Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
And it is here that an additional discomfort arises. For in the same breath as I
mention this broad scholarly acceptance of the importance of discursive ordering,
I do not want to ignore diffi culties arising from its attendant tendencies towards
discursive dematerialisation and political relativism. Yet before I rush to hasty con-
clusions, it remains essential to bear in mind that there is a plethora of approaches
to discourse analysis. For that reason my chapter refl ects on how different approxi-
mations of discourse and its materiality feed into a variety of methodological and
ecopolitical implications.
The chapter opens with a rather brief discussion of what is meant by 'environ-
mental discourse' and 'representation' and how these are hinged together, with an
emphasis on theoretical debate within geography. These are complex issues, which
I can only discuss parsimoniously here, since I also want to spend some time on the
question of how these theoretical insights are mobilised in actual research projects.
The second part of the chapter is devoted to giving a range of illustrative examples
of how geographers in their research go about unpacking environmental discourses.
For reasons of consistency, I will focus on Marxist, post-structuralist, and political
ecology work on sustainability and conservation. Their differences and commonali-
ties illuminate the complex formation of environmental discourse as a geography
of matter, meaning and power.
Environmental Discourses and the Spatiality of Power Systems
When geographers refer to discourses they tend to have more expansive things in
mind than the colloquial reference to speech or language generally. If there is any-
thing special about geographer's contribution to the understanding of environmen-
tal discourse it must be their attention to the
spatialities
of discourse. Since its
theoretical breakthrough in the discipline during the 1980s, the term discourse has
frequently been associated with a broad range of more or less strategic forms of
representation (maps, imagery, narratives) mobilised within the ongoing struggle
over spaces and places. Environmental discourses draw attention to how the produc-
tion, circulation and justifi cation of meaning within particular constellations of
power permeate all social practices and thereby always enter into the constitution
of the biogeophysical environment.
A useful starting point for thinking about the relations involved in environmental
discourse is offered by the concept of 'regional discursive formations', fi rst intro-
duced by Richard Peet and Michael Watts. This describes 'certain modes of thought,
logics, themes, styles of expression, and typical metaphors' that tend to 'run through
the discursive history of a region, appearing in a variety of forms, disappearing
occasionally, only to reappear with even greater intensity in new guises. A regional
discursive formation also disallows certain themes, is marked by absences, repres-
sions, marginalised statements, allowing some things to be mentioned only in highly
prescribed, 'discrete', and disguised ways'. For Peet and Watts, these regional dis-
cursive formations 'originate in, and display the effects of, certain physical, politi-
cal-economic, and institutional settings' (Peet and Watts, 1996b, p. 16). Regional
discursive formations are also part of an extensive relational geography of scale,
because they articulate and develop a society's wider 'environmental imaginary' in
which discourses of nature are a principal element. Such an awareness of the politics
and changing spatial situatedness involved in the production of knowledge and the
shaping of practices is typical for discourse analysis within geography. And,
pace
