Professional Documents
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ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
An Uncooperative Commodity
Privatizing Water in England and Wales
Karen J. Bakker
Manufacturing Culture
The Institutional Geography of Industrial Practice
Meric S. Gertler
War Epidemics
An Historical Geography of Infectious Diseases in Military ConXict and Civil Strife,
1850–2000
M. R. Smallman-Raynor and A. D. CliV
Worlds of Food
Place, Power, and Provenance in the Food Chain
Kevin Morgan, Terry Marsden, and Jonathan Murdoch
Poliomyelitis
A World Geography: Emergence to Eradication
M. R. Smallman-Raynor, A. D. CliV, B. Trevelyan, C. Nettleton, and S. Sneddon
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The nature of the state:excavating the political ecologies of the modern state
Mark Whitehead, Rhys Jones, and Martin Jones.
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1. Human geography—Political aspects. 2. Human ecology—Political aspects.
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EDITORS’ PREFACE
Geography and environmental studies are two closely related and burgeon-
ing Welds of academic enquiry. Both have grown rapidly over the past few
decades. At once catholic in its approach and yet strongly committed to
a comprehensive understanding of the world, geography has focused upon
the interaction between global and local phenomena. Environmental studies,
on the other hand, have shared with the discipline of geography an engage-
ment with diVerent disciplines, addressing wide-ranging and signiWcant
environmental issues in the scientiWc community and the policy community.
From the analysis of climate change and physical environmental processes to
the cultural dislocations of postmodernism in human geography, these two
Welds of enquiry have been at the forefront of attempts to comprehend
transformations taking place in the world, manifesting themselves as a
variety of separate but interrelated spatial scales.
The Oxford Geographical and Environmental Studies series aims to reXect
this diversity and engagement. Our goal is to publish the best original
research in the two related Welds, and, in doing so, to demonstrate the sig-
niWcance of geographical and environmental perspectives for understanding
the contemporary world. As a consequence, our scope is deliberately inter-
national and ranges widely in terms of topics, approaches, and methodolo-
gies. Authors are welcome from all corners of the globe. We hope the series
will help to redeWne the frontiers of knowledge and build bridges within the
Welds of geography and environmental studies. We hope also that it will
cement links with issues and approaches that have originated outside the
strict conWnes of these disciplines. In doing so, our publications contribute to
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particular and diverse scholarly traditions.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book reXects the culmination of ten years of collective engagement with
the testing notions of state and nature. As part of this collective endeavour
we have travelled many miles, searched through numerous archives, and
received various forms of advice and guidance. We would consequently like
to recognize the personal and intellectual debts we have accrued in the
completion of this volume.
We want to acknowledge, Wrst and foremost, that this book is the product
of the uniquely supportive and creative environment provided by the
Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of Wales,
Aberystwyth. Over the years we have all beneWted from the ‘Aber eVect’,
which is produced by the geographers working in Aberystwyth and the
special qualities of the place itself. At a more speciWc level we would like to
thank Tim Cresswell, Luke Desforges, Deborah Dixon, Bob Dodgshon, Bill
Edwards, Kate Edwards, Gareth Hoskins, Mark Goodwin, Robert Mayhew,
Pete Merriman, Heidi Scott, Mike Woods, and all our graduate students for
their advice, loaned books, and constant support as we completed this book.
In addition to our colleagues at Aberystwyth, this volume has also beneWted
from the input and guidance of a range of people from outside our depart-
ment. We would like to thank in particular Elizabeth Baigent, Neil Brenner,
Gavin Bridge, Allan Cochrane, David Demerrit, Marcus Doel, David C.
Harvey, Bob Jessop, Craig Johnstone, David Keeling, Gordon MacLeod,
John Pickles, Simon Naylor, Paul Robbins, and Erik Swyngedouw;
while they may not realize it, they have all helped to shape the form and
content of this volume.
The book is based upon a range of interrelated research projects. We
would like to acknowledge all of those organizations that have provided us
with the necessary funds and time to complete these projects. These include
the Board of Celtic Studies (of the University of Wales), the Economic and
Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, the Royal Geographical
Society’s HSBC Small Grant Initiative, and the University of Wales,
Aberystwyth Research Fund. We are also grateful for the advice and time
of librarians and archivists working at the British Library, the London
Metropolitan Archives, the National Archives (Kew), the National Library
of Wales, the Royal Society Library, and the Special Collections section of
Sussex University Library. We would like to extend particular thanks to
Huw Thomas (of the National Library of Wales) and the contributors to lis-
[email protected] (a Forum for Issues Related to Map and Spatial
Data Librarianship) for helping us with our work on Swedish cadastral
maps. Thanks are also extended to Anthony Smith, for the time he spent
producing the artwork in this volume; members of staV at the Waikato
x Acknowledgements
Regional Council; Carwyn Fowler for his tireless eVorts on the Board of
Celtic Studies project; and those interviewees who agreed to participate in
this project.
As with the production of any book, in many ways our academic debts are
far outweighed by our personal ones. It is in this context that we would like to
extend special gratitude to all of our friends and family, whose emotional
support and empathies have made the writing of this volume possible. It is to
these friends and family that this book is dedicated. Finally, we must
acknowledge the following organizations for granting us permission to
reproduce certain material presented in this volume: the Special Collections
Section of Sussex University Library, for allowing us to reproduce material
from the L. Dudley Stamp Papers (Professor Sir Dudley Stamp (1898–1966)
Papers SxMs5, University of Sussex Manuscript Collection Box, 19.1) on
pp. 99, 102, 105–6, and 107 the Ordnance Survey, for permission to repro-
duce as Fig. 6.2 the map of air quality automated monitoring sites in
operation, United Kingdom, March 2004, on p. 161; Blackwell Publishers
for allowing us to reproduce Fig. 4.1 on p. 114; and Taylor & Francis for
allowing us to reproduce Table 5.1 on p. 118.
Mark Whitehead, Rhys Jones, and Martin Jones
Aberystwyth
March 2006
CONTENTS
Bibliography 209
Index 227
LIST OF FIGURES
Nature does not respect national boundaries; human beings seem incap-
able of managing their aVairs without them. (Elhance 1999: 3)
Before continuing to read this book, stop, place this volume back on the shelf
and take a moment to look through the pages of an illustrated atlas of the
world. At least half of this atlas will probably be given over to illustrating one
of the dominant political ordering principles around which our world con-
tinues to be constructed and conceived—the nation-state. If your atlas is
similar to ours, however, you will also notice that nation-states are not only
represented and recognized according to their territorial shape and oYcial
political nomenclature. Skimming through the glossy colour pages of our
atlas,1 a continual cross-referencing appears between the political, ecological,
and geological motifs of nation-states. The political map of the US, for
example, is surrounded by images of the forests of New England in the fall
and the spectacular geological strata of the Grand Canyon. Turning the page
you Wnd an immediate association being made between Iceland and the
volcanically heated Blue Lagoon Lake, the Bahamas and its golden sandy
beaches, Belize and banana trees, Peru and the cloud-laden Andes. Further
into the atlas the fjords are deployed as an icon for the Norwegian state, barren
deserts are used to denote Western Sahara and Mauritania, and a dramatic
picture of Victoria Falls is carefully positioned below a map of Zambia. These
images are, of course, as with so much of what is routinely produced within the
visualizations of state and nationhood, crude stereotypes of complex geo-
graphical entities. However, we want to argue that this collection of ecological
and geological imagery does reveal an interesting relationship, a relationship
that is central to the ways in which our worlds are constructed, ordered, and
reproduced—the relationships between states and natures.
This book is premised upon the exploration of a paradox. While contem-
porary discussions of global environmental change, trans-boundary
biological communities, and systemic ecological threats routinely emphasize
the irrelevance of state systems and boundaries as means for understanding
and addressing questions of nature, everywhere you look nature is continually
being ordered and framed by nation-states. From President Sarney’s stringent
1
Ours is The Complete World Atlas (Leicester, Silverdale Books, 2000).
2 States and Natures
[A]fter Hurricane Katrina, the balance between protecting people from nature, and
protecting nature from people, has become an urgent matter of public policy. (The
Economist 2005c)
2
Notable exceptions include Johnston (1996), Scott (1998), Sheail (2002).
Introduction 3
Since hurricane Katrina, the world’s view of America has changed. The disaster has
exposed some shocking truths about the place: bitterness of its sharp racial divide, the
abandonment of the dispossessed, the weakness of critical infrastructure. But the
most astonishing and most shaming revelation has been of its government’s failure to
bring succour to its people at their time of greatest need. (The Economist 2005b)
system, many felt that FEMA failed to coordinate a quick enough response to
the ensuing disaster (The Economist 2005d). Such accusations were made
worse by the fact that FEMA had been relegated from its former position as
a cabinet-level agency. Ultimately, following FEMA’s perceived failing, its
director, Michael Brown, resigned. Our concern, however, is not so much
with whether FEMA and the US government were culpable in the Hurricane
Katrina disaster, but with the links this example highlights between state
bureaucracies and nature. The events surrounding Hurricane Katrina illus-
trate how there continues to be a belief that state institutions should be able
to predict, administer, and respond to nature in certain ways. Yet despite
their often elaborate bureaucratic infrastructures, it is also clear that states
are often unable to deal with the vagaries and power of the natural world
eVectively.
The administrative apparatus of the modern state, according to certain
scholars, provides the key to understanding the power and inXuence of the
state (see Chapters 2 and 5). According to Weberian and neo-Weberian state
theorists, the sheer scale of the administrative capacity associated with
national governments (which includes its various departments, agencies,
personnel, and civil servants) means that states continue to embody unique
sites of political organization and power in the world today. In relation to
nature modern states have developed a range of specialist administrative
structures to frame and manage the natural world. The administrative archi-
tectures of states are often characterized by specialist institutional subdivi-
sions with responsibilities for managing diVerent aspects of the natural
world. Such institutions include agricultural ministries dedicated to ensuring
a regular harvest from nature (see Chapter 4), environmental departments
and agencies designed to monitor and protect the natural world (see Chapter
5), and rapid response units created to deal with ecological risk management
and catastrophes (including FEMA) (see Chapters 5 and 7).
In addition to illustrating how the production of state nature is informed
and conditioned by institutional practices, analyses of the bureaucratic man-
agement of nature also reveal the social and political complexities that shape
state–nature relations. In this context, when studying the state administra-
tion of nature one immediately discovers a bureaucratic infrastructure that is
far removed from the modern myths of objective rationality and eYciency we
often associate with the state. Instead, one is routinely confronted with
a complex web of state oYcials, civil servants, political struggles, and envir-
onmental events that mix the human, the non-human, and the social and
ecological in ever more complex ways. The activities of Brazil’s environmen-
tal protection agency, IBAMA, and its interventions in the Amazonian
rainforest, are illustrative of this point. The Brazilian government established
IBAMA in order to eVectively coordinate the government’s environmental
protection programme. Given this remit, IBAMA has focused much of
its resources, time, and energy on Amazonia. With its extensive tropical
Introduction 5
3
For a wonderful insight into the complex politics and ecology of the Amazonian rainforest
and the ebb and Xow of state–nature relations there, see RaZes (2002).
6 States and Natures
Source: Compiled from information in Elhance (1999); Klare (2001); Vidal (2002); Renner (2002: 7).
4
For a more detailed analysis of the relationship between state, nature, and geopolitics, see
Dalby (1992, 1996, 2002a, b), Dodds (2000).
Introduction 7
which states were forged and in stimulating the internal expansion of states in
the quest for geographically ‘good lands’, with fertile soils and favourable
natures.5 But if nature played an important role in the geopolitical constitu-
tion of modern states, it is also clear that the struggle for natural resources
continues to underpin political and military struggles within a range of con-
temporary states. We claim that at the heart of resource conXicts is the
political framing of nature as a national resource and its associated discursive
association with national security. In the Wrst instance, the procurement of
natural resources from particular regions to serve abstract national agendas is
often a stimulus for conXict, as regional militia attempt to claim sovereignty
over their own local assets. But it would be impossible to understand these
conXicts without appreciating the historical processes of territorialization and
centralization that made nature an object of political struggle in the Wrst place.
In the context of the links between nature and issues of national security, many
now claim that the concentration of key energy resources in what are deemed
to be ‘politically unstable states’ has become one of the driving forces behind
contemporary military and geopolitical strategy in the West. The intervention
of the US in so-called ‘energy supply priority areas’ (particularly, it would
seem, the oil-rich Middle Eastern region and the Andean states), for example,
has been interpreted by some as an attempt to militarily frame natural
resources that actually lie beyond the formal territorial borders of the US.6
One conXict of particular relevance to this volume is the contemporary
struggle for water supply in the Nile Basin.7 Due to its exceptionally dry
climate, Egypt depends on the River Nile for much of its water needs. The
problem for Egypt is that the headwaters of the Nile pass through and supply
eight African states before the river eventually reaches Egypt. This does of
course make Egypt exceptionally vulnerable to attempts by other states to
capture water from the Nile through irrigation schemes and dam-building
projects. From the late 1970s onwards, the supply of water has been the top
geopolitical priority of the Egyptian state—even more important, it is now
argued, than its strained political relations with Israel.8 Egypt’s concerns
5
For more on the relationship between nature and the formation and expansion of early
modern states see Mackinder (1904) and Ratzel (1896). Notice in particular how Mackinder’s
famous analysis of the ‘pivot of history’ reveals the role that nature (in the form of geographical
landscapes and geomorphological forms) conditioned the geopolitical context for state formation
in continental Europe. It is also interesting to note the inXuence that Ratzel’s ideas of territorial
expansion and the enclosure of ‘good natures’ had on the geopolitical ambitions of the early
Prussian state and the territorial expansions devised by the German Nazi Party in the 1930s.
6
See Harvey (2003a) for more on the Carter Principle; see also Vidal (2002).
7
For a detailed review of water resource management conXicts in the Nile Basin, see Klare
(2001: chs 6–7) and Elhance (1999).
8
More detail on the geopolitical signiWcance of water supply can be found in Klare (2001: chs
6–7). Indeed the key focus of Egypt’s diplomatic policies and international relations strategies
now appears to be Sudan and Ethiopia—two states with inXuence over the Xow and utilization of
Nile water—not Israel.
8 States and Natures
with water supply issues stem from the fact that without water the state
would simply stop functioning. Clean water is vital at the most basic level for
human health and survival, but water is also a prerequisite for key industrial
processes and the production of economic wealth (see Chapter 3). What
interests us about this case study is that water supply has obviously been
an issue in the Nile Basin ever since its settlement by large numbers of people.
Despite this, it is the post-colonial carving up of the basin into individual
nation-states that is the key to understanding contemporary conXicts in
the region. The point is that modern states continue to use territorial strat-
egies to control facets of nature that are aterritorial in essence. Despite the
dam-building projects undertaken by the Egyptian state (the most famous of
course being the construction of the Aswan High Dam), the River Nile is not
the exclusive property of Egypt and it continues to Xow through other states
and across other territorial borders in the region. To many, the persistent
leakage of nature across sovereign territorial boundaries in places like the
Nile Basin makes discussions of the state meaningless within environmental
debate (see Kuehls 1996; Young 1994). Our point is, however, quite the
reverse, because we claim that it is the historical legacy and continued desire
of modern states to territorially frame nature that is generating this era of
resource wars. In this time of escalating nature wars, understanding the logics
that undergird the relationship between the modern state and nature is now
more, not less, important than it ever has been (see Chapter 7).
12
For an interesting discussion of the role of natural landscapes in the politics of insurgent
nationalism, see Nogué and Vincente’s (2004) work on Catalonia. Matless’s (1998) analysis on
the landscape preservationist groups and their opposition to modern post-war planning in
Britain is also very interesting in this context.
10 States and Natures
to the use of natural landscapes, nation-states also rely upon the artiWcial
construction of parks and gardens to convey the cultural ecologies of the
nation. For example, in his analysis of the incorporation of nature into major
European cities since the eighteenth century, Denis Cosgrove (1993) describes
how nature was manipulated to serve certain political ends. According to
Cosgrove, the use of picturesque garden design within royal parks and public
spaces conveyed important messages about national history and unity. As
a meeting place of culture and wilderness, or society and nature, the garden
came to symbolize the harmony that had been established by a nation and its
ecological inheritance. Cosgrove describes urban gardens as ‘middle natures’,
where through the proper arrangement of water, grass, trees, and native species
of Xowers, a nation could celebrate its nature, and perhaps more importantly,
its transformation and improvement of the natural world.
As this section has illustrated, the framing of nature by the modern state
does not only operate at political and economic levels. State–nature relations
clearly involve a series of cultural processes within which nature is framed
by a mix of narrative, landscape design, art, photography, and monuments.
As we have seen in our previous discussion of the administrative and
geopolitical farming of nature by the state, the cultural appropriation and
use of nature can often overXow and escape from its narrow codiWcation by
nation-states. In this context, it is clear that as well as supporting nation-state
building, natural landscapes have also been mobilized in a series of cultural
and political movements that question the modernizing logic of modern
nation-states.
18
See Williams’s (1998) careful etymology of the word ‘nature’ for more on the particular
diYculties of deWning the term. He actually claims that nature represents one of the most diYcult
words to deWne in the English language. According to Williams, however, this diYculty is
directly related to the importance of the processes to which the word actually refers.
Introduction 13
19
For a more detailed analysis of the various spatial scales and institutional modes of
operation associated with contemporary states, see Brenner (2004).
14 States and Natures
20
See also Barry (2001: ch. 7) for more on notions of process and becoming in the constitution
of objects of government.
Introduction 15
moments of connection. The terms ‘sites’ and ‘moments’ are important here
because they draw attention to the important role of both space and time
within the constitution of state nature. By focusing upon the sites and
moments (or speciWc spaces and times) of state–nature relations we reveal
the geographical complexities and temporal diversities that characterize these
relationships. In this way we aim to avoid oversimplistic and abstract
accounts of ‘the state’ and ‘nature’, and consider instead very speciWc imbri-
cations of certain states with particular facets of nature, within particular
spatio-temporal coordinates. We use the terms ‘sites’ and ‘moments’ because
at one level they suggest the existence of discrete bounded spaces and times
we can study—a national park or the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia, for
example, or an atmospheric monitoring laboratory, or a Xood event. In this
context, a focus on sites and moments gives us something to grasp onto as we
attempt to explore the pervasive yet strangely elusive relations between states
and natures. Following Harrison et al. (2004: 130), we argue that sites and
moments ‘are places and times of concentration and intensity of process and
energy’. As intense concentrations of process and energy we claim that the
various sites and moments we study in this book (including the American
Museum of Natural History in New York, the early modern Swedish state,
the Trewern Valley Reservoir, and even a particular day (22 July 2003) when
Congressman Dave Weldon addressed the American House of Representa-
tives) can all provide rich and complex insights into the ever-shifting rela-
tionships between states and natures. We consequently use diVerent sites and
moments of state–nature relations not to limit and bound our investigations,
but as points of departure as we become ever more immersed in the entangle-
ments of states and natures. Sites and moments thus force us to consider the
negotiated connection of the material and the discursive, the human and the
non-human, society and nature, in the perpetual reconstruction of space and
history. Throughout the seven chapters of this book we have deliberately
chosen to look at a variety of what may seem at Wrst glance unrelated sites
and moments of state–nature relations. Even in individual chapters we often
move between Welds as diverse as the Dutch polders and Welsh nationalism,
or governmental reform in New Zealand and parliamentary politics in the
UK. We have deliberately chosen this strategy so that we can more eVectively
convey the multitude of diVerent sites and moments where and when state–
nature relations operate and in turn convey the pervasive and critical nature
of this relationship to our contemporary modes of existence.
21
In particular note Latour’s (1993: 122) criticisms of the conceptualizations of the ‘total
State’.
20 States and Natures
provided by Marshall Berman (1983), we see the history of the modern era
presented not as a continuously unfurling historical project, but as a series of
intense periods of modernization, including the aforementioned political
and scientiWc revolutions of the sixteenth century (where modernity became
a force to oppose the ancient world) and the more recent technological
transformations associated with the industrial revolution during the nine-
teenth century.22 It would thus be erroneous to interpret our mobilization of
the notions of the modern state and modern nature as distinct historical
categories or types. It is quite clear that during the era of modernity (when-
ever that may actually be) states have taken very diVerent forms and fulWlled
varying functions, while nature has been understood and used in a variety of
ways. It is our contention, however, that as a ‘programmatic vision for social
change and progress’23 modernity has provided the ideological and techno-
logical context within which the intensive centralization and territorialization
of the natural world (which we claim characterizes contemporary state–
nature relations) has Xourished. Consequently, while Berman (1983: 15, 26)
describes modernity as a ‘vital mode’ of largely social experience, we also see
it in relation to a set of ecological ‘ways of being’ that have been shaped by
the ‘technocratic pastorals’ of the modern state.
In order to conceptualize the relationship between state, nature, and
modernity we Wnd the metaphor of the laboratory particularly helpful. The
modern scientiWc laboratory has a long historical association in the public
imagination with the objective uncovering of nature’s secrets. This idealized
vision of the laboratory has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years
from sociologists who have explored the cultural and political fabric of
laboratory life.24 Within these varied studies, the laboratory has been
shown to be an intensely cultural and political site within which conventions
(not truths) about the natural world are produced through everyday prac-
tices and struggles. By oVering the idea of the state as modernity’s laboratory
we are suggesting that the state not only be understood as a site for the
production of a deWnitive vision of (modern) nature, but as a political
context within which struggles over the properties, meanings, and values of
nature are being constantly expressed, managed, and partially regulated. As
a laboratory space, of course, the modern state does not frame nature in the
same way as real laboratories (through walls, experimentation columns, Petri
dishes, and refrigerators) but through territorial borders, institutional struc-
tures, and laws. We claim, however, that just as laboratories produce legit-
imate knowledge concerning nature, and physically transform fragments of
the natural world, so too states are actively engaged in the reiWcation of
22
See also Soja’s (1989: 24–31) analysis of Berman.
23
We use here Maria Kaika’s term (2005: 4).
24
See in particular here Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s (1979) celebrated anthropology of
the work of scientists sharing laboratory space. For a broader discussion of the politics of the
laboratory, see Barnes and Shapin (1979), Latour (1983), Shapin and SchaVer (1985).
Introduction 21
modern state nature. By drawing the parallel between the role of the state and
laboratory in the construction of nature, we are also mindful of Latour and
Woolgar’s reXection on the relationship between the laboratory and the
natural world: ‘ScientiWc activity is not ‘‘about nature’’, it is a Werce Wght to
construct reality. The laboratory is the workplace and the set of productive
forces, which makes construction possible’ (Latour and Woolgar 1979: 243;
emphasis in original). The distinction that Latour and Woolgar make
between nature and the reality produced in the laboratory is important for
us because it serves to highlight the diVerence between the natural world and
the reality of state nature that has been produced under modernity. Like the
reality produced in the laboratory, state nature is not simply an objective
reXection of the natural world, but rather a form of nature that is both
possible and politically useful to construct.
As a kind of virtual laboratory of nature, we claim throughout this book
that the state has been central in orchestrating our modern conceptions of the
natural world. In making this assertion we do not wish to deny the crucial
role that both capitalism (see Smith 1984) and religion (see White 1967) had
and continue to have in shaping the modern perception of nature. But we do
argue that by focusing on the state we are able to perceive the particular
impacts that the processes of territorialization and centralization have had
on our understanding and treatments of nature. Implicit within this agenda is
a belief that the emergence of modern states has fundamentally transformed
how we experience and can experience the natural world (see e.g., Harvey
1989a, b; Soja 1989: ch. 1; Thrift 1996).
This chapter is about how we think about states, natures, and the relationships
between them. Despite this book’s assertion that an understanding of the
relations between states and natures is vital for any interpretation of contem-
porary political life or ecological existence, it is important to recognize the
growing sense of antipathy towards theories of the state within work on
nature. This antipathy is based on two broad critiques of state theory—one
epistemological and the other ontological. At an epistemological level, chal-
lenges to work on the state can perhaps best be understood in relation to the
consistent tendency of certain strands of political theory to use the deWnite
article when referring to ‘the’ state. Reference to ‘the’ state, however inno-
cently deployed, implicitly suggests a clearly designated, singular entity of
government. But it is precisely this view of states as sovereign, territorially
autonomous containers of political life that has led to a concerted wave of
theoretical criticism. The reiWcation of a deWnitive vision of the state has
tended to create a very narrow view of the state within certain strands of
contemporary political theory. It is in this context that Rose and Miller (1992)
argue that the state is nothing more than a ‘mythical abstraction’ (see Chapter
1), or an attempt to simplify the complex networks and practices through
which governmental power is realized into narrowly conceived, centralized
visions of authority. Consequently, to many writing within what could
24 Thinking about Natures and States
1
For an overview of globalization see Held et al. (1999).
