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discourses from ideology and the material social conditions they speak of. Instead
of reaching back to the emancipatory idiom of traditional ideology critique, which
characterises Bridge and McManus' efforts, Braun follows a more Foucaultian road
to criticise discursive power. His discussion also tunes in to the theoretical language
of Deleuze and Guattari and envisages the environment metaphorically in term of
heterogeneous assemblages, as fl uxes of material de- and re-territorialisations. About
those assemblages, he argues, we need to enquire the processes of their becoming,
simultaneously 'opening space for thinking, doing and being otherwise. It is a
politics with a purpose, but without any certain or fi nal outcome' (Braun, 2002,
p. 267).
Leaving aside further questions about its practicality for progressive ecopolitical
change, this politics non-authoritatively returns questions about the materiality of
what our environmental discourses are about to the materiality of discourse itself.
In other words, it confi rms that environmental politics demarcates a material geog-
raphy of socially situated knowledges. Still, this does little to alter the clearly privi-
leged attention to various modes and languages of representation that pass through
Braun's and other post-structuralists' research on human-environment relations.
Critics may say that this has little of substance to offer when questions about the
biogeophysical aspects of environmental change appear (cf. Gandy, 1996). One may
indeed ask if this does not ultimately reduce and relativise the environment and
ecopolitics to habits of epistemology. The question arises how the insight that colo-
nial discursive privileges serve systems of social domination and rationalise unjust
material appropriations of land can be coupled with claims that meaning remains
ultimately undecidable. After all, the insight itself remains an expression of
meaning.
Political ecology: multimethod triangulation
Asking questions about the privileging of representation in research leads to scholars
who proffer a political ecology approach to environmental discourse and its
materiality. While the term 'political ecology' circumscribes a heterogeneous and
interdisciplinary fi eld of research rather than a metaphilosophical vantage point, it
has been important for thinking about discourse and environment within geogra-
phy. It is no random decision to spend some time on political ecology after discuss-
ing a Marxist analysis, which emphasises how discourses play a vital
ideological
role in capital's search for regime stability (Bridge and McManus), and a
genealogi-
cal
non-identity thinking which seeks to denaturalise all claims to environmental
truth (Braun). Simplifi ed, with Marxism, political ecology shares an interest in
environmental practice and justice, but also tends to probe further beyond the epis-
temology offered by a critique of capitalism. With post-structuralism it shares an
interest in discourse, but in many cases sees them as materially constrained, experi-
entially based, and 'grounded in the social relations of production and their atten-
dant struggles' (Peet and Watts, 1996a, p. 263). The work discussed here proposes
a realist (not genealogical)
denaturalizing
confrontation of (post)colonial geography
with discourses and a multimethod debunking of misconceived discourses.
Roderick Neumann's recent work, based on periods of fi eldwork in Tanzania
and a triangulation of methods (archival research, observations, household surveys
and interviews), follows what I read as a 'realist' line of thought concerning envi-
ronmental discourse. His intention is to explore the ways in which a European and
