Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 23
Analysing Environmental
Discourses and Representations
Tom Mels
Reservations about the Natural Environment
One of the most striking features of modern environmental experience is that it
takes place in a world suffused with discursive forms. Images and texts attract tour-
ists to a natural park, a map leads them from the parking lot to a walk on a wilder-
ness path, commentaries are provided at strategic locations to guide the experience
of nature, and an exhibition room at the entrance provides visitors with brochures,
plans, stories, and fi lms. What I fi nd most interesting about this is not so much the
pervasiveness of discursive forms, nor their technological sophistication. Instead, it
is that they tend to leave many people with a somewhat amorphous sense of
discomfort.
The very awareness of discursive forms awakens a feeling that the environment
presented 'as-it-really-is' may not be all that natural, but the exact expression of an
abstract system of manipulable, authoritative discourses. With every more cognizant
look at imagery, maps, and texts, intriguing questions of the social production of
knowledge and reality and the disciplining of experience come to one's mind. With
every visit, national parks, exhibition rooms and wilderness trails stand out as spa-
tialities at which environmental knowledges are produced rather than merely found.
I say spatialities, because they are more than the physical sites at which knowledge
is presented and encountered. They are places in a network of sites (universities,
bureaucracies, studios and desks) from which the natural parks are conjured up
through interpretive practices by particular people in particular social and occupa-
tional positions. Rather than submitting to an exhaustive and consistent story of
'the environment', these practices tend to unleash a stream of discourses and
counter-discourses. It seems to me, then, that the power-laden tension between the
reifying tendencies of discourses (their fi xity and claim to meet reality-as-it-is), the
elusiveness of the environment (its instability and shifting guises in different dis-
courses), and the spatiality of those discourses (their spatio-historical emergence
within a networked hierarchy of social sites) may help explain feelings of discomfort
(see fi gure 23.1).
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