Geoscience Reference
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agricultural “modernization” in the tropics). Scott explains how and why
these plans share a literal and political perspective. Attempts to make a soci-
ety legible and to arrange the population in ways that simplify state func-
tions create the conditions of their own failure, especially as these utopian
plans and projects disregard the experiences, worldviews, values, and
desires of their purported benefi ciaries. h ese episodes of state-initiated
social engineering share key elements: administrative ordering of nature
and society, high modernist ideology (including a valorization of rational
design through urban planning and manipulations of temporal/spatial con-
text), authoritarianism, and a weak civil society.
Contemporary eco-authoritarian practices—like the eco-city and eco-
development trend in China—are a milder, greener version of the plans dis-
cussed in Scott's
Seeing Like a State.
h ese schemes don't lead to the deaths of
millions. But they are similarly doomed to fail in ecological or social terms.
Authoritarian political structures by defi nition inhibit strong civil society.
h at explains why, even though China has very strong environmental legis-
lation on the topics, it's often not enforced.
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Scott's theory of “seeing like a
state” is useful in that far too many environmentalists wear blinders when it
comes to the contemporary eco-city.
Understanding his theory of “seeing” means that we instead focus on
issues of power and power relations. Unlike climate skeptics, climate change
activists and sensible policymakers understand the urgency of global envi-
ronmental problems. h is urgency can sometimes lead to a willful blindness
to the negative consequences of projects that are proposed to address climate
change but end up creating or exacerbating other social injustices.
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Chinese
eco-desire is also in lockstep with American eco-desires, which hold China
as both the environmental pariah and salvation in a fun-house distortion of
our own environmental hopes and insecurities, paradoxes and failures.
h is chapter lays out both the realities and the discourses around Chi-
nese pollution that set the political and ideological contexts for Dongtan
