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shifting ways in which the institutions of capital accumulation disseminate and nor-
malise discourses that codify and legitimise prevailing social relationships of environ-
mental practices within capitalist societies (Bridge and McManus, 2000, p. 20).
Exemplifying their approach with a case study of the forest industry in Canada's
British Columbia, Bridge and McManus (2000, p. 27) lay bare how the 'discursive
framework of forestry . . . increasingly focuses on manipulating considerations of
time and space to ensure the perpetuation of the industry'. In the latest decades of
crisis in the province's industry, this is accomplished by, e.g., rhetorically rescripting
and resituating the forest in a space and time of long-term sustained yield, by making
the industry seem compatible with the international discourse of sustainability, by
appeals to public and national interests, and by sowing doubt about more radical
notions of sustainability. While the rhetorical greening of industry signals a shift in
the mode of social regulation (i.e., institutions and discursive practices), it does
so without any fundamental adaptations of the regime of accumulation (i.e., tech-
nologies and the organisation of production), or the accumulation system (i.e.,
production-consumption connections). Notwithstanding important contextual dif-
ferences within and between sectors, the US gold mining industry offers a similar
example of how corporate discourses effectively regulate environmental practice and
sidetrack opposition.
What I fi nd noteworthy here is that Bridge and McManus seek to understand
environmental transformations in terms of contested representations and discourses,
but emphasise how those discourses play a vital
ideological
role in capital's search
for regime stability. I say ideological because they prefer a notion of discourse in
which power is largely (though not exclusively) situated in corporate hands, to dis-
course in a more outspread Foucaultian sense. The authors argue that material and
discursive appropriation of the environment tends to serve the interests of powerful
economic classes. Importantly, this remains a
contradictory
process whereby ongoing
environmental degradation and commoditisation stand in sharp contrast with cor-
porate espousal of sustainable development jargon.
Bridge and McManus claim that critical analysis of this contradiction needs to
bring out the couplings and synergetic relationships between the regime of accumula-
tion and the mode of social regulation (including its changing discursive moments).
Such analysis can only be successful if we refrain from collapsing these conceptual
components of capitalist economies together. Thus, their discourse analysis covers a
vital but
limited
space in their critique of corporate capital. Discourse becomes an
important yet restricted ideological 'moment' that does its work within the mode of
social regulation but is almost absent in the analysis of the organisational and tech-
nological qualities of the regime of accumulation. In the mind of post-structuralists
this would arguably be a far too 'clean' separation, as I will show next.
Post-structuralism: a forest genealogy
According to most post-structuralists, discourses and established categories of
knowledge do not in the fi rst place bear testimony to some ultimate factual reality,
but are rather associated with a solidifi cation of meaning and reality serving interests
of social control. Discourses percolate through the social power struggles of disci-
plinary institutions; they work as modes of socialisation, and tend to facilitate self-
disciplinary practices. This raises questions about how, by whom, and with what
consequences discourse and categories are made solid and taken-for-granted.
