststructuralism is, one recalls, that it
'domesticates' by suggesting that our notions of nature are human
projections. Asserting that we embed our assumptions in concep-
tions of the natural is not celebrated by poststructuralism, and it
is not done to dominate nature. It is asserted to insist on the
notion that we constantly construct the world. It is also asserted
as a means of demonstrating that even in moments of apparent
194 Peter Quigley
tribute to the other, we reveal our desire as we construct a space
that frees us. Foucault's insistence that power is everywhere, and
that there is no privileged position of calm outside power, is not
meant to paralyse either. Foucault puts it this way: 'My point is
not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which
is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we
always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy
but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism' (1984d: 343).
Because he does not see this in the poststructural project,
Evernden simply responds defensively when he realizes that the
realm of unmediated pure experience has been removed. Like a
mid-twentieth-century thinker, Evernden never tires of complain-
ing about our desire to control, as though there were a way to
perceive without construction and, therefore, without appropria-
tion, mediation and control. This is what Evernden refuses as he
privileges Annie Dillard's transcendent experience with a weasel:
Yet occasionally, an exceptional adult can still encounter an animal
in all of its ultrahumanity .... She did not observe the behaviors of
the beast, did not retain the proper, adult detachment requisite to
the study of nature. Instead she momentarily lost her self-conscious-
ness and encountered otherness directly and with astonishment.
(Everden 1992: 121-2)
Evernden desperately tries to work his way out of the epistemo-
logical trap he sets for himself. He states that the choices are
either to make the self into nature - and then we are mechanical
and dwell in a realm without subjectivity -or to make nature into
the self 'and populate our landscape with the pets and puppets
that these pseudo humans inevitable become' (ibid. 108). Actu-
ally these positions present many more problems. Nevertheless,
Evernden inadvertently points to the solution I want to offer with
the help of Foucault.
Evernden knows that 'there is no "nature", and there never has
been' (ibid. 99). Yet, as he tries to work from this insight, from
the position that states that knowledge is a shaping force and not
a window, he clings to a sense of the real that continues to con-
fuse his argument. He ends by countering common sense, another
word for ideology, or any other theorization of nature, with 'lived
experience' (ibid. 109, my emphasis). So we have inherited know-
ledge, which is common sense or ideology, and the distortions
of science. One wonders what it is that takes the place of these
Nature as Dangerous Space 195
'false' discourses. It seems to me that this unmediated proposition
actually hides other elements that expose themselves throughout
the text. For instance, Evernden has a particular penchant for
religious experience and the experience of children. In a section en-
titled 'The Ultrahuman', he theorizes an experience that resembles
Dillard's:
In such instances, we experience ... the 'wholly other': 'that which
is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the
familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the
"canny", ... filling the mind with blank wonder and astonish-
ment .... All the glorious examples from nature speak very plainly
in this sense.' Significantly, this experience is also reported among
the important events of childhood. (Ibid. 117)
The romantic bias here hardly needs comment at this point in
critical discussions. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that post-
structuralism is dismissed early in this text, in a distorted manner,
and the movement towards reclaiming a significant experience gives
the book direction.
It is crucial to note that Evernden has abandoned the references
to Barthes and poststructuralism that were his focus in the earlier
part of his text. He now takes issue with idealism and materialism,
two sides of the Cartesian paradigm. When Evernden theorizes
his sense of the epistemological problem, he works with old para-
digms, and only vaguely handles the assertions that come from
poststructuralism: 'the world is indeed "there" in lived experi-
ence, but that experience is not an ephemeral, transparent non-
realm between a "subjective" mind and an "objective" world. Nor
is it a passive "subjective" report of an autonomously existing
"objective" reality' (ibid. 109). Well, of course, there is no argu-
ment here. In fact, this is an old argument concerning scientific
dualism that hardly has any interest left in it. Evernden goes on
with hysterical italics to tell us what it is: 'It is reality, the only
reality that is actually given in experience rather than constructed
in experience' (ibid.). This is crucial, because it is the poststruc-
turalist position that abandons dualism, giving us what Evernden
asks for from his lived experience. As Mark Poster explains, 'This
sensitivity to the ability of language to shape practice is typical of
the post-structuralists and exemplifies their rejection of the meta-
physical dualism of mind and body, ideas and behavior, con-
sciousness and action' ( 1987: 116 ).
196 Peter Quigley
Typical of critics who have tried to wrestle with poststructuralist
thought, Evernden feels he must reaffirm that the world is there,
and that it has a particularly vital meaning. Poststructuralism
denies none of this. It insists that the world is quite material and
there, and has meaning for us. The difference is that materiality
comes in a context, an interpretation, an interest, and the meaning
is irretrievably charged with psychological, cultural and political
significance: and there is no relief from this. Evernden is trying to
dismiss the poststructural unfairly, by suggesting that it has no con-
cern for the material it is appropriating, and that it is 'nihilistic'.
In addition to intense, unconstructed reality, Evernden also
proposes nature as the other, the strange, the intense. This is where
I curiously cross paths and, simultaneously, part company with
Evernden. For, although I agree that nature, or experience, can
offer unsettling and paradigm-shaking episodes, Evernden, along
with Dillard, clearly makes a fetish of this phenomenon. Evernden
quotes Merleau-Ponty approvingly: 'to return to things themselves
is to return to that world which precedes knowledge' (1992: 110,
my emphasis). Fetishizing otherness, instead of seeing it as a counter
to a norm or expectation, Evernden holds out for an experience
that is not already written, that is wild and unmediated. He finds
himself in the romantic posture of being the ultimate humanist,
projecting a world of meaningful intensity available to a moment-
arily free, transcendent individual. Of course, this is precisely what
Foucault and other poststructuralists deny access to. Foucault, in
fact, defines nature in a most revealing fashion. Nature is the way
in which language works to produce our lives, that which seems
normal: 'to know nature is, in fact, to build upon the basis of
language a true language, one that will reveal the condition in
which all language is possible and the limits within which it can
have a domain of validity' (Foucault 1973: 161).
In short, nature, or the world that is ours every day, is lin-
guistic, and, in addition, limited to that language. This situation
does not make the world immaterial; it does not make it so plural
that one cannot function; it is not nihilism. Further, it does not
prevent the experience of change, astonishment and wonder that
Evernden's text leans towards and yearns for.
Challenging Deep Ecology and Resistance
Before trying to come to terms with the dynamics of a poststruc-
tural nature, one more example is called for. After reading my
Nature as Dangerous Space 197
poststructural attack on the history of the political use of 'nature',
George Sessions was kind enough to send along a series of well-
written articles he recently published on the topic. In The Wild
Duck, Sessions, in an attempt to defend ideas put forth in his
Deep Ecology for the 21st Century (1994), continues a similar
kind of attack on postmodern treatments of nature as Evernden.
In one essay, devoted to a review of Reinventing Nature? Responses
to Postmodern Deconstruction, Sessions applauds the essays for
assuming that 'the world really does exist apart from humanity's
perceptions and beliefs' and for producing a 'thoughtful critique
of the views of ... Foucault' (Sessions 1995b: 14). Once again
there is the assumption that the agenda in poststructuralism is
to foreground the human and to maintain a 'relativistic moral
neutrality' (ibid.). Apparently, when it is stated that there is no
nature, no hiding-place for human ideology, no escape to the
mountains, no easy reference to an uncomplicated value, there is
such a need for defensiveness that poststructuralism is accused of
the narcissism it is designed to expose.
In another edition of the same publication, Sessions pushes the
same sentiment by claiming that deep ecology 'does not put people
first' (1995a: 15), which poststructuralists, by inference, do. As
opposed to Stabile, who sees no politics functioning in the post-
structural at all, Sessions accuses poststructuralists of adhering to
the 'Marxist anthropocentric and relativistic doctrine of the social
construction of all knowledge about nature - that Nature is a
social category'. Andrew Ross is singled out for subscribing to the
Foucauldian notion that '"what we know about nature is what
we know and think about our own cultures"' (ibid.).
It is clear from recent conferences and publications that the
eco-lit constituency is nervous about language having trodden all
over the romantic glade of nature. Sessions's title, 'Postmodernism,
Environmental Justice, and the Demise of the Ecology Movement?'
(1995a) suggests this anxiety. It is easy to identify with thinkers
like Sessions, whose sincerity is so evident, and whose indictment
of conservative logic and motivations is so agreeable. However,
as my opening paragraph stated, this is not enough. The well-
documented obscenities of Dan Quayle and Rush Limbaugh aside,
this problem persists.
I would now like to turn to addressing some of the problems I
have raised. In my 1992 Environmental Ethics article, 'Rethink-
ing Resistance', I outlined the reasons why 'nature' could no longer
be used without ironic quotes. My position then, as now, is that
198 Peter Quigley
such terms are deceptive, in that they try to seduce without argu-
ment. Foucault suggested the same thing when he said that power
is 'ensured not by rights, but by technique, not by the law, but
by normalisation, not by punishment, but by control' ( 1976: 89).
If one agrees that it is natural to be greedy, for example, then all
sorts of other behaviour, economic systems included, are much
easier to implement. And social policies involving helping people
are much more easily dismissed, or, as Foucault points out, those
that hold such beliefs are considered insane.
My suggestion was to abandon reference to absolutes, in that
they try to bring about change through the use of authority instead
of argument. References to the normal, the natural, the obvious,
are coercive, and abort fundamental issues regarding the structure
of our lives. My point in the article was to demonstrate how resist-
ance theories are as guilty of this process as are dominant power
structures. Particularly illustrative of this problem is the classic
position of liberal humanist resistance laid out by Theodore Roszak.
In accounting for the shared point of resistance occupied by the
individual as well as the planet, Roszak defends it this way: 'this
right you feel so certain is yours, this right to have your unique-
ness respected, perhaps even cultivated, is not an extension of
traditional values like civil liberty, equality, social democracy .... It
springs independently, from another, far more mysterious source'
(Roszak 1979: 7, my emphasis). In the same way that capitalism
establishes a free individual outside the vagaries of history and
the social to defend its brutal economic practices, so romantic
resistances like those promoted by Roszak play the same game.
Roszak feels he must establish his truth as more vital, real, sacred
than the one of the dominant structure. The problem is that he
uses the same machinery.
I tried to suggest towards the end of the article that there was a
form of nature that could still be used effectively while satisfying
the sceptical attacks on foundational arguments. If nature could be
seen as a force that disrupts, overwhelms, undermines, explodes
or otherwise 'makes strange' our ideological consensus, our anthro-
pocentrism, then it is possible to see it as an agent of criticism and
deconstruction, as well as of reconstruction. The point was to
relieve 'nature' of the burden of carrying mysterious answers to
all of our questions, answers that spring from the most vague
sources of humanist foundational theory. Mostly, however, I have
used 'nature' as a force that can empty space, that can clear the
ground of ideological occupiers. Somewhat like Evernden's wild
Nature as Dangerous Space 199
nature, I theorized nature as a defamiliarizing, unsettling force;
but there is a thread that leads out of this fetish. There is a way to
think about how social meaning is generated, how it is contoured,
raised, given shape, how it is undermined, and what role 'nature'
plays in such a dynamic.
As the phrase 'makes strange' suggests, there is a connection
here with the Russian Formalists, especially the development of
formalism made possible by the Futurists. One recalls that Tony
Bennett (1979), in Formalism and Marxism, outlined the way in
which the Futurists insisted on a politicized form of defamiliar-
ization that otherwise moves in an art for art's sake direction.
In particular, Bennett states that the Futurists 'viewed the devices
of defamiliarisation as a means for promoting political awareness
by undermining ideologically habituated modes of perception'
(1979: 32). This is the dynamic that leads away from essentializing
nature, and towards a Bakhtinian, Harawayean (Haraway 1985)
and Foucauldean cultural critique and political movement.
If one were to rest with the cultural project of defamiliarization,
or making strange, one would find oneself connected to the tradi-
tion of the sublime. Perhaps some of this is unavoidable, since, as
Poster points out, '[a]n aspect of totalisation necessarily emerges
in every effort to counter the prevailing ideology' (1987: 111).
The more theoretically appropriate direction, however, is to the-
orize this other, this new information, structure or concept that has
infected (to use the language of computer culture referring to the
fissuring of a well-running program) the ordinary order of things
without grounding it. Bakhtin, I think, accomplishes this with his
concepts of carnival and centrifugal as opposed to centripetal
power. Like Foucault, Bakhtin builds fluidity and movement into
the history of ideas; not teleology or historical determinism, but
synchronic junctures, Kuhnian paradigm shifts that, for an instant,
stabilize and authorize the natural and the normal for a culture.
Bakhtin uses the terms centripetal and centrifugal to describe
how, alongside 'centralisation and unification, the uninterrupted
processes of decentralisation and disunification go forward' (1986:
668). This situation is hardly ever quite static, and the forces
of multiplicity are always eating away at the walls of the dike. So
Bakhtin, like Foucault, insists on the linguistic reality that is, never-
theless, quite material. More interesting, as Bakhtin points out, we
have multiple voices within an object: 'Discourse is directed toward
an ... object, naming it, portraying, expressing, and ... indirectly
striking a blow at the other's discourse, dashing ... within the
200 Peter Quigley
object itself' (1981: 196). It is from this perspective that Roland
Barthes put out the call to 'scour nature ... to discover History
there, and at last to establish Nature itself as historical' (Barthes
1978: 108). But too many critics want to draw an analogy at this
point between the wild and the plurality of language, its ambigu-
ity and interrelations, thereby fetishizing nature.
Rethinking Nature with Foucault
What establishes Foucault as the brilliant light on the horizon of
recent theorization of resistance is his insistence on re-theorizing
power and resistance. Since power is seen as pervasive, not located
in specific places, then resistance movements finally find themselves
firmly located amidst what they claimed to be outside. Abandoning
such self-righteous posturing and the promise of a utopia, Foucault
insists that we deal with the material here and now, the synchronic
ache. Perhaps Eagleton is partially correct about the genesis of this
sentiment, a middle-class capitulation; perhaps it is also matur-
ity, and admission that we are very much part of the problems
with which we are concerned. As opposed to leaving the 'cause'
behind, as he and many poststructuralists are accused of, Foucault's
project is designed to produce a 'reformulation which can unlock
the forms of domination inherent in diverse linguistic experiences
[and] reveal the significance of new forms of protest' (Poster 1987:
114-15).
Implied by the foregoing discussion, but not quite reached, is
Foucault's heterotopia. This is the area of resistance which so
many anarchist thinkers have been hovering around, without quite
putting it in such useful terms. Bakhtin's notions of heteroglossia,
centripetal power, and carnival point to, but ultimately do not
include, the urgency and dynamics of resistance suggested by
Foucault. Foucault abandons the individual, or the sacred grove
that contains mysterious truths. For him, nature, or resistance,
must be conceived of as a provisional linguistic space (which
structures action, of course, as well as specific physical sites) where
some momentary perspective can be assessed and from within
which a crisis can occur. It is this borderland that so many critics,
such as Haraway (1985), are writing about today. Foucault makes
it clear why, so often in the last 200 years, writers have thought
of nature as a viable option for society. Heterotopias are places
where a site of opposition is created. As William Chaloupka points
Nature as Dangerous Space 201
out, Foucault posits a possible point of opposition, but it is dis-
tinctly different from what we are used to in oppositional politics.