2
For a much shorter but related theoretical review of state–nature relations see Whitehead
et al. (2006).
Thinking about Natures and States 25
about some of these is that while often coming from opposing political
perspectives they have one thing in common—a tendency to create a tem-
poral and ideological dichotomy between states and natures. Let us begin
with one of the most celebrated writers on the state and political sovereignty,
Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was born prematurely on 5 April 1588 in the
English county of Wiltshire. The seemingly apocryphal tale was told that
Hobbes’s premature birth was a result of his mother’s concern with the
imminent arrival of the Spanish Armada to English shores. We note this
rather peculiar tale because it is suggestive of the times within which he lived
and wrote. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was a place and an era
of transition, when the political hierarchies of the medieval world were
gradually being replaced by early modern state systems. Hobbes witnessed
the kinds of social and military turmoil these transformations created—from
the English naval struggles with Spain to the internal conXicts over the form
and functions of the English state that raged during the civil war of 1642–48.
On the basis of these experiences Hobbes wrote a series of manuscripts in
which he reXected on nature, humanity, and social organization—including
De Cive (1642) and De Corpore (1655). His most inXuential work, however, is
undoubtedly Leviathan (1651), which, signiWcantly, was published only three
years after the cessation of the English civil war and the signing of the Treaty
of Westphalia.
In Leviathan Hobbes explores the role that emerging systems of govern-
ment (or embryonic states) should have in resolving social anarchy and war.
According to Hobbes the leviathan was a hybrid political structure, combin-
ing the ‘sovereign power’ and ‘the people’ within a system of political control
and obedience. While it would be erroneous to equate Hobbes’s vision of the
leviathan with the modern state, what is interesting, in the context of our
deliberations, are the discussions that he initiates regarding the relationship
between nature and political government.3 Hobbes refers to nature not as
a thing or as a set of ecological processes, but as a condition. In this context, it
is wrong to associate Hobbes’s use of the term ‘nature’ with its contemporary
manifestations. The condition of nature was, according to Hobbes, the type of
social relations that did (or would) exist in the absence of a sovereign power.
This idea of nature as a time or condition of ‘primitive’, savage society is often
referred to as a state of nature. The idea of the state of nature clearly resonates
with the contemporary idea of ‘Wrst nature’, or that time within human
prehistory and ancient times when humans were still a product of nature
and its laws, not a producer of nature themselves.4 As with all other species,
Hobbes (1996: 82–6) argued, humans were a product of a state of nature
3
Caloyn Merchant (1989: 206–15) provides a more detailed analysis of Hobbes’s account of
the natural world.
4
For more on the ideologies of Wrst nature and the idea of the production of nature, see Smith
(1984) and Luke (1995: 3–4).
26 Thinking about Natures and States
within which their animalistic instincts and capabilities were set. The problem
for Hobbes was that he believed that the natural impulse of humanity would,
if left to its savage freedoms and unchecked desires, result in a system of social
anarchy, destruction, and perpetual warfare. In his now (in)famous reXection
on the state of nature, Hobbes emphasizes this fundamental belief:
Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men [sic] live without a common power, to
keep them all in awe, they are in a condition which is called war . . . where every man
is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without
other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall Xourish
them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof
is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth . . . no knowledge of the face of
the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worse of all,
continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short. (Hobbes 1996: 84)
Perhaps what is most signiWcant about this often-cited quote is not so
much the notoriously bleak picture it paints of early human existence, but the
direct parallel it draws between the absence of the state (or a common power)
and the presence of an uncivilized natural realm. Debate still rages as to
whether Hobbes believed this state of nature (or ‘war’) actually existed, or
whether he was using it as an ‘apocalyptic myth’ against which to counter-
point his theories.5 Hobbes did, however, predicate that the only way of
resolving the natural inclination of humanity to follow selWsh desires and
generate divisive conXict was to cede certain natural freedoms to a sovereign
power. This sovereign power could then, through the advantages of the power
vested within it, provide an authoritative framework within which conXicts
and disputes could be resolved and social harmony achieved.
While Hobbes’s vision of a sovereign or common power cannot be read
simply as a call for a modern nation-state, it is clear that his idea of a civil
government with national territorial scope is an authoritarian precursor of
the modern state. What is also clear, however, is that when discussing issues
of government and society, Hobbes establishes a clear temporal/metaphor-
ical dichotomy between systems of nature and the laws and practices of
government. To Hobbes, the state, or common power, replaces or supersedes
nature—as the body of nature (‘primitive man’) is replaced by the body politic
(the leviathan).6 The demarcation of a state of nature (or the original state of
humanity), either in time or intellectually, from what we term the nature of
the state (the establishment of a system of civil society centred on a sovereign
government) is a common and persistent move within analyses of natures
and states. The separation of nature and the state in this way operates at
a number of levels, but is undergirded by a particular ideological vision of
nature as an alien, uncivilized, external realm, over which human rationality
5
See the editor’s introduction to Hobbes (1996: xxxii).
6
See ibid. (xviii).
Thinking about Natures and States 27
7
The taming, or civilizing, of nature by modern state institutions has been likened by Tim
Luke (1997) to the imposition of an artiWcially generated ‘techno-sphere’ (or second nature) onto
a pre-historical ‘eco-sphere’ (or Wrst nature).
8
Its full title was A Discourse on a Subject Proposed by the Academy of Dijon: What is the
Origin of Inequality Among Men, and is it Authorised by Natural Law?
9
See the editor’s introduction to Rousseau (1993).
10
This quote was taken by Rousseau from Aristotle’s Politics (Book I, ch. 2).
28 Thinking about Natures and States
the natural world (Smith 1984: ch. 1). Nevertheless, Rousseau did not advo-
cate a romantic quest in search of a lost Eden or natural order, but rather the
creation of an artiWcial system of political government to preserve the natural
rights of humanity to freedom. According to Rousseau, this system of
political government was best achieved through a social contract, or bond,
forged (and constantly re-aYrmed) between people and the state. On Rous-
seau’s terms the role of the state should be to deliver the collective will of the
people and to preserve their right to individual freedom. To Rousseau, then,
the state was a necessary institution in preserving nature or at least the
natural order of the world.
The signiWcance of the work of Hobbes and Rousseau for this book lies not
in their respective portrayals of the pre-statal realms of Wrst nature, but in the
fact that in order to theorize the political and moral functioning of states they
had to invent a natural world. In order to comprehend what living in a state
system was, it is clear that both Hobbes and Rousseau created a vision of an
antecedent regime of nature, and used this vision to justify absolutism and
republicanism, respectively, within the governments of their time. For both
writers it is clear that nature became a mirror for the state. For Hobbes this
mirror showed the problems that an absence of state power could create,
while for Rousseau nature was invoked to illustrate the intrinsic failure of
early modern governmental systems. This mirror for the state, oVered by
both Rousseau and Hobbes, is consequently best conceived of as a ‘stripped-
down’ vision of humankind—in Rousseau’s terms, humanity as it came from
‘the hand of nature’ (Smith 1984: ch. 1).
of personal liberties (see Bakunin 1970; Kropotkin 1974). The state, however,
has remained the central target of Anarchist writings and actions.
The Wrst clear articulation of Anarchist philosophies on political hierarchy
and the liberty of the individual was provided by William Godwin in his
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). In his famous reXections on the
nature of political justice, Godwin claims that the presence of the state has
two pernicious eVects upon the society over which it presides (Godwin 1976).
First, states tend to produce a condition of dependence, whereby individuals
turn to the state to provide the basic things they need to live rather than
securing these things themselves. Secondly, and in a related sense, Godwin
argues that states engender regimes of ignorance among their national popu-
lations, as individuals become increasingly alienated from the processes by
which their lives are made possible. While the problems of dependency and
ignorance identiWed by Godwin were invoked in a wide range of political
contexts to justify Anarchist-inspired visions of society, many Anarchists
equated these problems directly with the social experience of, and interaction
with, nature. Anarchist writers claimed that the emergence of the modern
state had eVectively severed people’s routine interactions with the natural
world and undermined the valuable ecological knowledges produced by these
immersions within nature. State-sponsored programmes of scientiWc forestry
and industrialized agriculture, and the shift of population from rural to
urban areas inspired by this transition were, according to the Anarchists, to
blame for the growing estrangement of people from nature. It was this belief
that inspired one of the most famous of all Anarchist writers, Peter
Kropotkin, to write his celebrated blueprint for an Anarchist society—Fields,
Factories and Workshops Tomorrow (1899). In this book Kropotkin argued
for the decentralization of society from a nationally integrated system of
industry and agriculture into a federated system of self-contained communes.
While inspired by the desire to create a better quality of life for people,
through the careful integration of industry, agriculture, and the home, at
the centre of Kropotkin’s vision was a clear desire to remove the barriers that
he believed the state had placed between people and the natural world.
Perhaps the clearest indication of the Anarchists’ concern with socio-
natural relations is captured in the publication of one of their earliest jour-
nals, Mother Earth. Edited by Alexander Berkman and published by Emma
Goldman, Mother Earth provided a framework within which Anarchist
concerns with political society were combined with deliberations on envir-
onmental change and ecological destruction. The dual purpose envisaged
for Mother Earth is perhaps captured best in Emma Goldman and Max
Baginski’s introduction to the Wrst issues of the magazine in March 1906:
MOTHER EARTH will endeavor to attract and appeal to all those who oppose
encroachment on public and individual life. It will appeal to those who strive for
something higher, weary of the commonplace; to those who feel that stagnation is
a deadweight on the Wrm and elastic step of progress; to those who breathe freely only
30 Thinking about Natures and States
in limitless space; to those who long for the tender shade of a new dawn for a
humanity free from the dread of want, the dread of starvation in the face of mountains
of riches. The Earth free for the free individual! (Goldman and Baginski 1906: 1)
The mantra of ‘the Earth free for the free individual’ espoused by Mother
Earth encapsulates the relationship that Anarchists regularly constructed
between political freedom and ecological harmony.
During the early part of the twentieth century Mother Earth became a very
fashionable place to publish, numbering among its varied contributors Frie-
drich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Leo Tolstoy.
Combining poetry with political philosophy and ecology with historical
commentary, the pages of Mother Earth reveal the links that Anarchists
discerned between the erosion of political liberty and freedom within emer-
ging state systems and the social estrangement and destruction of nature.
ReXecting on the consolidation of state power in the US, Emma Goldman
and Max Baginski make the political ecology of anarchism clear:
To the contemporaries of George Washington, Thomas Paine and Thomas JeVerson,
America appeared vast, boundless, full of promise. Mother Earth, with the sources of
vast wealth hidden within the folds of her ample bosom, extended her inviting and
hospitable arms to all those who came to her from arbitrary and despotic lands—
Mother Earth ready to give herself alike to all her children. But soon she was seized by
the few, stripped of her freedom, fenced in, a prey to those who were endowed with
cunning and unscrupulous shrewdness. They, who had fought for independence from
the British yoke, soon became dependent among themselves; dependent on possessions,
on wealth, on power. Liberty escaped into the wilderness, and the old battle between the
patrician and the plebeian broke out in the new world, with greater bitterness and
vehemence. A period of but a hundred years had suYced to turn a great republic, once
gloriously established, into an arbitrary state that subdued a vast number of its people
into material and intellectual slavery, while enabling the privileged few to monopolize
every material and mental resource. (Goldman and Baginski 1906: 1)
In this zealous passage on the socio-ecological consequences of state
formation it is possible to discern a clear distinction between the purported
slavery of arbitrarily imposed state systems and the inherent freedoms of
nature, and in particular wilderness. The connection between wilderness,
liberty, and nature is a consistent theme within the various issues of Mother
Earth and other Anarchist writings. It is of course not diYcult to draw
parallels between this vision of nature and freedom and Rousseau’s invoca-
tion of the state of nature. What appears to be diVerent, however, between
the state of nature envisaged by Rousseau and the Mother Earth invoked
by Anarchists are the political motives that informed these constructions.
While Rousseau used the idea of a state of nature to imagine a state system
that preserved the natural freedoms of humankind, the Anarchists’ recourse
to Mother Earth had much more to do with the creation of individual
freedoms, which were based on the independence of people from the state.
On Anarchist terms, personal independence from state systems was to be
Thinking about Natures and States 31
upon the state as a political principle but on the modes of rationality and
socio-ecological ordering that states tend to produce. This, of course, is much
more a critique of the modern logics of states than simply their institutional
existence. If we look, for example, at Bookchin’s reXections on states and
natures in his Post-scarcity Anarchism, this distinction becomes clear:
The cast of mind that today organizes diVerences among humans and other life-forms
along hierarchical lines, deWning the external in terms of its ‘superiority’ or ‘inferior-
ity’, will give way to an outlook that deals with diversity in an ecological manner.
DiVerences among people will be respected, indeed fostered, as elements that enrich
the unity of experience and phenomena. The traditional relationship that pits subject
against object will be altered qualitatively; the ‘external’, the ‘diVerent’, the ‘other’ will
be conceived as individual parts of a whole all the richer because of its complexity.
This sense of unity will reXect the harmonization of interests between individuals and
between society and nature. Freed from an oppressive routine, from paralyzing
repressions and insecurities, from the burdens of toil and false needs, from the
trammels of authority and irrational compulsion, individuals will Wnally, for the
Wrst time in history, be in a position to realize their potentialities as members of the
human community and the natural world. (Bookchin 2004: 57)
The issue for Bookchin here is clearly not so much with the existence of
political authority in the form of a state or government, as with the ordering
logics that this centralized authority imposes upon the natural world and the
impacts that these ordering techniques have on subsequent social experiences
of nature.11 As opposed to a conscious unity of experience between the social
and ecological worlds, Bookchin sees a dual tendency within state systems.
At one level states impose a hierarchical order which reduces nature to its
component parts and establishes clear boundaries between the social and
natural worlds. Secondly, Bookchin discerns that as the social and natural
worlds are ordered hierarchically by state institutions, a process of othering
emerges through which nature loses much of its social and spiritual meaning.
Of course what both the processes of hierarchical ordering and othering have
in common is that that they tend to simplify nature into a series of socially
discernable and manageable categories and simultaneously obfuscate other
systems that could be used to understand nature and ecology.
primarily concerned in this section with how a political and cultural conscious-
ness of an emerging form of second (or socially changed) nature is intimately
connected to the conceptual embracing of the state as a necessary manager of
natural resources and ecological risk. When we speak of second nature, we do
so in direct and deliberate contradistinction to the idea of Wrst nature we
discussed in the previous section. Consequently, if Wrst nature is the primordial
substratum of existence, or that which pre-exists social production, second
nature is a nature that has been constructed and produced, an artiWce of a
prevailing socio-technical order (Smith 1984: ch. 2). While we are suspicious
of the widespread use of the term ‘second nature’ within contemporary philo-
sophical debate,12 what is interesting about the term is that it describes a form of
nature that humanity is responsible for producing. This notion of social respon-
sibility for nature has been manifest in two main ways. First, there has been a
growing awareness—often driven through the environmental movement, but
also through environmental sciences—of the unprecedented ecological damage
that the industrial generation has done to the natural world. Secondly, and
strangely allied to the production of environmental damage, has been an emer-
ging socio-cultural and techno-scientiWc belief that human society can control
and manage the environment in new ways. This process of environmental
management is based upon maximizing environmental resource use while alle-
viating the eVects of environmental damage. It is in this dual context of environ-
mental change and increasing political power over the environment that the idea
of the state as manager or caretaker of nature Wrst emerged.
In many ways the idea of the state as caretaker, or guardian, of the
environment is a philosophy not too distant from the Hobbesian state (see
Johnston 1996: 131–2). Consequently, and in the context of capitalist social
relations in particular, it is not diYcult to imagine how the selWsh pursuit of
individual economic agents, if unchecked, could have devastating eVects on
the welfare of environmental commons like the atmosphere, biosphere, and
hydrosphere. The somewhat simplistic and economically Xawed argument
goes that in such circumstance, each economic agent would be impelled to
exploit the environment to his or her fullest capacity, while avoiding any
form of environmental reparation for fear of subsidizing the resource use of
competing economic agents.13 This is in eVect the eco-industrial equivalent of
Hobbes’s chaotic vision of the state of nature.14 From this perspective the
12
This is primarily because of the way in which the term has been used to deny the continuing
reality of Wrst nature—which, if not in terms of ecological space, at least in relation to eco-
biological processes, endures.
13
See in this context Garret Hardin’s (1968) famous, if controversial, tragedy-of-the-
commons thesis.
14
While conceived of in relation to the need for collective international action to protect the
global commons, the classic exegesis on the economic exploitation of global commons was
provided by Garret Hardin in his Tragedy of the Commons (1968). See also Hardin (1974) for
a discussion of the need for global or world government.
Thinking about Natures and States 35
15
For more on the links between the state and collective environmental action, see Johnston
(1996).
36 Thinking about Natures and States
16
See also Bridge and Jonas (2002) for a more recent discussion of the links between state
government and nature.
17
It was issues of scarcity and the problems of global resource management during the 1970s
that led Ophuls (1977) to call for an ecological leviathan.
38 Thinking about Natures and States
nature. While not written from a strictly Weberian perspective, the work of
Scott (1998: 29) reveals that one of the key resource management issues
facing early modern states was securing a regular and suYcient supply of
food (see Chapter 4). With variable harvests and diVerent local methods for
measuring agricultural yields it was diYcult for early modern states to be
certain that in any given year nature would provide a suYcient quantity of
food to feed the population. Social unrest, which regularly followed food
shortages and famines, meant that the monitoring and management of
agricultural production became one of the prime functions of early state
systems in Europe. In order to manage agricultural nature eVectively, the
early modern state rolled forward its administrative capacity into local
agricultural communities, forcing farmers to adopt standard measures for
agricultural returns. Gone were parochial, imprecise measures like ‘basket-
fuls’, ‘cartloads’, and ‘handfuls’, to be replaced by the centrally approved
measures of the state (Scott 1998: 25). The critical eVect of such uniform
measures was that nature became something that could be seen by the state,
its likely returns calculated and predictions made on future harvests, poten-
tial food storage, and territorial redistribution requirements (Scott 1998).
The early state administration and measurement of nature in this way not
only made the vagaries of nature politically manageable but also transformed
the natures that were subject to such techniques. At one level this transform-
ation was ideological, as facets of the agricultural landscape were converted
by the logic of state administration from nature to existing only as ‘natural
resources’ (Scott 1998: 13). At another level, the transformation of nature
was more material as the early modern state promoted standardized agricul-
tural systems to complement their measurement regimes. While these systems
involved regimented Weld patterns and new harvesting techniques, they often
undermined the varied ecologies of local nature that had existed before. Of
course, what began with the management of agricultural resources during the
early modern period has now been extended to the management of water,
forestry, minerals, and energy supply within the complex systems of state
administration, techno-science, and engineering in the late modern era.
historically been imposed by the natural world at both a global scale (in terms
of extended resource exploitation, nuclear power, and biosphere engineering)
and at a microbiological level (in relation to genetic modiWcation, nano-
technology, and cloning). The combined transcendence of tradition and
nature has, according to Beck, not only resulted in the proliferation of risk
but also given rise to a whole new brand of risk: he calls these new forms of
risk industrial or ‘avoidable’ (1992a: 97). Industrial risk diVers from pre-
industrial risk to the extent that it can be calculated and partially con-
trolled—it cannot simply be interpreted as a product of fate or a ‘freak of
nature’.
While Beck (1992a: 113) is highly critical of the ability of territorially
constrained nation-states to address the increasingly global patterns of eco-
logical risk, it still appears that the state has an important role in the so-called
risk society. Within the risk society it is clear that the role of the state changes
from being an institution primarily concerned with wealth/resource (re)dis-
tribution to one focusing on the management and distribution of socio-
ecological risk (see Chapter 7). But in this context, the administrative
power and infrastructural reach of the state means that it has a crucial role
in both managing the material eVects of risk-taking and in making risk
politically acceptable. In relation to managing the eVects of ecological risk,
Beck (1995: ch. 4) comments on the emergence of ‘hazard bureaucracies’
within the contemporary state, which are based upon complex systems of risk
assessment calculation, contingency plans, and rapid-response units, which
respond to the worst eVects of ecological disaster.18 Beyond the actual
manifestation of ecological risk, however, the state also has a critical function
in the political and cultural management of risk. Consequently, in liaison
with the scientiWc and technological communities, the state has a central role
in alleviating social anxiety about risk through various assessment exercises
and public outreach campaigns. The continual liaison between state and
scientiWc oYcials within the discursive management of risk reXects what
Rudolf Bahro (1987) described as ‘elite stewards’ who act as dedicated
guardians of society against environmental harm. Bahro’s vision of
elite stewards of nature was based upon a belief that the state had a crucial
role in marshalling the wise deployment of ecological knowledge. In both
the management of actually occurring and potential risk, certain Weberian
state theorists argue that the state now has an important reXexive role in
monitoring the worst socio-ecological side-eVects of industrial modernity.
This is a process of which Beck was well aware, referring to it as ‘reXective
modernity’—a process whereby ‘modernization becomes its own theme’
(1992b: 19).
18
Beck’s notion of a hazard bureaucracy is echoed in the earlier writings of Rudolf Bahro
(1987) when he described the need for a ‘salvation’ or ‘rescue’ government that is able to
intervene in the face of the most extreme forms of ecological crisis. See also here Gandy (1999).
40 Thinking about Natures and States
19
Indeed, it was during his honeymoon in Paris in the summer of 1844 that Marx (perhaps
rather unromantically) penned his famous Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.
Thinking about Natures and States 41
Their assertion that the state was nothing more than the instrument of the
ruling capitalist class led them to be highly critical of prevailing bourgeois
ideologies of the state (like those of Rousseau, described above, and Hegel) in
which the state was presented as a progressive framework of enlightened
social empowerment.
The instrumentalist vision of the state developed in the early writings of
Marx and Engels is perhaps stereotypically the one most associated with
42 Thinking about Natures and States
20
Focusing on the period from 1848 (the year of a revolutionary socialist uprising in Paris) to
1851 (the year of the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte), Marx
provides a wonderfully detailed and sophisticated reading of the relationship between class,
revolution, and state power in France.
21
For more on Marx’s analysis of the institutional functioning of the capitalist state, see
Joseph (2003: 17–18).
22
For a review of Marxist theories of the nature, see Schmidt (1971) and Smith (1984). For
more on Marxist theories of the state, see Jessop (1982, 1986, 1996).
Thinking about Natures and States 43
ive. In one article for the Rheinische Zeitung (where he began work as
a newspaper columnist), Marx discusses the introduction of the Wood
Theft Law in Germany.23 As with many other similar acts of legislation in
Europe at the time, it was designed to stop peasants from exercising their
rights to collect kindling wood from local forests. In eVect such legislation
served to transform nature (in the form of woodland) from a communal
resource into a privatized economic good. Marx was, as you might expect,
scathing in his criticism of the Wood Theft Law. But within this criticism we
see traces of the themes that recur within Marxist discussions of the relation-
ship between the state and nature:
1 the role of the state in favouring certain class interests above others in the
use of contested natural resources (in this particular case favouring the
forest owners above the peasants);
2 the state reinforcing social alienation from the natural world (in this case
the local socio-ecological metabolisms of forest and local community).
The links between class interests, disputes over nature, and social estrange-
ment (or alienation) from the natural world have become recurrent themes
within contemporary Marxist analyses of nature–state relations. At one level,
the relationship between the state and nature can be understood on Marxist
terms as a largely economic aVair. As Marx pointed out in the famous
opening lines of his Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx 1971), nature
is a crucial source of economic wealth (labour in this sense was understood by
Marx (p. 11) as a ‘manifestation of a force of nature’). According to Marx, as
the vital substratum for wealth creation, the bourgeois exploitation of nature
was a central component of capitalist society.24 In this context, the state has
had an important historical role in providing the necessary conditions
through which the wealth of nature can be abstracted. The role of the state
within the economic exploitation of nature can be seen in a variety of ways.
The state has, for example, consistently provided the material conditions
under which the industrial utilization of nature has been able to proceed. It
has often been the state, through national programmes of road- and rail-
building, that has provided the basic infrastructures through which nature
has been excavated and transformed within the industrial production pro-
cess. States have also provided the conditions under which facets of commu-
nal nature have been converted into private assets which can be freely
appropriated for individual gain. In this context, the state has also been
able to exercise its legitimized monopoly on the use of violence to police
unpopular industrial interventions within the natural world (Watts 2001).
23
For a more detailed discussion of this article, see the editor’s 1999 introduction to Marx and
Engels (C. J. Arthur: 12).
24
See Burkett (1999: Part II) for a recent review of Marxist work on the link between
capitalist society and nature.
