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argument is that accentuating 'local knowledge, environmental history, multi-scale
politics, and socially differentiated resource-management practices, requires inten-
sive fi eld study and multiple research methodologies' (Bassett and Koli Bi, 2000,
p. 68). This illustrates a strong (critical) realist turn in political ecology in which
evaluations of the biogeophysical processes shaping human-environmental dynam-
ics depend on an understanding of both human discourses and physical geography
(Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003, p. 3).
Importantly, this approach goes to some length beyond the deep-seated anthro-
pocentrism of many geographical investigations of environmental discourse. On the
level of ecopolitics, it is critical of the lack of attention to geographical contexts
typical of mainstream sustainability discourses - not least those materialised in the
guise of the World Bank's embracement of technocratic, neoliberal ideology and
its way of 'assisting dozens of African governments to develop NEAPs which, in
assembly-line fashion, are being produced according to a blueprint' (Bassett and
Koli Bi, 2000, p. 68). In concord with the philosophical realism of their research
design, concrete suggestions for policy reforms could be extracted from the results,
which is an additional difference with what tends to be the case with post-structural
and Marxist approaches.
'The' Environment Is No More
In my view, one of the presently most imperative challenges for environmental
geographers is to decipher the work and logic of discourse by keying it to the
destructive logic of capitalist nature but without resorting to some crude, unrefl exive
realism. Environmental discourses are power systems, which seek to systemise,
capture and fi x what is constantly mediated, in process, and getting away. As soon
as it looks as if all the shapes are in place and audiences convinced, the environment
has somehow always already made its escape, only to return in different guises. This
is one of the reasons why the struggle over environmental discourse has become a
profoundly political matter. Although the work discussed in this chapter offers
illustrative rather than exhaustive insights into geographical approaches to dis-
course, I would suggest that it does motivate some tentative general conclusions.
First, geographers tend to link the history of discursive ordering and representa-
tional practices to the material appropriation of the world. Struggles over discourse
and representation are crucial in the geographically uneven struggle over the envi-
ronment and what counts as environmental issues in science and society. Bringing
out a variety of power struggles and taken-for-granted assumptions and reifi cations
is thus not necessarily a hyper-hermeneutic diversion from ostensibly more impor-
tant material practices. On the contrary, this is just as important, precisely because
discourses and representations help arrange, codify and challenge the practices that
make up environmental politics.
Second, differences in approach to environmental discourse tend to emanate from
philosophically distinct ways of imagining knowledge to be related to the biogeo-
physical world. Different research strategies of denaturalisation (genealogy or more
realist) demand different ways of working with scientifi c data and other knowledges.
The broad compasses of '-isms' and 'posts' translate into a variety of methodological
maneuvers - ranging from deep-seated deconstruction in which discourse leaves no
room for 'facts' or 'science', to multimethod triangulations, which can corroborate,
verify or falsify discourses.