Like a bubble in molten rubber or rock or steel that is preserved
after hardening, these spaces seem to occur as a result of the
particular structuring of particular cultural moments: they are not
eternal. As Foucault states, 'There are also ... real places places
that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society
- which are something like counter-sites ... in which the real sites
that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously repres-
ented, contested, and inverted' (Foucault 1986: 22). It is also the
case, however, that Foucault stated that 'crisis heterotopias', which
are 'privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for indi-
viduals who are, in relation to society ... in a state of crisis', are
disappearing (ibid. 24-5). Foucault's analysis of the internaliza-
tion of discipline gives us a better sense of why deviance is less
observable. Some would say that Foucault's theories, which have
abandoned strong identification to clearly outlined resistance move-
ments, are part of the reason for this. On the contrary, however,
one could argue that, because of a new understanding of power, it
is easier to see why resistance has been so ineffective. This under-
standing prepares one to support and comprehend any number
of protests emanating from various areas. And indeed, Foucault
was interested in supporting the 'new movements' emerging out
of the 1960s, such as feminism, gay rights and civil rights. Finally,
Foucault explores many unlikely spaces in the social structure
where tensions occur and discourses collide, and, therefore, where
change is possible. Chaloupka and Cawley point out, in a note,
Foucault's interest in Polynesian vacation villages, as '"a new
kind of temporal heterotopia"' (1993: 23, n. 34). The point here
is not to examine this site of nature and nudity, but to point out
that resistance and opposition will continue to be produced by the
social structure, and that these spaces will occur in places that are
different from traditional liberal humanist and Marxist theories.
Heterotopia characterizes the place of the language of resist-
ance quite specifically. Like Bakhtin's object, it is a place full
of tension and criss-crossed with cultural dialogue. Wilderness
then becomes a cultural space, much to the dismay of critics like
Evernden. However, this is a space where, as Chaloupka and
Cawley say, 'wilderness may even begin to make sense' (ibid. 14).
This is an important point, since the mystical characterizations of
nature only serve to mystify and posit positions for new author-
ity. Nature makes sense as a 'response' to culture. Nature may be
202 Peter Quigley
a place to escape to, but it is not a world elsewhere, another realm,
or a place containing sacred ideas or lessons. It is a place to
gather strength against the forces of domination, but also a place
we have created, and a place to remember that nature has fre-
quently been a weapon of oppression.
Notes
1 This observation concerning the political ineffectiveness of certain
kinds of American deconstructive practice is not new. See Scholes
1985: 86-110, which compares de Man to Eagleton. See also Eliss
1989: 74; Eagleton 1983: 142; and Lentricchia 1983: 50-1; also Moi
1985 for a discussion of French versus American applications.
2 Baudrillard's America (1988), for instance, is critical of the circular-
ity of simulacra, that which defines current American society. See also,
Allison Fraiberg's (1991) discussion of Baudrillard.
3 He does not consider the problems of rationally oriented systems
such as Nazi Germany or the systematization in the Soviet Union
caused. It is typical of this approach to simply point out the distort-
ing and disquieting features of capitalism. Poststructural approaches
are quite good at this. They tend to focus on that analysis without
the driving force of a better plan or a utopia in the background. This
may be exhaustion; it may also be a sobering encounter with the
depth of a problem that may be without solution at the moment. No
rational programme of nationalism seems likely to be helpful.
4 I have recently made this argument, in 'Jeffers and the Possibilities of
Politics', using Robinson Jeffers's use of nature as cultural critique.
Jeffers Studies is a new journal devoted to the life and writing of
Jeffers. It has a printed annual version, but also an electronic version
at www.jeffers.org. In a different way from the forthcoming essay I
made a similar point in Quigley 1994.
5 Cheney preserves a ground while apparently working within post-
modern parameters. The degree to which he is implicated in the
romantic grounding is suggested by the fact that he even privileges
the child as a superior epistemologist. Will we ever get tired of these
old stock manoeuvres?
Foucault's Unnatural Ecology
Neil Levy
Contemporary critical theory and the most progressive political
practice are today, if not dominated, at least powerfully shaped,
by the currents of thought and practice which go under the broad
names of the Green movement and of poststructural philosophy.
Yet, on the face of it, it would seem that these are movements
which stand essentially in opposition to each other. The Green
movement's critique of contemporary social formations is often
mounted in the name of, or at least informed by, a concept of
nature, pure and unsullied, which stands as the ideal and the goal
toward which we are urged to move. Poststructural cultural theory,
on the other hand, has been profoundly anti-naturalistic. For
the poststructuralists, the denomination of any practice, of any
state of affairs, as 'natural' has been seen as an ideological move
intended to legitimate certain historical and therefore contingent
social relations.
1
From the perspective of the Green movement,
therefore, poststructuralism must appear dangerously relativistic
and abstract, absorbed in arguments about representation, while
forests fall. From the poststructural perspective, on the other hand,
the language of environmentalism appears hopelessly romantic,
and potentially reactionary, in its call for us to return to some
putative state of harmony with nature (see chapter 9).
Even at those points where the affinities between poststructural
thought and certain currents of environmentalism seem strongest,
we should hesitate to conflate their perspectives. One such point
concerns the issue of humanism. Poststructuralism develops out
of a critique of humanist thought, thus apparently echoing the
deep ecological urge to move beyond anthropocentric outlooks.
Moreover, for both deep ecology and poststructuralism in general,
204 Neil Levy
many of the negative aspects of Western social and political struc-
tures are attributable to the dominance of a type of rationality often
described as 'instrumental', which looks upon the non-human world
as so many tools and resources to be manipulated for human
ends, and sees only those ends which can be measured in terms of
efficiency and economy as being valuable (Soper 1995: 5).
These superficial similarities notwithstanding, however, it would
be a mistake to see Foucault or his poststructuralist colleagues as
lending aid and comfort to the deep ecological project. French
anti-humanism is not ecological eco-centricism; nor does Foucault's
analysis of reason lead to a valorization of non-rational, or nat-
ural processes. If Foucault has a contribution to make to the envir-
onmental movement, it must be sought elsewhere, in less obvious
places. In what follows, I will first sketch the reasons for my
assertion that Foucault's work is not compatible with deep eco-
logical thought. I will then proceed to show how certain aspects
of his work, especially of the first volume of The History of
Sexuality and associated texts, might be extended so as to yield a
relatively 'shallow', or anthropocentric, environmental ethics. This
conclusion may disappoint many deep ecologists, who might have
hoped to find philosophical resources in the work of the reputedly
radical French thinker. Nevertheless, this thought has the advant-
ages of being eminently defensible and practical, as well as con-
sonant with Foucault's work. If it can be shown that it is not deep
enough, I believe, then Foucault, along with much of the Western
rationalist tradition, must be abandoned in the search for an ethic
more appropriate to the dangers we face.
Anti-Humanism and Anthropocentricism
Despite the apparent similarities between at least the rhetorics of
environmental and poststructural thought, their common identi-
fication of 'humanism' as their prime enemy does not lead to a
convergence in the solutions they proffer. The French humanist/
anti-humanist and the environmental anthropo/biocentric distinc-
tions are not isomorphic. In fact, in its Foucauldian formulation
at least, the French distinction is a division internal to what eco-
philosophy calls 'anthropocentricism'. If Foucault is insistent that
'it is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void
left by man's disappearance' (Foucault 1989e: 341-2), it is by no
Foucault's Unnatural Ecology 205
means the biosphere that will replace 'man' as the centre of thought.
Instead, what decentres the human is the system of codes which
interpret Being to a particular culture at a particular stage in its
history: 'The fundamental codes of a culture - those governing its
language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques,
its values, the hierarchy of its practices - establish for every man,
from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be
dealing and within which he will be at home' (ibid.).
It is these codes, which divide up and establish the mode of
being of reality at a pre-conscious level, which are the primary
focus of Foucault's archeological investigations. And while they
may not lie within reach of human control, they are thoroughly
cultural and historical. As the investigations of the epistemolo-
gical foundations of natural history and biology in The Order of
Things make clear, these codes are not themselves natural, but
underlie our conception of the natural.
2
If Foucault rejects 'man'
as the meaning-bestowing centre of thought, it is not in order to
replace 'him' with a non-human substratum or system. Instead,
what replaces the individual is the equally human historical sedi-
mentation of meaning and codes which go to make up a culture.
Furthermore, Foucault gives us other grounds for being suspici-
ous of deep ecological positions, at least in so far as the concept of
nature remains central to such positions. From Foucault's per-
spective, any invocation of such a normative notion, which claims
to stand apart from the flow of history, is profoundly suspicious.
And the concept of nature does seem to be indispensable to the
deeper environmental ethics.
3
Why does this river have rights, and
not this bulldozer? I presume that the answer will have something
to do with the assertion that the river is a natural part of the
landscape, whereas the bulldozer is artificiaL
Foucault has no deconstructive critique of the concept of nature
to offer. Instead, he gives us a description of the way in which
the term has functioned in discourse. In the first volume of The
History of Sexuality, he traces the ways in which the claimed
naturalness of sex and sexuality have acted as a powerful mechan-
ism to normalize individuals and populations: 'Situated at the point
of intersection of a technique of confession and a scientific dis-
cursivity ... sexuality was defined as being "by nature": a domain
susceptible to pathological processes, and hence one calling for
therapeutic or normalising interventions' (Foucault 1976: 68).
The naturalization of sexuality has a fourfold function. First, it
serves to tie individuals to an identity, an essence which can he
206 Neil Levy
expressed or hidden, but cannot be changed. Thus the perverse
individual is constituted as an example of a species: homosexual-
ity is defined by 'nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and
literature' in all its 'species and subspecies' (ibid. 101). Secondly,
by defining this essence as natural, the deployment of sexuality
deflects criticism away from itself. What is natural is discovered,
not invented. If the naturalization of sexuality is successful, de-
bates over sex can be concerned only with ways in which it should
be repressed or expressed, with whether this nature is good or
evil, with its importance or triviality. But the more important
question: 'Do we truly need a true sex?' (Foucault 1980d: vii)
cannot be asked. That is, the naturalization of sexuality forces us
to accept its reality as given, and thus to accept many of the
presuppositions it carries along with it.
Thirdly, the naturalization of sexuality provides a powerful justi-
fication for intervention in its realm. If sex is natural, if it has a
state of health from which it can deviate, a purpose and a func-
tion which carry their own normativity within themselves, then
it becomes difficult to deny to those who claim knowledge of
this state the right to attempt to restore it when it malfunctions.
Sexuality may easily become a medical problem under these
conditions, a lever with which to institute a regime of policing
individuals.
Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, the establishment of
sexuality as our essential nature turns each individual into a self-
policing subject. For the deployment of sexuality teaches us, not
just that our essence is sexual, but that this essence is - unnat-
urally - repressed. Thus, for the sake of our mental and physical
health, it is incumbent upon us to seek out our sexuality, to track
it in its most obscure manifestations and give expression to it. The
'repressive hypothesis', the belief that our sexuality contains our
nature, coupled with the conviction that concerning that nature
'we have never said enough' (Foucault 1976: 101), authorizes a
more massive, more total and, at the same time, more precise
extension of the mechanisms of subjectification than ever before.
It is through this mechanism that the apparatus of discipline is
extended beyond the criminal and the deviant, to the apparently
'normal'.
All these functions of the naturalization of sex are predicated
on the great prestige that the so-called sciences of nature have in
our societies. To call something natural is to assert (a) that it
holds within itself its own normativity, its state of health, which it
t"oucault's Unnatural tcotogy LUI
is important to preserve, and (b) that the entity so called is essen-
tially outside history. If something is natural, it is eternal and
unchangeable, at least in its essential aspects. Foucault's objections
to nature, then, like Barthes's objection to myth, lie in nature's
transformation of the historical into the eternal.
4
For these reasons, the term 'nature' has a powerfully negative
value in Foucault's writings. But it will immediately be objected
that the nature which Foucault critiques and the nature to which
environmental ethics has recourse are not the same entity. At the
very least, they have a different site. As Jonathan Dollimore has
argued, if the evocation of the term 'nature' by the Green move-
ment risks carrying along with it a whole set of reactionary polit-
ical significations, 'there are obvious and fundamental distinctions
which can help prevent that - between human nature and the
nature that is destroyed by human culture; between the ecological
and the ideological conceptions of nature' (in Soper 1995: 119).
That is, Foucault wishes to deny, not that there is a world
outside ourselves, which exists independently of our history, but
that we have a nature, an essence, to which we have an obligation
to conform. In this sense, he continues the French line of anti-
essentialist thought which stretches back to the existentialists.
Explicitly, at least, Foucault has nothing to say about nature as
it might exist outside of us.
5
However, the distinctions which
Dollimore calls upon us to respect are not as easily established as
he would seem to believe. Foucault's insistence on the role of
cultural codes in constituting our perception of reality by dividing
it up and assigning it a mode of being before we can encounter it
forecloses the space in which a nature which is independent of us
could appear. If there is nature in Foucault's work, we can have
no knowledge of it.
The Struggle in Discourse
The further we follow Foucault, it seems, the less he offers us.
Culturally, he argues, nature functions negatively, so as to restrict
people by coercively assigning them identities. Beneath this cul-
ture, however, there is no true nature, 'in itself', to which we can
appeal. But perhaps we can follow the model of some feminists,
and bracket the question of the existence of nature, just as they
have bracketed the question of the definition of 'woman'. Like
Spivak, we could rely upon a strategic essentialism, so long as it
208 Neil Levy
offers us a useful tool for our cause (Spivak 1984-5). Looked at
in this light, Foucault can begin to offer us environmental strat-
egies for resistance which do not rely upon notions as to what
nature, in itself, might be, but instead attempt to put the received
concept to work without committing us to a belief in an ontolo-
gical referent for that concept.
The model here, once again, is the discourse of sexuality. We
have already seen the way in which the deployment of sexual-
ity worked so as to medicalize homosexuality in the name of a
'normal' sexuality, given 'by nature'. The resistance to such oppres-
sive discourses by homosexuals themselves was itself mounted in
the name of precisely the same nature:
There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century
psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of dis-
courses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality ... made
possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of 'per-
versity'; but it also made possible the formation of a 'reverse'
discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to
demand that its legitimacy or 'naturality' be acknowledged, often
in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was
medically disqualified. (Foucault 1976: 101)
The discourse of nature is double-edged. It can serve to justify
intervention into the sphere of the born deviant, or to proclaim
the right to exist of another manifestation of a natural diversity.
The concept of the natural can simultaneously signify the primit-
ive, which must be civilized, and the spontaneous, which gives
health.
It is this battle over the meaning and functioning of networks
of terms which receives, in Foucault's work, the name 'strategy'.
It here that the battle in discourse - and through discourse, prac-
tice - is joined, not through opposing to the current deployment
of sexuality a system of concepts foreign to it, but by reversing
certain of its central ideas at strategic points.
It is here, I believe, that Foucault would locate the current state
of play in environmental discourse and counter-discourse. Eco-
politics is largely a battle over certain key terms, foremost among
which is 'nature'. Against the readings of nature as resource to
be utilized or danger to be controlled, environmentalists mobilize
the largely romantic concept of nature as nurturer and as state
of health. This is a genuine, meaningful struggle, through which
real gains may be made (and real losses incurred). Despite the
t-oucault's Unnatural tcology LUY
deconstructive critiques that can be levelled at this notion, despite
its lack of ultimate philosophical justification, environmentalists
abandon this- perhaps their most powerful weapon- at the peril
of the small gains they have made.
Beyond Nature
Nevertheless, Foucault was never content to remain at this level
of the strategic reversal of the concepts employed by the domin-
ant discourse. Such a reversal may constitute a necessary first step
toward a discourse of resistance, but it needs to be followed up by
the formulation of concepts which to some extent at least break
with the presuppositions of the deployment which it opposes.
The demand that nature be respected may have a number of posit-
ive effects. But it always remains open to recolonization by the very
discourse to which it is opposed. The situation is exactly ana-
logous to Foucault's reading of the critique which Reich instituted
of the control of sexuality, in the very name of sexuality: 'The
importance of this critique and its impact on reality were substan-
tial. But the very possibility of its success was tied to the fact that
it always unfolded within the deployment of sexuality, and not
outside or against it' (Foucault 1976: 131 ).