44 Thinking about Natures and States
25
See in particular Jessop (1982, 1985, 1996, 2002) to chart Jessop’s continuing Marxist
engagement with the capitalist state.
Thinking about Natures and States 45
and Erik Swyngedouw (1993, 1997) have recently questioned the ontological
division that is regularly constructed between society and nature. While not
writing explicitly about the state, the collective work of these authors does
provide us with some fascinating insights into what neo-Marxism can oVer
work on nature. In line with classic dialectical thinking, these writers have
shown that the categories of nature and society cannot exist (in any mean-
ingful sense at least) without their relative positioning to each other. Beyond
the linguistic dialectics of society and nature, however, these Marxist geo-
graphers have also stressed the material relations that make nature and
society categories that are always already deeply implicated moments of
each other. By combining analyses of the ideological and material dialectics
of society and nature, they have questioned the ontological foundations of
the natural world. They argue that instead of seeing nature as something that
is an eternal and pre-given fragment of reality (Wrst nature), or merely a
mental or linguistic construct, nature should be seen as a produced outcome
of the dialectical interplay of ideologies and the material practices though
which it is created. This interpretation of nature has been articulated most
clearly in Neil Smith’s (1984: ch. 2) production of nature thesis. According to
Smith (1999), the idea of the ‘production’ of nature is important for two
reasons: Wrst, because of the distinction that can be made between the
‘production’ and the ‘construction’ of nature; and, secondly, because of the
emphasis that the term ‘production’ places on the prevailing capitalist rela-
tions within which nature is continually being (re)produced. Smith asserts
that the idea of a socially produced nature is diVerent from the notion of the
construction of nature by virtue of the fact that it considers the socio-
economic and political practices in and through which nature is transformed
(at a simultaneously ideological and material level), rather than simply
drawing attention to the social representation of an underlying natural
world. While rarely developed in relation to the politics of the state, it is
not diYcult to extrapolate, from Smith’s work, an understanding of the role
of the modern state within the various moments of production through
which nature has its contemporary existence.
Marxist work on the state and nature, then, suggests some potentially
dynamic ways in which the emerging dialectics of states and natures can be
studied. We do, however, perceive a danger within Marxist analyses of states
and natures: they tend to resolve the dichotomy between the political and
ecological worlds by making them both ultimately subservient to capitalism
(see Castree 2002). In Marxist theory it is consequently capitalism that in the
last instance moulds the state and it is capitalism that ultimately drives
the social production and transformation of nature. In this context, there is
a danger within Marxist theory of providing an integrated account of the
state and nature, whose integration depends on the theoretical diminution of
both the political capacity of the state and the ecological power of nature in
order to make way for a broader theory of capitalism.
46 Thinking about Natures and States
26
For good overviews of the work of political ecologists see Peet and Watts (1996) and
Robbins (2004).
Thinking about Natures and States 47
27
See also the work of Jane Jenson (1993, 1995) for examples of feminist/discursive analyses
of national politics.
48 Thinking about Natures and States
Foucault identiWed a transition within both the operation of state power and
ultimately the relationship between the state and the exercise of wider forms
of social control. In relation to the operation of state power itself, Foucault
(2002a) charts the emergence of a new type of government from the sixteenth
century onwards (see also Hardt and Negri 2000: chs 1–2; Ótuathail 1996:
ch. 1). No longer concerned expressly with the interests of the king or prince,
this was a state devoted to the careful administration of its population. This
form of state is perhaps most easily identiWable with Giddens’s ‘administra-
tive state’, regulating its population through statistical surveys and tax
registers. According to Foucault (2002a), this administrative state governed
through the household—by monitoring the household as its basic govern-
mental unit and by ensuring social reproduction through the provision of
household welfare. From the eighteenth century onwards, however, Fou-
cault discerns an altogether diVerent state in operation. This was a form of
political rule that Foucault referred to as the governmental state, and is
largely synonymous with the character of the modern state we outlined in
Chapter 1. The key diVerence for Foucault between the administrative state
and the governmental state was the expanded vision of power associated with
the latter. No longer simply concerned with discrete households, the govern-
mental state was a system of government concerned with the management of
a national population and the ordering of the entirety of its territorial
resources (Foucault 2002). This period of state (trans)formation is particu-
larly pertinent to our discussions of state–nature relations because it corres-
ponds to the emergence of a series of new ordering devices for quantifying
and delimiting national natures (including systematic national mapping
programmes, biological catalogues, and various ecological inventories
designed to describe the nature of the nation) (Ótuathail 1996: 7–12).
According to Foucault, both the administrative and governmental forms
of the state were expressions of a disciplinary society—based upon the overt
application of political power and discipline on to the national population
(Ótuathail 1996: 7–12). In the late modern era, Foucault charts a diVerent
constellation of social power, however, based less on overt discipline and
more on social control, or the ‘regulation of social life from its interior’
(Hardt and Negri 2000: 23). This was a ‘society of control’ not discipline, a
society characterized by a far less centralized apparatus of governance and
a more diVuse Weld of social power.28 A critical aspect of Foucault’s reXec-
tion on the changing form of governmental power was his emphasis on the
increasingly biopolitical form that power takes in the late modern world
(Foucault 2002). Hardt and Negri capture well the signiWcance of biopolitical
power when they observe that:
28
While Foucault never actually used the terms ‘disciplinary society’ and ‘society of control’,
we borrow the terms here from Hardt and Negri (2000: 23–4) as useful ways of expressing
Foucault’s argument.
Thinking about Natures and States 49
Biopower is a form of power which regulates life from its interior, following it,
interpreting it, absorbing it and re-articulating it. Power can achieve an eVective
command over the entire life of the population only when it becomes an integral,
vital function that every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her own accord
. . . The highest function of power is to invest life through and through, and its
primary task is to administer life. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 23–4)
In the emergence of biopower, of course, we see the paradox of the modern
state. In order to achieve total socio-territorial command, the state, at least as
a centralized bureaucratic locus of power, must disperse so that it can
become a behavioural principle of the individual. The goal of state power
can only be achieved with the Xow of power from the state to the individual,
to life itself. This is why many Foucauldians argue that the study of political
and social power should focus on the micro-politics of everyday life and
language, not the formal structures of government and the state.
Despite providing a radical disjuncture with existing approaches to the
state, Foucault provided little indication of what his approach to power
meant in relation to the state’s control and utilization of nature (see Darier
1996: 6).29 Throughout this book we argue that Foucault’s focus on human
life, within his excavations of biopower, can be usefully extended to cover
a much broader range of life sources—including the non-human and eco-
logical. In this way we argue that the state has become increasingly impli-
cated in the routine disciplining and control of nature, both in regulating
social actions towards the natural world and in terms of altering bio-
ecological processes themselves. The extension of Foucault’s theories of
power to work on the government of nature has been partly developed within
an emerging group of writings on environmental governmentality (Darier
1996, 1999; Goldman 2004; Luke 1996, 1999). Within this emerging body
of work, writers such as Éric Darier (1996: 601) have considered how Fou-
cault’s analysis of the technologies of government and associated knowledge-
gathering institutions could be deployed in order to expose the inner work-
ings of the intensiWed Weld of power that governments are bringing to bear on
the natural world (see Chapter 6).
29
One instance when Foucault does talk about nature is in the preface of The Order of Things
(2003: xvi), when he discusses Borges’s reXections on a Chinese encyclopaedia’s division of
animal types. Foucault notices how the modern rationalization of nature into logical categories
leaves little room for alternative visions or knowledges of nature—which could include (in
Borges at least) the Chinese classiWcation of animals as ‘belonging to the Emperor’ or those
that ‘from a long way oV look like Xies’!
50 Thinking about Natures and States
30
For more on the post-Westphalian territorial forms of the state, see Brenner (1998, 1999,
2001, 2004), Jones (1998), and MacLeod and Goodwin (1999).
31
For an example of the broad cross-section of work that has been carried out under the
banner of ANT, see a selection of the following: Callon (1986), Castree (2002), Law (1992),
Murdoch (1997, 1998), Swyngedouw (1999), Whatmore and Thorne (1998).
52 Thinking about Natures and States
32
Here it is important to note the similarity between Latour’s work on puriWcation and
translation and Deleuze and Guattari’s (2002) reXections on the processes of coding, overcoding,
and decoding within the modern state. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the state gives form
to its territory and subjects through a continual process of classiWcatory coding. As the state’s
institutional apparatus expands, however, Deleuze and Guattari notice how the state tends to
overcode its objects of power by more and more sophisticated systems of coding. The result of
this is that increasingly the state sets in motion expanding systems of decoding within which the
various forms (labour, Wnance, tax) created by the state generate new types of power that elude
state-coded surveillance. The objects of translation identiWed by Latour appear to reXect what
Deleuze and Guattari would recognize as decoded facets of nature.
54 Thinking about Natures and States
the formation of modern state power, and has in turn been framed by the
nation-state. The notion of the frame, then, becomes a useful way of under-
standing the ways in which the centralizing and territorializing desires of the
state are both realized in and compromised by the objects, techniques, and
devices that mediate state–nature relations and make framing possible. In the
shadow of the modern state we argue that the purpose of framing continues
to be preWgured by the acts of centralization and territorialization. This is not
to say that acts of framing become any less dependent upon a complex set of
political and ecological struggles for their realization, or any less prone to
incidences of overXow, leakage, and failure.
The framing of nature by the state can be seen all around in the world
today: the passionate defence of the right to exploit national resources
oVered by many developing nations in the face of international pressure for
them to pursue environmental protection (see Seager 1993: 141–7); the use
of nature within various eco-nationalist movements as an iconographic
resource through which to assert national identity and diVerence; and the
technological monitoring of nature in order to produce national archives and
inventories cataloguing environmental change within national borders. We
assert that the continual framing of nature by the state in this way has
produced (and continues to produce) a particular historical form of
nature–state relation. Within all these examples, however, it is important to
see the act of framing not only as a practice of limiting nature (either
territorially or administratively) but also as a call to recognize the heteroge-
neous ways in which states and nature interconnect. State–nature relations
are heterogeneous because they operate not just in state departments but
also in museums, laboratories, health clinics, parks and gardens, and even
corporate boardrooms. Throughout this book we attempt to combine a
conscious awareness of the centralizing institutional/territorial capacity of
the state with an appreciation of the changing nodes and diVuse networks
through which many forms of state power are now being realized. This
requires us to steer a careful route through the macro and micro-worlds
of state–nature relations, between Weber/Marx and Foucault/Haraway,
between state institutions and cybernetic technologies, between the nation
and the body, the past and present. Holding these apparently contradictory
perspectives together may seem almost impossible, but we feel that this task
is important if the heterogeneous associations that exist between states and
natures are to be revealed.
3
1
Alternatively, see Schatzki (2003).
58 The Moments of Nature–State Relations
diVerent nature–state moments have been crucial over the modern period.2
The Wrst key nexus of nature–state relations is what we term the moment of
consolidation. The moment of consolidation refers to the beginnings of the
relations between modern states and natures. The term ‘consolidation’, of
course, draws on Charles Tilly’s account of the process of state consolidation
that characterized the modern period, where the multiple political forms and
identities of the Middle Ages were gradually and, in most cases, painfully
rationalized into a more horizontal association between sovereign states
(Tilly 1975, 1990; see also Mann 1988). We want to focus in this chapter on
the way in which nature was intimately intertwined with the process of state
consolidation. As well as the attempts made during this period to deWne
national languages, laws, and customs, considerable eVorts were directed
towards the deWnition and consolidation of ‘national natures’. The discursive
construction and the subsequent material transformation of a national
nature facilitated and constrained the process of state consolidation that
was taking place during the period. We examine this theme by focusing on
the early modern period, paying especial attention to the complex inter-
actions between the state and nature in the Dutch Netherlands.
The second key nexus of nature–state relations, we argue, is a moment of
contestation or, in other words, a particular set of nature–state associations in
which nature is used to challenge and contest state forms and ideologies. If
one key facet of the political geographies of the modern period has been the
gradual and tentative consolidation of the state, another equally important
process has been the contestation of the selfsame institutions and ideologies
of the state by various organizations, groups, and individuals. In this regard,
it can be dangerous and misleading to attempt to talk of a moment of
contestation that is somehow separate from a moment of consolidation.
Many authors have attempted to show the interdependency of relations of
domination/resistance or, alternatively, of the ‘entanglements of power’ (see
Pile and Keith 1998; Sharp et al. 2000). We agree fully with the sentiments of
these authors. One cannot speak of a moment of ‘nature–state’ consolida-
tion, for instance, without focusing on the various uses of nature as a means
of contesting the consolidation of the state. Similarly, the moment of con-
testation—where nature is used as a way of challenging state forms and
ideologies—structures and is structured by the forms of political and eco-
logical domination that are prevalent in that place at that time. We believe,
nonetheless, that there is a need to emphasize certain contexts within which
2
We do not doubt, in this regard, that it would be possible to expand this list to take account
of other nexus of nature–state relations. We limit ourselves to the three that are discussed in this
chapter since they illustrate, in our minds, the range of key relations that have existed between
political and ecological processes and institutions throughout the modern period. In doing so, we
do not want to classify these diVerent types of association as ‘ideal types’, of the sort so popular
in some branches of the social sciences. Instead, we view them as indicative and particularly
crucial instances of nature–state relations.
The Moments of Nature–State Relations 59
nature has been used speciWcally as a way of challenging state forms and
discourses. It is in this sense, we maintain, that a speciWc focus on a moment
of contestation is warranted. Indeed, there are numerous examples of the use
of nature as a way of contesting and challenging dominant state institutions
and ideologies. The various writings of the Anarchists, discussed in Chapter
2, illustrate the way in which nature could be mobilized as part of a broader
political strategy to challenge the dominance of the state. We focus in this
chapter on the use of nature and ecological arguments as a way of sustaining
challenges to the state by sub-state territorial movements or nations. SpeciW-
cally, we discuss the contestation of the use of water resources in Wales and
its use as a discourse around which Welsh nationalism has been mobilized.
We maintain that a third form of nature–state moment lies in the recon-
stitution or re-fabrication of political and ecological relationships in the form
of simulacra. Authors such as Umberto Eco (1987), Jean Baudrillard (1994),
and Timothy Mitchell (1988), argue that we are witnessing a present in
which representations of the past are deemed to be far more real that the
past itself. It is in this context that we can speak of a moment of simulacrum,
in which actual human relations are reworked through ‘protection, embalm-
ing, restoration’ and are, thus, reborn into the ‘eternal birth of the simulac-
rum’ (Baudrillard 1994: 41). In the context of the current project, we need to
think about the way in which the representation of nature–state relations—
potentially in a variety of diVerent forms—assumes a reality in itself, more
potent than that which it seeks to represent. We argue that a key moment of
simulacrum for nature–state relations lies in the context of the natural
history museum, where the national natures of the state are displayed. The
representation of nature–state relations reaches its apogee within natural
history museums with regard to the diorama (see especially Mitchell 1988).
In devising a ‘true’ representation of habitats and ecosystems within particu-
lar dioramas, we argue that natural history museums seek to incorporate
nature into state history. We examine such ideas empirically in this chapter
through a discussion of the American Museum of Natural History.
Speaking of museums alludes to another important theme that will emerge
within this chapter, namely the signiWcance of remembering nature–state
interactions. Much has been made of the importance of narrating pasts and
histories as a way of shaping present individual and group identities or, in
other words, of the need to ‘historicize our understanding of identity’ (Somers
1994: 6). In the context of nationalism—the group identity most relevant
to the themes discussed in this chapter—there is a clear emphasis on remem-
bering national pasts as a way of inspiring national presents and futures. The
contested, plural, and political aspect of this process has been described
by Benedict Anderson (1983: especially ch. 11) as one of ‘remembering/
forgetting’: certain aspects of national pasts are remembered whereas other
aspects, conveniently, are forgotten. The key point we want to stress in this
chapter is that nature is often incorporated into this narrative of the nation,
60 The Moments of Nature–State Relations
The process of state consolidation has been the subject of much academic
debate in a variety of disciplinary contexts. Various authors have noted how
societies in Europe from approximately the beginning of the sixteenth cen-
tury experienced a number of interrelated institutional changes as they
gradually discarded feudal methods of organizing people and land and,
instead, adopted more rational, bureaucratic, and territorial forms of societal
organization. With the formation of the modern state, the feudal commenda-
tio, which was characterized by ‘an intensely personal relation, envisaging
two partners [lord and vassal] who choose, aid, and respect each other as
individuals’ (Poggi 1978: 21), slowly gave way to a more impersonal, uni-
form, and territorial method of governance.
Numerous authors have focused on diVerent aspects of this process but
they have, on the whole, paid little explicit attention to the role of nature,
natural resources, or the environment in facilitating the process (see Chapter
2).3 A particular set of literatures that rectiWes this deWciency to some extent
is that concerned with environmental history. The branch of ‘political envir-
onmental history’, in particular, has focused on the interrelationships
between the histories of the environment and state policies and laws. As
J. R. MacNeill (2003: 8) has shown, however, this work has tended to focus
explicitly on the imbrications of politics and the environment during the
relatively recent past—especially the period after 1880.4 The two major
exceptions to this unwarranted narrow temporal focus are John Richard’s
(2003) magniWcent account of the global interrelationships between states,
3
See Giddens (1981), Mann (1986), Tilly (1975, 1990), see also Giddens (1985) and Foucault
(2002). For a discussion of the growth of rationality in a more general context during this period,
see Weber (1985).
4
McNeill’s account of the scope of political environmental history would seem to be relatively
narrow, being conWned to state policies and laws. Material environmental histories—concerned
with the material transformation of the environment in an historic context—and cultural
environmental histories—which focus on the past representation of the environment—are
bracketed oV as diVerent and separate branches of environmental histories. We would con-
tend—and hope to demonstrate in the current volume—that it is impossible to compartmentalize
environmental histories neatly in such a way. The politics of the environment, of necessity,
involve both material transformations and cultural representations of the environment.
The Moments of Nature–State Relations 61
markets, and the environment in the period between 1500 and 1800 and
Alfred Crosby’s (1986) discussion of the importance of environmental con-
cerns for the development of political forms throughout the whole of the
modern period. Richards discusses the role of states and empires in trans-
forming the environment at ever-greater rates during the early modern
period in four interrelated contexts: the intensiWed human land use along
settlement frontiers; biological invasions; commercial hunting of wildlife;
and the search for scarce energy resources. Crosby, similarly, focuses on
the way in which the European empires of the modern period were able to
transform global environments in more drastic ways. Importantly, these
global environments also helped to shape the form and functions of the
new empires of the modern period as various European states sought out
‘new Europes’ located in the furthest reaches of the world and relocated their
‘portmanteau biota’ there (Crosby 1986: 7, 89). While these contributions are
to be welcomed, their explicit focus on the intermeshing of global environments
and equally global empires would seem to downplay a far more fundamental,
common, and productive association between states and national natures,
and its impact on the process of state consolidation that so characterized
the early modern period.
We would argue that there needs to be a more sustained enquiry into the
political and ecological transformations of the early modern period, particu-
larly with regard to the framing of national natures by emerging states. The
Dutch Netherlands (see Figure 3.1) is the locus classicus of the mutual
transformation of state forms and national natures during this period.
Simon Schama, who has written so eloquently on the topic, argues for
instance that:
it can never be overemphasized that the period between 1550 and 1650, when the
political identity of an independent Netherlands nation was being established, was
also a time of dramatic physical alteration of its landscape. In both the political and
geographical senses, then, this was the formative era of a northern, Dutch, nation-
hood. (Schama 1987: 34)5
Schama’s account focuses, in particular, on the relationships between the
contemporaneous transformation of Dutch nature and of Dutch political
identity during the crucial ‘golden age’ of the seventeenth century, but his
work also has much to say concerning the inXuence of Dutch national
natures on the development of new state organizations during the same
period. We want to argue that nature, in the form of water, was framed
into the development of the Dutch state since it brought many advantages
with regard to trade and agriculture. At the same time, considerable eVorts
were made to frame nature, in the form of water, out of Dutch national space
5
The following paragraphs are based on Schama’s account of the penal system adopted in the
Dutch Netherlands during the seventeenth century.
62 The Moments of Nature–State Relations
because of its threat to people, livestock, and land. In this section, we focus
on this tangled association between nature and Dutch political identity
before moving on to examine the relationship between Dutch nature and
state organizations.
The link between nature and political identity is illustrated most poetically
in Schama’s description of the ‘drowning cell’, a feature of the Dutch penal
system during the seventeenth century. The drowning cell was a means of
correcting the behaviour of prisoners who were too lazy or uninterested to
work. The slothful convict would be placed in a small enclosed space, into
But if the struggle for survival against the sea was viewed as a key
contributor to the emerging Dutch national identity, it also, equally, helped
to shape the development of the political organization of the Dutch state. At
a general level, a strong connection was envisaged between the act of forging
the new and independent political organization of the Dutch state and the
physical struggle against the tides of the sea. This was especially the case
given the fact that the Dutch state was created in opposition to a dominant
Habsburg empire, based in Spain.6 The Dutch Netherlands had been inher-
ited by Charles V, King of Spain, through his paternal grandmother, Mary of
Burgundy, at the beginning of the sixteenth century. From then on, conXict
raged between the Dutch and their Spanish overlords. At certain times, the
focus of the conXict would centre on what we would term proto-national
issues: the need for the Dutch people to govern themselves independently and
to be freed from a distant oppressor. At other times, religious issues would
come to the forefront. For instance, Philip II, son of Charles V, could declare
to the Pope that he would ‘rather lose a hundred lives, if I had them, than
consent to rule over heretics’ (quoted in Koenigsberger 1987: 117). The
breaking point was reached in 1581, when William of Orange of the House
of Nassau proclaimed on behalf of the Dutch people that ‘God did not create
people slaves to their prince to obey his commands whether right or wrong,
but rather the prince for the sake of his subjects’ (quoted in Koenigsberger
1987: 117). This declaration led to a long and bloody war of secession
between the Dutch and the Spanish, one that also intermittently attracted
the interests of the other great European powers (Koenigsberger 1987: 146).
The struggle for independence from Spain was to last eighty years and was
successful only with the recognition of the independence of the United
Provinces of the Northern Netherlands in 1648. In many ways, the struggle
for independence brought together notions of political identity with more
abstract notions of state government. The declaration contained in the
so-called PaciWcation of Ghent in 1577 illustrates the way in which notions
of Dutch identity became associated with the need to create new Dutch
political formations. The various signatories of the PaciWcation agreed to
create a political federation in the Dutch Netherlands, stating that they
oblige[d] all inhabitants of the provinces to maintain, from now on a lasting and
unbreakable friendship and peace and to assist each other at all times and in all events
by words and deeds, with their lives and property, and to drive and keep out of the
provinces the Spanish soldiers. (Quoted in Mackenney 1993: 303)7
Crucially for our argument, a clear analogy was drawn during this period
between the tyranny of the Spanish Habsburg empire and the tyranny of the
sea, to the extent that ‘in the minds of those who fought this battle on two
6
For a brief account of the Dutch revolt against Spanish Habsburg rule, see Mackenney
(1993: 300–5).
7
See also Koenigsberger (1987: 140).
66 The Moments of Nature–State Relations
fronts, they were causally connected’ (Schama 1987: 42).8 The Spanish and
the sea were two external forces that needed to be resisted and tamed if an
independent and economically thriving Dutch state was to be created. The
description of the Dutch struggle against the sea given by the sixteenth-
century hydraulic engineer Andries Vierlingh could equally well be applied,
as Schama argues, to the struggle against the Spanish:
Your foe Oceanus, does not rest or sleep, either by day or by night, but
comes, suddenly, like a roaring lion, seeking to devour the whole land. To have
kept your country, then is a great victory. (Andries Vierlingh, quoted in Schama
1987: 42)
At a more fundamental level, we can also think about the emerging
organization of the Dutch state and the way in which it was linked to its
need to inXuence and withstand the vagaries of nature. The social and
political organization of a system of dykes was crucial in this respect. From
the Middle Ages onwards, when the Dutch had begun the process of draining
the polders and reducing the potential impact of the sea on their society and
agriculture, the organization of the dyke system had been based on a high
degree of local autonomy. This had been especially important in the more
precarious provinces of Holland and Zeeland, where the pernicious impact of
the North Sea was experienced more readily. As Helmut Koenigsberger
(2001: 21–2) has so aptly put it: ‘here life was dominated by water—the sea
and the great tidal estuaries, lakes and meres’. The highly devolved character
of the Dutch political system during the Middle Ages and at the beginning of
the sixteenth century derived in part from the autonomy granted to commu-
nities in Holland and Zeeland with regard to the maintenance of dykes. Local
communities were left to develop a shared responsibility for maintaining
their own section of dyke with little interference from the emerging Dutch
state. The key political Wgures within this system of government were the
local reeves, the dyke-wardens (dijk-graven), and the heemraadschappen (the
so-called water guardians), rather than any overlords located in distant
major settlements. The Count of Holland, for instance, was merely one
individual on a larger council of people involved in the erection and main-
tenance of sea defences within his territory (Koenigsberger 2001: 40). This
led to an ‘ascending’ conception of political power, one that diVused outwards
from Holland and Zeeland to the whole of the Netherlands: political author-
ity was derived from local consent rather than being imposed from above.9
The contours of political power within this system were essentially far ‘Xatter’
than in other countries in medieval Europe, where it was organized along
8
See also Schama (1987: 35).
