Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Geographies of Environmental Discourse
My aim here is to tease out a variety of ways in which geographers have appre-
hended their ambitions of unpacking environmental discourses. For reasons of
conciseness, I centre my discussion on research related to conservation and sustain-
ability from within three broad varieties of discursive strategies. Looking at Marxist,
post-structural, and political ecology approaches to environmental discourse, I will
show how their theoretical positioning of discourse reverberates in methodology
and ecopolitics. Let me say from the outset that I am aware that terms, such as
Marxism and post-structuralism, signal metaphilosophical perspectives, while polit-
ical ecology refers to a disciplinary fi eld, and that there are arguably as many com-
monalities between the three approaches as there are differences within them. Yet,
rather than teasing out niceties of taxonomies, subdisciplines and philosophical
angles, my intention is primarily to discuss a range of geography's engagements with
environmental discourse.
Marxism: regulating corporate discourse
While there is a range of Marxist approaches to discourses, a frequently recurring
thread is that they are seen as devises of abstraction vital to capitalism's production
of nature. If environments are produced as commodities by labor power applied
under specifi c conditions, they are also liable to be represented in ways that efface
and reify the struggles, processes and relationships that go into their making
(Henderson, 1999; Walker, 2001). In that sense environments can be theorised in
politico-economic terms as 'dead labor': material and conceptual reifi cations of
what are really social relationships and struggles (Mitchell, 2003).
Some of the key characteristics of Marxist engagement with environmental dis-
course can be extracted from a study by Gavin Bridge and Phil McManus. Their
approach owes much to regulation theory, which tries to comprehend the societal
framework of capitalism as a system full of contradiction and confl ict that neverthe-
less manages to attain periodic stability. Rather than resorting to transhistorical
imperatives of social reproduction, regulationists analyze capitalism in more
contingent terms of geographically and historically embedded, institutionally sanc-
tioned modes of socio-spatial control and organisation. Adopting and adapting
components of this line of thought, Bridge and McManus (2000) argue 'that
regulation of the forestry and mineral sectors in contemporary market economies
is increasingly achieved through the deployment and co-optation of narratives of
sustainability' (p. 11). According to their reading, environmental discourses are
moments in the mode of social regulation: they are simultaneously a guiding frame-
work for and outcome of the institutional structures and material practices that
make possible the reproduction of the conditions for capital accumulation. Sustain-
ability narratives are of particular importance to industries with an unsavory envi-
ronmental reputation, because they can negotiate and defl ect accumulation crises
by disenfranchising opposition, co-opting green language, creating coalitions of
support, smoothing over contradictions and facilitating access to new deposits.
This is not to say that discourses and their regulatory mechanisms stand in any
seamless, functional relationship with accumulation systems. Rather, the authors
accentuate that these relationships tend to be contextual, contingent, politicised,
contradictory, and highly negotiated. Simultaneously, their concern lies with the