It is necessary, then, to go beyond this strictly reactive stage. In
Foucault's view, the inability to formulate a vocabulary which is
not simply the reverse of the deployment of sexuality constituted
the major failing of the '[h]omosexualliberation movements', which
remain 'caught at the level of demands for the right to their
sexuality' (Foucault 1980a: 220). Feminism, on the other hand,
has been more successful in working through this necessary stage
of strategic reversal:
the feminist movements have accepted the challenge. Are we sex by
nature? Well, then, let it be but in its singularity, in its irreducible
specificity. Let us draw the consequences from it and reinvent our
own type of political, cultural and economic existence .... Always
the same movement: take off from this sexuality in which move-
ments can be colonised, go beyond them in order to reach other
affirmations. (Foucault 1989a: 144)
For Foucault, homosexuals could get beyond strategic reversal by
abandoning the question of the homosexual identity, and instead
210 Neil Levy
seeking to elaborate new relationships (Foucault 1989c: 203-4).
Can environmentalists go beyond the discourse of nature to which
they remain mortgaged? I believe that we have already demon-
strated sufficiently that a Foucauldian environmental discourse
must ultimately abandon such a discourse. But this is a conclusion
that others have reached before us; yet so far no new basis for
environmentalism has emerged. Perhaps the concept of bio-power,
developed by Foucault in his analysis of nineteenth-century med-
ical and governmental discourses, could serve as such a basis.
BioPower
Let us return once more to the concept of nature. Besides the
deconstructive critique of its foundations, and the historical cri-
tique of its functioning, there is yet a third reason to doubt the
efficacy of an appeal to nature as an environmental tactic. Con-
sider some definitions of nature advanced by environmentalist
philosophers. Nature is that which 'has not been modified by
human hand', that which 'is independent of us' (Elliot 1995: 79,
82), that which 'is human neither in itself nor in its origins'
(Passmore 1995: 129). Regardless of whether this nature can be
conceptually defined, whether an untainted origin or essence could
ever be postulated for it, there is good reason to believe that such
a nature does not exist today. Given the ubiquity of the human
presence on the earth today, as indicated by the effect human
activity has on patterns of weather, on the composition of the air,
on the amount of ultraviolet radiation, even in places where no
human has ever lived and no tree been felled, and given the poten-
tial we now have to destroy much of life at a stroke with nuclear
weapons, it is not clear that there is any place on the Earth which
exists independently of us, which has not been modified by use, or
could not be very dramatically further modified.
6
As Bill McKibben
has noted, nature in this sense has ended: 'By changing the weather,
we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have
deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its mean-
ing. Nature's independence is its meaning; without it there is
nothing but us' (McKibben 1989: 58). We are not in control of
the non-human world, because we are unable to predict with any
accuracy the effects of our actions upon it. Nevertheless, that
world can no longer be said to exist independently of us.
r-oucau1r s unnatural tco1ogy Ll I
Perhaps, then, we have crossed a threshold similar to that crossed
by Western countries in the eighteenth century. At that period in
our history, Foucault contends, the basic method of governing
underwent a dramatic, and relatively sudden, change. Prior to
that time, the fundamental power of the sovereign lay in his or
her right 'to take life or let live' (Foucault 1976: 136). Power in
European societies during this period was a 'discontinuous, ramb-
ling, global system with little hold on detail' (Foucault 1980b:
151). If it focused upon an individual, it was in order to intervene
'by means of exemplary interventions' (ibid.), most notably, the
confiscation of life. For most people, for most of the time, power
was a distant rumour; in the rare cases when it manifested itself
concretely, it was usually in order to dramatize its might through
spectacular punishments ending in death.
But with the growth of new techniques of medico-social inter-
vention at the level, not just of the individual, but of the popula-
tion, we have the development of a form of power which operates
upon life itself, 'that endeavours to administer, optimise, and
multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive
regulation' (Foucault 1976: 137).
The method of organization of power changed to such an ex-
tent that it was now able, not simply to ignore life or to confiscate
it, but to make credible attempts to foster it. Power now inter-
venes continually in the life of every member of the population,
for where phenomena of population are concerned, all individuals
have the same statistical value. The eye of power is no longer
a malevolent gaze, whose attention is to be feared. Instead it is
the absence of this fostering power which must be avoided, and
political struggles are largely over the claims of competing groups
for a greater share of the attention of power.
This new form of power Foucault calls 'bio-power'. And it is
perhaps this form of power with which we are dealing in discuss-
ing environmental politics. For, after the end of nature as an
independent force, it is the non-human world as much as the
human which has entered 'into the order of knowledge and power,
into the sphere of political techniques' (ibid. 142). Just as the
conditions of existence of human life entered for the first time the
centre stage of history, as variables subject to intervention by
medical authorities, by town planners, by public policy, so the
conditions of non-human life have ceased to be 'an inaccessible
substrate', and have 'passed into knowledge's field of control and
power's sphere of intervention' (ihid.).
212 Neil Levy
It will immediately be objected that, whereas with phenomena
of human life we have achieved a degree of control, and can
plausibly claim to be able to create environments for ourselves
favourable, for example, to the reduction and management of
disease, it is radically implausible to see our interventions in the
non-human world as examples of our control over it. Were we in
charge of the effects of our interventions in the non-human world,
we would not be faced with the prospect of global warming, of
the hole in the ozone layer, and of the depletion of the biodiversity
upon which we ultimately depend. The looming environmental
disaster is largely the inadvertent result of attempts to expand our
control over the human world, which simply ignored the conse-
quences for the non-human, as well as the longer-term conse-
quences for ourselves. This objection has a certain validity. We
cannot overlook the fact that, despite our ability to intervene in
any sphere of the non-human world, our ability to calculate the
consequences of that intervention remain very limited. Neverthe-
less, the fact that we have intervened on such a large scale that
nature is no longer in principle independent from us by itself
entails the extension of bio-power to the non-human world. As
Foucault insists, bio-power does not imply control over life; it
implies simply that life is no longer inaccessible to our intervention:
It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that
govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them ... the bio-
logical risks confronting the species are perhaps greater, and cer-
tainly more serious, than before the birth of microbiology. But
what might be called a society's 'threshold of modernity' has been
reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political
strategies. (Ibid. 143)
Perhaps, then, now that the life of not one species but of all is the
stake of our politics, we have crossed a new threshold: the thresh-
old, perhaps, of postmodernity.
The entry of life on to the stage of history changed the stakes
and the methods of political struggle. If the dominant powers
now operated through the optimization of the conditions for life,
then the counter-powers which opposed them utilized the same
vocabulary, and fought over the same stakes. Bio-power instituted
'a very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a
sense taken at face value and turned back against the system that
was bent on controlling it' (ibid. 145).
roucouiT s unnoruro1 cco1ogy Li,J
Foucault, of course, wished to resist certain features of bio-
power, to the extent to which sexuality was the primary means
by which power was given access to the smallest recesses of both
individuals and of populations, and the form this sexuality took
involved the coercive normalization of individuals, as well as an
undesirable degree of control over populations. He wished to
move beyond a struggle formulated in terms of the life of indi-
viduals and populations, their health and their sexualities, to a
less coercive way of imagining the autonomy of the subject. To
this end, he formulated the aesthetic analogy which he was to
develop in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexu-
ality, which enabled him to think of the individual as needing to
be created, rather than brought into harmony with its being. But
in the case of a discourse of bio-power which takes as its object of
analysis the non-human world, no such problem of essentializing
definition arises. Bio-power need not, therefore, have any coercive
or normalizing functions when it is turned away from the human
and toward the non-human.
The fact that Foucault himself attempted to go beyond bio-
power, therefore, need not present a Foucauldian environmental
discourse which remains within its framework with any obstacle;
for his critique of bio-power was predicated on its coercive effects
when applied at the level of individual identity. In fact, Foucault
himself, in what appears to be his only pronouncement upon
environmentalism, seems to have come to the same conclusion,
that it is necessary to remain with the confines of discourses preval-
ent today, in order to develop an environmental critique:
Things being what they are, nothing has, up to the present, proved
that we could define a strategy exterior to [the obligation of truth].
It is indeed in this field of obligation to truth that we sometimes
can avoid in one way or another the effects of a domination, linked
to structures of truth or to institutions charged with truth. To say
these things very schematically, we can find many examples: there
has been an ecology movement ... which has often been, in one
sense, in hostile relationship with science or at least with a techno-
logy guaranteed in terms of truth. Bur in fact, ecology also spoke
a language of truth. It was in the name of knowledge concerning
nature, the equilibrium of the processes of living things, and so
forth, that one could level the criticism. We escaped then a domina-
tion of truth, not by playing a game that was a complete stranger
to the game of truth, hut in playing it otherwise. (Foucault 1988h:
IS)
214 Neil Levy
It may be, then, that it is by applying the very strategies of gov-
ernmentality which Foucault analysed and critiqued for us that
a Foucauldian environmental discourse can find its most potent
resource.
Strategies of Governmentality
If our current situation can really be accurately characterized as
the extension of bio-power from the realm of population to that
of all life, does that entail that the strategies we should be adopt-
ing are those of management of the non-human world, as well as
that of the human? I believe that it does. But I do not believe that
this necessitates, or even makes possible, the genetically engineered,
artificial world which McKibben and many others who have
advocated non-anthropocentric ethics have feared, the replacement
of the natural world with 'a space station' (McKibben 1989: 170).
And not just for the reason that, after the end of nature, the
artificial/natural distinction is impossible to maintain. The world
McKibben fears, in which forests are replaced by trees designed
by us for maximum efficiency at absorbing carbon, and new strains
of genetically engineered corn flourish in the new conditions
brought about by global warming, seems to me unlikely in the
extreme. The systems with which we are dealing, the imbrication
of a huge variety of forms of life with chemical processes, with
meteorological and geographic processes, are so complex, and
occur on such scale, that I can see no way in which they could be
replaced by artificial systems which would fulfil the same func-
tions. Every intervention we make in that direction has conse-
quences which are so far-reaching, and involve so many variables
and as yet undetected connections between relatively independ-
ent systems, that they are practically unforeseeable. To replace
non-human systems with mechanisms of our own devising would
involve thousands of such interventions, each of which would
then require follow-up interventions in order to reverse or control
their unintended consequences. Even when, and if, our knowledge
of the environment were to reach a stage at which we were able
to predict the consequences of our interventions, it would be likely
to be far easier, and, in the long run, cheaper, simply to turn the
already functioning, 'natural' systems to our advantage. No method
of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is
likely to be more effective than preserving the Amazonian rain
roucau1r s unnarura1 cco1ogy Ll;)
forest. For this reason, I believe, environmentalists have nothing
to fear from such an apparently instrumental approach.
If the 'technological fix' is unlikely to be more successful than
strategies of limitation of our use of resources, we are nevertheless
unable simply to leave the environment as it is. There is a real and
pressing need for more, and more accurate, technical and scien-
tific information about the non-human world. For we are faced
with a situation in which the processes we have already set in
train will continue to impact upon that world, and therefore us,
for centuries. It is therefore necessary, not only to stop cutting
down the rain forests, but to develop real, concrete proposals for
action, to reverse, or at least limit, the effects of our previous
interventions.
Moreover, there is another reason why our behaviour towards
the non-human cannot simply be a matter of leaving it as it is, at
least in so far as our goals are not only environmental but also
involve social justice. For if we simply preserve what remains to
us of wilderness, of the countryside and of park land, we also
preserve patterns of very unequal access to their resources and
their consolations (Soper 1995: 207). In fact, we risk exacerbating
these inequalities. It is not us, but the poor of Brazil, who will
bear the brunt of the misery which would result from a strictly
enforced policy of leaving the Amazonian rain forest untouched,
in the absence of alternative means of providing for their liveli-
hood. It is the development of policies to provide such ecolo-
gically sustainable alternatives which we require, as well as the
development of technical means for replacing our current green-
house gas-emitting sources of energy. Such policies and proposals
for concrete action must be formulated by ecologists, environ-
mentalists, people with expertise concerning the functioning of
ecosystems and the impacts which our actions have upon them.
Such proposals are, therefore, very much the province of Foucault's
specific intellectual, the one who works 'within specific sectors, at
the precise points where their own conditions of life or work
situate them' (Foucault 1980g: 126). For who could be more
fittingly described as 'the strategists of life and death' than these
environmentalists? After the end of the Cold War, it is in this
sphere, more than any other, that man's 'politics places his exist-
ence as a living being in question' (Foucault 1976: 143). For it is
in facing the consequences of our intervention in the non-human
world that the fate of our species, and of those with whom we
share this planet, will be decided.
216 Neil levy
Notes
1 Thus Kate Soper: 'insofar as theory of sexuality and the body denies
a realist conception of nature, it is ... incompatible with ecological
thinking' (Soper 1995: 130-1 ).
2 It is true that some poststructuralists, more closely allied to Heidegger
than is Foucault, adopt an even less humanist vocabulary, referring
to that which underlies perception, knowledge and even culture, not
as a system of codes, but as Being. It remains the case that the
primary exemplar of this Being is usually language, which even for
Heidegger was 'the house of Being' (Heidegger 1977: 193).
3 There are, of course, alternative foundations for the possibility of
an environmental ethics. Unfortunately, none of those which I have
encountered survive poststructural critique any better than does
'nature'. For instance, environmentalists sometimes attempt to defend
ecosystems on the ground of their beauty (e.g. Sober 1995: 246);
enough work has by now been done on the history and ideological
functioning of aesthetic criteria (e.g. by Pierre Bourdieu) to make any
such appeal problematic in the extreme. Another such putative ground
refers to the origin of the natural world (e.g. Elliot 1995: 81; Callicott
1995: 50). Here too we are on shaky ground, given Derrida's critique
of the concept of the original and of the authentic. Furthermore,
these positions themselves rely upon a notion of nature at some level.
It is natural beauty that Sober wishes to ground his ethics, and it has
by no means been obvious to everyone that such beauty is greater
than that of machines (the Italian Futurists are here a case in point).
Sober, as much as any environmentalist who relies upon a notion
of nature unmediated by aesthetic argument, thus needs criteria to
distinguish between the natural world and the artefactual. Similarly,
those who would defend the natural on the grounds of its origin
stand in need of such criteria.
4 'Semiology has taught us that myth has the task of giving an histor-
ical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear
eternal' (Barthes 1978: 142).
5 On the other hand, it is clear that Foucault could not condone any of
the many environmental discourses which have recourse to our essen-
tial nature, such as Callicott's call for us to 'accept and affirm natural
biological laws, principles, and limitations in the human personal
and biological spheres' (Callicott 199 5: 54).
6 There are, of course, alternative definitions of nature which stress,
not its independence from us, but our belonging to it. The problem
with such definitions is that they do not contain any criteria which
would allow us to differentiate between what we may and may not
do to the non-human world. As Jan Narveson says, if we are part of
nature, this remains true, 'lnlo matter what we do to it' (1986: 120).
Foucault against Environmental Ethics
Eric Darier
[Nature is] prodigal beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure,
without aims or intentions, without mercy or justice, at once fruit-
ful and barren and uncertain.
-Nietzsche
What do we need ethics for?
1
This question could probably sum-
marize Foucault's own interrogation of 'ethics'. Maybe the word
ethics is so loaded with meaning that it would be better to aban-
don it altogether and, like Foucault, use other terms like 'aesthet-
ics of existence' or 'practices of freedom'. In fact, Foucault's
position was more 'against ethics' (Caputo 1993
2
) or located 'after
virtue' (Macintyre 1981) than the articulation of a yet another
'ethical' theory. If Foucault was critical - or at least suspicious -
of 'ethics' in general, he would probably be even more suspicious
of most contemporary 'environmental ethics', because of the tend-
ency of advocates to use naturalistic and moralistic justifications.