9
As Mackenney (1993: 303–5) notes, the lack of central authority in the Dutch Netherlands
proved to be somewhat of a drawback when contesting the sovereignty of the King of Spain over
Dutch lands. If the King of Spain was not sovereign, then who was?
The Moments of Nature–State Relations 67
10
Koenigsberger also argues that part of the reason for the lack of developed social hierarch-
ies within the Netherlands derived from the importance of the merchant class within the various
provincial estates, something that led to a far more dispersed patterning of political power. On a
broader note, see Dodgshon (1987: 166–92).
11
The Duke of Alba’s scheme was ultimately unsuccessful due to combination of a concerted
eVort on the part of the various provinces to resist it and political intrigue in the royal court in
Madrid, which served to undermine the Duke’s credibility.
68 The Moments of Nature–State Relations
For people within the Welsh nationalist movement, the area in which the
condemned community—Capel Celyn—was located was a key location
where the folk culture of the Welsh people still survived and thrived. Echoing
themes discussed earlier, it was also portrayed as a community that lived in
The Moments of Nature–State Relations 73
harmony with its natural environment. In eVect, the people of Capel Celyn
were close to the land and close to the culture of Wales, whereas the new and
foreign technologies and inXuences represented the antithesis of this close
relationship to nature.
Building on these themes, it is useful to follow John Davies’s distinction
between the political context and the linguistic and/or cultural context for the
nationalist protests of the time. At one level, many activists stressed the
broader political context for the Tryweryn farrago. SpeciWcally, many argued
for the distinctiveness of Wales as a separate nation, which should possess
various territorial rights regarding the use and transformation of, inter alia,
nature. This viewpoint was summed up impressively by Elystan Morgan, the
barrister who represented two protestors against the scheme, who were
brought to trial for acts of vandalism in 1962. He argued that ‘if the Welsh
nation exists and if it possesses rights over its assets, then we should believe
that these two young men acted in order to protect those assets’ (quoted in
Davies 1998–2001: 169). In this statement, it is the territorial coherence of the
Welsh nation that takes precedence, along with a related argument concern-
ing the validity of the nation’s claim to control its own natural resources.
This was Welsh water, not British water. Similar arguments arose in the
context of the need to develop a Welsh Water Board, which would be able to
manage the exploitation of a key natural resource located within the bound-
aries of Wales (Davies 1998–2001: 179). Other protesters were more con-
cerned with the cultural or linguistic contexts framing the proposed
Tryweryn project. The main signiWcance of the proposed scheme was the
fact that it destroyed a culturally vibrant Welsh-speaking community. As
John Davies notes, it was widely known by the 1950s and ’60s that the
number of Welsh-speaking communities was deteriorating rapidly. To des-
troy a classic example of a Welsh-speaking community in such a way,
according to many activists, was tantamount to a direct attack on the heart
of the Welsh nation. In this sense, the proposed scheme would have been
criticized and withstood even if it were meant as a source of water for towns
and cities within Wales (Davies 1998–2001: 179). While it is useful to separate
out the diVerent contexts within which the national rhetoric of the time was
embedded, we maintain that in practice there is a strong and productive
relationship between the two. Although individual activists may well have
stressed one aspect at the expense of the other, much of the later signiWcance
of the Tryweryn episode lies in its symbolic expression of a territorial and
cultural injustice.
Of course, one should not overemphasize the support of the Welsh people
towards the Tryweryn campaign. Much has been written about the varie-
gated character of Welsh politics during the period, especially with regard to
the policies and strategies of the Council for the Preservation of Rural Wales
(CPRW). At a national Welsh scale, the CPRW was conspicuous by its
absence from any eVort to resist the construction of the dam. Indeed, the
74 The Moments of Nature–State Relations
plans for the dam found favour in the ranks of the national-level CPRW.
Patrick Abercrombie and the Reverend H. H. Symonds, for instance, were
far more in favour of the Tryweryn project than they were of an alternative
project to develop a hydro-electric scheme on the Conwy river. Symonds
noted as follows:
Liverpool’s Tryweryn scheme is far preferable to the . . . Conwy scheme; it involves far
less civil engineering (and what there will be would be far less injurious to the
landscape) and, above all, no power stations and linking pylons. (Quoted in Roberts
2001: 176)
As Owen Roberts (2001) has rightly pointed out, such sentiments Wtted in
with the CPRW’s aim to preserve and enhance the aesthetic and visual
qualities of the Welsh environment. Indeed, some within the CPRW at a
national level went as far as to argue that the Xooding of the Tryweryn valley
could actually enhance its visual appeal! What is signiWcant, in this respect, is
the wholly diVerent attitude taken by the local Merionnydd branch of the
CPRW. Vincent Evans, for instance, a local branch member of the CPRW,
was keen to distance himself from the strategy being adopted by the CPRW
at a national level. He referred admiringly to the particular way of life that
existed in the village about to be submerged as part of the proposed scheme
and contended that:
My Committee rightly or wrongly believe that . . . the destruction of the village of
Capel Celyn and the Welsh way of life that has grown up with the village cannot be
replaced by the rebuilding of the village elsewhere . . . The new village will be Wlled up
by outsiders brought in to look after the Reservoir and another where the Welsh way
of life is practised will disappear. (Quoted in Roberts 2001: 183–4)
We witness here the drawing up of a close discursive link between the
impact of the proposed water scheme both on one particular locality in
North Wales and the wider Welsh nation. For many activists during the
period, whether members of national or environmental movements, aban-
doning this Welsh village could be equated with abandoning a distinctive
Welsh way of life and nature–culture connections therein.
The other signiWcance of the Tryweryn episode is the way in which it has
entered the Welsh popular imagination as an instance of an insensitive
interference by English governmental authority in Wales. As such, it has
assumed an iconic status within Welsh nationalist circles and become a
symbol of the various woes suVered by the Welsh people at the hands of an
English state, industry, and culture (Davies 1998–2001: 167).12 Liverpool
12
On a broader level, Welsh nationalist sentiment has drawn much ideological support from
the notion of internal colonialism, popularized by Michael Hechter (1975). During the 1960s and
1970s, for instance, Plaid Cymru based much of its political ideology on ideas related to internal
colonialism. The abstraction of Welsh water from the valleys of Wales was seen to be but another
example of an historic process of economic, political, and cultural oppression of a Welsh people
by English institutions.
The Moments of Nature–State Relations 75
Council’s recent formal apology for their past insensitivity will do little to
appease Welsh nationalists. The phrase ‘Remember Tryweryn’, indeed,
seems set to retain its potency within the Welsh nationalist lexicon as a
form of shorthand to describe the perceived oppression of the Welsh
people by English and British institutions. Indeed, the Tryweryn reservoir
is remembered on a subliminal, day-to-day, and banal level in Wales today
through various artistic practices and graYti (Jones 1988; Thomas 1997).
Nature, thus appropriated, is used as a means of contesting dominant state
ideologies.13
13
For a discussion of the concept of banal nationalism or, in other words, the way in which
nationalism is reproduced in a mundane and everyday context, see Billig (1995).
76 The Moments of Nature–State Relations
a model hung from the ceiling by wires, a helium-Wlled inXatable model, and
a model that would be supported from below by a metal rod. None were
deemed to be appropriate. One seemingly madcap idea, which gained much
support for a while, was to exhibit a dead whale in the museum, half-covered
in seawater and surrounded by the sounds of lapping water and crying gulls.
The proposal was not scrapped until the smell of a decaying whale carcass
was demonstrated to the museum’s Women’s Committee. It seemed as if the
reality of museum exhibitions could only be taken so far before museum
patrons protested. Finally, it was agreed that the most practical and elegant
solution would be to bolt the model to the museum’s ceiling. Opened in 1968,
the gallery now, according to Joseph Wallace (2000: 30), represents one of
the ‘most spectacular and popular displays ever mounted at any museum in
the world’.
This debate surrounding the creation of an appropriate exhibit for the blue
whale, we would argue, begins to illustrate the moment of simulacrum within
nature–state relations. The whole tenor of the various discussions regarding
the blue whale exhibit were based on deciding the most eVective and real
ways of depicting nature. Which technologies and materials should be used?
How should the visitor’s experience of the exhibit be regulated? How real
should the exhibit be? Which senses should be appealed to within the exhibit?
It is signiWcant that Joseph Wallace, almost as an afterthought to his account
of the creation of the blue whale exhibit in the museum, comments that
scientists now know that not every physical detail of the model is completely accurate.
The color, for example, isn’t blue enough. But without doubt, this superb exhibit
comes breathtakingly close to capturing the spirit that animates the real blue whale.
(Wallace 2000: 30)
Yet whereas Wallace argues that the model of the blue whale does not
approximate in every detail to the blue whale of reality, what we would
argue—following authors such as Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco—is
that it is the reality of the blue whale as it is exhibited in the museum that is
most signiWcant. In this simulacrum of the blue whale, the reality as repre-
sented is far more important than the blue whale’s reality in the world’s
oceans.
Speaking of the simulacrum, Baudrillard (1994: 2) has maintained that the
postmodern present is characterized by an ‘era of simulation’ in which an
original reality is being erased. Simulations and simulacra become the new
reality, which entails ‘substituting the signs of the real for the real’ through
the creation of an ‘operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly
descriptive machine’. For Eco (1987: 7), too, this ‘furious hyperreality’
involves the replacement of a thing by a sign—a representation, a memor-
ialization, or an image—which, in turn, assumes the signiWcance of the thing
that it replaces. Similar to Baudrillard, Eco (1987: 21–2) maintains that the
thing itself can lose all sense of integrity, as in William Randolph Hearst’s
The Moments of Nature–State Relations 77
14
Other venues exist for the protection and embalming of nature: they range from national
parks to the idealized human–nature relationships portrayed in theme parks, such as Disney’s
EPCOT (see Fjellman 1992: 319–47).
78 The Moments of Nature–State Relations
15
Much of what is discussed in this paragraph derives from Preston’s (1986) account of
Bickmore’s contribution.
The Moments of Nature–State Relations 79
(Gramsci 1978: 258). It is clear, in this respect, that the American Museum of
Natural History played a key role in facilitating this broader educational
process that has been crucial to the reproduction of the political and cultural
hegemony of the US state.
The extent to which the museum can be viewed as a state project can Wrst
be elucidated through reference to those key individuals involved in its
formation and development. At a quite straightforward level, the presence
of two US presidents at key stages in the erection of the museum’s Wrst
purpose-built building would seem to indicate the extent to which the insti-
tution was viewed as a symbol of American national esteem. Other individ-
uals involved in the setting up of the museum were also key Wgures within
both the Wnancial and political establishment of New York and the wider US,
including J. Pierpont Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt Sr. Similarly, it is
possible to argue that many of the museum’s early activities reXect a concern
with the need to promote the national natures of the US. We bear witness to
this national concern in the development of the museum’s gem collection,
whose formation derived from the activities of George Kunz, gem expert for
TiVany and Co. and honorary curator in the museum, and J. Pierpont
Morgan, the wealthy New York Wnancier and museum trustee. A combin-
ation of Kunz’s expertise and Morgan’s money led to the formation of one of
the best gem collections in the world at the tail end of the nineteenth century,
containing as it did the much-vaunted sapphire, the Star of India. Much of
the impetus for the formation of the collection, however, came from the Paris
World Exhibition of 1889, which we have already discussed. It is signiWcant
that Kunz was able to convince Charles TiVany, founder of TiVany and Co.,
of the need to show European jewellers the quality of North American gems.
Driven by a combination of professional and national pride, Kunz set out on
a nationwide journey across the US to acquire the best examples of precious
stones that he could Wnd. The collection, subsequently, won the Gold Medal
at the Paris Exposition and, upon its return to New York, was bought for the
museum by Pierpont’s money (Preston 1986: 219–20; Wallace 2000: 101–2).
The signiWcance of this brief example, we would maintain, is the way in which
the museum was involved in taking natural artefacts formed under the
geological conditions of a prehistoric past—a past in which humans and
nation-states were evidently non-existent—and framing them as part of the
national nature of the US. In this crucial shift, gems were transformed from
being products of the natural processes taking place beneath the earth’s
surface to being national products that could elicit a national sense of pride
amongst Americans.
The role of natural history museums in enabling humans to impart a sense
of order on the natural world has been made clear by Michel Foucault. In the
process, rational thought ‘operate[s] upon the entities of our world, to put
them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names
that designate their similarities and their diVerences’ (Foucault 2003: xix).
The Moments of Nature–State Relations 81
16
As Luke notes, this tendency is partly linked to the shift identiWed by Francis Bacon as
universal nature was made private. One key way in which nature was made private was in the
context of the nationalization or statization of nature (see Impey and MacGregor 1985: 1).
17
In a related context, see Billig (1995).
82 The Moments of Nature–State Relations
18
It is also possible to position the concept of race, and its association with both the museum
and the US state, within a broader context of social anarchy and disorder (see Rexer and Klein
1995: 25).
19
For a discussion of the new techniques of taxidermy developed by Carl Akeley in the
African Hall of Mammals, techniques that enabled him to create hyperreal exhibits, see Haraway
(2004b: 166–71), Luke (1997: 27), Preston (1986: 92–3), and Wallace (2000: 13).
The Moments of Nature–State Relations 83
that the group can represent the essence of the species as a dynamic, living whole . . .
Each group forms a community structured by a natural division of function; the
whole animal in the whole group is nature’s truth. (Haraway 2004b: 156)
The pivotal diorama is the group of African mountain gorillas, with the
male silverback gorilla, the Giant of Karisimbi, as its centrepiece. Perhaps as
a result of the genetic closeness of the gorilla to humans, the quality of the
panoramic artwork, or the Werceness and integrity of the ‘Giant’ himself, this
diorama has been viewed as the apogee of the taxidermist’s art: a spiritual
vision of nature and of humanity’s place within it (Haraway 2004b: 157).
But these dioramas, not least that of the mountain gorillas, also comprise a
narrative of state–nature relations. Luke (1997) argues that Akeley’s experi-
ences in Africa—where he was nearly killed by a charging elephant, and
where he witnessed Wrst hand the damage inXicted by ‘European’ hunters on
African wildlife—led him to re-evaluate the narratives contained within
the African dioramas. At one level, their implicit message is of an anthropo-
genic and state-centred transformation of nature within Africa—through the
hunting of wild animals and the exploitation of natural resources (Luke 1997:
28–9). But, at the same time, the dioramas’ act of freezing nature and time in
an everlasting set pose, or, as Luke (1997: 31) has put it, ‘slowing or stopping
civilization’s spoilage with simulations of Nature’, could be viewed as a
symbol of the ability of states to attempt to freeze nature in reality, or, in
eVect, to develop means of conserving threatened species and habitats.
Akeley, for instance, was a keen advocate of the need to form a national
park within the Belgian Congo, which would serve to protect the habitat of
his beloved mountain gorillas (Wallace 2000: 19). Similarly, the freezing of
nature–state relations within the diorama can be viewed as a metaphor for
the increasing eVorts made to conserve and ‘freeze’ national natures within
the US at the same time. The 1920s, when Akeley carried out his expeditions
to the Belgian Congo and when he planned and produced the gorilla dio-
rama, were, after all, in the middle of a period when national natures were
being preserved at an unprecedented rate in the US (Wilson 1992: 224). The
reasons behind this process were the same in the US as they were in the
Belgian Congo: namely, the need to protect species and environments that
were in danger of despoilation (Green 1996: 95). In this light, the gorilla
diorama can be viewed as a symbol of a further state transformation, or,
alternatively, the reiWcation of nature through the creation of new state
conservation bodies within the US and further aWeld.
Natural history museums, such as the one in New York, are involved in a
process of deWning and classifying national natures, which are represented
through the hyperreality of the exhibition and/or the diorama. Natural
history museums are, therefore, ‘biopolitical acts’ in which curators
and other technocrats contribute to a process of Wxing and Wnalizing ‘the
empiricities of humanism and naturalism as complex clusters of practicable
representations, carrying stabilized accounts of normalizing knowledge’
84 The Moments of Nature–State Relations
(Luke 1997: 47). They are infused with political meaning: in their mechan-
isms of classiWcation, in their use of technologies, and in their representations
of nature. It is the world of hyperreality that enables this moment of simu-
lacrum within nature–state relations to be produced by curators and con-
sumed by museum patrons.
Concluding comments
The connections between nature and the modern state have unfolded in
certain key momentary associations. While we have stressed that these
moments of nature–state relations do not strictly adhere to historic time
periods as such, but rather reXect particular conWgurations of practices,
ideologies, and materialities of states and natures, it is likely that particular
types of momentary relations will assume greater signiWcance at certain times
more than others. In this regard, the moment of consolidation was of greater
signiWcance during the period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries
in the majority of European states. The moment of contestation became
more prevalent from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, as various forms
of sub-state or insurgent nationalism sought to counter the processes of
consolidation that had taken place throughout the modern period. The
moment of simulacrum, too, is one that is part of a postmodern contempor-
ary world, where new technologies and cultural forms have enabled the
replacement of realities by more eYcient and eVective substitutes.
But while such a temporal framework might prove alluring at Wrst glance,
it can ultimately oversimplify a reality—in terms of nature–state relations—
that is far more complex. At one level, we need only think of a process of state
consolidation and a related moment of consolidation of nature–state rela-
tions that is proceeding at a tortuously slow pace in some developing coun-
tries in the contemporary period. In countries that still suVer under the
neocolonial rule of multinational corporations and other global agencies,
there is little sense of a successful historic process of deWning national
natures. Indeed, and as we shall see in Chapter 7, the moment of consolida-
tion of national natures is an ongoing process for the vast majority of states
in the contemporary world, in the face of continuing global appropriations of
nature and natural resources. Similarly, and as noted in the introduction to
this chapter, it is likely that moments of contestation have coexisted, and
continue to coexist, with moments of consolidation. The manifold processes
of state consolidation that have taken place during the whole of the modern
period have always been contested by various groups and individuals. Nature
has formed one key battleground within this process of territorial domin-
ation of, and resistance to, the state. Even the moment of simulacrum,
ascribed by Baudrillard (1994) to a contemporary, postmodern period, has
been in evidence over a far longer term. The desire to represent natural
The Moments of Nature–State Relations 85
In 1965 it was estimated that Belgium had 607,142 hectares (ha) of forested
land, while Finland had 21,800,000 ha (6,500,000 of which were swamp
forest).1 France, meanwhile, had 111,800 ha of swamps and marshes (étang
en rapport), compared with the Federal Republic of Germany’s 188,000 ha.
Of its total land area of 24,402,000 ha, the UK had 7,541,400 ha of unim-
proved grazing land being grazed by a staggering 28,967,000 sheep. Further
estimates revealed that the Netherlands had 7,990 ha of dunes and 50,700 ha
of land designated as muddy Xats. Perhaps what is most unusual about these
Wgures is that they don’t appear at all unusual. What, after all, could seem
more normal than knowing such detailed statistical facts about a series of
modern European states? These Wgures are actually taken from a World
Land Use Survey, which was conducted in collaboration by a series of states
during the middle of the twentieth century.2 Despite their seemingly routine
character, however, what interests us about these Wgures are the links they
reveal between nature, the state, and space (or more speciWcally land). The
Wgures presented above have two things in common: Wrst, they are all
statistics about the natural world, which have been organized through spe-
ciWc reference to nation-states (France, Belgium, the UK); and secondly, they
all (with the exception of the statistics on British sheep) describe nature by
making reference to its spatial form—or more accurately its extent (hectares
of marsh, forest, dune, etc.). This association between nature and land is, we
argue, a signiWcant one. We claim that historically the idea of land has
1
The statistics quoted here are all from Stamp (1965: 8, 12–14, 29, and 21, respectively).
2
The World Land Use Survey was established by the International Geographical Union and
sought to use a standard set of land-use classiWcations (which were agreed in 1949) to provide
a global survey of land uses. L. Dudley Stamp (the famous geographer and land-use specialist)
was given the responsibility of collating standardized land-use Wgures for European states, which
were ultimately presented in Occasional Working Paper 3 of the World Land Use Survey (see
Stamp 1965).
Spatializing State Nature 87
states mould, and are in turn shaped by, the natural world. In adopting
this perspective, however, we are not abandoning our sensitivity to the
territorial strategies through which states seek to control nature through
controlling space (i.e. through wildlife reserves, conservation areas, or
national parks: see Neumann 1995, 1998, 2004), but rather attempt to
understand how territorial techniques are used alongside a range of spatial
strategies to frame and manage social relationships with the natural world. In
exploring these varied spatialities of state nature, however, we are
particularly interested in the tension that the great theorist of space, Henri
Lefebvre (2003), discerns within the state’s spatial relations. This contradic-
tion is based on two interrelated but antagonistic processes. The Wrst involves
the constant desire by states to homogenize the natural spaces they inherit
(according to Lefebvre the homogenization of space is about trying to
make the territorial area of nation-states function as socio-ecological
wholes). The second, apparently contradictory, process that Lefebvre dis-
cerns within the state management of space is its support for systems of
private land and property. He argues that within advanced capitalist eco-
nomic systems, the proliferation of private property relations tends to pro-
duce a chaotic and fragmented spatial system. This chaos of space is
a product of individual landowners following their own narrow interests
and failing to recognize the importance of a spatially integrated society to
the maintenance of the overall economy. A paradox thus emerges: while one
of the most important roles of the modern state is to preserve and maintain
property relations—and by deWnition the basis for capitalist economic
expansion—this very act tends to undermine the capacity of the state to
create an eVectively coordinated national space for the use and conservation
of nature. It is this paradox that provides the broad context for the remainder
this chapter.
identity around iconic ‘land’ scapes.5 The idea of land is, however, intriguing
to us precisely because of its association with landscape and ‘the country’.
Despite ‘land’ being a very general term (which incorporates both social and
natural spaces and landscapes), it has become synonymous with accounts of
natural landscapes, soils, and pastoral ideals (Short 1991). To us, then, the
notion of land has been used to understand space both politically (and in
particular nationalistically as ‘our land’) and ecologically (in relation to
certain understandings of natural landscapes as places of nature). In this
context, we claim that the notion of land attributes certain political and
ecological qualities to more abstract spaces—in other words, the notion of
land is often used to give space simultaneous political and ecological meaning
(see Olwig 2002). To this extent, we suggest that land can be thought of as the
ecological equivalent of place. Consequently, just as places are spaces that
have been imbued with socio-cultural meaning and value,6 we claim that land
is equivalent to space that has been given both political and ecological signi-
Wcance.
In the context of this broad understanding of land as a meeting point of
state, space, and nature, the land-use map takes on a new level of sign-
iWcance. We interpret the land-use map as an attempt to articulate, represent,
and produce land through the rigorous and standardized practices of carto-
graphic science. In this sense, land-use mapping is an exercise in making the
often vague cultural invocations of a nation’s land into an actually knowable
spatial entity. As we shall see, this process involves a signiWcant amount of
time, political coordination, and expertise, but it can result in the production
of land that is not only of cultural utility to states, but can also facilitate an
expanded governmental reach of the state over its territorial natures.
Accordingly, we do not see the mapping of land as simply a neutral recording
process, but as a strategy with particular political goals and aims.7 From the
surveying practices through which cartographers compile the data that is to
be represented in maps to the drafting of map sheets themselves, we argue
that it is important to consider what types of map are being produced, and
perhaps more importantly, which cartographic modes of representation are
being deployed.
As with many other types of map, land-use surveys record information
about nature that expands the individual state’s knowledge of its natural
resources (Gascoigne 2004). It is consequently wrong to think of land-use
maps as purely maps of how land is being used. Land-use maps have always
provided chronicles of how land is being under-used, or even misused, and
5
For a more detailed exploration of the links between land, country, and landscape, see Olwig
(2002).
6
See here the collected works of Tim Cresswell (1996, 2004), on the relationship between
space and place.
7
For a critical review of the politics of maps and mapping, see Dorling and Fairbairn (1997),
Monmonier (1993, 1996), and Woods (1992).
