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improvement of public health, the effective cir-
culation and storage of agricultural production
and provision of modern water supply systems.
When connected to the practices of governing, the
nation state is best thought of not so much as a
territorial entity, or set of centralized ministries, but
as a father figure or shepherd, constantly super-
vising and monitoring the family/flock to ensure
needs are being met. Crucially, in the context of this
chapter, Foucault recognizes that the goal of
government means that nation states must carefully
regulate the relationship between people and the
environment, so as to ensure that the welfare of the
population is not compromised in the long-term.
Foucault (2007 [2004]: 96) thus states:
water in arid areas, in the forms of flood defences,
irrigation systems and domestic supply, that
necessitated the formation of large-scale political
bureaucracies (for more on contemporary water
government issues see Chapter 2 i n this volume).
Given the limited sources of available water in such
areas, and the need to distribute water over large
tracts of land, effective water management could
not be achieved at a local level: it required the
formation of what Wittfogel describes as hydraulic
empires . While the forms of political society
described by Wittfogel are very different from
modern nation states, and significantly predate the
formation of the first nation states, they provide
an important insight into the historical connec-
tions between government and the environment.
The ability to coordinate and control the supply
and distribution of water over large geographical
scales has continued to be a key goal of the modern
state systems (see Swyngedouw, 2007; Linton,
2010). However, if securing the effective supply
and distribution of water was a key factor in
the establishment of political communities that
occupied large tracts of space, the territorial and
bureaucratic forms of nation states had other
implications for human environmental relations.
With the establishment of sovereignty over
significant expanses of territory, early nation state
systems interpreted the exploitation of natural
resources as a key factor in obtaining economic and
military advantages over competing sovereignties.
But the wide territorial distribution of natural
resources (including agricultural land, forests and
minerals) made it difficult for nation states to
effectively monitor and control their environ-
mental assets. In his account of the formation of
early forms of state-sponsored scientific forestry in
eighteenth-century Prussia and Saxony, James
Scott describes the processes in and through which
states attempted to more effectively govern the use
of natural resources (Scott, 1998). According to
Scott, it was crucial for early state systems to have
a clear understanding of their available forest
resources. During the eighteenth century, forest
resources were a vital source of fuel and building
The things that government must be
concerned about . . . are men [sic] in their
relationships, bonds, and complex involve-
ments with things like wealth, resources,
means of subsistence, and, of course, the
territory, with its borders, qualities, climate,
dryness, fertility, and so on.
7.2.2 States, government and the
environment
Having established the relationship between nation
states and sovereignty, centralization, territory
and the practices of government, I want to move
on to briefly consider the connections that exist
between the formation of states and environmental
affairs. In exploring these relations, I want to
illustrate the long historical connections that exist
between nation states and the transformation and
management of the natural world. If we start by
looking at the origins of the very first large-scale
political communities, we discover that issues of
environmental management were central to their
formation. In his book Oriental Despotism;
A Comparative Study of Total Power , the German-
American writer Karl Wittfogel (1957) argues
that the emergence of early civilizations in places
such as Egypt and Mesopotamia was based on the
control and management of water resources.
According to Wittfogel, it was the management of
 
 
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