This is what has been called the 'naturalistic fallacy'. The legitima-
tion of most conventional environmental ethical theories seems to
rest - in the final instance - on a belief that the alleged 'natural
world' should be the source of norms or directions that humans
should obey. Like gods and 'objective scientific truth', 'nature'
becomes another normative yardstick to impose itself on human
behaviour and values. For example, it is in the name of the pre-
sumed 'proper' functioning of the 'ecosystem', in the name of
'sustainable development', that humans are now urged to adopt
new values and new sets of conduct. Furthermore, as the 'laws of
nature' are recognized as applying universally, the norms and
solutions which are derived from them also claim to be universal,
218 Eric Darier
transcending the cultural and the historicaL This is nevertheless
what many environmental ethicists would understand by environ-
mental ethics. Maybe surprisingly, many conventional environ-
mental ethicists would condemn the theoretical recourse to a
'naturalistic fallacy' (Sober 1995: 233-8). However, they gener-
ally fall back - in the end - into the 'naturalistic fallacy' they
themselves condemn. For example, Holmes Rolston seems very
clear in his condemnation of the 'naturalistic fallacy'.
Ethicists had settled on at least one conclusion as ethics became
modern in Darwin's century: that the moral has nothing to do with
the natural. Science describes natural history and natural law;
ethics prescribes human conduct, moral law; and to confuse the
two makes a category mistake, commits the naturalistic fallacy.
Nature simply is, without objective value; the preferences of human
subjects establish value; and these human values, appropriately con-
sidered, generate what ought to be. (Rolston 1.992: 135)
3
After denying adopting an ethical justification based on a 'nat-
uralistic fallacy', Rolston tells us that as we prepare to enter the
next millennium, 'we must argue from the natural to the moral',
and that 'this biological world that is also ought to be' (ibid.).
Rolston becomes much bolder when he declares soon after that,
'If ]aced with revolution, ethical conservatives may shrink back
and refuse to think biologically, to naturalise ethics in the deep
sense' (ibid.). Although Rolston's targets here are anthropocentrists,
his argument falls into a naturalistic fallacy of his own ('from the
natural to the moral'). What seems to be missing from Rolston's
argument is an evaluation of the conditions for the emergence of
its own justifications and a heavy dose of much-needed scepti-
cism. Failing to acknowledge that grand universalizing ethical the-
orizing is itself the product of a specific time and place, Rolston's
ethical position becomes just another totalizing theory. His nat-
uralistic ultimate temptation is not, however, unique (Cheney
1989;
4
Hargrove 1989
5
). For example, even Max Oelschlaeger, who
is generally more sympathetic to postmodernism than Rolston, feels
that 'as opposed to "deconstructive or negative" post-modernism'
(Oelschlaeger 1995: 2), 'affirmative post-modernists naturalise the
category of "history", so that human beings are described as
members of the earth community' (ibid. 7). In this context, the
description/prescription by Rolston, Oelschlaeger and others of
what environmental ethics ought to be leads me to echo David
Halperin and ask: what do we need environmental ethics for?
Foucault against Environmental Ethics :21'1
This is where Michel Foucault might help us in recontextualiz-
ing 'ethics' and in outlining the conditions for a possible green
'aesthetics of existence', while resisting the temptation to use a
naturalistic justification as a foundationalist anchor.
6
Ethics and Power/Knowledge
One of the current dominant and possible naturalistic justifica-
tions for environmental ethics is offered by the natural sciences.
Many conventional environmental ethicists would generally agree
that the natural sciences' understanding of how the environment
functions is more or less accurate, and therefore legitimate as
'truth', and so as a foundation - or at least as a solid starting-
point - for environmental ethics. In the late twentieth century, an
acceptance of scientific knowledge as a positivist representation of
'reality', of 'truth', is seen as increasingly untenable (Darier 199 5 ).
In terms of Foucault's archeology of knowledge (savoirs), modern
science is more aptly caricatured as a 'will to truth' (Foucault
1973 ). Like Thomas Kuhn, Foucault argues that 'truth' is context-
specific; it emerges from specific world-views ('discourse') or from
specific paradigmatic communities (Kuhn 1962). For Foucault,
there are only 'games of truth', not absolute 'truth'; knowledge
cannot be external and detached from the context of its produc-
tion. Thus, 'games of truth' are 'an ensemble of procedures which
lead to a certain result, which can be considered in function of its
principles and its rules of procedures, as valid or not, as winner or
loser' (Foucault 1988b: 16). Knowledge is no longer a more or
less accurate 'representation' of a presumed fixed, external reality.
In some cases, as Latour and Woolgar (1986) have demonstrated,
natural scientists are actively engaged in constructing natural
'objects' in the course of their research. In this context, it is futile
to expect clear, certain, absolute, universal sets of environmental
ethical norms from these contingent, but nevertheless rational in
their own terms, 'games of truth'.
The second major challenge to most conventional approaches
to environmental ethics is the impossibility of outlining an ethic
free from existing relations of power. The omnipresence of un-
bracketable relations of power renders this task impossible. In
fact, it is the existence of specific relations of power that makes it
possible to articulate specific codes of moral conduct. For Foucault,
the coexistence of 'games of truth' and 'relations of power' are
220 Eric Dorier
intimately linked in what he calls 'power/knowledge', a single
word underlining the fact that all knowledge is inevitably inter-
twined with power relations, and vice versa. However, Foucault's
approach to 'power' is radically different from what is usually
understood by this term, as explained in greater detail in the
introduction to this volume. Like Nietzsche, Foucault doesn't
define 'power' from the traditional notion of sovereignty as negat-
ive and repressive. 'Power' should not be understood as 'domina-
tion', although Foucault would not deny the existence of relations
of domination in specific cases. Instead, Foucault attempts to go
beyond a negative, repressive view of power. He sees power rela-
tions as taking place in a non-deterministic 'field of power', and
in a non-linear, non-top-down dominating I dominated type of
relationship. Thus, 'power is not an evil ... Power is a strategic
game' (Foucault 1988b: 18), as knowledge is a 'game of truth'.
Therefore, 'power/knowledge' is the necessary condition for the
emergence of any environmental ethic. This means that environ-
mental ethics cannot adequately be conceived in terms of grand
universal principles detached from the context of their actual
production.
Foucauldian 'Ethics'
Knowing now what ethics is not for Foucault, is it possible to
examine what it could be, or rather, what the possibilities of non-
foundationalist ethics could offer? Just before his death in 1984,
Foucault published the second and third volumes of The His-
tory of Sexuality, in which he explored how 'one can think dif-
ferently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees'
(Foucault 1984f: 8). As explained later in more detail, Foucault
didn't believe in the existence of a transhistorical, universal human
essence. He was strongly opposed to the humanist essentialist pro-
ject on account of its potential totalizing consequences. This is
why Foucault's ethics can be described as being an attempt to out-
line a 'post-Auschwitz ethic' (Bernauer 1992), which is to say,
how it is possible to be 'ethical' after the systematic Nazi effort to
erase previously established 'ethics'.
If Foucault rejects the idea of human essence, he keeps the con-
cept of identity. For him, individual identity- or rather, identities,
and certainly not essence - is the result of a historical construc-
tion emerging from within a specific cultural context. Identity
should be understood as what is located within the boundaries
Foucault against Environmental Ethics 221
which emerge from the socio-cultural milieu, or as what Jacques
Lacan would call the 'empty place of the structure' (Sandilands
1995: 80).
7
'Individuals are therefore the matter on which the work
of subjectification is to be carried out. They do not really have
any being outside this work' (lambert 1992: 240). In the case of
the Western European experience, Foucault locates the emergence
of the identity of the 'modern' subject in the intersection of three
axes: '( 1) the formation of sciences (savoirs) ... (2) the systems
of power that regulate [a] practice, [and] (3) the forms within
which individuals are able, are obliged, to recognise themselves as
subjects' (Foucault 1984f: 4). The second axis and parts of the
third ('individuals ... are obliged to ... ') are what Foucault calls
'normalization' - that is to say, the process by which individuals
are induced to internalize a given set of norms, world-view and
expected conduct. Elsewhere, Foucault shows that the internaliza-
tion of norms by each individual, and by the population in general,
was a strategy adopted by the emerging modern European 'states'
from the sixteenth century onward. Competing states required
greater and more effective control of their populations for milit-
ary and economic reasons. States became increasingly concerned
about all aspects of the life of their populations, especially if they
affected the population's biological well-being, as do adequate
food supply, reproduction, disease control, health, illness and so
on. Ruffie and Sournia ( 199 5) provide an excellent example of a
historical study of the culturo-political aspects of 'illness' and
'health' following Foucault. Foucault identified this state preoccupa-
tion as 'biopolitics', a concern which 'brought life and its mechan-
isms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge/
power an agent of transformation of human life' (Foucault 1976:
143 ). The effective control of the population - from the perspect-
ive of an instrumental reason of state - required more than the
simple use of - or threat of - brutal force. It required instilling
self-enforcing, self-imposed mechanisms of social control on the
entire social body (omnes) and on each individual (singulatim)
(Foucault 1981c). In the context of this strategy, called 'govern-
mentality', states incorporated 'pastoral' techniques (developed
earlier by the Christian Church, like confession and introspection)
through the 'social sciences', to achieve greater control of the
population through new forms of 'self'-discipline (Darier 1996a).
This necessary digression may enable us to better understand
foucault's deep suspicion of any ethics based on grand univer-
salizing principles whose objectives or consequential 'power effects'
222 Eric Darier
might be to increase the normalization of individuals by means of
a presumed autonomous expression of their essentialist and human-
ist subjectivity. In this context, Foucault's The Use of Pleasure
can be disconcerting for many. Foucault had indeed engaged in
another 'theoretical shift', one in which he 'felt obliged to study
the games of truth in the relationship of self with self and the
forming of oneself as a subject' (1984f: 6). However, Foucault's
choice of antiquity as the site for the 'slow formation ... of a
hermeneutics of the self' (ibid.) wasn't a nostalgia for a lost Eden
in which social control was less overwhelming than it is in our
current societies. Foucault was very clear on this point: 'Nothing
is more foreign to me than the idea that philosophy strayed at a
certain moment of time, and that it has forgotten something and
that somewhere in her history there exists a principle, a basis that
must be rediscovered' (1988b: 15). Foucault was not trying to
persuade his readers to adopt some idealized Greek ethic per se,
but to investigate 'if one can think differently than one thinks, and
perceive differently than one sees' (Foucault 1984f: 8; Halperin
1990: 62-71).
Beyond Truth, Normalization and Resistance
As mentioned before, there is no universal human essence for
Foucault. The essentialist humanist subject is dead, or, more ex-
actly, never existed. Instead, Foucault is interested in examining
the conditions for the emergence of specific ways whereby humans
constitute their self-identity through the axes of knowledge, power
and subjectivity. It is in the context determined by these axes that
the process of truth-normalization-resistance takes place. To illus-
trate the complexity of strategic games of truth, of power/know-
ledge and resistance, Foucault uses the example of the ecology
movement
... which has often been, in one sense, in hostile relationship with
science or at least with a technology guaranteed in terms of truth.
But in fact, ecology also spoke a language of truth. It was in the
name of knowledge concerning nature, the equilibrium of the pro-
cesses of living things, and so forth, that one could level the criticism.
(1988b: 15)
This means that, to Foucault at least, there is no fixed, certain
strategic position that a group or individuals can adopt. All the
Foucault against Environmental Ethics 223
choices present dangers - and opportunities - which have to be
reappraised constantly as the configuration of the 'field of power'
changes. Every single move by any group, individual or institution
alters the dynamics in the 'field of power'. The concept of resist-
ance is hard to define, because what is resisted and who resists
constantly change.
Resistance for Foucault is radically different from the way
'liberationists', ranging from early Liberals and Marxists to psy-
choanalysts, would understand it. 'Liberationist' theory pre-
sumed the existence of an irreducible human essence masked and
repressed by existing omni-present politico, socio-economic or
moralistic values, which need to be lifted as a condition for the
realization of human potential. The liberationist position presumed
that relations of power are mainly 'negative' - that is, 'repressive'
(Foucault 1976). Therefore, for liberationists, the suspension of
existing relations of power is a necessary condition for the fulfil-
ment of their objective.
However, Foucault argues that relations of power are largely
'positive' in the sense that they also give identity I identities to
individuals, which enables them to act in the world. There cannot
be 'liberation' per se, because there cannot be 'liberation' in the
absence of relations of power. Instead of 'liberation', Foucault
preferred the term 'resistance'. The existence of a 'field of power'
- and therefore of unbracketable relations of power - is the con-
dition for resistance and, ultimately, the expression of human
freedom. Freedom manifests itself through, and because of, rela-
tions of power, and certainly not through their absence. In fact,
'[t]here cannot be relations of power unless the subjects are free'
(Foucault 1976: 12). What Foucault means is that some indi-
viduals or groups are able to resist, to challenge and to transgress
the boundaries of their given identity I identities. For Foucault, re-
sistance is the obvious manifestation of ultimate human freedom,
a freedom grounded in context and in the practices of the trans-
gression of limits, not an ontological and abstract freedom.
For Foucault, a person 'does not begin with liberty but with the
limit' (Foucault 1972: 578). In this context, one can understand
Foucault's critique of foundational identity politics, because for
him, 'the target nowadays is not to discover who we are but to
refuse who we are' (Foucault 1982: 216).
Consequently, Foucault vehemently refused to offer any explicit
grand normative project which could emerge from resistance. While
Marx refused to offer a precise description of the future ideal
224 Eric Darier
Communist society on the ground that this task should be left to
tomorrow's working class as agents of historical change, Foucault
refused for fear of introducing another totalizing project. This
fear is understandable in the pessimistic context of the twentieth
century, which has witnessed two world wars, systematic genocide
in Nazi concentration camps and in Stalinist gulags, nuclear ex-
plosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, traumatic decolonization
wars and the current profound changes in the environment of the
planet encouraged by 'integrated world capitalism' (Guattari 1990).
Nevertheless, Foucault encourages us 'to promote new forms of
subjectivity through the refusal of a kind of individuality which
has been imposed on us for several centuries' (Foucault 1982).
This refusal to outline a normative project doesn't mean that
Foucault's position is without normative assumptions. On the
contrary, Foucault's constant questioning of the self - or, more
precisely, the boundaries defining the self - should be seen as one
of his core normative assumptions. This is why Lawrence Olivier
perceives Foucault as an avowed partisan of nihilism - a nihilism
understood as a 'space inside Modernity where thought operates
a reflexive turn on itself to interrogate the condition of it own
possibility' (Olivier 1995: 17, my translation). This is what Foucault
calls 'genealogy', an approach anchored in the constant question-
ing and transgression of boundaries. This is within the trajectory
of the Enlightenment project, but in a radicalized form - 'a self-
critical Enlightenment' (Mahon 1992: 179: Foucault 1984h). In
light of his genealogical approach, Foucault interprets Kant's critical
ontology of ourselves as 'an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life
in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time
the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an
experiment with the possibility of going beyond them' (Foucault
1984h). Foucault uses Kantian reason to question and historicize
Kant's own interrogations. Foucault's questions are 'not "What can
I know?" but rather, "How have my questions been produced?",
"How has the path of my knowing been determined?" Not "What
ought I to do?" but rather, "How have I been situated to experi-
ence the real?"' (Bernauer 1992: 270-1).
Therefore, Foucault's ethics is 'the practice of an intellectual
freedom that is transgressive of modern knowledge-power-sub-
jectivity relations' (Bernauer and Mahon 1994: 152). Foucault
believed that through transgression it was possible to go beyond
the normalizing effects of knowledge-power-subjectivity and find a
relatively autonomous space -a crack in the normalizing dispositif
Foucault against Environmental Ethics 225
- which would enable each individual 'to give one's self the rules
of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the
ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of
power to be played with a minimum of domination' (Foucault
1988b: 18).
A Foucauldian Environmental Ethics: An Aesthetic
of a Green Existence?
One of the central features of Foucault's ethics, as outlined in The
Use of Pleasure, is an 'aesthetic of existence', or 'arts of exist-
ence', which are 'those intentional and voluntary actions by which
men [sic] not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek
to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular
being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain
aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria' (Foucault 1984f:
10-11).