Spatializing State Nature 91
[T]he history of property . . . has meant the inexorable incorporation of what were
once thought of as free gifts of nature: forests, game, wasteland prairie, subsurface
minerals, water and water courses, air rights . . . , breathable air, and even genetic
sequences, into property regimes. (Scott, 1998: 39)
8
We would like to acknowledge the support and guidance of Elizabeth Baigent in helping us to
write this section. We are particularly indebted to her because of the valuable insights she oVered
us on the relationship between early modern cadastral mapping in Sweden and the natural world.
92 Spatializing State Nature
9
Our analysis of the role of the cadastral map in the government of early modern nature in
Sweden is inspired by Kain and Baigent’s (1992) wonderful book on the history of property
mapping.
Spatializing State Nature 93
(2004: 97) describes a newly emerging ‘map consciousness’ at this time, as the
map became implicated in the expansion and territorial logics of the early
state and capitalist systems. At this particular time the map was essentially
transformed from a device dedicated to the presentation of spatial data to
a marker of political boundaries and control (see Buisseret 1992). In many
emerging European states during this period, the process of cadastral map-
ping was transformed from a privatized ad hoc process to a standardized,
centrally administered exercise. State funds became available to support
national cadastral surveys, training institutions were created to instruct
cadastral cartographers, and state oYcials were designated to oversee the
mapping process. While the precise reasons for the emergence of cadastral
mapping in early modern Europe are far from clear, we claim that cadastral
maps were not only used to gather taxes. Drawing on Kain and Baigent’s
analysis of cadastral mapping in Sweden, we argue that cadastral maps
provided an important territorial strategy for regulating social relations
with nature, and for making nature more readily exploitable within pro-
grammes of national economic development.10
Our focus on the process of cadastral mapping in Sweden perhaps requires
a little explanation. First, it is important to realize that Sweden was one of the
Wrst countries in the world to instigate a systematic cadastral survey of its
territory (Kain and Baigent 1992: ch. 3). Indeed, it is believed that most of
Sweden’s unforested lands had been subjected to cadastral analysis by 1700
(Baigent 1990). Secondly, the Wrst systematic national cadaster in Sweden
was constructed at a crucial moment within the political and economic
modernization of the country. State-sponsored cadastral mapping began in
Sweden in 1628 under the reign of Gustav II Adolf (1594–1632) (Kain and
Baigent 1992: ch. 3). In many ways Gustav II Adolf’s twenty-one-year reign
as king of Sweden marked the emergence of Sweden as a powerful and
inherently modern European state (Ahnlund 1940; Roberts 1968, 1992).
While Gustav II Adolf is perhaps most remembered for his military cam-
paigns against Denmark, Norway, and Poland, and the expansion of the
Swedish state that accompanied these endeavours (Lindegren 1985; Roberts
1968), he was also instrumental in laying many of the socio-political foun-
dations of the modern state system in Sweden. During his reign, constitu-
tional reform saw a clear role emerging for the Swedish Riksdag
(Parliament), a revised tax system, the consolidation of the Swedish language
through the development of a new Swedish dictionary, and a reinvigorated
national education system (Ahnlund 1940). Gustav II Adolf’s educational
history meant that he valued science, logic, and political order highly, and
with the help of his state oYcials and aids he sought to create a highly
modern state system (Baigent 2003: 33). The era of state modernization
and expansion achieved under his reign became known as the ‘Age of
10
See also in this context Baigent (2003).
94 Spatializing State Nature
mapping (Kain and Baigent 1992: 50–1). Bureus’s prominent role in the early
mapping of the Swedish state led to him being known as ‘den svenska
kartograWens fader’ (the father of Swedish cartography) (Baigent 2003:
33).11 Once an eVective team of state land surveyors had been trained, an
assessment of Swedish property could begin. Utilizing their standardized
measures and cartographic techniques, the Lantmätare began to produce
two types of map: the Wrst type was called a Skifte, and involved producing
a very simple geometrical map of property boundaries; the second map type,
known as a Kanceptkorta, provided a much more detailed base map cata-
loguing the diVerent qualities of the land in question (Baigent 2003: 52). As
more and more cadastral maps of Swedish territory were produced during
the seventeenth century, groups of a hundred maps were normally bound
together to create map books called geometriska jordeböckerna (literally
meaning ‘geometric land books’) (Baigent 2003: 54). The utility of this new
breed of state map was based upon their standard form and scale. The
rigorous, scientiWc standardization of map surveying and drawing in Sweden
ensured that diVerent maps could be compared and then compiled into
registers of the land. Every eVort was made to ensure the scientiWc compar-
ability of cadastral maps by the Lantmäteriet—even to the extent of banning
the decoration of the maps with Swedish folk art (Baigent 2003: 54).
How and why cadastral surveys were used in Sweden during the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries is a matter of some dispute. Beyond national
security, their obvious function (as previously discussed in the context of
Scott’s work) was to provide a basis for systems of land taxation. However,
in the context of Sweden, it appears that the cadastral survey served other
governmental functions. The main indication of the broader role of Swedish
cadastral maps relates to the fact that cadastral surveys were carried out for
all lands in Sweden, not only those that were to be taxed (Baigent 1990, 2003:
56). Beyond taxation, then, it appears that, at least initially, cadastral surveys
were used to chart the availability of good and potentially productive land in
the kingdom. Many accounts of Sweden during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries recognized its shortage of good quality agricultural land and the
extensive forms of social poverty this had created (Roberts 1992). In his
celebrated account of seventeenth-century Sweden, Michael Roberts recog-
nizes that ‘[A] great part of the land was lake and forest; a wilderness of wood
and water, very diYcult to traverse except in winter; a country where land
was still dwarfed by nature’ (1992: 13). In the context of the scarcity of good
land, it became imperative that the Swedish state knew where its productive
land was and that that land was utilized eVectively.
It is clear that many Swedish cadastral maps were designed to be records of
nature just as much as of property boundaries. In good agricultural areas, for
example, Kain and Baigent (1992) describe how Lantmätare were required to
11
After Lönborg (1903: 235).
96 Spatializing State Nature
record whether the land was black earth, clay, sand, or heath. Later, in 1636,
a colour-coding system was introduced by the Lantmäteriet to detail if land
was cultivated (grey), forested (dark green), meadows (green), covered by
mosses (yellow), or stony slopes (white). This form of topographical detail
can be clearly seen on Swedish cadastral maps from the time. When this type
of land survey information was combined with the newly instigated standard
measurements employed by the Lantmätare,12 it became much easier for the
Swedish state to estimate national productive yields and to target new
regions for development. In addition to the cadastral surveying of agricul-
tural land, Baigent (2005) describes the particular emphasis that was placed
by land surveys at the time on woodland area. This was of course because of
the strategic importance of timber to the early modern states for both fuel
and shipbuilding. The Lantmäteriet did also, however, give signiWcant atten-
tion to the mapping of Sweden’s mineral assets. The Swedish economy
during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries relied heavily on mines
for the production of its economic wealth (Baigent 2003: 48–50). Baigent
reXects on the importance that was given to the mapping of mineral resources
within the Lantmäteriet. Indeed, in 1629 a new map was developed in Sweden
within which surface information regarding the location of mineral assets
was supplemented by cross-sections of the depth of the resource. In this
context, it is clear that the Lantmäteriet were devoted to the construction
of both a horizontal and vertical territorial representation of the natural
world (Braun 2000).
The desire for land-based environmental knowledge of the seventeenth-
century Swedish state was, however, not simply an administrative exercise.
Kain and Baigent (1992: 130) assert that in addition to information gather-
ing, cadastral surveys were designed to guide improvements to Swedish land
assets. Initially these state-sponsored land improvements focused on rivers,
lakes, forests, and mining areas, as well as agricultural land. During the
eighteenth century, however, cadastral surveys became increasingly tied to
issues of agricultural reform (Baigent 2003: 39–40). In this context, it became
increasingly common for Lantmätare to devise property divisions that would
not only resolve land disputes but would enhance the capacity of farmers to
maximize their agricultural yields and the productive potential of nature.
With the appointment of Jacob Faggot as director of the Lantmäteriet in
1747, cadastral surveys become increasingly tied to agricultural reform and
the creation of a new rural landscape of larger-scale farms and more isolated
settlement patterns (Baigent 2003: 60). It appears that the use of the map as
a basis for improvement was also applied to mining as well as agricultural
12
While measurements did change with diVerent directors of the Lantmätare, early cadastral
maps were draw using the tunnland as the standard cartographic measurement (the tunnland is
equivalent to 0.5934 m); see Kain and Baigent (1992: 52).
Spatializing State Nature 97
areas, with Bureus adopting some degree of inXuence on the operations and
techniques employed by individual miners (Baigent 2003: 49).
This brief account of cadastral mapping in early modern Sweden illustrates
the way in which early modern states utilized private property relations to
frame social relations with the natural world. At one level, the consolidation
of private property relations through various surveys, topographical maps,
and land-use books enabled the Swedish state to perceive for the Wrst time
a national nature. But beyond knowledge of national state nature, it is also
clear that the consolidation of private land in Sweden was also a territorial
strategy designed to change social (and in particular agricultural and mining)
relations with nature through the control and administration of space.
Cadastral mapping in Sweden is thus a clear example of the state utilizing
private property as a means of extending its own power and inXuence ever
more deeply into the natural world. It is clear in this sense, that as a very
speciWc form of land-use survey, cadastral maps were not only designed to
record proprietorial nature but also to shape and transform it. As Baigent
(2003: 34) persuasively argues: ‘the maps were as much geopolitical as
cartographic statements . . . they were intended to enhance the nation’s
greatness, not simply to record it’. The shaping and transforming of nature
associated with the Swedish cadastres operated at two levels. First, the
cadastral maps were designed to ascertain which natural resources could be
claimed by the Swedish state, thus depriving their geopolitical rivals and
neighbours of the strategic advantage of using certain borderland resources.
But secondly, cadastral mapping was also about depicting an increasingly
detailed and diverse sense of what Swedish nature was and where it was
located. The Swedish cadastral map thus transformed understandings of
land and nature in Sweden. This transformation saw both land and nature
become national objects with key geopolitical signiWcance within the process
of early modern state-building. Consequently it is clear that land-use map-
ping in Sweden was just as much about the forging of Swedish identity as it
was about recording property boundaries and mapping the location of
natural resources (Pickles 2004: 100–6). The role of cadastral mapping in
the ‘self-fashioning’ of the Swedish state of course serves to illustrate how the
spatial framing of nature—and the associated territorial and military security
it can aVord—is a crucial moment within the formative dynamics of state-
hood itself (Pickles 2004: 100–6).
doing this we focus speciWcally on the eVorts of one man, Sir L. Dudley
Stamp, in shaping the land and nature of Britain in the periods immediately
before and after the Second World War. L. Dudley Stamp is a fascinating
character; a geographer by profession, he rose to prominence within the
British state as a member of the Scott Committee on land utilization in
rural areas, as the chief adviser on rural land use to the Ministry of Agricul-
ture, and as the oYcial land-use delegate of the British government to
the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Buchanan
1968). His rise to become the British state’s expert on land-use issues and
mapping must be understood in relation to his role in coordinating the Wrst
national land-use survey of the UK during the 1930s. Through this survey,
he not only helped to instigate a new science of land-use surveying but
also alerted the British state to the value of accurate land-use mapping.
During our exploration of the procedures and political eVects of
L. Dudley Stamp’s land utilization survey of Britain, we will see that land-
use surveys have a very diVerent set of relations with private property than
those we observed with cadastral maps. In this context we will see how
surveys like that carried out in Britain were a response to the fragmentation
of space by private property relations noticed by Lefebvre (2003),
and the problems that this fragmentation process created for the eVective
management of national nature. But what is perhaps more signiWcant
about our analysis of the British Land Utilisation Survey is that it contrib-
uted, in the longer term, not to the reform of social relations with nature
on private land, but to the restructuring of the spatialities of nature at
a national level.
It is also clear that Stamp believed that as a relatively small country with
a large population, the ineYcient use of land and the natures it contained
could adversely aVect Britain’s economic and political prospects.
Following the eVects of the parliamentary enclosure in Britain during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the proportion of British land given over
to agriculture reached its peak of approximately 87 per cent at the end of the
nineteenth century (Best 1968: 90). The commercialization of British agricul-
tural land following enclosure did, however, lead to a decline in the avail-
ability of agriculturally productive land in the twentieth century. The main
cause of this decline was the shift from a rural/agricultural economy to an
urban/industrial system. This economic shift had important territorial im-
pacts, as the expanding industrial cities of Britain gradually started to cover
‘good-quality’ agricultural land with concrete, houses, and roads—sealing
the land’s productive potential oV from further use. Between 1900 and 1950 it
has been estimated that there was a 7 per cent reduction in the amount of
land available for agricultural production (Best 1968: 92). Interestingly,
before detailed studies of the changes in agricultural land-use patterns
could be carried out, estimates of the loss of British agricultural land were
vastly exaggerated. Some, for example, estimated that Britain had lost up to
50 per cent of its agricultural surface area (Best 1968: 89). Such wild estimates
undoubtedly contributed to a growing sense of social and political hysteria in
Britain during the 1920s and 1930s concerning the erosion of the countryside,
which contributed to the related ‘land scare’. In this context, David Matless
(1998: ch. 1) has described emerging forms of protests and popular cam-
paigns instigated at this time, particularly in England, to protect the nation’s
countryside. These campaigns were coordinated through groups like the
Council for the Preservation of Rural England and the National Trust, and
were based upon a series of written articles, exhibitions, and even popular
postcards (Matless 1998: 25–6). While these campaigns were partly con-
cerned about the loss of agricultural resources, they were primarily interested
in the socio-cultural impacts of rural landscape erosion. In the context of this
book two things are particularly interesting about these rural protest move-
ments. First, as Matless (1998: 26–7) recognizes, a signiWcant portion of the
100 Spatializing State Nature
British rural conservation lobby in the 1920s and 1930s did not advocate an
anti-modernist nostalgia for some form of bucolic idyll in the British coun-
tryside. Instead, many in the rural conservation lobby (including Stamp)
believed that the preservation of the British (and in particular English)
countryside depended upon modern planning techniques and associated
forms of control and ordering. Secondly, there was a strong belief among
these rural preservationists that it was the British state that should provide
the legal and institutional support needed to protect the countryside (Matless
1998: 27–32).
It is clear that the emerging concern over the protection of the English
countryside informed Stamp’s desire to produce a detailed national survey
of land uses. In a sense, the growth of rural preservationism made the need
for a land-use survey even more pronounced. Suddenly the competition for
rural land was not simply between agriculture and urban industrialism, but
also involved those who wanted to see more of the countryside protected
from both the practices of commercial agriculture and urban expansion. In
this context, it is clear that Stamp was confronted with a situation within
which there was increasing competition for the use of a dwindling stock of
rural land. It appeared to Stamp that a crucial step in handling such land-
use disputes was to gain an accurate sense of precisely what national land
assets were being used for. Beyond these broad incentives for a national
survey, the role of Stamp’s Land Utilisation Survey (LUS) was given
further impetus by events that occurred during and directly after the survey
had been completed. The Great Depression that swept through Britain
during the early 1930s had a crippling eVect on British agriculture: with
a declining market for agricultural goods and a lack of investment in the
agricultural sector, increasingly large swathes of the British countryside
were left uncultivated and turned to rough brush (Best 1968: 91–8). Locat-
ing and monitoring these underutilized fragments of British countryside
would become an important part of land-use planning in the UK. Secondly,
with the onset of the Second World War and the loss of valuable agricul-
tural imports, the eVective and eYcient use of agricultural land became a
national priority (Short et al. 2000). In this context, Stamp’s recently
completed land-use survey was to prove an invaluable source of knowledge
to the British state during the war years.
It is clear that Stamp himself understood his LUS as a tool not only for
protecting and maximizing the use of agricultural land but also for managing
the multiple pressures that were brought to bear on Britain’s land resources
in the 1930s. In this context, when commenting upon the potential utility of
his survey for British planning authorities, he states: ‘essentially the problem
of national planning in the physical sphere becomes that of allocating the
right land for the right purposes to satisfy all the varied needs of the people’
(Stamp 1946: 74). As we shall see in the following section, the tensions in the
use of national land in pre- and post-war Britain increasingly related to how
Spatializing State Nature 101
best to use the natural assets of the nation and how best to manage these
facets of nature spatially.
13
Indeed, Board (1968: 31) observes that Stamp was commissioned to carry out a national set
of regional surveys for the GA before he began his own Land Use Survey.
102 Spatializing State Nature
At the outset of the LUS, Stamp appears to have been confronted with
a fundamental tension. While he wanted to carry out the Wrst systematic and
standardized survey of land use in Britain, it is clear that there was a shortage
of geographers, Weld surveyors, and cartographers available to carry out such
an enormous task to the required standards. Board (1968: 32) does, however,
observe that while the LUS did lack (in terms of quantity) the skilled
personnel that it perhaps needed, it was still able to exploit the abilities of
the expanding number of geographers who were emerging from British
university departments in the 1920s and 1930s. In this context, trained
geographers and cartographers were given the task of overseeing Weld sur-
veyors and compiling oYcial survey reports. The main work of the survey
was, however, to be carried out by often untrained volunteers recruited from
schools and other educational establishments (Stamp 1946: 37). Interest-
ingly, additional support was secured through Scout, Guide, and Rover
groups through a national Hike for a Purpose Campaign (Scouter 1932). In
all, it is estimated that some 10,000 schools and 250,000 schoolchildren
actually participated in the LUS (Rycroft and Cosgrove 1994, 1995). In
order to create an army of young land-use surveyors the LUS had to gain
the active consent of numerous county education committees throughout
Britain. Indeed, much of the early work of the LUS organizing secretary
appears to have been spent corresponding and liaising with the chairs of
education committees.14 In order to achieve a truly national land-use survey
it was crucial for Stamp to obtain the acquiescence of all county education
committees. The problem was that many committee chairs (for example, in
Cambridge) were suspicious of the motives and utilities of the LUS. While
they had a number of reservations about the use of schoolchildren in the
LUS—particularly in relation to safety and its distracting inXuence on their
classroom studies—their main concern related to the suspicion that many
had that the LUS was part of a covert, state-sponsored land tax or valuation
procedure.15 Given these suspicions, it is interesting to note how Stamp and
his LUS were keen—despite their own real beliefs—to underestimate the
national value of the LUS to the British state when corresponding with
education oYcials. In one letter to an education committee chair, the secre-
tary of the LUS consequently states:
Its [the LUS] primary objective being educational and its secondary objective being
of national utility . . . its educational value is enormous, it teaches the school children
the geography of their own village, their own parish, their own borough, and their own
county. It teaches them how to read a map, and trains their powers of observation.16
14
See for example: Professor Sir Dudley Stamp (1898–1966) Papers, SxMs5 University of
Sussex Manuscript Collection, Box 19.1.
15
Letter from LUS Secretary (Leo J. Riordan) to the Chair of the Cambridgeshire County
Education Committee, 21 August 1931: Professor Sir Dudley Stamp (1898–1966) Papers, SxMs5
University of Sussex Manuscript Collection, Box 19.1.
16
Ibid.
Spatializing State Nature 103
It is interesting, then, that despite the great eventual value of the LUS to
the British state, it was initially promoted as a device for developing the
geographical skills of a new national citizenry. Through a series of reassuring
letters, and even visits from Stamp himself, the LUS was gradually able to
secure the support of enough education authorities to ensure that there were
no spatial gaps within their national land inventory.
The need to use schoolchildren to carry out large parts of the LUS was one
of the key factors in determining the relatively simple system of land clas-
siWcation that Stamp developed (Board 1968: 32). In his summary of the
Wndings of the LUS—The Land of Britain and How it is Used—Stamp (1946:
39) outlines the classiWcatory system used in the survey. It was based upon
seven basic descriptions of land use, which were to be marked on survey
sheets using a colour-coding scheme and a series of classiWcatory letters (see
Table 4.1). Many have commented on the symbolic signiWcance of the
colour-coding scheme deployed Stamp. The pale greens, browns, and yellows
used to represent rural land reXected the same colours that were being used
by British landscape artists at the time to reXect the beauty of the countryside
(Rycroft and Cosgrove 1994: 36). The use of red to depict built-up urban
areas was, however, clearly deployed by Stamp to convey the threat to the
British countryside posed by metropolitan expansion (Rycroft and Cosgrove
1994: 36). This colour-coded designation of land was supplemented by a more
detailed survey of the ecological properties of agricultural land by the LUS.
This sought to designate the agricultural quality of land and attempted
to represent soil types, elevations, and drainage properties (Rycroft and
Cosgrove 1994: 39–42). This survey led to a further system of land classiWca-
tion involving three main categories of land—good quality, medium quality
and poor quality—and ten further categorical subdivisions (see Table 4.2).
Collectively, the classiWcatory schema used and developed by Stamp and
the LUS embodied a new scientiWc system for land-use surveys in Britain. It
was scientiWc to the extent that it replaced the vernacular descriptions of
landscapes often found in regional surveys with a standardized discourse of
the land. The accuracy of this new scientiWc discourse is of course open to
104 Spatializing State Nature
question, but what is not in doubt is that suddenly British land had a new
language. So what had previously been ‘ploughable’, ‘rich’, or ‘fertile’ was
now suddenly preWxed with standardized adjectives such as ‘good’, ‘med-
ium’, or ‘poor’ quality. Underpinning this new scientiWc discourse of land-use
classiWcation was the role of vision. What each of the classiWcatory categories
of the LUS had in common was the strong emphasis they placed on the visual
qualities of the land and natures encountered by the surveyors. The emphasis
on visual features was of course important because the LUS did not have an
adequate number of skilled surveyors to carry out more detailed and intru-
sive studies of the chemical and physical properties of land. In this context,
under the guidance of their teachers and experts from the LUS, the children
and volunteers who participated in the British Land Utilisation Survey had
to be trained how to see land.
The idea of vision has been discussed extensively within analyses of gov-
ernmental power and the activities of states. In his Seeing Like a State, Scott
(1998) uses the notion of sight as a metaphor for the diVerent ways in which
the state makes social and natural worlds legible. In his fascinating study of
the US census, Hannah (2000: 177–8) also utilizes the metaphors of the
state’s Weld of vision and the viewer to try and understand the diVerent
ways in which governments collect knowledge about their territories.
According to both Scott and Hannah, then, the visual power of states—
achieved through censuses, surveys, registers, and statistical tables—is a type
of vision that depends upon the abstraction and simpliWcation of knowledge.
In terms of nature, Scott (1998: 11–33) emphasizes the violence that this
visualization can have on the natural world, as it is stripped of its ecological
complexities in order that it may become politically governable. Of course,
we see this process of abstract visualization in the procedures and practices of
the British LUS. Indeed, in their review of the LUS, Rycroft and Cosgrove
(1994: 38) notice how the Survey transformed the ways the state saw nature
and land, from an oblique, on-the-ground perspective, to a vertical, abstract
Spatializing State Nature 105
view. Vision does, however, take a more literal form in the operations of the
LUS. As we have already established, the LUS was based upon the recording
of visual information about the natural landscape and associated resources.
The point we wish to make is that by emphasizing the visual codiWcation of
land and nature, the LUS was not simply providing an unambiguous and
unbiased picture of British land resources, it was actively shaping what it was
possible to know about British land and the natural qualities it possessed.
In their absorbing analysis of the links between vision, space and nature,
Macnaghten and Urry (1998: 109–25) emphasize a contradictory relationship
emerging between modernity, nature, and sight. They recognize that while
the sense of sight has long been synonymous with the Enlightenment project
of bringing all that is hidden and mysterious in to the light, the emerging
‘hegemony of vision’ (to use Levin’s term) in the West has also been central to
emerging forms of modern surveillance and suppression (see Levin 1993:
121–2). In order to understand the power relations between vision and
political suppression, however, it is necessary to distinguish between vision
in general and the particular brand of vision that has become a deWning
characteristic of modern science and government. Within modern science
and government vision has been constructed as the classical sense of dis-
tanced objectivity. As the ‘cognitive canon’ of modern science, Haraway
(1991: ch. 9 and p. 183) describes how visualization has enabled the con-
struction of a detached but totalizing way of looking at the natural world.
The association between vision and scientiWc objectivity can be traced
through the Cartesian discourses, which emphasized the purity of the eye,
to the Linnaean practices of optical classiWcation.17 In order to secure the
link between vision and objectivity of course, ‘homogenization of the visual
experience’ must be guaranteed (Macnaghten and Urry 1998: 17).
