Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
has been the ostensibly increasing remove from the materiality of the biogeophysical
environment. Some might argue that relativistic distrust to any mode of representa-
tion is inappropriate in a time of increasingly sharpened political stakes of environ-
mental issues. For how can we say anything substantive and meaningful about
pending or existing environmental catastrophes when retreating into a detached
world of endless signifi cation and interwoven discursive refl ection? Yet again, is any
such comparison between our stories and knowledges about the material environ-
ment based on an erroneous belief that we can break through discourse to reclaim
some unmediated reality?
These recurrent questions concerning the dichotomisation of 'cultural' discourse
and the 'natural' realm of environment/nature are important enough and widely
reviewed (Castree and Braun, 2001). From these debates one can identify various
degrees to which discourse analysis within environmental geography is prepared to
go beyond the domain of discourse to study biogeophysical environments. Discourse
analysis is certainly not limited to the kind of dematerialised constructionism, which
shelves any reference to an extra-discursive world. In Marxian and some post-
structuralist quarters, it remains common to emphasise that discourses do not just
relate to other discourses nor to a universal play of power. Instead, they relate to
the range of material processes through which people shape the environment and
to specifi c expressions of power within particular social formations.
Congruent with such an attempt at transcending ingrained oppositions between
materialism and idealism (and this is exactly the dualism which Marx described as
false consciousness!), 'discursive relations and representational practices are consti-
tutive of the very ways that nature is made available to forms of economic and
political calculation and the ways in which our interventions in nature are socially
organized' (Castree and Braun, 1998, p. 16). What matters most to geographers
engaged in this kind of discourse analysis, is not necessarily the degree of corre-
spondence to reality (always a mediation) but by whom and how discourse is pro-
duced, how it works, and what is does. Mapping out the ascendance through which
some environmental discourses have come to posses their present power in society
may help to challenge taken-for-granted truths and refl exively shape alternative and
emancipatory ways forward.
In the third place, and by extension, although Peet and Watts envision discourses
as constituent parts of a society's environmental imagination, the academic recep-
tion of discourse analysis remains selective. While human geographers have been at
pains to map discourses of various kinds in both theory and practice, physical
geographers have as yet spent far less thought on this issue (cf. Castree, 2005, chap.
4). To some degree this may be unsurprising since discourse analysis takes human
meaning as its prime objective, rather than inanimate objects studied by physical
geographers. Occasionally, of course, physical geographers have utilised discursive
material, such as qualitative data from interviews, for estimating quantitative envi-
ronmental changes. Most physical geographers nevertheless hold on to a kind of
correspondence theory of truth, in which science provides access to what they regard
as an ontologically independent world and thus produces increasingly accurate ref-
erential knowledge. On a principal level, however, physical geographers too are
discursively situated and they play an active role in shaping environmental dis-
course. I will revisit these issues in the section that follows, where I will try to
address some of the myriad ways in which discourse analysis has been mobilised in
research practice.