Foucault borrowed this idea of an 'aesthetic of existence' from
Nietzsche, for whom aesthetics became not only a strategy of
resistance in late modernity, but the only way in which individuals
could give meaning to their own life after the death of external
referential points, such as 'God' or 'Truth'. For Nietzsche and
Foucault, 'we need art not to make us immoral, or to take us bey-
ond the sphere of the ethical, but to enable us to carry on being
moral in the fate of our recognition of the terror and absurdity of
existence' (Ansell-Pearson 1994: 5).
Before going into further detail about this 'aesthetic of exist-
ence', it is important to examine the way in which Foucault mapped
the different aspects of ethics as understood since the Greeks
(Davidson 1986: 229). The first aspect is 'morality', which is a
prescriptive ensemble forming a 'moral code'. In this context,
'morality' is the mechanism by which individuals are normalized.
Consequently, 'morality' is 'a set of values and rules of action that
are recommended to individuals through the intermediary of vari-
ous prescriptive agencies such as the family (in one of its roles),
educational institutions, churches, and so forth. It is sometimes
the case that these rules and values are plainly set forth in a
coherent doctrine and an explicit teaching' (Foucault 1984f: 25).
Nevertheless, it doesn't necessarily constitute a coherent, 'system-
atic' ensemble. As in the 'field of power', there are cracks in
any moral cmk which provide possibilities for 'compromises or
226 Eric Darier
loopholes' (ibid.). This leads to the second aspect of 'morality',
perceived as 'the morality of behaviors', which is the actual
'behavior of individuals in relation to the rules and values that are
recommended to them; the word thus designates the manner in
which they comply more or less fully with a standard of conduct,
the manner in which they obey or resist an interdiction or a
prescription; the manner in which they respect or disregard a set
of values' (ibid.).
There is a third aspect of ethics, however, which is the reflexive
work on, and by, oneself about 'how one ought to "conduct
oneself"' (ibid. 26). This third aspect - let's call it an ethics of
'conduct' - is what Foucault is concerned with in the last two
volumes of The History of Sexuality. This concern for an ethics of
conduct doesn't mean that he ignores the other two aspects ('moral
code' and 'morality of behaviors'). On the contrary, the first two
aspects provide the necessary conditions, in a non-deterministic
manner, for an ethics of conduct, an aesthetic of existence. Differ-
ences between the three aspects of ethics can be explained by the
four levels of the ethical process: ( 1) the determination of the
ethical substance, (2) the mode of subjection, (3) the forms of
elaboration of ethical work, and (4) the telos.
The 'determination of the ethical substance' is the 'way in which
the individual has to constitute this or that part of himself as the
prime material of his moral conduct' (ibid.). The 'mode of subjec-
tion' is the 'way in which the individual establishes his relation to
the rule and recognises himself as obliged to put it into practice'
(ibid. 27). The 'forms of elaboration of ethical work' refer to the
way 'that one performs on oneself, not only in order to bring
one's conduct into compliance with a given rule, but to attempt to
transform oneself into the ethical subject of one's behavior' (ibid.
27-8). Finally, the 'telos' relates to the fact that 'an action is not
only moral in itself, in its singularity; it is also moral in its circum-
stantial integration and by virtue of the place it occupies in a
pattern of conduct' (ibid. 28).
What is Foucault telling us here, and how can we understand it
in the context of environmental ethics? First of all, for Foucault,
for an action to be ethical, 'it must not be reducible to an act or
a series of acts conforming to a rule, a law or a value' (ibid.).
Simple compliance with an environmental code of conduct is
not alone sufficient to make an individual an ethical subject.
Secondly, for Foucault, 'self-awareness' is necessary but not suffi-
cient for an individual to engage in 'self-formation as an "ethical
Foucault against Environmental Ethics 227
subject"' (ibid.). An environmental ethics based only on heightened
self-awareness of the natural world is not sufficient. This 'aware-
ness' must also lead to the self-formation as an 'ethical subject'
which Foucault defined as 'a process in which the individual
delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral
practice, defines his position relative to the precept he will follow,
and decides on a certain mode of being that will follow, and
decides on a certain mode of being that will serve as his moral
goal' (ibid.). This means that individuals must engage in 'practices
of the self' which require that they 'monitor, test, improve, and
transform' themselves (ibid.). I believe that an environmental ethics
a la Foucault implies constant 'self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-
examination' of the existing limits of what constitutes the 'envir-
onment' and the individual's conduct vis-a-vis the 'environment'
and vis-a-vis oneself. Therefore, the objective of a Foucauldian
Green aesthetics of existence might not be to 'save the planet'
per se- although it could well be one of the 'happy' consequences.
It is the perpetual process of 'self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-
examination', of transforming one's life into an aesthetic of exist-
ence, of 'self-overcoming' one's self.
8
An Example of Foucauldian Politics and Ethical
Practices: Gay Resistance and Queer Identity
Foucault's lasting contribution may not be located exclusively in
the theoretical and academic debates surrounding the meaning of
his voluminous work. On the contrary, one of the most obvious
impacts of Foucault has been on the political practices of groups
- such as women's or gay and lesbian organizations - engaged
directly in struggles. Obviously, the political practices of these
groups influence the theoretical work undertaken by feminism
and queer theory (Diamond and Quinby 1988; McNay 1992;
Ramazanoglu 1993). Therefore, it is highly pertinent to study
more closely the 'Foucault effect' (Burchell et al. 1991) on these
groups, and to see if and how Foucault could be relevant to
environmentalism. I shall focus here on gay 'ethics', for several
reasons - although non-foundationalist feminism would have been
another obvious option (Butler 1992; Sandilands 1995). First of
all, recent essays have outlined a gay 'ethic' based on Foucauldian
ethics (Blasius 1995; Halperin 1995). Secondly, using Foucault,
many gay activists have gone beyond naturalist/essentialist argu-
ments to justify their activism. It is through acts of resistance that
228 Eric Darier
there emerged the conditions for an alternative ethic let's call it
'queer' - in distinction to the given 'homosexual' identity, and
whose motto could be 'identity without an essence'. For Halperin,
Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the
legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it
necessarily refers. It is an identity without essence. 'Queer,' then,
demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-a-vis the normat-
ive - a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men
but in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized
because or her or his sexual practices: it could include some mar-
ried couples. (Halperin 1995: 62)
In contrast to this queer 'ethic', most environmental ethicists rarely
question their underpinning naturalist I essentialist assumptions,
and even more rarely examine their own discourses strategically,
rather than substantively. Thirdly, Foucault is less controversial
among queer theorists and practitioners than he is among femin-
ists (Ramazanoglu 1993 ). Let us remember that the objective here
is not to settle theoretical arguments about Foucault, but to give
a concrete example of what a Foucauldian understanding of
environmental 'ethics' might be.
Would it be possible, following the example of a queer
Foucauldian ethics, to imagine an environmental ethics (let's call
it a 'Green ethics' to distinguish it from existing environmental
ethics) grounded not in naturalist I essentialist assumptions but in
practices of transgression of, for example, these naturalist I essen-
tialist boundaries? Would it be possible to imagine a Green ethics
based on the transgression of a given subjectivity, such as con-
sumerism (as the 'satisfaction of desire'), to radically change one's
own conduct towards a post-consumer identity? Wouldn't the
radical questioning and transgression of given subjectivities, such
as the consumer subjectivity, be an act of resistance which could
lead towards a Green ethics, a Green aesthetics of existence?
Gay Resistance, Not Gay Liberation,
as an Aesthetics of Existence
In the first volume of The History of Sexuality Foucault chal-
lenges what he calls the 'repressive hypothesis' which claims that,
since the late nineteenth century, sexuality has been repressed. for
Foucault, this scenario of 'repression' doesn't take into account
F-oucault against tnv1ronmental tth1cs LL'I
the multiplication of discourses about sexuality, ranging from med-
ical explanations to Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis.
Far from being 'repressed', sexuality has been given new forms of
expression. Furthermore, it was the creation of the 'homosexual'
category by the medical profession which led to the emergence of
a new social group called 'homosexuals'. Individuals trapped in
the definition of 'homosexual' started to incorporate it as part of
their subjectivity. Therefore, it is not surprising that they started
to organize themselves politically as 'homosexuals'. However, it
was only in the 1970s that organized 'homosexuals' decided to
change their name to 'gays and lesbians', to create a tactical rup-
ture between the narrowly defined medical term and the new
collective identity they wished to create. The very act of claiming
a 'gay or lesbian' identity was an act of resistance - a tactical
reversal- to the imposed 'homosexual' label. Yet, at the same time,
it was the existence of various discourses about 'homosexuality'
which created the conditions for the emergence of the contempor-
ary 'gay and lesbian' movement. The form taken by 'gay and
lesbian' politics has been largely a discourse of 'liberation', from
oppression and from homophobia. Nevertheless, this 'liberatory'
discourse should be seen as a strategy of resistance, of posturing,
which is only part of a 'complex strategic situation in a particular
society', not some a priori grand project in favour of some uni-
versal, transhistoric, transparent and uncensored expression of
human sexuality.
This tactic of resistance, not liberation, became more obvious
in the political practices of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash
Power), which have included spectacular actions that 'blocked
traffic on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, halted trading on
the New York Stock Exchange, and disrupted the broadcast of
the CBS Evening News' (Halperin 1995: 23). It is interesting to
note that these spectacular actions are a form of 'camp' politics
which is the overt, ironic exaggeration of a social role to increase
visibility and to undermine dominant, idealized role models. For
example, the 'drag queen' manages to attract attention to her/
himself (visibility), and to caricature to an extreme the hetero-
sexual model of an ideal feminine body, thus undermining the
very possibility of such a heterosexual male fantasy. In the case of
ACT UP, the spectacular actions publicly present the 'victims' of
AIDS not in a patient role, but, on the contrary, as being very
'impatient'. One of the central objectives of ACT UP is to resist
the dispositif (apparatus) of normalization which emerges from
230 Eric Darier
various problematizations around AIDS. The normalizing dispositif
surrounding AIDS follows the three axes of knowledge, power
and subjectivity identified by Foucault. ACT UP's multiple, diverse
political targets represent acts of resistance to the three axes of
the dispositif. For example, ACT UP challenges simultaneously
the monopolistic authority of research and treatment by the med-
ical profession (knowledge) and the legitimacy of public health
authorities imposing policies without the active, consenting par-
ticipation of those directly concerned (power), and promotes a
reversal of position, from that of a helpless, passive, shameful
AIDS victim (normalized subjectivity) to that of powerful proud
activist (subjectivity 'by choice'
9
). The politics, and therefore the
practical ethics, of ACT UP is based on constant resistance to the
normalization process, because it always transforms and mutates
itself. Through this process of constant resistance to forever shift-
ing relations of power, emerge conditions for different subjectivities,
different ways of being in the world, a different ethic of existence.
This is why Foucault states that resistance is 'not simply a nega-
tion but a creative process' (Gallagher and Wilson 1984: 26-
30, quoted in Halperin 1995: 60). For Foucault, resistance is a
practice of human freedom, a freedom in context, not a grand
ontological category, as liberation theorists believe.
Queer Identity as an Identity without Essence,
or the Transgression of the Boundaries
of Naturalism
One of the reasons why resistance is central to Foucault's political
ethics is to avoid having to justify social action by recourse to a
foundational essence such as a naturalist category.
History has shown repeatedly that horrors have been com-
mitted in the name of universal categories such as 'naturalness',
'progress' and 'liberation'. In the history of political theory, re-
course to a foundationally grounded discourse on 'nature' has
had many diverse outcomes. For example, Rousseau's interpreta-
tion of society and civilization as corrupters of humans' natural
good disposition led to the possibility of a majoritarian negotiated
social contract to preserve, to a certain extent, the presumed nat-
ural good dispositions of humans in the state of nature. On the
other hand, for Hobbes, humans were naturally self-interested
Foucault against Environmental Ethics 231
and selfish, and only an authoritarian Leviathan could keep soci-
ety from falling into chaos. There are many examples of how
abstract naturalistic categories can be used to justify specific socio-
political systems. Indeed, it seems that 'nature will justify any-
thing' (Winner 1986: 137). The rejection of foundationalism based
on the 'naturalistic fallacy' by some gay and lesbian activists is
an attempt to circumvent the pitfalls of such tactics. Whether
homosexuality is 'natural' is not an ontological and/or scientifico-
rational question, but a choice within a specific context of relations
of power. For example, the late nineteenth-century German homo-
sexual rights movement argued that homosexuality was a natural
condition, and should therefore be decriminalized. Sadly, the
Nazi regime also used a naturalistic argument (homosexuals are
indeed members of a natural category - a degenerate 'species') to
justify exterminating about 60,000 homosexuals in concentration
camps. Other homophobic discourses use the opposing argument
that homosexuality is not 'natural', because it doesn't result in
human reproduction. Therefore the choice of a foundationalist/
naturalist category always presents dangers. Halperin suggests that
it is a no-win tactical choice for gays and lesbians. There cannot
be any external 'rational' adjudicator in the debate about the
validity of foundationalist/naturalist categories. In fact, Halperin
goes further, and argues that the apparent incoherence of homo-
phobic discourses, through a 'series of double binds', is in fact a
subtle dispositif to ensure their effective deployment with dire
political consequences (Halperin 1995: 33-8; Sedgwick 1990). '[l]f
homosexuality is an immutable characteristic, we lose our civil
rights, and if homosexuality is not an immutable characteristic,
we lose our civil rights. Anyone for rational argument on these
terms?' (Halperin 1995: 34).
Another act of resistance adopted by some gay and lesbian
activists consists in a reversal of discourse by questioning the
unproblematized norms which enable the identification, definition,
medicalization and control of 'abnormalities' such as 'homosexual-
ity'. For example, 'lesbian and gay sexualities may be understood
and imagined as forms of resistance to cultural homogenisation,
counteracting dominant discourses with other constructions of
the subject in culture' (de Lauretis 1991: iii). In this context, the
issue is no longer the search for the causes of 'homosexuality',
but, on the contrary, the process which makes a norm unproblem-
atized. [n practical terms, one of the central questions becomes:
how docs an individual become 'heterosexual'? This strategy of
232 Eric Darier
reversal enables a recontextualization of 'homosexuality' in a
broader context. The 'homosexual' category becomes a strategic
means to define 'heterosexuality' by creating a negative distance.
'Whatever else you might say about [heterosexuality], at least it's
not that.' However, this negative problematization of 'hetero-
sexuality' in opposition to 'abnormal' categories {'it is not that'),
creates a void in the 'normal' category of 'heterosexuality'. In turn,
this void creates a 'heterosexual anxiety' which could explain
homophobia (Morrison 1993-4: 57 in Halperin 1995: 44-5,
n. 203 ). In other contexts of 'normality', it could explain many
'isms', such as sexism, racism and/or xenophobia.
10
However, let
us be clear, the statement that the deployment of 'normality' could
explain many 'isms' shouldn't be taken as a claim to truth per
se-despite its seductive and very persuasive logical explanation.
On the contrary, it should be taken tactically in the overall con-
text of the axes of knowledge, power and subjectivity.
From a Queer Ethics to a Green Ethics
On the basis of the two aspects of queer ethics presented - resist-
ance and non-essentialism let us examine if and how they could
be applicable to Green ethics. The theme of environmental resist-
ance, as ethics, has already been addressed, notably in an article
by Peter Quigley in this volume and elsewhere { 1990, 1992). For
him, 'traditional and contemporary postures of ecological re-
sistance share too many features with the power they wish to
oppose', and therefore 'could benefit from a thorough reconsidera-
tion in light of poststructural philosophy, which provides the basis
for a sweeping resistance movement' {Quigley 1992: 291). Quigley
claims that for structuralism there is 'no eternal truth' and no
'transcendent essences', and that what is 'made to seem "nat-
ural"' is the result of an 'act of centering and freezing' by 'a power
group' {ibid. 293 ). Quigley sees anthropocentrism as an example
of an 'act of centering and freezing' which can be opposed by
'deconstruction', a technique to 'demonstrate the arbitrary nature
of this centering', and ultimately forces its dismantling. In prac-
tical terms, this means questioning the dominant type of environ-
mental resistance, which advocates a return to a lost, presumably
more natural, state as a way of opposing the current degradation
of the environment. Quigley correctly identifies this type of resist-
ance in the politics of 'liberation' of the 1960s. It is also precisely
Foucault against Environmental Ethics 233
this 'liberationist' discourse that Foucault criticized in the first
volume of The History of Sexuality. Transferring Foucault's argu-
ment to the environmental issue, we note that the proliferation of
environmental discourse, policies, legislation, political struggles
and so on is taking place at the point in history when discourses
about human-led environmental changes ('pollution') emerged.