The standardization of vision in the LUS was secured by the instructions
the LUS members and teachers gave to volunteers and students. These
surveying instructions were contained in the special pamphlet sent to
all participating education committees which was used by teachers to
instruct their students. In addition to the explanatory pamphlet, however,
the LUS also regulated the standards of the survey through regular corres-
pondence with education oYcials, within which they talked through the
diYculties and common errors that arose within land surveying. In one
letter to a GA member involved in the Cheshire survey, the LUS secretary
reXects on the confusion that can often arise from the classiWcation of
natural land:
Swampy areas by streams, especially when marked by rough pasture, marsh and reed
symbols, are ‘H’ and if the Ordnance Survey have put these signs on, we do not
usually pay much attention to any letters of doubtful value added by schoolchildren
17
For a more detailed analysis of the links between vision and modernity, see Jenks (1995),
and Levin (1993).
106 Spatializing State Nature
who may not appreciate the symbols . . . Areas shown on the six inch maps as rough
pasture, etc. and marked with ‘W’: in these cases all we do is to decide whether they
(the surveyors) have really seen anything in the way of a factory sprouting on the spot,
or as is usually the case, taken a dislike to such areas and called them waste.18
In essence, this pamphlet and associated guidance trained the surveyors in
how to look at land. A central element within this training exercise was not
only to instruct surveyors on what they should see, but also what they should
not see and therefore ignore. In this context, the surveyor’s gaze was a way of
seeing land and nature that automatically simpliWed the Weld of vision being
observed. This simpliWcation operated on two levels. First, it suggested the
visual elements of land and nature that were not relevant to the surveyor
(perhaps a Weld’s diverse uses, wildlife inhabitation, or broader ecological
context). Secondly, the surveyor’s gaze automatically marginalized other
ways in which land could be experienced and perceived (whether it was
through smell, touch, or other ambient features).19 What both these simpliW-
cation processes seem to have ensured is that the production of a land-use
survey was achievable (despite a lack of resources and expertise) and that the
knowledge it produced could be used by the British state to make sense of,
and then govern, its land.
There were, however, problems associated with the visual practices of the
LUS. The limitations of its visual codiWcation methods were illustrated in the
problems associated with the codiWcation of housing land. The secretary of
the LUS reXected:
Housing estates marked in an unsatisfactory manner are annoying. All we really
worry about is whether they are as large as indicated. If, as often happens, that
a surveyor has been confronted from the road by a piece of ribbon development,
and has erroneously presumed that the whole of the Weld behind the houses is built
up. . . . we frequently have to leave these points to be checked.20
18
Letter from LUS Secretary to Mr Warrington of the GA, 18 April 1935: Professor Sir
Dudley Stamp (1898–1966) Papers SxMs5, University of Sussex Manuscript Collection, Box 19.1.
19
For more on varied sensual engagements with nature and landscapes, see Tuan (1974).
20
Letter of LUS Secretary to Mr Warrington of the GA, 18 April 1935: Professor Sir Dudley
Stamp (1898–1966) Papers SxMs5, University of Sussex Manuscript Collection, Box 19.1.
21
For more on the idea of ‘mobile eyes’, or eyes that are simultaneously everywhere and
nowhere, see Haraway (1991: ch. 9).
Spatializing State Nature 107
veyors’ gaze was useful precisely because it enabled the LUS to penetrate
beyond the boundaries of private landowners in ways in which more direct
surveying techniques could not. Sight in this context enabled surveillance to
be carried out at a distance and in ways that could cross the boundaries
between public and private space (only two instances of landowners actually
preventing schoolchildren from surveying their properties were recorded in
the early years of the LUS22). As we shall see in the following section, it was
this training that enabled the surveys to produce a picture of British land and
nature that was in keeping with the synoptic vision of the British state over its
natural assets.
While the LUS contribution to national economic development and plan-
ning has been discussed at length, far less has been made of its contribution to
education and learning among the children who participated in the survey.
Much was made during the 1930s of the unique opportunities the LUS
oVered to schoolchildren. In one particularly nostalgic report of the time,
for example, in the Eastern Daily Express, J. E. Mosby claimed that:
The summer of 1931 is one that will be remembered by over a thousand young
surveyors who set out for the open country with six-inch maps explaining their own
neighbourhood and with renewed interest in even going into distant parishes and
correcting Weld boundaries, marking the position of new houses and adding mystic
letters according to the nature of the ground they were surveying . . . During the late
summer evenings, they sailed forth on bicycles after long hours exploring the coun-
tryside, and returning home at dusk with their precious reports, displaying that spirit
of adventure which is the heritage of every Norfolk boy. (Mosby 1932)
It appears that many involved in the LUS scheme saw the adventurous
exposition of young schoolchildren to the open countryside of Britain as
a virtue in itself. It is clear from many accounts of schoolteachers at the time
that they believed that the LUS could help to create a new ecologically
informed citizenry, whose understanding of their nation’s heritage could be
enhanced through more regular exposure to its natural landscapes.
22
Letter from LUS Secretary (Leo J. Riordan) to the Chair of the Cambridgeshire County
Education Committee 21 August 1931: Professor Sir Dudley Stamp (1898–1966) Papers SxMs5,
University of Sussex Manuscript Collection, Box 19.1.
108 Spatializing State Nature
out Britain. The raw maps of the LUS were amalgamated and analysed by
the LUS in a collection of reports. The Wrst LUS report was composed
by L. Dudley Stamp and E. C. Willatts (the organizing secretary of the
LUS) in 1934. It provided a brief, interim summary of the Wrst twelve one-
inch maps produced by the Survey (Stamp and Willatts 1934). From 1937,
however, the LUS gradually began to present its Wndings through a series of
Regional Reports. In keeping with the regional geographical tradition—of
which Stamp was of course a prominent Wgure—these reports sought to
position their respective descriptions of land use within an explanatory
frame that incorporated an account of the social, economic, and geological
histories of the regions from which they were taken. It was prominent
geographers and geography teachers, who had led many of the survey
expeditions, who generally prepared these reports (Board 1968: 34). It
was partly on the basis of these surveys that in 1946 Stamp was able to
produce The Land of Britain and How it is Used, within which he highlighted
the strategic land-use implications of the LUS Wndings. The importance
of the LUS did, however, become apparent long before Stamp’s 1946
publication.
As one would expect, the outbreak of the Second World War in September
1939 had a profound aVect on how the LUS was perceived and used. The
advent of war fundamentally shifted how land assets were conceived of in the
UK. With the loss of food imports and trade from Europe and the threat to
Commonwealth trade posed by the German Navy, British land assets sud-
denly become re-nationalized. British land was re-nationalized in two ways.
First, agricultural land suddenly became a Wnite resource that had to be used
to feed the nation’s population. Secondly, it became evident that increasingly
large swathes of privately owned land would have to be used for the purpose
of national food production. Even in 1938, before the war, the UK was
dependent on overseas suppliers for 70 per cent (by value) of its food assets
(Short et al. 2000). Suddenly this 70 per cent food lifeline was under threat!
Essentially the Second World War meant that the British state had to
mobilize its land assets and maximize its use of its natural assets in new
and more extreme ways. Matless (1998) describes how British land was
mobilized through a series of emergency measures that mixed militaristic
metaphors with new ways of using land and nature. To the British govern-
ment, land became a ‘weapon of war’, and its eVective use during the war was
guaranteed by its own army (the Land Army) and associated ‘Dig for
Victory’ campaigns (Matless 1998: 174–9). Undergirding these eVorts
was a desire to ensure that as much land as was possible could be put to
productive use (Ministry of Information 1945). To achieve this goal of course
required knowledge of existing land-use patterns so that future developments
could be planned and mapped. It was in this context that Stamp’s LUS
records were to play such an important role in Britain’s early war eVort.
Spatializing State Nature 109
Stamp’s own account of the months following the outbreak of the Second
World War provides an insight into the emerging role of LUS records in the
British war eVort:
An unexpected result of the declaration of war was the receipt of several telegrams
asking to borrow sets of original [Land Utilisation Survey] Weld maps as a basis for
planning the ploughing up campaign . . . the next two or three months were occupied
in sending out thousands of our original six inch Weld sheets on loan to County War
Agricultural Committees . . . . our maps, of course, showed the areas actually
ploughed in the years before the war. (Quoted in Short et al. 2000: 29)
The scramble for LUS maps and inventories described by Stamp reXects
the growing desire of the British state to collate an accurate and up-to-date
picture of Britain’s organic resources. This political desire would eventually
lead to the instigation of the National Farm Survey, which ran from 1941 to
1943. This was coordinated by the Ministry of Agriculture but carried out by
County War Agricultural Committees (Short et al. 2000: ch. 1). Using the
LUS as a guide, the teams working on the National Farm Survey collated
information on farmland use, which was then used to identify pastoral areas
that could be ploughed and used as arable land, or arable land that could be
utilized in more eYcient ways to support the war eVort and feed the nation.
One of the central ways in which the wartime state sought to maximize the
eYciency with which Britain exploited its natural organic resources was
though the promotion of a new era of mechanization within the agricultural
sector. While the National Farm Survey was not the Wrst survey of farms in
the UK (a farm management survey, for example, was completed during the
1930s), it was the Wrst to legally require the cooperation of private land-
owners and to achieve anywhere near a national picture of farmland use. In
their detailed analysis of the National Farm Survey, Short et al. (2000: ch. 1)
argue that with its bureaucratic support mechanism and statistical outputs, it
was a key moment in the incorporation of British agriculture into the modern
era. What is signiWcant, in the context of this book, is that along with the
LUS, the National Farm Survey cemented the increasing centralization of
state surveillance over a nationally framed nature.
One of the key consequences of data obtained from the LUS and the
National Farm Survey was the growing ability of the state to challenge the
use of private landowner in the UK. If land was deemed to be underused or
used in an inappropriate way, legislation enabled the state to demand
changes to how farms were being used and, in extreme situations, to seize
control of land assets (Matless 1998: 175). Through the use of Plough-Up
Orders and eviction actions, the British state slowly began to take control of
an increasingly wide range of land and associated natural resources. Accord-
ing to Short et al. (2000: 35), during the Second World War the British state
conWscated the relatively small, but nevertheless signiWcant, quantity of
440,000 acres of land. The interventions of the state in British agriculture
110 Spatializing State Nature
during the Second World War reveal the ambiguities that surround the
relationship between states and land. Although states have had an important
historical role in protecting the rights of private landowners, it is clear that
when this duty collides with prevailing national interests that land is quickly
re-nationalized. In their discussions of the British National Farm Survey,
Murdoch and Ward (1995) recognize the link between governmental power
and the Xuctuating territoriality of private land. Consequently, while the
territoriality of private land may appear to lie outside the Welds of power
associated with the state, it is clear that private ownership is only tolerated
under circumstances wherein the resulting land uses serve strategic state ends.
The territorial control of nature through land use and monitoring pro-
grammes may therefore Xuctuate between private (local) and common (na-
tional) modes of ownership, but it is never outside the framing inXuences of
the nation-state.
23
The Barlow Commission was actually formed in 1934 but did not publish its Wnal report
until 1940 (see Hall 1992: ch. 4).
24
These commissions/committees were named after their respective presiding chairs: Sir
Andrew Montague-Barlow, Sir Leslie Scott, and Sir Augustus Andrewes Uthwatt (Lord Justice
Uthwatt).
Spatializing State Nature 111
ch. 4) has described this elaborate array of institutions and acts of legislation
as a post-war ‘planning machine’. The modernist undertones of Hall’s
phrase eVectively capture the nature of post-war planning in Britain. It was
machine-like to the extent that it sought to instigate an extensive and highly
rational framework within which land-use disputes could be resolved and
land-use resources could be quickly mobilized in the national interest. Mat-
less (1998: 190) claims that the emergent planning system of post-war Britain
was designed to enable the state to rise above the divisive politics that
surrounded land-use issues and through the science of planning create a
spatial order within British socio-environmental relations.
While each of the British state’s reports on land-use planning had an
important bearing on the emerging spatial relations between the British
state and nature in the post-war period, we want to focus our attention on
the work and recommendations of the Scott Commission in particular. In
part our concern here relates to the fact that Stamp was himself a key Wgure
on the Scott Commission and saw the initiative as a key opportunity to
further his calls for the protection of British agriculture and the countryside
(Matless 1998: 220).25 The signiWcance of all this to our deliberations also
derives from the fact that it laid the foundations of a national system through
which the utilization of nature and land would be set. The Scott Report
(1942) essentially proposed a nationalized land planning system through
which the high-quality agricultural land identiWed within Stamp’s LUS
could be eVectively protected and utilized (Hall 1992: 71–2). The result of
the Scott Commission’s Report was the formation of a national planning
system, which would embrace both town and country and which placed an
onus on land developers to illustrate the ways in which new constructions
were in the public interest (particularly where they threatened good-quality
agricultural land). Through subsequent planning legislation and various
procedures associated with planning reports, permissions, appeals, and con-
sultations, the Scott Commission led to a new era of national control over
nature, which was facilitated through the territorial control of land use.
Despite popular calls at the time, however, the Scott Report did not result
in the nationalization of British agricultural land. As Stamp emphasized in
an article for Foreign AVairs, private landowning farmers had historically
played a crucial role as custodians of the nation’s land assets and as the
‘nation’s unpaid gardeners’ (Rycroft and Cosgrove 1994: 38). The Scott
Report’s recommendations to the Ministry of Town and Country Planning
would eventually lead to a planning system that would deter farmers from
seeking short-term gains by selling their land for development—thus
25
Matless notes that Stamp’s prominence on the Scott Commission led The Economist to dub
its Wnal publication not the Scott Report but the Stamp Report.
112 Spatializing State Nature
protecting some of the nation’s most precious ecological assets (Rycroft and
Cosgrove 1994: 39).
The mixed reactions that the Scott Report received at the time are, how-
ever, indicative of its status as an inherently modern strategy for the protec-
tion of state nature. Members of the British business community were critical
of Scott and Stamp’s report because they argued it was too preservationist,
not allowing for necessary change and economic development in the coun-
tryside (Matless 1998: 220–1). At the same time, however, many rural con-
servationists argue that the scientiWc rationalities undergirding the report
were anathema to the organic ideals of the conservation movement (Matless
1998: 221–4). It was feared by certain rural conservationists that the close
bond forged between local communities, farmers, and nature was gradually
being replaced by the state, as a removed modernist landlord, with little sense
of the local ecological speciWcities that make up rural community life (Mat-
less 1998: 221–4).
Stamp’s LUS was instrumental in shifting the British state’s spatial cogni-
tion of national nature. While at one level this shifting cognition was based
upon a heightened spatial awareness of the location of natural resources, it
was also predicated on a growing realization of a broader spatial order within
British nature. The LUS and its subsequent regional reports and national
summaries (see Stamp 1946: 41) recognized a broad spatial division within
British land and nature. In Stamp’s own work this division was expressed in
terms of the harsh but spectacular upland areas of the UK and its more
agriculturally productive lowland regions. While the Scott report, with its
recommendations on town and country planning and rural land use, applied
to both upland and lowland Britain, it is clear, at least in terms of Stamp’s
intentions for the report, that it was primarily designed to protect and
conserve lowland Britain’s natural assets and ecologies. Heavily inXuenced
by both the Scott Commission and Stamp’s LUS survey, the treatment and
use of key upland areas in the UK would eventually be dealt with by the 1949
National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act. Following the recom-
mendations of the Scott Report pertaining to issues of public access to the
countryside, the idea of establishing a system of national parks, as part of
a planned and ordered nation, became accepted government doctrine (Cul-
lingworth 1982: 197–8). Ultimately these reports, committees, and acts of
parliament led to the creation of the ten original national parks in England
and Wales, each with their own planning authority and system of land-use
regulation.
What most interests us about Britain’s much-discussed national park
system is not so much the technical legislative processes that informed their
inception and the planning procedures that regulate their activities to this
day, but rather their spatial location and their wider role in the spatial
ordering of nature in the UK. What was most striking about the Wrst ten
national parks in England and Wales was the types of natural landscapes
Spatializing State Nature 113
26
As Shoard notes, the preference shown for upland, wild nature in the Dower Report (1945)
was a concern for the National Parks Commission. The Commission did look at the case for
including the Norfolk Broads and the South Downs in the original list of national park sites
devised by Dower (see Shoard 1980: 67).
114 Spatializing State Nature
27
For an interesting discussion of (admittedly much earlier) historical debates surrounding
the relationship between landscape, identity, and the state in Britain, see Olwig (2002).
Spatializing State Nature 115
Conclusions
In this chapter we have explored the spatial implication of states and nature.
Focusing speciWcally on the historical emergence of land-use maps, we have
considered how space is used as a strategy for simultaneously centralizing
and territorializing nature. The land-use map has provided us with some
particularly pertinent insights into the spatial form of state–nature relations.
Within the deployment of land-use maps on behalf of states, we have seen
their valuable role in the collection of an increasingly centralized roster of
ecological knowledge. In relation to the emergence of modern state systems,
it is important to notice how such rosters were produced on the basis of
increasingly standardized and institutionalized (in the case of the Lantmäter-
iet) systems of cartography and mapping. The case of the land-use map has
116 Spatializing State Nature
also illustrated the diVerent ways in which states attempt to develop forms of
territorial control over nature. Land-use surveys and cadastral mapping are
never simply about the recording of pre-existing boundaries but are always
about imagining new ways of spatializing nature. Land-use maps have
consequently produced new boundaries both at the external reaches of states
and in the internal proprietorial regimes of national systems. These new
cartographic boundaries are always part of emerging state strategies to
control, transform, or co-opt nature in diVerent ways. Sometimes, as in the
case of Swedish cadastral maps, such surveys can be used to shape the uses of
nature that are adopted within diVerent estates. The example of the LUS,
however, serves to illustrate that even when surveys begin outside the state
apparatus, they can be co-opted within broader national schemes for the
spatial re-ordering of socio-natural relations.
Finally, our analysis of land-use maps has also illustrated their role not
only in mapping a pre-existing nation but in actually forging a sense of
national political identity. Consequently, in the case of early modern Sweden,
we saw how cadastral maps were used by the state administration to forge
a sense of an expanded Swedish political community. In the context of the
British LUS, it is possible to discern the use of land surveying as a device for
educating a new ecologically aware national citizenry. If, as we argued at the
outset of this chapter, states are inherently spatial political actors/institu-
tions, then it appears that the spatial framing of nature is a crucial moment
within the consolidation of the political and cultural power of states.
5
The previous two chapters have examined key moments and sites of nature–
state interaction and have argued for the need to explore the manifold
contexts within which these linkages develop. This discussion proved useful
as a way of highlighting the diVerent ways in which modern states have
sought to frame national natures through ideological and material processes,
and began to illustrate the ideological and concrete impacts of national
natures on state organizations. This chapter focuses on the ways in which
nature has been incorporated into the state apparatus, as well as showing
how the state apparatus has helped to frame national natures. When refer-
ring to the state apparatus, we mean the ‘set of institutions and organizations
through which state power is exercised’ (Clark and Dear 1984: 45). The state
apparatus is distinct from the state form, which refers to the relationship
between a given state structure and a particular social formation, and the
state function, which alludes to the ‘activities which are undertaken in
the name of the state’ (Clark and Dear 1984: 37, 41).1 Despite the reference
to a state apparatus in the preceding sentences, it is clear that it does not
represent a singular entity. If, as Neil Brenner (2004: 4) maintains, a reference
to the state in the singular misleadingly ascribes to it a unity and uniformity
that it does not possess, then by the same token, we need to think about the
state apparatus as something that is not singular in character. Gordon Clark
and Michael Dear (1984) have emphasized the multi-faceted and plural
nature of the state apparatus (see Table 5.1).
The state apparatus, in this sense, comprises an agglomeration of diVerent
sub-apparatuses, which are the ‘collection of agencies, organizations and
institutions which together constitute the means by which state functions
are attained’, and para-apparatuses, namely those ‘auxiliary agencies’ that
1
Many neo-Marxist state theorists would tend, however, to use the term ‘state form’ when
referring to what Clark and Dear refer to as the ‘state apparatus’; see, for example, Brenner
(2003) and Jessop (1990). Our use of the term ‘state apparatus’ equates to Weberian understand-
ings of the state bureaucracy (see Giddens 1985; Weber 1991).
118 Nature and the State Apparatus
Source: Adapted with the permission of Taylor & Francis from Table 3.1 in Clark, G. L. and Dear, M. J., The
State Apparatus: Structures of Language and Legitimacy (London, Allen and Unwin, 1984), p. 50.
possess ‘some degree of operational autonomy’ (Brenner 2004: 49). The state
apparatus ranges, therefore, from those bureaucracies charged with conduct-
ing the state’s executive functions to a plethora of agencies involved in its
more mundane aspects of governance. For Antonio Gramsci, the state
apparatus is even broader in scope, drawing in important aspects of civil
society. If ‘state ¼ political society þ civil society’, then we need to think of
the state apparatus as something that is inclusive and broad-ranging in
character (Gramsci 1973: 263). This is especially the case in the contemporary
period, when lines of separation between the roles of state and private
agencies are increasingly diYcult to demarcate.
For many authors, the modern state betrays—in its form and function as
well as its apparatus—a singular undergirding inXuence, namely its associ-
ation with the capitalist mode of production. Perry Anderson, for instance,
has noted how the shift from feudalism to capitalism led to the creation of
a capitalist state apparatus, which included ‘standing armies, a permanent
bureaucracy, national taxation, a codiWed law, and the beginning of a uniWed
market’ (1974: 17). The impact of the capitalist mode of production on the
modern state is clearly important, but we would hope that the Wrst four
chapters of this book have also begun to hint at the inXuence of diVerent
forms of nature, too, on the apparatus of the modern state. The discussion in
Chapter 3, for instance, showed how eVorts to both frame (and frame out)
water in the sixteenth-century Dutch Netherlands possessed far-reaching
implications for the tentative process of state consolidation that was taking
Nature and the State Apparatus 119
place then. The various guises of the state apparatus, we maintain, should be
viewed as both a producer and a product of national natures. Claus OVe
begins to draw our attention to such sentiments when he argues that the state
organizes certain activities and measures directed towards the environment and it
adopts for itself a certain organizational procedure from which the production and
implementation of policies emerge. Every time a state deals with a problem in its
environment, it deals with a problem of itself, its internal mode of operation. (OVe
1975: 135; emphasis in original)
central and local state apparatus with regard to the formation of new laws
and policies, new organizations, and new ideologies of government (see also
Driver 1988). New developments with respect to the management of nature
have taken place over the twentieth century, according to Gandy, and the
‘earlier emphasis on public health has been extended to a range of newer
concerns with biodiversity, climate change and the pollution of the global
commons’ (1999: 60; see also O’Connor 1994). As we show in the empirical
sections of this chapter, it is these newer environmental concerns of the
twentieth century that have signalled a more sustained embeddedness of
nature into the state apparatus, through the development of new depart-
ments and agencies concerned with national ecological issues and the imple-
mentation of new strategies and policies that seek to ameliorate national
environmental risk. Finally, the development of more neoliberal state forms,
as well as the related emergence of less predictable forms of environmental
risk, have led to fundamental challenges to the state apparatus’s ability to
manage national and international natures eVectively. The emergence of new
forms of ecological risk, in particular, has led to a ‘diminution in the power
and legitimacy of liberal conceptions of the state as arbiter of the public
interest’ and as manager of national natures (Gandy 1999: 63; see also Beck
1992). Indeed, some even argue that the persistence of the centralized and
centralizing state apparatus actually serves to exacerbate environmental
problems, both within and beyond its boundaries (Torgerson 1990). The
political, ecological, and geographical implications of such developments
are discussed at length in Chapter 6.
We focus in particular in this chapter on the relationship between national
natures and the state apparatus in three separate contexts. First, we consider
the relationship between the state apparatus and national natures by exam-
ining the development of regulatory agencies that have sought to respond to
natural risk and hazard. As Johnston (1996: 131–2) has argued, the admin-
istrative or bureaucratic state is the only organization that possesses the
wherewithal to manage competitive and unsustainable uses of nature within
national contexts. The compartmentalization of such responsibilities within
particular state sub-apparatuses—with the sole aim of managing the various
risks associated with national natures—has been a feature of state rule in the
majority of states since the 1970s. But as well as being a guarantor of certain
environmental rights within particular national contexts, the other signiW-
cance of these agencies has been their eVort to understand the complex and
manifold interdependencies of diVerent kinds of nature within one ecological
and national whole (Johnston 1996: 131–2). The modern state’s ‘infrastruc-
tural power’ and its status as a centralized hub for the collection of informa-
tion, therefore, means that it is the only organization with the ability to
monitor and manage national natures in eVective ways. As a way of illus-
trating the state’s role as both a manager of environmental risk and
a centralized hub for the collection of ecological information—speciWcally
Nature and the State Apparatus 121
2
R. Nixon, ‘Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1970’ (Washington 1970), at <http://www.epa.gov/
history/org/origins/reorg.htm> accessed 16 May 2005.
