Geoscience Reference
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related to lack of knowledge of the environmental harm, alternative
explanations for the calamity (for example, an act of God) and socio-
economic pressures to 'accept' environmental risk (see Harvey, 1996;
Julian, 2004; Waldman, 2007). Alternatively, certain types of events may
be perceived as disasters that are 'natural' rather than 'human-induced'
(unusual weather events, for example), and this likewise influences
how people respond emotionally and strategically, including how they
interpret victimhood itself.
Social patterns of harm and risk
It is corporations and nation-states that define environmental risk and
harm in ways that prop up existing profit-based modes of production
and consumption (see Chapter Five). In so doing, transgressions against
particular groups of people, specific environments and other species
occur as a 'natural' consequence of systemic pressures and elite choices.
Exploitation of both the human and the nonhuman is built into the
very fabric of dominant constructions of natural resource management
and the national interest.
Sectional class interests and the interests of state elites are privileged
over and above both universal human interests (such as for an
ecologically sustainable environment) and the particular needs and
rights of specific population groups, nonhuman species and biospheres.
Wealth, power and influence are not pluralised, but are increasingly
concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, typically in the form of the
transnational corporation. The state is not independent of the general
power relations of a society, and therefore the exercise of state power
generally reflects the interests of those who have the capacity to marshal
significant economic and legal resources (for example, large mining
companies, agricultural corporate giants). Nonetheless, there is a relative
autonomy to state power insofar as the nation-state must rule in favour
of the system-as-a-whole (which periodically means intervention in the
affairs of specific companies). Likewise, for the sake of the wider political
economy the nation-state has an interest in maintaining a modicum of
public order (which may require addressing the most obviously harmful
social and environmental practices of private business).
The capitalist state is located squarely at the structural nexus of class
antagonism and reproduction. Insofar as this is the case, the expanding
role of the state in social control becomes central, as does its role in
legitimating the status quo. Concretely, then, the nation-state must
operate and be seen to protect the interests of capital-in-general (which
includes reining in those environmental activists who impinge upon
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