Thus, environmentalism might also be, beyond the genuine attempt
to prevent 'pollution' and preserve 'nature', a subtle strategy to
make the human population adapt to the effective end of 'pristine'
nature and the collapse of the previously established distinction
between nature and culture. Quigley illustrates this type of 'lib-
erationist' environmental discourse by the example of Theodore
Roszak's (1979) argument, which 'posits an eternal essence and
suggests that this essence is shared by the unique personality
and spirit of nature' (Quigley 1992: 298). However, what is to be
resisted, according to Roszak, is defined by clear naturalist bound-
aries which are themselves not questioned. Quigley's critical ana-
lysis follows the same general direction as Foucault's. However,
Quigley stops short of giving precise tactical and practical sugges-
tions for an ethics of environmental resistance, despite the fact
that there are already existing examples, notably queer ethics.
Green Resistance as an Aesthetic of Existence
It should be obvious by now that a Foucauldian Green resistance
is not simply a potential instrument with which to oppose the
destruction of 'nature', taken as a pre-given essential category,
but is also the ultimate act of human freedom to constantly
question the process whereby essential categories emerge histor-
ically, and how human subjectivity and human conduct are con-
structed in the context of these categories. This constant critique
in itself could constitute an aesthetic of existence. A beautiful life
worth living is a life of constant self-critique, a work on oneself
with regard to the possibilities of thinking differently, of becom-
ing something different from what we have been made, of engaging
in the process of construction called 'self-improvement' (Hacking
1986). But how do we know that an act of resistance is 'Green'?
As there are no absolute, external referential categories, it is not
possible to evaluate in the abstract the degree of 'greenness' of
any act of resistance. However, since any action is situated in a
234 Eric Darier
specific context of power relations, it is possible to know if, tactic-
ally and at a given time, a Green act of resistance merely legitimizes
the existing system of power relations or if it undermines it.
Because of the extreme fluidity and adaptivity of the relations of
power, a genuine act of Green resistance yesterday could rapidly
become one of the legitimating elements for environmental prac-
tices contrary to the intentions of the initial acts of resistance. For
example, the quest for scientific knowledge about the functioning
of the natural environment can be seen as an instrument for
instigating changes in human practices which might otherwise have
arguably dire ecological and human consequences. However, the
same knowledge can also be used to justify the introduction of
changes in social practices vis-a-vis the 'environment' which, in
the longer term, could have even worse ecological and/or human
consequences. This is the case with 'conservationism', which wanted
to prevent deforestation, but led to increased exploitation of forests
for commercial and state interests, through greater scientific - and
presumably 'rational' - forest management (Darier 1991 ). Fire
prevention can be seen as a measure to protect forests (as well as
commercial, fiscal and tourism revenues), but can also lead to
long-term ecological decline if forests are prevented from regenerat-
ing themselves through fire. Therefore, the degree of 'greenness'
of resistance can be measured only in context, not in the abstract.
In summary, Green ethics based on resistance must be under-
stood as an aesthetic of human existence rooted in a permanent,
radical questioning and re-questioning of the broader conditions
which result in humans seeing the world as they see it, so as to
think differently from the way they now think. It is through this
process of constant hyper-criticism and 'tactical hyper-activism'
(Gandal 1986: 122) that one can question the conditions which
account for one's subjectivity, and start to imagine and build new
kinds of subjectivities. For example, it is through practical opposi-
tion to a new landfill site or an incinerator that individuals and
communities may start questioning the conditions which have led
to a 'garbage crisis'. Household recycling can be one technical
alternative which transforms individual subjectivity from 'waste-
ful' consumer to recycling or Green consumer. However, it could
also lead one to re-question the entire process of consumerism,
and why and how individuals are seduced by it. In this case,
opposing a landfill site or incinerator might be a necessary condi-
tion for a radical shift from a consumer self to a post-consumer
self, which might be a green self (Conley 1993; Darier 1996b).
Foucault against Environmental Ethics
Believe in Non-Naturalism, but Tactical
Naturalism if Necessary
235
Even if one adopts a green ethics of resistance, one could still be
tempted to ground it in some kind of naturalist certainty. It is at
this point that one might see a contradiction between existing
environmental struggles and a green Foucauldian ethics. The over-
whelming majority of environmental struggles appeal to some kind
of 'natural' imperative to justify their actions. It is in the name of
some 'natural' law which is violated that the environmental move-
ment is mobilized. It would appear that the discourse of the envir-
onmental movement is indeed strongly anchored in naturalistic
arguments. On the other hand, a Foucauldian approach challenges
foundationalism, including the naturalism of environmentalism.
How can we square this apparent contradiction? Again, we
have to go back to Foucault's understanding of discourse and
practices, not as the affirmation of absolute truth, but as a stra-
tegic game which the existing relations of power forces on the
players. As history has shown, naturalist arguments have been
powerful strategies to justify virtually any social or economic sys-
tem. In this context, one can understand that the environmental
movement might want to use naturalistic arguments as a political
tactic. However, if naturalism can be a powerful tactic, it always
includes political dangers. On the one hand, naturalistic argu-
ments have a powerful capacity to seduce and mobilize. On the
other hand, the struggle can shift towards the actual content of
natural categories which can be discussed ad nauseam by scien-
tific experts and counter-experts, without any definitive, absolute
certainty. For example, current developments in biotechnologies
have exploded the traditional limits between what is 'natural' and
what is human-engineered. However, in the context of relations
of power, those who resist may not have the choice of political
strategies. For example, the procedure of public environmental
hearings is an illustration of the structural constraints imposed on
environmental groups. Faced with credible-sounding experts and
scientific studies presented by advocates of a proposed develop-
ment, environmental groups are forced to play a tactical game of
presenting counter-experts and counter-studies. Because of the
degree of inherent uncertainty in any scientific argument, the final
decision rests on either the legitimacy of the scientists or the
broader state of relations of power.
236 Eric Dorier
Nevertheless, the participation of environmental groups in envir-
onmental public hearings can also become a site of resistance
(Wynne 1982). For example, Richardson, Sherman and Gismondi
have documented the detailed struggle of environmental groups
and citizens in the context of a public environmental enquiry
concerning a $1.3 billion Cdn proposal to build a paper plant
in northern Alberta, Canada (Richardson et al. 1993 ). One argu-
ment used by the promoter, Alberta Pacific Forest Industries,
to justify the production of bleached paper was demand from
the market- more precisely, the demand from 'housewives'. The
promoter was trying to argue that the 'market' was imposed
on them, and external to their own corporate strategy. It was an
obvious attempt at shifting responsibility for environmental dam-
age from the corporation to the consumer. It was also an obvious
attempt to 'naturalize' the market, by considering its functions as
an imposed imperative - like a law of nature that one ought to
submit to. In response, a local housewife shouted, 'Not this house-
wife!', to undermine the attempt. Most of the time, the instru-
ments of environmental resistance, like public hearings, are imposed
by the overall relations of power. However - and even in gener-
ally unfavourable contexts hearings can be
moments ... when less powerful groups undermined the discourses
empowered by the dominant groups and in the process constructed
counter-discourses of their own .... The acts by subordinate groups,
of questioning convention, subverting dominant discourses and
asserting counter-discourses are highly political. (Richardson et a!.
1993)
The recourse to naturalistic arguments by environmentalists is
not, however, proof of an inherent naturalism in environmental-
ism. In large part, it is a tactical game whereby to challenge the
legitimacy of what is considered 'natural'. In the process of that
challenge or resistance, existing boundaries of what has been con-
stituted as 'nature' are being questioned. The anti-anthropocentrism
of deep ecology can indeed appear as the ultimate 'naturalist'
discourse, which can present dangers (Luke 1988; Stark 1995).
For example, Luke perceives deep ecology as an extreme form of
anthropocentrism (an anti-anthropocentric anthropocentrism),
which leaves unproblematized the question of who will define and
manage the new boundaries of nature, as understood by deep
ecology. However, deep ecology can also be a tactical game of
Foucault against Environmental Ethics 237
counter-discourse to create a radical difference in the existing
discursive configuration (lngalsbee 1996; List 1992). Yet, it could
become more than just a counter-discourse: it could also create
'possibilities for ... new subjectivity to arise' (Richardson et al.
1993).
Conclusion: Do We Need Environmental Ethics?
In order to answer this question, it might be helpful to go back to
the mapping of the different types of ethics that Foucault identi-
fied: (1) 'morality', (2) 'morality of behaviors', and (3) reflexive
work on, and by, oneself about 'how one ought to "conduct
oneself"' (Foucault 1984f: 26). Foucault would probably classify
most conventional (i.e. foundationalist) environmental ethics in
one of the first two types. Indeed, most foundationalist envir-
onmental ethics tends to be highly moralistic, unreflexive and
uncritical about the full extent of its normalizing effects and how
they fit into a disciplinary 'environmentality'. However, the third
type of ethics identified by Foucault, which he preferred to call
'an aesthetic of existence' rather than 'ethics', could be the basis
for a non-foundationalist environmental ethics or, maybe, as it
should be called now, a 'Green aesthetic of existence'. This 'Green
aesthetic of existence' doesn't offer solutions to the 'environmental
crisis'; it merely suggests the adoption of an 'ethical sensibility'
(Connolly 1993a, 1993b), a constant critical, sceptical attitude
toward foundationalism and assumed natural categories, a con-
tinued transgression of the limits of the conditions that have con-
structed our current and past subjectivities, a permanent reinventing
of ourselves. However, this hyper, constant self-critique doesn't
lead to paralysing quietism. On the contrary, it leads to hyper-
activism, of reflexive and critical resistance.
Together with so many other resistance movements, such as
anti-colonialism, anti-racism, feminism, working-class organizing
and queer politics, the environmental movement shares this fea-
ture of hyper-activism. However, Foucault's original contribution
to a politics of resistance is to add a further reflexive, critical turn.
Environmental resistance, inspired by a green aesthetic of exist-
ence, includes the questioning of existing dominant discourse and
practices around 'nature'. The adoption of naturalistic counter-
discourses by environmental groups should be seen as a tactic of
resistance rather than a deep ontological and/or metaphysical claim.
Affirming counter-essentialist, counter-naturalist alternatives may
238 Eric Darier
result in undermining existing dominant discourses about the
environment, and thereby creating conditions for the establishment
of a permanent critique of all essentialism and naturalism, as a
mechanism of deployment of power.
In sharp opposition to many conventional environmental ethical
theories, like that of Callicott (1990), a Green aesthetic of existence
acknowledges the impossibility of grounding environmental ethics
upon an absolute, external, universal and coherent 'truth' about
'nature'. For example, the discourse of 'ecological limits' as a
strategy for changing human behaviour might simply reproduce
existing relations of power which posit an absolute truth external
to humans God or gods, scientific 'truth' and now an 'ecological
imperative'. Foucault would agree with Andre Gorz, that
[i]t is important to make sure that the political approach is not
presented as the 'absolutely inevitable' product of a 'scientific ana-
lysis', to avoid producing a new version of the sort of scienristic and
anti-political dogmatism that, in its diamat version, purported to
raise political practices and concepts to the level of scientifically
proven necessities, thus denying their specifically political charac-
ter. (Gorz 1993: 55)
11
The truth-discourse about 'ecological limits' could result in a will
to push back these limits even further (a will of 'acting' on these
'external' limits), rather than a will to remain 'within the limits'
as an aesthetic of existence. For example, reducing individual
energy consumption in the North shouldn't be justified by an
imperative I threat like 'global warming' defined by an 'ex-
pertocracy' (ibid.), but because one might not want the con-
sumption of large amounts of energy be a defining characteristic
of oneself! In the context of rampant consumerism in the North,
it is up to us to advance into a Green askesis that would make us
work on ourselves and invent a manner of being that is still
improbable.
12
Therefore the challenge to environmental activism is not to
establish a binding 'ecological rationality' (Dryzek 1990), with
even more powerful instruments of control and management, but
to acknowledge human freedom, which can manifest itself any-
where, from the outright destruction of the planet to its survival.
Maybe it is not environmental ethics we need, but rather, a Green
aesthetic of existence. In this case, Foucault is particularly relev-
ant to the task.
13
I UtJUIII;)I L.IIVIIUIIIIIt:::IIIUI L-.)7
Notes
1 This question was formulated by David Halperin while commenting
on a previous draft of this chapter.
2 Although Caputo doesn't discuss Foucault specifically, he articul-
ates a 'postmodern ethics' -an ethics of 'dissemination' (1993: 1)
which Foucault would probably subscribe to. For Caputo, conven-
tional 'ethics makes safe. It throws a net of safety under the judge-
ments we are forced to make, the daily, the hourly decisions that
make up the texture of our lives. Ethics lays the foundation for
principles that force people to be good; it clarifies concepts, secures
judgements, provides firm guardrails along the slippery slopes of
factical life. It provides principles and criteria and adjudicates hard
cases. Ethics is altogether wholesome, constructive work, which is
why it enjoys a good name. The deconstruction of ethics, on the
other hand, cuts this net. Or rather, since deconstruction is not
some stealthy, cunning agent of disruption, is not an agent at all,
is in a sense nothing at all, it is much more accurate to say that
a deconstructive analysis shows that the net is already torn, is
"always already" split, all along and from the start. The decon-
struction of ethics is ethics' own undoing' (ibid. 4 ).
3 I am leaving aside some of the problematic issues I assumptions
such as: ( 1) the presumed separation between 'science' and 'ethics',
(2) the unresolved question of how we can even pretend to know
what 'nature is' (presumably for Rolston the unproblematized
answer comes from 'science'), and (3) the assumption of a right
method ('appropriately considered') to determine 'what ought to
be'.
4 For a critique of Cheney, see Frodeman 1992, Quigley 1992, and
for a general critique, see Quigley's chapter above (ch. 9).
5 The ontological argumentation for the preservation of nature 'is not
intended to prove that nature exists, which is taken as a given, but
to show that humans have a duty to act so as to ensure the continua-
tion of nature in its appropriate, natural forms' (Hargrove 1989:
191-2, my emphasis). A Foucauldian critique would ask how
'nature' has become an unquestioned 'given', or what led (some?)
'humans' to feel that they 'have a duty to act so as to ensure the
continuation of nature', or who is the final authority on what should
be considered 'appropriate natural forms'.
6 For Foucauldian - or Foucauldian-inspired - studies around these
issues see Davidson 1986; McGee 1994; Michael and Grove-
White 1993; Quigley 1992; Szerszynski 1993: 49-88, 235-64;
Tully 1998.
7 For a wonderful comrarison hetween Lacan and Foucault, see
Rajchman 1991.
240 Eric Darier
8 Nietzsche uses the terms Selbstaufhebung and Selbstiiberwindung
interchangeably, and means 'self-dissolution' and 'self-conquest' or
'self-surmounting'. See Ansell-Pearson 1994: 223, n. 1).
9 I used 'by choice' in the same sense as Elspeth Probyn (1995). Probyn
makes a distinction between 'for choice' and 'by choice'. The first
refers to an individualist, universal, liberal ontological category,
while the second refers to the possibility of multiplying choices by
problematizing and transgressing the presumed universal, individual,
liberal notion of 'choice'.