Nature and the State Apparatus 123
3
EPA, ‘DDT ban takes eVect’, EPA Press Release, 31 December 1972, at <http://www.epa.-
gov/history/topics/ddt/01.htm> accessed 14 July 2005.
124 Nature and the State Apparatus
within the federal state apparatus. In monitoring water and air quality within
the US, as well as researching the environmental problems caused by radiation,
pesticides, and other solid wastes, the EPA assumed certain governmental
responsibilities that had previously resided within the purview of the Depart-
ment of the Interior, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the
Atomic Energy Commission, the Federal Radiation Council, and the Agricul-
tural Research Service.4 Rather than pursuing the fragmented and disjointed
approach that had characterized the federal state’s management of ecological
risk prior to 1970, it was deemed necessary to create one united regulatory
agency that could frame the national nature of the US—and, more import-
antly, transgressions against it—in an eVective and holistic manner (Lewis
1985). The increasingly predominant view of the need to study the ‘total
environment’ thus entailed the formation of a sub-apparatus of the federal
state that was equally all-encompassing in its framing of US national natures.
But as well as evincing a sectoral reorganization of the US federal state
apparatus, it is also clear that the EPA emphasized a mechanism for regu-
lating nature at the national scale. The overarching emphasis on the federal
level within the EPA represented a reiWcation of the national scale and
a related downplaying of the regional and global scales. William D. Ruck-
elshaus, in an oral history account of his period in charge of the EPA,
outlined the signiWcance of this realignment:
Up to that point—up to the formation of the EPA—it was largely a question of the
states enforcing the environmental laws . . . it was left to the states, and they competed
with one another so Wercely for the location of industry that they weren’t very good
regulators of those industries. Particularly in the whole social regulatory area—
health, safety, and the environment—they just weren’t very good.5
4
EPA, ‘DDT ban takes eVect’, EPA Press Release, 31 December 1972, at <http://www.epa.-
gov/history/topics/ddt/01.htm> accessed 14 July 2005.
5
W. D. Ruckelshaus, ‘Environment before the EPA’, at <http://www.epa.gov/history/publi-
cations/ruck/05.htm> accessed 16 May 2005.
Nature and the State Apparatus 125
6
D. P. Rogers, ‘The Clean Air Act of 1970’, at <http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/caa70/
11.htm> accessed 16 May 2005.
7
EPA, ‘DDT ban takes eVect’, op cit.
8
W.P. Ruckelshaus, ‘Russell Train and Robert Fri’, at <http://www.epa.gov/history/publi-
cations/ruck/05.htm> accessed 16 May 2005.
Fig. 5.1. Map of the EPA’s boundaries.
Nature and the State Apparatus 127
risks. The EPA, in other words, through its organizations, policies, and
strategies, has helped to increasingly frame the national natures of the US.
The key signiWcance of the EPA is its role as a centralized hub for collecting,
interrogating, and disseminating information.9 It has, admittedly, utilized a
regional structure as a means of facilitating the process of collecting and
disseminating information about various environmental risks (see Figure
5.1). At present, its national headquarters in Washington coordinates the
activities of its regional oYces in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta,
Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle.10 But
despite this devolved structure, the central hub in Washington retains a prime
signiWcance. The OYce of the Administrator, the coordinating centre of the
EPA, for instance, contains an OYce of Policy, Economics, and Innovation,
whose duties include managing the whole of the EPA’s regulatory agenda.
These oYces, located in Washington, represent the centre point out of which
the framing of the national natures of the US emanates.
One way of further exploring this centralized framing of national natures
in the US is to focus on the people that staV the EPA as an organization. The
key Wgure throughout the history of the EPA has been the head of the
Agency, the so-called Administrator. The Administrator has acted as
the central lynchpin for the EPA, around which monitoring and enforcement
duties have coalesced. Especially during its formative years, there was an
onus on the Administrator to instil a sense of purpose within the organiza-
tion, something that could contribute to its emerging role as the collector of
information concerning environmental risk in the US. Ruckelshaus, the Wrst
Administrator, for instance, emphasized that one of the key early challenges
for the EPA was to make it work as an organization, especially given its
organizational legacy as a union of responsibilities drawn from many separ-
ate predecessor organizations.11 The oYcial title of Ruckelshaus’s post—the
Administrator—was highly signiWcant, in this respect, since it signalled
a belief in the ability of the state to frame all aspects of US national nature:
to collect information concerning its diVerent forms and locations and to
centralize it within the state sub-apparatus; to manage nature in eVective
ways; to monitor instances in which nature is being transgressed in some way;
and to develop ways of ameliorating the impact of environmental risks. In
short, the use of the term ‘Administrator’ to designate the head of the EPA is
redolent of a state mentality in which nature is viewed as an object of
government, which can be subsumed within a centralized and internally
diVerentiated state bureaucracy. Equally signiWcant, we would argue, were
the informal appellations given to Ruckelshaus, as the Wrst Administrator,
9
More broadly, see Dandekar (1999) and Giddens (1985).
10
See the EPA organizational chart at <http://www.epa.gov/epahome/organization.htm>
accessed 16 May 2005.
11
W. P. Ruckelshaus, ‘Important issues’, at <http://www.epa.gov/history/publications/ruck/
10.htm>accessed 16 May 2005. In a diVerent context, see Jones et al. (2005).
128 Nature and the State Apparatus
during his early years in oYce. These included ‘Mr Clean’ and, in reference to
the newly released Clint Eastwood motion picture of the time, ‘The Enforcer’
(Lewis 1985). Both of these more popular descriptions of Ruckelshaus’s role
also illustrate, we maintain, the attitudes towards the responsibilities of the
EPA: namely, to clean up the US environment by forcing recalcitrant private
or city corporations to adhere to the various environmental laws that were
already present on the statute books (Williams 1993).
The role of the EPA in framing national natures—through a process of
collecting and centralizing information—is illustrated further when one con-
siders its remit in more detail. Throughout its period of existence it has
sought to outline the levels of environmental degradation that would be
tolerated within the national natures of the US. Technical and scientiWc
eVorts have been made to deWne the parameters of environmental risk that
would enable the EPA to achieve subsequent environmental gains. Table 5.2
shows the danger levels of air pollution that were deWned by the EPA in 1971.
The precision of the EPA in both monitoring and deWning the environmental
dangers displayed in this table speaks of a state sub-apparatus whose role is
highly dependent upon the precise collection, collation, and dissemination of
information concerning US national natures. As a result of its existence as
a systematized and centralized branch of the US federal state apparatus, the
EPA was becoming highly cognizant of the ecological risks that were present
in the US during the 1970s. Moreover, the EPA used this unparalleled depth
of knowledge to deWne the acceptable and unacceptable characteristics of
various aspects of the US national nature at this time. But as we have been at
pains to emphasize, this was not a one-way process. At the same time, the
precise deWnition of various types of environmental risk that were present in
the US at the time contributed in a fundamental way to the bureaucratic
diVerentiation of the EPA as an organization. At present, for instance, the
OYce of Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances, headed by Acting
Table 5.2. Danger levels for air pollution deWned by the EPA in 1971
Environmental risk Pollution levels that could harm public health
Source: Data from ‘EPA deWnes air pollution danger levels’, press release (19 October 1971) at <http://
www.epa.gov/history/topics/caa70/90.htm> accessed 15 July 2005.
Nature and the State Apparatus 129
Our second case study examines the role of the state apparatus in arbitrating
between diVerent social and ecological interests, speciWcally in the context of
the planning system of New Zealand. With the inception of the Resource
Management Act (RMA) in 1991, New Zealand experienced a sea change in
its planning laws. A focus on the RMA, we maintain, enables us to examine
the means through which the state apparatus seeks to frame nature as
a technical issue that should be administered by professional bureaucrats
and specialists, most notably ‘rational’ planners. Scratching beneath the
surface, however, allows us to demonstrate how politics actually infuses the
relationship between the apparatus of the arbiter state and New Zealand
national nature in all aspects of the RMA.
The Act was promulgated in 1991 as a means of promoting the sustainable
management of natural and physical resources within the boundaries of the
New Zealand state and, as such, provides the legal framework within which
the management and development of New Zealand’s natural resources takes
place. The promulgation of the Act represented a radical overhaul of the
planning system, as New Zealand sought to replace its British-derived town
and country planning legislation with a far greener and more sustainable
understanding of the need to manage the biophysical environment. In this
regard, the RMA has been viewed as something that has signalled a funda-
mental change in the way that the state understands the environment within
New Zealand, in both normative and practical terms (Memon and Gleeson
1995; Perkins and Thorns 2001: 639; Robertson 1993).
The inception of the RMA brought about a detailed re-evaluation of the
means through which the state apparatus should adjudicate over competing
ecological interests. There is a concerted eVort within the RMA, for instance,
12
See EPA, ‘Pesticides section’, at <http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/contacts/opp_contacts.htm>
accessed 14 September 2005.
130 Nature and the State Apparatus
Table 5.4. Soil issues and management in the Waikato Region, New Zealand
Environmental issue Policy
Accelerated soil erosion (loss of soil productivity, Avoid, remedy, or mitigate accelerated
degradation of water supply through erosion through:
sedimentation and adverse eVects on the . environmental education programme
values associated with land) . preparing regional plans that may contain
rules for the management of land and soils
. developing a regional monitoring
programme
. advocating the control of pest populations
. maintaining the integrity of existing soil
conservation programmes
. liaising with organizations that seek to
lessen adverse environmental eVects
. liaising with territorial authorities and other
agencies to promote soil conservation.
Soil contamination (the discharge of Reduce the impact of contaminants on the soil
contaminants onto or into land aVecting the resource through:
condition of the soil) . encouraging the development of sustainable
land management practices
. advocating sustainable land management
practices through the environmental
education programme
. establishing rules in the Regional Plan to
avoid, remedy or mitigate the discharge of
contaminants
. developing, through the Regional Plan and
environmental education programmes,
means of discouraging illegal dumping
Maintenance of soil health (to maintain the Land uses should avoid the degradation of soil
versatility and productive capacity of the versatility and productive capacity through:
Region’s soil resources—with a focus on the . the development of a regional land
use of fertilizers, the biological activity and monitoring programme
organic carbon levels within soils, and the . the development of an environmental
physical condition of the soil) education programme
. encouraging research into development of
sustainable land management practices
. preparing rules to avoid, remedy, or
mitigate the degradation of soils
. liaising with other bodies that seek to reduce
soil degradation
Moisture management (ensuring no net loss of Moisture to be managed to maximize the
productive soils as a result of poor moisture sustainable productive capacity of soils
management) through:
. preparing regional rules for moisture
management in Regional Plans
. monitoring the eVects of land drainage
within the Region
. developing asset management plans to
deliver drainage services in former drainage
board areas
134 Nature and the State Apparatus
into its decisions concerning the use and conservation of nature. Section 6 of
the Act requires that Maori are consulted, for instance, in order to ensure
that any resource development does not impinge on their sacred sites and
other ‘treasures’. This alternative discourse, speaking of Maori perceptions
of the intrinsic value of nature and the environment, acts as a powerful
counter-melody to the dominant technocratic theme contained within the
RMA. The tensions between these two discourses are evident in the Waikato
Region. At a general level, the Waikato Regional Council considers the close
link between Maori and the land and soil of Waikato as an important
contextualizing factor within its discussion of the various environmental
issues facing the region:
Tangata whenua by deWnition means people of the land. Maori believe that they have
a unqiue spiritual aYnity with the land. Maori view themselves as an integral part of
the natural world. Their relationship to land provides a link with both ancestors and
future generations. It conWrms tribal and kinship ties, and in doing so, establishes
a sense of tribal identity and continuity. In managing the land resources of the
Waikato, it is acknowledged that Maori are able to use land in their ownership in
accordance with their culture and traditions, and on ancestral land, to protect sites
and resources which are of particular cultural value to iwi [tribe] consistent with
statutory requirements. (Environment Waikato 1996: 41)
More speciWcally, the Regional Policy Statement elaborates on the key
Maori concepts that are central to the RMA’s operation within the region,
including its methods for arbitrating the use of soil. Table 5.5 illustrates some
of the key terms and concepts that help to articulate this alternative concep-
tion of appropriate forms of land and resource use.
The promotion of Maori values within the RMA bears welcome testimony
to the increased consideration given to the material and spiritual needs of
Maori in New Zealand after years of neglect (Laitouri 1996: 332; Walker
Aki kaa The rights to occupy land and use resources are sustained through
occupation and resource use
Hapu Band or sub-tribe
Io The Supreme Being for Maori
Iwi A tribe or people
Kaitiaki A guardian or steward
Kaitiakitanga To exercise stewardship over land, resources, and nature
Kawanatanga Governorship or government
Mana Whenua The customary authority exercised by an iwi or hapu
Rohe A territory within which a tangata whenua group claims an association
Tangata whenua The iwi or hapu that holds mana whenua over an area
Taonga Treasures or properties that are prized as the sacred possessions of a tribe
Tino rangatiratanga ChieXy authority
Waahi tapu Sacred site
Nature and the State Apparatus 135
1990). But at the same time, it is dubious how seriously these Maori concerns
are taken. It is signiWcant that the references to Maori concepts and ideas
tend to appear in isolated sections of Waikato’s Regional Policy Statement,
rather than being mainstreamed within the whole of the document. We
would argue, ironically, that the persistence of such a non-technical and
non-scientiWc language in certain sections of the policy statement actually
serves to highlight its otherwise highly technocratic and scientiWc character.
Even though the modern state apparatus in this case has seen Wt to admit
another set of discourses in order to enable it to arbitrate between diVerent
forms of land and resource use, it is clear that it is the technical, scientiWc, and
neutral language of the established planning system that dominates the
RMA’s framing of national natures in New Zealand.
At one level, therefore, the RMA can be considered as something that
represents a technical and scientiWc means in and through which the New
Zealand state may arbitrate between diVerent forms of land and resource use.
Many have argued, nonetheless, that it also betrays a highly politicized under-
standing both of the broader role of the state apparatus and of New Zealand’s
national natures. Memon and Gleeson, in this regard, give a Xavour of the
broader context for the development of the RMA, as well as indicating some of
the ideological tensions that have aVected its operation. They have argued that
New Zealand’s new planning legislation is the product of two quite distinct, and
contradictory, sociopolitical forces, notably the New Right and the environmental
movement. The new legislative context in New Zealand signals a paradigmatic shift in
planning ideology and perhaps practice. The movement is from a town and country
mode, which was embedded in the wider political economy of the welfare state, to a new
biophysical and technocentric planning paradigm. (Memon and Gleeson 1995: 109)
Up until the 1970s, the New Zealand state had followed a political and
governmental programme that had emphasized broadly welfarist principles,
in line with the similar emphases being made in other Anglophone countries
in the post-war period. Under the leadership of a Labour government during
the 1980s, however, it embarked on a sustained programme of governmental
and socio-economic reform, which emphasized the need to increase the
competitiveness of New Zealand industries within an increasingly globalized
world economy. The recurring theme within this period of reform was to
deregulate and minimize the impact of government on all socio-economic
processes (Grundy and Gleeson 1996: 198–201; Franklin 1991; Memon and
Gleeson 1995: 114; see also Bray and Haworth 1993). At the same time, New
Zealand—like other states—began to engage with an environmentalist dis-
course from approximately the 1970s onwards: the Labour, National, and
Social Credit parties (the three main political parties in New Zealand)
adopted certain policies that were supportive of environmental issues.
A productive relationship between these two diVering ideologies has been
diYcult to maintain. Nowhere is the forced marriage between the two
136 Nature and the State Apparatus
demonstrated the extent to which concerns regarding the nature of the Ever-
glades became implicated within the policies of Republicans and Democrats
at both a state and federal scale. But in addition to thinking about the extent to
which nature is represented within the political sub-apparatus of the state, we
also need to examine in greater depth how nature becomes represented within
the political arena. Latour, for instance, has elaborated on the potential
mechanisms in and through which an ecological form of politics enters the
political sub-apparatus of the state. At one extreme lies an ecological politics
that can impinge in a limited fashion on the broader repertoire of policies and
strategies adopted by political parties and governments, being added as a new
‘layer of behaviour and regulations to the[ir] . . . everyday concerns’ (Latour
1998: 222). Alternatively, a more all-compassing and holistic version of eco-
logical politics can enter the political sub-apparatus of the state. In this rarer
‘ ‘‘globalisation’’ of environmentalism’, we witness an eVort by political par-
ties and governments to demonstrate how nature and society must be man-
aged as a whole ‘in order to avoid a moral, economic and ecological disaster’
(Latour 1998: 222). Focusing on these two alternatives makes us think of how
political ecology can be incorporated into the political sub-apparatus of the
state through either the development of a ‘new form of politics or a particular
branch of politics’ (Latour 1998: 221; see also Whitehead 2004). In other
words, Latour suggests that we need to examine how political ecology can
be engaged with ‘surreptitiously, by distinguishing between questions of nature
and questions of politics, or explicitly, by treating those two sets of questions
as a single issue that arises for all collectives’ (Latour 2004: 1). The empirical
discussion in this section illustrates these twin mechanisms as they were played
out in the environmental politics of the UK during the 1980s and 1990s. We
focus on the growing environmental awareness of established political parties
as a way of discussing the piecemeal and limited greening of formal politics,
while an exploration of the UK Green Party enables us to elaborate on the
explicit ‘globalization’ of ecological concerns.
Porritt and Winner (1998), writing towards the end of the period, describe
the signiWcance of the 1980s as a time during which ecological issues began to
assume greater signiWcance within British politics.
The 1980s have witnessed a spectacular greening of mainstream British politics, at
least in the narrow environmental sense of the word. Until the beginning of this
decade, few major politicians were prepared to speak up on green issues. From the
1983 General Election onwards, national politicians have been catching up with the
popular perception that the environment in an increasingly important issue. Now,
according to their manifestos at least, Conservative, Labour and Alliance13 parties all
care deeply about the environment. (Porritt and Winner 1998: 85)
13
The ‘Alliance’ refers to the pact made between the Social Democratic Party and Liberal
Party during the 1980s. This formed the basis for the creation of the Liberal Democrats, who
currently assume the status of the third party within British parliamentary politics.
138 Nature and the State Apparatus
14
For an account of the greening of the opposition parties during the 1980s, see Garner (1996:
139–47) and Porritt and Winner (1988: 63–76).
Nature and the State Apparatus 139
This is certainly the case with regard to the UK Green Party. Its current
policies range from a need to re-evaluate the meaning of work through
140 Nature and the State Apparatus
15
See <http://www.greenparty.org.uk/issues> accessed 9 November 2005.
16
Interview with Jonathan Porritt conducted and transcribed by a research assistant under
the direction of Rhys Jones.
Nature and the State Apparatus 141
17
For a cautionary note on the credibility of the Green Party’s success within the European
elections, see McCormick (1991: 122).
18
Interview with Jonathan Porritt conducted and transcribed by a research assistant as part
of a research project under the direction of Rhys Jones.
142 Nature and the State Apparatus
of talks about forming an electoral pact between the Green Party and Plaid
Cymru within Ceredigion. A leading green activist at the time saw the 1989
result as a key catalyst for political accommodation between Plaid Cymru and
the Green Party: ‘It had a big inXuence I think from Plaid’s perspective . . . in
that we did ever so well . . . I was at the count and Cynog [DaWs] said to me
‘‘Look, you’ve really hammered us. We have to get together’’.’19
19
Interview conducted and transcribed by a research assistant as part of a research project
under the direction of Rhys Jones.
Nature and the State Apparatus 143
20
‘Plaid Cymru–Green agreement ‘‘creates winning combination’’ ’, Plaid Cymru/Ceredigion
and Pembroke North Green Party press release, 10 April 1991: Cynog DaWs papers (National
Library of Wales PCD, 10).
21
It is signiWcant that Simon Hughes, MP, following the heavy defeat suVered by the Alliance
in the 1987 general election, contemplated becoming a joint Liberal and Green Party candidate
(see Porritt and Winner 1988: 75).
22
Interview with Cynog DaWs conducted and transcribed by a research assistant as part of
a research project under the direction of Rhys Jones.
144 Nature and the State Apparatus
Candidate Votes
recalled how he felt ‘just uncomplicated joy at the result’. More locally, Alun
Williams, a Green Party activist stated during an interview that
There was a tremendous sort of jubilation, right across Ceredigion in lots of ways. I
remember . . . we had a huge great party after Cynog won and someone saying to me ‘do
you know I’ve lived here 20 years and this is the kind of thing I’ve always dreamt of’, that
sort of coming together of these ostensibly very diVerent cultures but diVerent cultures
which actually had quite a lot in common that wasn’t previously recognised, really.23
Cynog DaWs subsequently took up his position as the Wrst Plaid Cymru/
Green Party MP. On arriving at the House of Commons, he took every
opportunity to announce the fact that the Wrst Green Party candidate had
been elected to the UK Parliament.24 He also contributed in more concrete
terms to the development of green legislation. On 20 January 1995, he
co-sponsored the Home Energy Conservation Bill, which became law on 8
June 1995 (Friends of the Earth 1995a,b). On 20 March 1996, after the
dissolution of the Plaid/Green pact, Cynog DaWs introduced a Road TraYc
Reduction Bill to the House of Commons (Friends of the Earth 1996b).
Although the Bill stood no chance of becoming law, it provided a Wrm
parliamentary precedent for the subsequent Liberal Democrat Bill of 13
November 1996, which became law on 21 March 1997 (Friends of the
Earth 1996a, 1997). Not surprisingly, perhaps, in June 1993 Cynog DaWs
won the Green Magazine award for best newcomer to Parliament.
At one level, Cynog DaWs’s election to Parliament signalled a radical
re-evaluation of the place of nature within the political sub-apparatus of
the state. His policies ranged widely in terms of their scope and demonstrated
an engagement with a holistic vision of ecological politics. A substantial
document entitled Together: Building a Future, underlined the policy em-
phasis of the Plaid/Green partnership. The document’s themes included the
Rio summit, equal opportunities for women, global consumption, the NHS,
housing, devolution, agriculture, regional economic development, education,
the Welsh language, and transport. Many of these policies were combined
23
Interview with Alun Williams conducted and transcribed by a research assistant as part of
a research project under the direction of Rhys Jones.
24
Draft of Cynog DaWs’s maiden speech to the House of Commons, 11 May 1992: Cynog
DaWs papers (National Library of Wales PCD, 11–12).
Nature and the State Apparatus 145
after the 1992 general election into a more coherent single publication
entitled Towards a Green Welsh Future (Plaid Cymru and Green Party
Ceredigion and Pembroke North 1993). Within these various themes, we
witness an eVort to stay true to the ideals of a broad and all-encompassing
ecological politics. But at the same time, it is possible to maintain that Cynog
DaWs’ election as a joint Green Party and Plaid Cymru candidate actually
illustrates the precariousness of nature’s representation within the politics of
the UK state at this time. This point is made clearly by the fact that the
election of the Wrst Green Party MP was dependent upon the concatenation
of a range of contingent factors. The representation of ecological issues
within the political sub-apparatus of the British state also suVered as a result
of the Green Party’s status as a partner within a broader pact, whose other
member was a party that emphasized the territorial politics associated with
nationalism. Furthermore, there was a belief in some quarters that the Green
Party was being asked to compromise its ecological vision in order to sustain
its membership within the pact. Richard Bramhall, an opponent of the
Ceredigion coalition, for instance, argued that Plaid Cymru policy ran
contrary to Green Party policy, in that Plaid was committed to a traditional
growth economy, road-building, the Maastricht Treaty, nuclear energy,
blood sports, transport of live farm animals, and the Criminal Justice Act,
and that it was opposed to a land value tax. In addition, Bramhall (1994)
drew attention to the way in which Plaid Cymru’s linguistic and nationalist
parochialness ran contrary to the Green Party’s more international and
global ecological vision. Tellingly, the distrust of nationalist politics amongst
certain sections of the Green Party, along with a belief that their ecological
politics were being compromised as a result of their association with Plaid
Cymru, led to the break-up of the pact between the two parties.25 By the time
of the 1997 general election, Cynog DaWs stood—and was subsequently
elected with an enlarged majority—as a Plaid Cymru candidate. No Green
Party MPs have been elected to the UK Parliament since that short yet
signiWcant period at the beginning of the 1990s.
