Environmental Engineering Reference
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of society—elections, partisan bickering, policy-making activities, fund-
raising, campaigning, and so on. I interpret these activities broadly as
processes of relation building between different humans actors to fi nd
common ground (in the best of circumstances) or to engage in power plays
(in the worst cases) and to orient societies into particular confi gurations.
Following on the relational perspective forwarded in chapter 2, I argue
that nonhuman actors—water fl ows, endangered species, ecological ser-
vices, impervious surfaces, and so on—play a signifi cant role in political
activity. They are not merely objects that are manipulated and shuffl ed
around by human actors, nor are they simply the substrate upon which
human activities occur; instead, they are part and parcel of the practice
of politics. This expansive defi nition of politics follows upon Latour, who
argues that, “In practice, politicians have never dealt with humans, but al-
ways with associations of humans and nonhumans, cities and landscapes,
productions and diversions, things and people, genes and properties, goods
and attachments, in brief cosmograms .” 3 In this sense, politics is a process
of building relations between humans but also between humans and non-
humans. Embracing such an expansive notion of politics to focus on the
interactions between human and nonhuman actors allows us to interpret
and act upon urban nature in new ways.
I begin the chapter by describing the dominant form of environmental
politics in Austin and Seattle, what I term “rational politics.” Here, the
municipal government is the main arbiter of human/nonhuman relations,
an evolution of the Promethean Project and technomanagerial governance
as described in chapter 1. Rational political actions are challenged by grass-
roots activities undertaken by individuals and local organizations, what I
term “populist politics.” These activities expose the defi ciencies in techno-
managerial governance and challenge rational actors to reform their activi-
ties and forge new relations. And a third form of politics, “civic politics,”
cuts across this top-down/bottom-up dichotomy of rational and populist
politics by forwarding local, deliberative, and action-oriented programs
for reworking urban nature. Civic politics has the potential to enact the
relational perspective of urban nature as described in chapter 2 while re-
inventing the roles of urban residents, governments, and technical experts
through radically different forms of political life.
“Leave It to the Experts”: Rational Politics
Like all cities in developed countries, the most recognized and legitimate
form of environmental management in Austin and Seattle is dominated by
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