10 For example, racism cannot be defined positively. In the case of
'white' racism, it is only by opposition to a 'non-white' category
that it is definable. Both Said (1978a, 1993), in the context of
European colonial empires, and Tully (1993b, 1995), in the context
of aboriginal peoples in North America, have performed a tactical
reversal by revealing the extent to which 'Western' culture and
political systems have incorporated the 'other', while at the same
time denying it or failing to recognize it. For example, Tully (1993b)
has shown that the political and constitutional concept of 'federalism'
so central to contemporary Western political culture, was introduced
only in late eighteenth century. The introduction of federalism in
to the American Constitution was lifted directly from the existing
Iroquois federal system.
11 There seems to be a convergence around the theme of 'self-limita-
tion' even among some post-Marxists. Gorz justifies 'self-limitation
as a social project' on the ground that it 'remains the only non-
authoritarian, democratic way towards an eco-compatible industrial
civilization' (1993: 64).
12 I am adapting Foucault. 'Ascetism as the renunciation of pleasure
has had bad connotations. But the askesis is something else .... We've
rid ourselves of asceticism. Yet it is up to us to advance into a homo-
sexual askesis that would make us work on ourselves and invent, do
not say discover, a manner of being that is still improbable' (Foucault
1989b: 303).
13 I would like to thank the following individuals for helpful com-
ments on previous drafts of this chapter: James Bernauer, Mary
Carpenter, Kevin Crombie, David Halperin, Eric Laferriere, Phil
Macnaghten and the two anonymous reviewers of the journal Envir-
onmental Ethics. The usual disclaimers apply.
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Index
NOTE: Page numbers followed by n indicate that information is to be found in a
note. All titles indexed are works by -'v1ichel Foucault mentioned in the text,
except where a different author is given in brackets.
Abenheim, Lucien Lewys 74
aboriginal peoples 5; boulder
structures 152-8, 161
ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash
Power) 229
activism: environmental 14, 20, 238;
Foucault's influence on 5; gay and
lesbian 228-33; hyper-activism 237
Adorno, Theodor 97-8, 99
aesthetics: aesthetics of existence 5,
219, 225, 228-30, 233-4; Green
aesthetics of existence 30, 237-8;
of nature 216n
'Aesthetics of Existence, An' (paper)
166
AIDS: ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to
Unleash Power) 229-30
Alberta Pacific Forest Industries 236
America see Canada; North America;
United States
anthropocentrism 19-20, 22-3, 24,
204-7, 218, 232; anti-
anthropocentrism 30, 236-7
Archaelogy of Knowledge, The 10
Architecture-M ouvement-Continuite
152
Arnold, Ron 121, 122
art: artworks as heterotopias 29,
152-62
ascetism 240n
askesis 240n
Austria: ecological modernization in
109
author: death of 6
autopoiesis 106
Bachelard, Gaston 10, 96
Bakhtin, Mikhail 199-200
Barnet, Richard J. 125
Barthes, Roland 182, 192, 200, 207
Bartlett, R. 57-8
Baudrillard, Jean 20-1, 33n, 185,
202n
Beck, Ulrich 95, 101, 108, 111-12,
113, 115; ecological fields of
conflict 43-4; on environmentalism
4; risk society 62n, 103-6
Bell, Daniel 187
Bennett, Tony 199
Bentham, Jeremy: panopticon 158
Berman, Morris 66
Bernauer, James W. 220
Berry, Thomas 77
Berry, Wendell 174
big science 56, 113, 129
Bighorn Wheel 153, 154
biocentrism 148
bio-economics 53-4, 102
biology 11-12, 17, 22, 40-1, 51, 205
biophilia 148
268 Index
biopolitics 5, 22-3, 28, 37-8, 95;
and discipline 38-43, 45; and
ecological risk 43-5; and
governmentality 59, 60, 96, 112,
113, 114-15, 221; and population
38, 39, 46, 51-2, 102, 142
biopower 12, 21, 22, 95, 97, 122;
and discipline 38-43; discourses
of 210-14; and environmental
regulation 56; and population
44-5, 81-4, 211, 213; and power/
knowledge systems 142-3, 144;
and statist ecology 149-50; see also
geo-power; governmentality
biosphere and net primary product
140
Birth of the Clinic, The 31n
birth control see contraception; family
planning strategies
body see human body
Bookchin, Murray 3, 33n
boulder structures: aboriginal 152-8,
161
Bowerbank, Sylvia 29
Bramwell, Anna 51
Brumley, John H. 153
Brundtland, Gro Harlem: 1987 report
53, 110, 136-7
Brundtland Commission 136-8
Buell, Lawrence 174
Cairns, John, Jr 146-7
Callicott,]. Baird 2-3, 216n, 238
cameralism 47, 48
camp politics 229
Canada: Green Plan 60, 62n; living
environment 78n; medicine wheels
in 153, 154; rock art in 155; see
also North America
Canguilhem, Georges 10, 12, 96
capitalism: and biopower 40;
integrated world capitalism 224;
and population control 51, 82,
83-4, 85, 87-91, 97; post-
structuralist critique of 185 -6; and
scarcity 82; and sustainability 138,
145
Capra, Fritjof 65-6, 70
Caputo, John D. 239n
Care of Self, The 172
Cavailles, Jean 10
Cawley, R. McGreggor 166, 182, 201
Cecil Textbook of Medicine
(Wyngaarden et al.) 75
Certeau, Michel de 17, 23, 32n
Chaloupka, William 166, 182, 200-1
Cheney, Jim 188-9, 202n
children's experience 195
Christoff, Peter 109, 110, 111, 115
Christopher, Warren 127, 128, 140-1
Classical Age 11, 40-1
clean technologies 109, 110
Clifford, James 157
Clinton, Bill/Clinton administration
29, 123, 124, 126-8, 140-1;
Gore's new stewardship story
128-33
Club of Rome 53, 135
Cold War conflict 122-3, 125, 135
collective awareness 191
colonialism and environmentalism 52,
70
Commoner, Barry 52-3, 62n
Commons, Open Spaces and
Footpaths Preservation Society 62n
communication 106-9
conduct: of conduct 46, 149; ethics of
226, 237; see also governmentality
confession 221; eco-confessional
167-71
Connolly, William 8
conservationism 234
consumerism/consumption 18, 33n,
52, 234, 236; as dysfunction 129,
134, 148; sustainability of 33n,
126
contraception 87-8; see also family
planning strategies
cosmology 65-72, 77-8
critical theory 96-9
Cronan, William 176
Cubist paintings as heterotopias 161
Darier, Eric 60, 91, 92, 95
Darman, Richard 126
Darwin, Charles 51
de Certeau, Michel 17, 23, 32n
de La u retis, Teresa 231
de Maria, Walter 156
Dean, Mitchell 46, 115
death: of the author 6; death culture
67-70, 71-2; and work 74
deconstruction: and aboriginal art
162n; of ethics 239n
Index 269
deep ecology: anti-anthropocentrism
30, 236-7; challenged 196-200;
ecocentrism 23, 24; and
instrumental rationality 203-4; and
limits 80; and population control
94n; and technological modernity
101; wilderness discourse 33n
demography 149; see also population
deplacements 6, 10, 14, 16
Derrida, Jacques 30n, 182, 216n
Descartes, Rene 67
dialectic of environment 117
Diamond, Irene 87-8
Dillard, Annie 194, 196
discipline: and biopolitics 38-43, 45;
and the body 38-9, 46, 97, 122;
enviro-discipline 29, 142-8, 150; of
homosexuality 18; and population
81, 82; and power 17-18, 38;
of self 221-2; and societal
rationalization 96-7; and subject
167; see also ceo-confessional
Discipline and Punish 38, 39
Dobson, Andrew 13
Dollimore, Jonathan 207
Donzelot, Jacques 50
Drengson, Alan 171, 176
Dreyfus, Herbert 96
Duden, Barbara 94n
Dumm, Thomas 19, 31n
e-factor 131, 133, 140
Eagleton, Terry 181, 182, 200
Earth: carrying capacity 52, 139; as
environmental engine 146-7
Earth Days 131, 135
Earth Summit (1992) 53
earthworks 156-7
eco (as prefix) 171
ecocentrism 23, 24; see also deep
ecology
ecocide 71-2
ceo-confessional 167-71
ceo-knowledge 29, 133-42, 144, 150
ecological critique 111
ecological ethic of stability 147-8
ecological governmentality 28, 37,
51-60, 116-17, 121-51
ecological hazards see ecological risk
ecological identity work 167-71
ecological modernization 109-11,
115-lfi
ecological movements: modernizing
rationality of 99-103
ecological postmodernism 189-91
ecological rationality 116-17
ecological reflexivity 126
ecological risk 103-6, 107-8, 116;
see also environmental risk
ecology 2; as biopolitics 45; change in
meaning 167; defined 63; Foucault
on 4, 13, 213, 222; four laws of
52-3; and limits 28-9, 238;
scientific 53-4, 102, 113, 116;
social ecology 24; and society
95-118; statist 149-50; systems
53-4, 59, 62n, 112, 113, 114;
see also deep ecology; limits
economics 11, 51; bio-economics
53-4, 102; geo-economics 123-33;
sustainable growth see green
governmentality; see also capitalism
ceo-pastoral writing 1 71-2
ecopolitics 23
eco-sexual normativity 92
Eder, Klaus 43-4, 95, 101-3, 108-9,
111-12, 113, 115
Ehrlich, Paul 52, 81, 84, 85
EIA see environmental impact
assessment
Einstein, Albert 68
Elder, John 164
Engels, Friedrich 69
enviro-discipline 29, 142-8, 150
environmental activism 14, 20, 238;
see also environmental movement
environmental awareness see
environmentalism
environmental ethics 27, 30, 108,
116, 203-16; and Foucault 204-7,
217-40; see also Green ethics
environmental fundamentalism 13-14
environmental governmentality 22,
37-62; ecological governmentality
28, 3 ~ 5 1 6 ~ 116-17
environmental hearings: public
235-6
environmental impact assessment
(EIA) 28, 55, 56-9, 60, 85; see
also environmental risk
environmental management 15, 23,
45, 52; see also environmental
governmentality; environmental
impact assessment (EIA)
270 Index
environmental movement 63; diversity
of 2; media image 121; militant 69
environmental protection 123, 126-8;
see also environmental impact
assessment; green governmentality
Environmental Protection Agency
(US) 127
environmental regulation 55-60; see
also green governmentality
environmental risk 12, 28, 43-S, 56,
85, 103-6; see also environmental
impact assessment (EIA)
environmental theory: nature-
endorsing 3, 4, 19, 29-30; nature-
sceptical 3, 4, 29-30
environmentalism 63-S, 77-8; and
cosmology defined 63; and
Foucault 1-33; and health 72-7;
and limits 79-81; and post-
modernism 2-3
environmentality 142; green
governmentality 121-51; and
population control 80, 84-7, 90
episteme 9
epistemology 3, 11; see also
knowledge
Eribon, Didier 6
ethics: of conduct 226; deconstruction
of 239n; environmental 27, 30,
108, 116, 203-16, 217-40; ethic of
stability 147-8; and Foucault 5, 7,
8, 9, 25-7, 163-4; gay 227-33;
Greek 25; Green 228, 232, 233-4;
post-Auschwitz ethic 220; post-
modern 239n; of responsibility 71
ethos of pluralization 5, 8
eugenics 83, 87
Evernden, 1\'eil 30, 191-6
family planning strategies 82, 83-4,
87-9
federalism: origins of 240n
feminism 5, 25, 207-8, 209,
liberal 88-90; and population
control strategies 88-90
Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas 96
filters 3, 30n
Finch, Robert 164
formalism 199
Foucault, .'vlichel: aesthetic of
existence 225; archeological
approach 7, 8, 9-14, 16, 31n;
confession work 168, 170; death
25; detests nature 6; discipline
discourse 38-43, 81, 82; on
ecology 4, 13, 213, 222; enviro-
discipline 142-6; environmental
ethics 204-7, 217-40; and
environmentalism 1-33; and ethics
7, 8, 9,25-7, 163-4,227-33;and
Neil Evernden 193-5; Foucault
effect 227; and Frankfurt school
98-9; genealogical approach 7,
8, 9, 10, 13, 14-25, 26, 224;
heterotopias 152, 158-62; and
homosexuality 208, 209-10,
and humanism 220;
influence of 5; interpretations of
7-8; on knowledge 8, 9-14;
literature on 5; on madness 10, 11;
marginal belonging of 8, 10; and
Marxism 13, 16, 31-2n; and
modern state 149; on natural
sciences 118n; and naturalization of
sexuality 204-9; on nature 182,
196, 197, 200-2; on nature
journals 171, 172; postmodernist
critique of 20-1; on power 90,
112-13, 114-15, 198,219-20,
223-4; and scientific discourse 8,
10-12; and social theory 95-9; and
space 158-61; and structuralism
12-3, 14; and surveillance 151n;
technologies of self 165, 166, 177;
on Weber 117n; see also
biopolitics; biopower; death of the
author; discipline; governmentality;
heterotopias; power; space
foundationalism 198, 231
France: and governmentality 23;
intellectuals as icons 7, 8; militant
environmental movement in 63
Frankfurt school 96, 97, 98-9
functional systems 106-9
fundamentalism 13-14; sexual
91-2
Futurists 199, 216n
Gare, Arrane E. 30, 184-5, 186,
187-8, 188-9
gay and lesbian identity see queer
identity
gay and lesbian movement: emerp;encc
of 229; gay politics 30; p;<1Y
1naex L/1
resistance 227-30; influence of
Foucault on 5; see also homo-
sexuality; queer politics; queer
theory
genetics 70-1; eugenics 83, 87
geo-economics/geopolitics 123-33,
133-5
geo-power 123-33, 144, ISO
Germany: ecological modernization in
1 09; homosexual rights movemLnt
.231; social theorists in 29, 95-9
Gismondi, Michael 236
Glacken, Clarence 51
God: as seen by AI Gore 129-JO
Gordon, Colin 49, 97, 11711, I 18n
Gore, AI 29, 124, 128-33
Gorz, Andre 238, 24011
government: police doctrine of 47-8;
programmes of 59-60; see also
governmentality
governmental rationality 45-8; and
liberalism 48-50
governmentality 5, 9, 21-2, 23, 24,
37, 50-60; biopolitics 59, 60, 96,
112, 113, 114-15, 221; and
ecocide 71-2; ecological 28, 37,
51-60, 116-17, 121-51;
environmental 22, 37-62; green 29,
121-51; and population control
144-5; and social theory 96;
strategies of 214-15; see also
biopolitics; biopower; population
Graff, Gerald 192
Greek ethics 25
Green aesthetics of existence 30,
237-8
Green ethics 228, 232; Green
resistance 233-4
green fundamentalism 13-14
green governmentality 29, 121-51
green movement 203-16
Green Plan (Canada) 60, 6211
green subjectivity see nature
writing
Gregory, St 171
grounded responsibility 30
Grove, Richard 52
guilt 170
Gutting, Gary 9, 12, 13, 3111
Habermas, .Jiirgen 7, 48, 95, 108,
118n; modernizing r<ltionality
99-101, 102-3, 111-12; Weber's
intluence on 97, 98
llalperin, David 218, 228, 231, 239n
!Iaraway, Donna 200
llardin, Garrett 52
llargrove, Eugene C. 239n
hazards see ecological risk;
environmental risk
health 28; women's 88-9; and work
72-7
Heidegger, Martin 21611
Heizer, Michael 156
heterotopias 25, 29, 30, 152,
15 8-61; alternative meaning 16211;
crisis heterotopias 201; as sites of
resistance 200-1
Heyd, Thomas 25, 29
Hinchman, Hannah 17811
Hippocrates 72, 78n
history see Foucault, Michel:
archeological approach
History of Sexuality, The: biopower/
biopolitics 38, 45-6, 213; and
ethics 25, 26, 204, 220, 226;
liberationist discourse 233;
normalization of sexuality 205,
228-9; self-technology 172
Hoagland, Edward 175
Hobbes, Thomas 230-1
Homer-Dixon, Thomas 9411
homosexual askesis 24011
homosexual identity see queer identity
homosexuality: disciplining of 18;
homosexual liberation movements
209-10, 231; as medical creation
208, 229; normalization and 206,
229-30, 231; and strategic reversal
209-10, 231-2; see also ACT UP;
gay and lesbian movement; queer
identity; queer politics; queer theory
Honneth, Axel 48, 98-9, 118n
Horkheimer, Max 97-8, 99
Hubbell, Sue 174
Hulley, Stephen B. 75
human body 15; discipline of 38-9,
45, 46, 97, 122, 144; see also
population control; sexuality
human sciences: discourse of 10-12
humanism 19-20, 26, 198, 203-4,
220; anti-humanism 204-7
Husser!, Edmund Gustav Albrecht
108
272 Index
Hutcheon, Linda 183-4
hyper-activism 237
idealism 195
identity: ecological identity work
167-71; gay and lesbian 18; and
power relations 223-5; queer 8,
227-8, 230-3; self-construction
25-7
instrumental rationality 97-8, 128,
129, 203-4
instrumentalism 6 7
International Biological Programme
(1964-74) 54, 55, 112, 114
International Geophysical Year
(1957-8) 54
International Union for the
Conservation of Nature 138-9
irony: as tactic of resistance 7-8, 18
Iroquois indians 240n
Jameson, Fredric 192
Jamison, Andrew 54
Japan: geo-economic snategies 125;
sustainable development
programme 131, 132
Jeffers, Robinson 202n
journals: nature 164, 171-2, 173-6,
177
juridical power 41
Kant, Emmanuel 224
Klassen, Michael 155
knowledge: discourses on 4, 99,
194-5; ceo-knowledge 29, 133-42,
144, 150; Foucault's archeological
approach to 7, 8, 9-14, 16,
31n; and government 49-50;
instrumental 15, 21; knowledge
systems 108; power/knowledge
systems 5, 9, 95, 97, 142-6,
219-20, 221, 222; ratio to
ignorance 2; scientific 2, 8, 101,
111-12; and society 105, 111-12,
113; will to 15; see also
epistemology
Kritzman, Lawrence 26-7
Kuhn, Thomas 2, 219
Lacan, Jacques 221
Lalonde, Marc 78n
land art 156-7
language and nature 195-6; see also
nature writing
Lanthier, Isabelle 28
Latour, Bruno 219
legislation and environmentalism 70-2
lesbian movement see gay and lesbian
movement; homosexuality; queer
identity; queer politics; queer theory
Levi, Primo 19
Levy, Neil 30
liberal feminism 88-90
liberalism 18-19, 19-20; influence of
Foucault on 8; and security 48-50
liberationist theory 223, 232-3
liberty: Foucault on 18-20, 26
life-style 28, 74-7
limits: ecological 28-9, 238; and
environmentalism 79-94; of growth
13, 53, 135, 139; population and
81-94; of self 240n
Limits to Growth, The (Club of
Rome) 135
linguistics 11
Linnaeus, Carolus 11
living environment see life-style
Long, Richard 156
Lopez, Barry 164, 174-5
Luhmann, Niklas 95, 101, 106-9,
111-12
Lukacs, Georg 96
Luke, Timothy W. 24, 29, 84
Lurtwak, Edward 124, 125
McCarthy, Thomas 99
Macintyre, Alasdair 157
McKibben, Bill 210, 214
McMichael, D. J. 139
McWhorter, Ladell 170
Macy, Joanna 165, 166
madness: Foucault's studies of 10, 11
Magne, Martin P. R. 155
Makower, Joel 133
Malthus, Thomas 51, 81, 82
management see environmental
management
Manhattan Project (US Atomic
Energy Commission) 54
Marsh, George Perkins 51
Marx, Karl 20, 96
Marxism 20; and Foucault 13, 16,
31-2n; poststructuralist critique of
I!U-9
tnclnx I.IJ
Mathews, Freya 33n
media image of environmentality I! I
medicine 28, 71; occupational 72 4, !t.
medicine wheels 29, 152-8, I ld
mercantilism see cameralism
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice I 0, I Yh
Mies, Maria 87
militant environmentalism li.1, 6'1
Miller, Peter 59-60, 115-17
mind wheels 152-8, 161
misanthropy 148
modernity 11, 40-1; and biopown/
biopolitics 42, 43-4; and ecolog1,,tl
movements 99-1 03; nature in
24-5; and population managl'lllent
82; power relations in 17; rdltxlv<'
106, 115; and social theory Y8;
societal 95-118; technological 101
modernization: ecological I OY-1 I,
115-16
moral pluralism 2; see also
postmodernism
morality 237; moral code 225-li;
morality of behaviors 226, 2.17;
see also ethics
Mots et les chases, Les see Order of
Things, The
Murray, John A. 164
mysticism: challenged 189-96
Narveson, Jan 216n
nationalism 188, 202n
natural contract 70-2
natural sciences 3, 4, 95, 118n;
see also biology
naturalism 230-2; non-naturalism
235-7
naturalistic fallacy 30, 217-18, 23 I
nature: aesthetics of 216n; definitions
of 210, 216n; discourse of 207-9;
human interpretation of 3-4;
human relationship with 24-5, 51;
language and 195-6; and limits
84-5; and normalization 16, 141;
as other 196; and poststructural
theory 181-202; stewardship of
129-33; writing on 29, 163-78
nature journals 164, 171-2, 173-6,
177
nature-endorsing/nature-sceptical
environmental theory 3, 4, 19,
29-30
N.111 rq,ime: persecution of
IH"""'l'xuals 231
Nll't\ "'''United States
lttvtrontnental Policy Act
111'1 prnna ry product (NPP) 140
Nl'lhl'tl.111ds: ecological modernization
Ill Jil'l
Ntw t\g .. movements 189
Nl'w Y11rk Museum of Modern Art:
l'r111111 ivism exhibition 157
Nnv11111, Isaac 31n
N 111 "' hl', Friedrich Wilhelm 163,
I H.'., 240n; aesthetics 225; analysis
"' dt",nr 14; influence on
l'""'''tult 8, 96; influence on
h.1nk lurt school 97; and power
220
nthtlt"ll 'J7, 224
non l'S'l'lltialism and queer identity
10, 2.!0-2
normalization 5, 80, 221-2; of
l'llvironmentalism 80; heterosexual
'10, 'II, Y2-J; and homosexuality
20h, 229-.10, 231; of life-style 28;
and nature 16, 141; of population
I H, 25, 59; and sexuality 18, 90,
Yl, 205-6,208,213,228-9,
2.11-2
North America: aboriginal boulder
structures 29, 152-8, 161; influenn
of Foucault in 5; see also Canada;
United States
NPP (net primary product) 140
nuclear arms race 68
Oates, David 146, 147, 148
occupational medicine 72-4, 71i
Oelschlaeger, Max 165-li, 218
'Of Other Spaces' (paper) 152, ISH-'!
oil crises 125, 135
Olivier, Lawrence 28, 224
'On the Genealogy of Ethics' (paper)
163-4
Oppenheimer, J. Robert 1i8
Order of Things, The I I, 205
Our Common Future: see Brundtland,
Gro Harlem
panopticism 59, 158
pastoral techniques 58, 221
philosophy of experience 1 0
photosynthesis 140
274 Index
Picasso, Pablo 161
Plains boulder structures 152-8,
161
pluralism 5; moral pluralism 2
police doctrine of government 47-8
pollution 52; control 55, 104-5
Population Conference 1994 (United
Nations) 53
population control 28-9, 79-94, 135,
221; and biopolitics 38, 39, 46,
51-3, 102, 142; and biopower
44-5, 81-4, 211, 213; and
capitalism 51, 82, 83-4, 85,
87-91, 97; and governmentality
122, 144-5; and limits 81-94;
and normalization 18, 25, 59;
overpopulation 84-5; and {JOlice
doctrine of government 47; racism
in discourse of 87, 90-1; repressive
83; strategies for 88-90; women
and 83, 86-7, 87-8; see also
biopolitics; biopower;
governmentality; sexuality
positivism 67
post-Auschwitz ethic 220
Poster, Mark 183, 195, 199
postmodernism 218; critique of
Foucault 20-1; critiques of 2-3,
15; ecological 189-91; postmodern
ethics 239n; and poststructuralism
30n, 186-7
poststructuralism 30, 181-202,
203-16
poverty and environmental welfare
137
power 15, 16-21, 23-4, 90, 194; and
discipline 17-18, 38; geo-power
123-33, 144, 150; and idenriry
223-5; juridical power 41; in
modern society 111-13; power/
knowledge systems 5, 9, 95, 97,
142-6,219-20, 221,222; and '
resistance 200-1; and sexual limits
28 -9; sovereign power 17-18, 41,
211; see also biopolitics; biopower;
discipline; governmental rationality;
governmenrality
'Practising Criticism' (essay) 166
precautionary principle 116
primitive art 157
Probyn, Elspeth 240n
Property Rights mowment 2 ':1, 12 I
psychoanalysis 10
public environmental hearings 235-6
queer identity 18, 227-8, 230-3
queer politics 30, 9 3
queer theory 5, 227
Quigley, Peter 25, 30, 188, 197, 232,
233
Rabinow, Paul 96
racism 87, 90-1, 240n; anti-racist
movement 5
raison d'etat (reason of state) 28, 29,
46-7, 48
Rajchman, John 165, 166
rationality: ecological 112, 116-17;
instrumental 97-8, 128, 129,
203-4; societal rationalization
96-8
Ravetz, Jerome 2
Rawlings, D. L. 173-4
reason of state (raison d'etat) 28, 29,
46-7, 48
reflexive modernity 106, 115
Reich, Robert 124, 125, 209
religious experience 19 5
re-locations see deplacements
Renaissance squares as heterotopias
161
representationalism 11
Research Institute of Innovative
Technology for the Earth (Japan)
131
research programmes 54-5
resistance S, 18, 27, 30, 92, 196-200,
222-3; gay 227-33; Green 233-4
resource exploitation 52
retreats 172; wilderness 171, 172-3,
174-7
Richardson, Mary 236
Rifkin, Jeremy 69
rights 43, 72, 205; homosexual 231;
right of sovereignty 17-18
risk see ecological risk; environmental
risk
risk society 103-6
rock art 155-8
Rolston, Holmes, Ill 218
Roman Empire: retreats in 172
Rose, Nikolas 59-60, 115-17
Ro>s, AnJrew 2, 16, 79-80, 185-6,
197
Index
Roszak, Theodore 198, 233
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 230
Ruffie, Jacques 221
Rutherford, Paul 28, 29
Ryan, Michael 183
Sadik, Nafis 89, 90
Said, Edward W. 240n
Sandilands, Catriona 28-9
Sartre, Jean-Paul 10
Sarup, Madan 30
Scandinavia: ecological modernization
in 109
scarcity 13, 79-80, 82, 85; see ,dso
capitalism; limits
science 54, 101; big science 56, 113,
129; and environmentalism 68-70;
regulatory science 55-60; scientific
discourse 8, 10-12, 40-1; scientific
ecology 53-4, 102, 113, 116;
scientific knowledge 2, 101, 111-12;
scientization of risk 104-6, I 08;
US hegemony in 113-14; see also
biology; medicine; natural sciences;
technology
security: and environmental risk
103-6; and liberalism 48-50;
see also biopolitics; biopower;
governmentality
self 226-7, 237; discipline of 221-2;
Nietzsche and 240n; self-
construction 25-7; self-limitation
240n; technologies of 8, 29,
163-78
Sessions, George 24, 30, 197
sexuality: control of 209; gay
resistance 227-33; and limits 28-9,
81-94; naturalization of 205-6;
normalization of 18, 90, 91,
205-6, 208, 213, 228-9; strategic
reversal of 231-2; see also History
of Sexuality, The; homosexuality;
population control
Sherman, Joan 236
Shiva, Vandana 87
Sierra Club (US) 62n
Singer, Linda 82, 83
Slovic, Scott 173
Smithson, Robert 156
Snyder, Gary 172
Sober, Elliott 21611
socia I body 61-211
social ecology 24
social practices: Foulault's apprn.H h
to 8, 14-25
social sciences 3, .I'J
social theory 2'1, 'J.'i-IIH
social welfare 50
societa I rat ion a liz:ll ion 'lh H
society: hctl'rotopias 111 I hO; .111d
knowll'dg<' 105, Ill 12, Ill; mk
society I 0.1-h
Soper, Kate .I, !.I h11
Sourni:l, .It-an ( :Lludt' 1.1.1
sovereign pown 17 I H, 4 I, !.I I
space !.I, !.I- 'i, !.'!, I '14; ht'tnotopi . ._
15!.-h!.
spiritual U>Slllology h'i--7 2.
Spivak, ( ;;lyatn ( :hakravorty !.07 7
Sprcrnak, ( :harlt'lll' .10, I H'i-'1 I
Stabile, Carol I H.l, I H4, I '17
stability: ecological ethic of 147-H
statist ecology 14Y-50
stewardship of natun; 12Y-33
Strategic Environmental Initiative (US)
130, 132, 147, 151
stress 72-3
structuralism 12-13, 14; see also
poststructuralism
subjectivity 26, 29, 166-7, 221; see
also identity; nature writing; self
surveillance: panopticism 59, 158;
statistical 15111
survivability 146-7
sustainable development 110, 124,
135-42; definitions 138-9; Gore's
programme for 130-3;
unsustainable development 140-1;
see also green governmentality
Sustainable Development Commission
(United Nations) 53
systems ecology 53-4, 59, 6l11, 112,
113, 114, 122
systems theory 106-9, 11811
T a ~ o n Paul S. C. 155
Taylor, Charles 11, 13, 16, 3111
technology 2, 52, 68; clean 109, 110;
and risk 104-6, 108
Thackeray, J. F. 155
Thomashow, Mitchell 164, 167-70
Thurow, Lester 124, 125
tools as art 155
truth 21 Y, 220, 222
276 Index
Tully, James 240n
Turner, Brian 44, 117-18n
UNCED see United Nations
Conference on Environment and
Development
UNFPA see United Nations
Population Fund
United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development
(UNCED): Brundtland report 53,
110, 136-7
United Nations Earth Summit 53
United Nations Environmental
Programme 138-9
United Nations Population
Conference 53
United Nations Population Fund
(UNFPA) 85-6, 89
United Nations Sustainable
Development Commission 53
United States: Clinton administration
29, 123, 124, 126-33, 140-1;
environmental regulation in 55;
green governmentality in 29,
121-51; hegemony of science from
113-14; industrialization of science
in 54; see also North America
United States Atomic Energy
Commission: Manhattan Project
54
United States Environmental Policy
Act (NEPA) 56-7
United States Environmental
Protection Agency 114
Use of Pleasure, The 25, 221,
225
Vattimo, Gianni 162n
Verdeaux, Jaqueline 6
Vitousek, Peter 140
Waechter, Antoine 63
Weale, Albert 109-10, 111
wealth: analysis of 11; see also
capitalism; economics
Weber, Max 96,97-8, 117-18n
welfare programmes 50
wilderness 33n, 94n, 201; retreats
171, 172-3, 174-7; wilderness
trippers 177
Williams, Raymond 167, 171
Williams, Terry Tempest 174, 176
Wilson, Marie 176-7
Wilson, Michael 161n
Winch, Peter 157
Wise Use movement 29, 121
women: health of 88-9; and
population control 83, 86-7, 87-8
women's movement 5, 227
Woolgar, Steve 219
work and health 72-7
World Commission on Environment
and Development 138; Brundtland
report 53, 110, 136-7
World Conservation Strategy (IUCN,
1980) 136
World Wildlife Fund 138-9
Worster, Donald 51-2, 62n, 102
writing: ceo-pastoral 171-2; nature
29, 163-78
Writing-On-Stone, Alberta, Canada 155
Wynne, Brian 14, 56
Yearley, Steven 101