In this sense, the particular contingencies that were required in order to
elect one MP to the UK Parliament, the turbulent relationship between the
two parties within the pact, and their subsequent acrimonious split, we would
argue, illustrate the inherent diYculties associated with representing nature
within the political sub-apparatus of the UK state. Nature’s access to, and
representation within, the political sub-apparatus of the UK state, it seems, is
highly regulated and restricted. Established political parties, although keen to
promote their environmental credentials, have been, at best, only half-hearted
supporters of ecological concerns. Similarly, the UK Green Party has strug-
gled to make much of an imprint on political debate within the UK’s various
formal spaces of democracy. This does not mean that nature experiences the
25
For a discussion of the reasons behind this collapse, see Fowler and Jones (2005: 541–5).
146 Nature and the State Apparatus
Concluding comments
This chapter has focused on the relationship between national natures and
the modern state apparatus. From the 1970s onwards, there has been an
attempt to incorporate nature into various sub-apparatuses of the state: with
regard to the formation of regulatory agencies concerned with minimizing
ecological risk; in the context of those aspects of the state apparatus involved
in arbitrating between diVerent uses of nature; and with respect to the
representation of national natures within the political sub-apparatus of the
state. But while this process speaks of the growing extent of the association
between nature and the state apparatus, it does not necessarily reXect a
meaningful or far-reaching incorporation of ecological ideals into state
bureaucracies. We have already seen, both in the case of the New Zealand
RMA and in the Green Party’s limited electoral success in the UK, how
ecological politics was muted—almost had to be muted—in order gain access
to the state apparatus. Nature, conceived of in terms of a holistic ecological
politics, has struggled to be represented within the apparatus of the state. In
more philosophical terms, too, Latour has maintained that it is extremely
diYcult for nature to be fully represented within state bureaucracies and
politics. He has argued, for instance, that political ecology, while claiming
that it seeks to give voice to nature, has based its practices and ideologies on
a thoroughly humanized account of the natural world (Latour 1998: 228).
While such a misconception of its own stated aim is political ecology’s main
weakness, Latour maintains that its discussion of the mutual associations of
nature and political forms can also be its overarching strength. Political
ecology, thus re-conceived, can help to dissolve boundaries between the
political and the ecological and, we would argue, bring forth a more pro-
ductive imbrication of states and natures. This may well be a long-term aim
of political ecology but, for the present, nature’s incorporation into the state
apparatus takes place on highly uneven terms, being determined by the
latter’s political priorities and limited ecological vision.
26
See the discussion in <http://www.europeangreens.org/peopleandparties/members/germany.html>
accessed 20 May 2005.
6
To talk about technology when exploring the relationship between states and
nature may seem paradoxical. The paradoxical nature of this assignment is
twofold. First, many argue that to speak of the technological is to speak of
the anti-political—here technology is understood not as something of the
state, but as an external arena that can simultaneously be used by the
government to verify its policies, or, if unchecked, undermine the governing
capacities of politicians (Barry 2001: ch. 1). Others claim that technology is
the antithesis of nature—if nature is the un-produced eternal substratum of
existence, technology is a socio-cultural artefact, a fragment of produced
nature and a mechanism for ecological transformation (Luke 1996). Despite
this apparent conundrum, this chapter argues that technology provides a
crucial basis upon which many of the interplays between the state and nature
continue to be expressed. Within his recent book on the links between states,
government, and technologies—Political Machines—Andrew Barry (2001: 9)
suggests that we need to think of technologies in two related but distinct
ways. He argues that our Wrst recourse when considering technologies is often
to technological devices—or those labour-saving and labour-enhancing
gadgets, tools, instruments, and gizmos that make new socio-economic
practices possible and speed-up existing exercises (see also Harvey 2002).
Secondly, Barry discerns a broader understanding of technology, which
incorporates a wider set of procedures, rules, and calculations in and through
which a technological device is animated and put to use.
In this chapter we explore the technological devices and supporting tech-
nological infrastructures through which the contemporary politics of state–
nature relations are being played out. We interpret the role of technology
within state–nature relations in two main ways. First, we explore the ways in
148 Technological Development and the Cyborg State
which various technologies have been synthesized with and within the state
apparatuses in order to enhance governments’ capacities to manage nature.
The role of technology in facilitating the governance of nature can be
conceived of at a number of levels. It can, for example, be related to a
Marxist reading of technologies as tools/machines deployed in the physical
transformation of the natural world (Harvey 2002: 534). At another level, it
could also be interpreted in relation to the role of technologies in providing
the monitoring apparatuses and digital archives through which an increasing
amount of knowledge about the natural world can be channelled, or ‘brought
together’ within new ‘centres of calculation’ (Latour 1990; see also Law
1991). Technologies, however—particularly in relation to the ever-improving
capacity of micro-processing devices—can also enable the increasingly elab-
orate replication and simulation of nature and an associated capacity to
predict its regular transformation (see Kitchin and Dodge 2001). Secondly,
we recognize how certain ‘technological zones’—including laboratories,
cyberspaces, and trans-national technological ensembles—have threatened
the capacities of the modern state to regulate the transformation of the
natural world and to manage associated forms of ecological risk. In this
sense, we recognize the capacity of new, and in particular experimental,
technologies to both challenge the authority of states and to enable social
interventions in nature to slip beyond the Welds of power associated with
national governments. It is in this context that John Gray’s quote (2004: 14)
with which we began this chapter seems most prescient, as we are forced to
reconsider our instrumentalist assumptions about the human exploitation of
nature and embrace the uncomfortable idea that technology may well be
beyond political control.
This chapter presents an analysis of the opportunities for, and diYculties
of, governing nature within an inherently technological society. Techno-
logical innovations have enabled new forms of territorial power to be realized
and heightened degrees of centralization to be achieved over the natural
world on behalf of the state. At one and the same time, however, techno-
logical innovations have enabled the proliferation of a series of centres of
ecological calculation to be produced and new territorial zones to be con-
solidated which lie at a distance from state apparatus and routinely transect
the territorial borders of nations. In order to develop this particular perspec-
tive on state–nature relations, this chapter initially focuses on one site and
one moment of state–nature imbroglios—the Warren Spring Laboratory in
the UK.
Established to act as the UK state’s centre for monitoring atmospheric
environmental change, we explore how the Warren Spring Laboratory
became increasingly plugged into real-time environmental changes in the
UK through the elaboration of a complex national network of environmen-
tal monitoring technologies and procedures. Moreover, through an analysis
of the historical emergence of the Warren Spring Laboratory, this chapter
Technological Development and the Cyborg State 149
considers how the ecological data produced and marshalled through the use
of this centralized scientiWc institution has facilitated increasingly complex
territorial simulations of nature by the British state. These have, in turn,
enabled new forms of state intervention within the ecologies of the UK. This
particular moment of state–nature imbroglios is then contrasted with a
detailed consideration of the Weldon–Stupak Bill in the US, an act of
legislation that has been speciWcally designed to ban all forms of reproductive
and therapeutic human cloning in the US. It represents an attempt by the US
state to govern social interventions within microbiological natures, which
could potentially be practised in a range of biotechnology laboratories
throughout the US.
Given our concern with the operations of scientiWc laboratories, analysis
draws heavily on the insights of those writing on the politics of ‘tech-
noscience’ (Hables-Gray 1996; Haraway 1989, 1991, 1997, 2004a; Martin
1998). Drawing on the Wgure of the cyborg—a cybernetic organism which
fuses together the organic and technological, the body and the computer,
nature and technology—we claim that signiWcant analytical purchase can be
gained from understanding the state as a cyborg. Understood as a cyborg, we
argue that the state can be analysed as a political body that is technologically
fused with nature. In this context, it is possible to understand state–nature
relations not simply as a process by which the state acts on nature, but as the
contingent outcome of the technological networks that simultaneously make
state power over nature possible, while persistently undermining the ability
of the state to manage nature because of the complex ecological mutants (or
monsters) produced by these technological networks.
2
See also here Driver (1988), Flick (1980), and Osborne (1996) for more speciWc analyses of
the politics of environmental health reform in nineteenth-century Britain.
152 Technological Development and the Cyborg State
3
For more on the notion of ‘environmental governmentality’ see Darier (1996) and Luke
(1999).
Technological Development and the Cyborg State 153
The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution was one of the Wrst state
bodies to raise concerns about the ability of the UK pollution monitoring
network to deal with new threats to nature. The Royal Commission was an
154 Technological Development and the Cyborg State
4
For an eVective critical overview of the work of the Royal Commission on Environmental
Pollution, consult the work of Susan Owens (1994, 1999, 2003).
5
These initiatives would eventually lead to the creation of a UN-based Global Environmental
Monitoring System (GEMS). This initiative was further supplemented in Europe by the forma-
tion of a European Chemical Data Information Network.
Technological Development and the Cyborg State 155
6
See Barry (2001: 75–8) and his discussion of the politics surrounding the European Union’s
attempts to monitor the quality of bathing water.
7
For further information and an analysis of the National Survey of Air Pollution, see Hall
et al. (1975).
156 Technological Development and the Cyborg State
8
See the by-law made under the 1926 Public Health (Smoke Abatement) Act by Bradford
City Council (London County Council 1925–6). This by-law was a local attempt to try and
produce a quantitative measure of air pollution based partly on the duration of the pollution
event. It was enacted because of the lack of national guidance on air pollution measurement.
Technological Development and the Cyborg State 157
simpliWed (Scott 1998: 30–3). This simpliWed nature is stripped of its eco-
logical frame of reference to produce a Wgure, or datum, which can be entered
into a spreadsheet cell or a statistical equation. The simpliWcation of nature,
which national monitoring systems tends to produce, is captured well in the
distinction that the DoE makes between environmental monitoring and
environmental research:
The term ‘monitoring’ is used both in a wide and a narrow sense. In the wider usage it
means the repeated measurement of pollutant concentrations so that we can follow
changes over a period of time. In its more restricted sense the term is applied to the
regular measurement of pollutant levels, in relation to some standard, or in order to
judge the eVectiveness of a system of regulation and control. In neither case does it
encompass short-term studies which aim to identify relationships or causal factors:
such studies are a kind of research. (DoE 1974: 3)
The distinction established here, between monitoring as the repeated
measurement of one form of environmental output and research as an exercise
in placing an environmental output within a broader ecological frame of
Technological Development and the Cyborg State 159
9
See the Independent on Sunday (17 October 1993) and Barry (2001: 157). In addition to
questions being asked about the value of environmental monitoring in the UK, by 1992 the
British government had agreed to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This
agreement, which has subsequently been reWned by the Kyoto Protocol, commits the British
government not only to reducing the UK’s production of greenhouse gases (and in particular
carbon dioxide), but also requires that the UK demonstrates this action through internationally
validated environmental monitoring systems. Although the Kyoto agreement has not been
ratiWed by all signatories, the UK government is committed to reducing its level of greenhouse
gas emissions by 12.5% below 1990 levels by 2008. In addition, the UK has voluntarily commit-
ted itself to reducing emissions of carbon dioxide by 20% by 2010 (see DEFRA 2000).
160 Technological Development and the Cyborg State
10
All the government’s automated, non-automated, and carbon dioxide monitoring networks
have either been designed, operated, or quality assured by NETCEN (the National Environment
Technology Centre).
11
Supporting the automated data collection facilities are 1500 non-automatic centres, which
collect air quality data on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. With regard to carbon dioxide, there
are a staggering 723 sites—ranging from factories to government-run laboratories dedicated to
collecting data on carbon dioxide emissions.
12
See <http://www.airquality.co.uk/archive/index.php> accessed 12 September 2005.
Technological Development and the Cyborg State 161
Fig. 6.2 Automated air quality monitoring sites in the UK, March 2004.
Source: Reproduced with the permission of the Ordnance Survey. ! Crown Copyright.
All rights reserved. Licence number 100008429.
15
HR 2799, the Commerce and State Appropriations Bill, FY 2004.
16
For an intriguing analysis of the socio-cultural and political origins of the anti-abortion and
anti-cloning movement in middle America, see Franks (2004).
17
HR 534, the Human Cloning Prohibition Bill 2001 and 2003.
18
See National Right to Life ‘Congress Bans Patents on Human Embryos—NRLC-backed
Weldon Amendment survives BIO Attacks’, at <http://www.nrlc.org/killing_emryos/index.html>
accessed 22 November 2004.
Technological Development and the Cyborg State 165
19
HR 2799, op. cit.; see also National Right to Life, op cit.
20
Letter dated 11 September 2003 from BIO President Carl. B Feldbaum to C. W. Young,
Chairman, Committee on Appropriations, at <http://www.nrlc.org/Killing_Embryos/
Human_Patenting/index.html> accessed 21 June 2006.
166 Technological Development and the Cyborg State
and its history. The term ‘clone’ was Wrst coined in 1963 by J.B.S. Haldane21
to refer to any form of direct biological/genetic copy of a plant, animal, or
organism. Following signiWcant advances in genetic science and biotechno-
logical techniques during the 1970s and 1980s, a range of diVerent organisms
and animals have now been cloned. Perhaps the most celebrated events were
the cloning of cattle in the mid-1980s by Danish scientist Steen Willadsen and
the cloning of Dolly the sheep at the Roslyn Institute in Scotland in 1996.
While the ethics of animal cloning were a matter of concern for many
governments, it was only when the prospect of human cloning became a
realistic scientiWc goal that state intervention within the cloning debate
became prominent on the political agenda. Concerns over the moral impli-
cations of human cloning have been evident ever since the earliest develop-
ments in gene science made the prospect of cloning a human a distant, but
nevertheless plausible, possibility.22 It was not, however, until the mid-to-late
1990s, as species similar in their genetic make-up to humans (like rhesus
monkeys) were cloned, that states Wrst took oYcial measures to regulate and
control human cloning within their borders. The gradual response of states
to the perceived ethical threat of human cloning reXects a broader historical
struggle between governments and experimental science described by Bruno
Latour (1993: 15–32). According to Latour, the establishment of the modern
laboratory in the seventeenth century represented the creation of new centres
of truth and power lying beyond the formal apparatus of the state (see also
Shapin and SchaVer 1985). As arenas of scientiWc, not political, consensus,
laboratories have consistently challenged the power of the state and facili-
tated the production of a range of ‘fabricated objects’ over which states have
had to struggle to establish ordered rule (Latour 1993: 21). It is now clear that
with advances in the technologies and procedures of bioscience laboratories,
cloned material is rapidly becoming the most diYcult fabricated object to
govern in the contemporary world. In the context of the emerging possibility
of human cloning, it remains unclear what sort of ethical position and
political stance states should take on these issues. Consequently, following
the advice of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, President Bill
Clinton ordered a Wve-year moratorium in 1997, stopping the supply of
federal funding to any form of human cloning research. The British govern-
ment has, however, adopted a more moderate position, allowing, for
example, the Wrst patent to be granted to the Geron Corporation for a cloned
‘early-stage’ human embryo in 2000.
In many ways the dilemmas facing modern states concerning the complex
morality of human cloning reXect a new front that has been emerging more
21
In a speech given in 1963, entitled ‘Biological possibilities for the human species of the next
ten-thousand years’.
22
See in particular here David Rorvik’s book, In His Image: The Cloning of a Man (1978).
This book sparked a widespread international debate about the rights and wrongs of human
cloning.
Technological Development and the Cyborg State 167
generally between society and nature. The political signiWcance of this new
front has been expressed most poignantly in the publication of Bill McKib-
ben’s book Enough: Genetic Engineering and the End of Human Nature
(2004). The importance of this book lies not so much in what it says but
more in what it represents. Fifteen years before its publication McKibben
wrote a highly inXuential book entitled The End of Nature (1989). At the
beginning of his contemporary critical analysis of genetic science, McKibben
compares the two books:
Fifteen years ago I wrote a book called The End of Nature. It dealt with the ways that
one set of technologies—those that burn fossil fuels—were leading us into a new
dangerous, and impoverished relationship with the planet we’d been born into. In
a sense, this book follows from that one. It too posits that we stand at a threshold: if
we aggressively pursue any or all of several new technologies now before us, we may alter
our relationship not with the rest of nature but with ourselves. (McKibben 2004: ix)
23
For more on the cultural and scientiWc constructions of bodies as social entities, see the
excellent work of Emily Martin (1991, 1992).
168 Technological Development and the Cyborg State
In this context, although the Weldon amendment can be (and perhaps should
be) interpreted as part of a broad attack on the morality of cloning, as a
political act, it was designed at least in the short term to prevent the prolif-
eration of therapeutic forms of cloning.
It is in relation to discussions of therapeutic modes of cloning that the
contemporary cloning debate in the US has become embroiled in the longer-
established and divisive debates surrounding abortion (Franks 2004: ch. 9).
The links between therapeutic cloning and the abortion debate in the US can
be clearly discerned in Kenneth L. Connor’s comments. The anti-abortion
lobby in the US (as elsewhere in the world) is opposed to abortion because it
argues that human life begins after conception and not after birth. In this
context, the protection of the unborn pursued by the anti-abortion move-
ment has clear implications within the Weld of therapeutic cloning. Just as the
anti-abortion movement has protested against the termination of ‘unwanted’
foetuses, it is now becoming actively engaged in preventing what it describes
as the ‘killing’ of early-stage foetuses for medical research. At the centre of
this debate is the distinction between a cloned ‘egg’ and a cloned ‘embryo’.
According to many working within the biotechnology industry, a cloned egg
is a legitimate object for scientiWc research and its legitimacy stems from the
fact that it is not yet human. For many in the now heavily intertwined anti-
cloning and anti-abortion lobby, any egg or tissue with the capacity to
produce human life is an embryo, and as such is not an object for any form
170 Technological Development and the Cyborg State
24
See here Whatmore’s (2002: ch. 7) analysis of the construction of human ethical commu-
nities (often within the state) and the associated exclusion of nature from designation as an
‘ethical subject’.
25
See here President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Personhood Proclamation’ (made on 14 January
1988) in which he opposed abortion and discussed the rights of all humans to life. This
proclamation reXected the President’s own inability to alter the legislation governing abortion,
but his desire nevertheless to provide moral leadership on the issue.
26
See here the Executive OYce of the President’s ‘Statement of Administration Policy’ (26
February 2003) in which President Bush oVers his support for the Weldon–Stupak Bill (HR 534).
Technological Development and the Cyborg State 171
a political voice for both small and large biotechnology outlets. It now
represents some 503 biotechnology Wrms and has brought the activities of
the Industrial Biotechnology Association and the Association of Biotechnol-
ogy Companies together within one organizational framework.27 Its stated
role is to work with/lobby Congress and the Food and Drug Administration
on issues relating to the pricing of new drugs and the regulation of biotech
research, and to help to shape public opinion on key bio-ethical issues.28 In
the context of this stated mandate, on 11 September 2003, Carl B. Feldbaum,
President of the BIO, wrote to the Chairman of the Committee on Appro-
priations to challenge Weldon’s proposed amendment to House Resolution
2799. In this letter, Feldbaum talked about the importance of preserving the
economic dynamism of America’s biotechnology industry and complained
about the wording of the Welden amendment. According to Feldbaum, the
failure of the Weldon amendment to deWne what it meant by the term ‘human
organism’ (a deWnitional conundrum that we have already seen lies at the
heart of the modern division of society and nature) could unnecessarily
jeopardize future medical research and development.29
To understand the concerns of BIO with the Weldon amendment more
fully, it is important to reXect upon the role and functions of patents.
According to Whatmore (2002: 60–1), patents are interesting ‘property
devices’, which are becoming increasingly implicated in the problematic
regulation of the boundary between the social and natural worlds. The
BIO actually provides a useful deWnition of precisely what a patent is:
A patent is an agreement between the government and an inventor whereby, in
exchange for the inventor’s complete disclosure of the invention, the government
gives the inventor the right to exclude others from using the invention in certain ways.
Note that the property right provided in a patent is quite diVerent from what we
typically think of when we own property. What is granted is not the right to make,
use, oVer for sale, sell or import, but the right to stop others from making, using,
oVering for sale, selling or importing the invention.30
As this deWnition reveals, patents are a form of proprietorial contract be-
tween innovators and the state. Unlike the other proprietorial functions of
the state, however, patents are not concerned with the territorial defence of
spatial forms, but with the protection of intellectual rights. The patent as a
property device or technology is important because it embodies a form of
state intervention that enables economic, technological, and scientiWc innov-
ations to Xourish. The point is that according to classical economic theory, in
order for the creative energies of a free-market economic system to be
realized, the freedom of the market has to be curtailed. The curtailing of
27
See BIO’s website at <http://www.bio.org/index.asp?stay¼yes> accessed 2 December 2005.
28
Ibid.
29
Letter dated 11 September 2003 from BIO President Carl B. Feldbaum, op. cit.
30
BIO at <http://www.bio.org/ip/primer/patent.asp> accessed 14 December 2004.
172 Technological Development and the Cyborg State
31
BIO at <http://www.bio.org/ip/primer/patent.asp> accessed 14 December 2004.
32
Article 1, section 8, clause 8. This clause of the Constitution reads: ‘To promote the
progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the
exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries’ (quoted on the BIO wesbite at <http://
www.bio.org/ip/primer/patent.asp> accessed 14 December 2004).
33
This often-used quote is actually taken from the Committee Papers associated with the 1952
Patent Act.
34
Title 35 USC [United States Code] 101.
Technological Development and the Cyborg State 173
35
BIO website at <http://www.bio.org/ip/primer/patent.asp> accessed 14 December 2004.
36
Ibid.
37
For more on the changing use of discourses of nature within legal dispute see Delaney
(2002).
174 Technological Development and the Cyborg State
38
George W. Bush has threatened to use his veto powers if Congress decides to support
embryonic stem cell research: see BBC News, ‘Bush would veto stem cell bill’, 20 May 2005 at
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4567253.stm> accessed 12 June 2006.
Technological Development and the Cyborg State 175
Conclusion
In this chapter we have considered the impacts that technology has had on
emerging forms of state–nature relations in the twentieth and twenty-Wrst
centuries. Within these explorations we have seen how, when territorially
marshalled, technological devices can greatly enhance a state’s ability to
monitor and control the natural world. In the case of environmental mon-
itoring in the UK, for example, we saw how the formation of new techno-
logical infrastructures has enabled government departments to become
increasingly plugged into their territorial natures. The use of technology as
an instrumental tool for state intervention in nature has created a new
capacity to produce knowledge about changes in the natural world. As part
of this process, however, the increasing use of digitized computer technolo-
gies and complex software codes within British environmental monitoring
appears to be heightening the potential for humans to become increasingly
isolated from the machinic processes by which ecological knowledge is now
created. In the second case study, we observed how technological develop-
ments—especially those associated with experimental science and private
laboratories—can challenge the authority of the state. In our discussions of
the emergence of therapeutic cloning in the US, it was possible to discern how
new technologies can produce hybrid objects—like a cloned human egg/
embryo—which destabilize the systems of socio-natural order through
which states govern. What perhaps interests us most about the case of
therapeutic cloning in the US is that the related focus on the relationship
between a fertilized egg and a human embryo arguably represents the most
important moment of all when it comes to socio-natural relations. The point
at which a fertilized egg stops being an egg and becomes an embryo is to some
the precise moment when humans cease to be a patentable part of nature
and become part of political society. What is signiWcant about this crucial
moment of socio-natural relations, in the context of this book, is that again it
appears to be the state that is called upon to arbitrate on the socio-economic
and ethical complexities of this situation.
While we have not explicitly developed the idea of a cyborg state—which
we mentioned at the opening of this chapter—within our discussions and
case studies, to us the idea of the cyborg state is an intriguing one. It is
intriguing at one level because of the ways it immediately draws attention to
the imbrications of technology and nature within the acts of governing. But
beyond this obvious association, the notion of the cyborg state also suggests
a series of fascinating real and metaphorical ways in which we can think
about the relationships between states, technology, and nature. For example,
can the idea contained within Haraway’s idea of a cyborg or cybernetic
command and control of biological processes be extended to include an
analysis of how states program nature within their laws, plans, and proclama-
tions? It is also important to consider whether the idea of a cyborg state could
176 Technological Development and the Cyborg State
social and economic development, in this section we want to argue that urban
policies are becoming an increasingly important context within which states
are intervening, and governing, the natural world.
Our focus on the relationship between cities and nature may appear peculiar,
given the historical form that urban–nature relations have taken. We believe
that the apparent peculiarity of our focus stems from two factors: Wrst, the
modern dichotomy that has been constructed between cities and nature; and
secondly, the role of modern industrial cities in the exploitative transformation
of the natural world. In the Wrst instance cities have long been constructed as the
puriWed social spaces of modern civilization, which have been sealed oV from
the violent corruptions of nature.1 Cities have in some senses become synonym-
ous with progress, enlightenment, and civility, while the exurban spaces of
nature have been characterized as backward, feral, and immoral. This ideo-
logical distinction between cities and nature has been supported by modern
states in a variety of ways, ranging from laws governing the presence of animals
on city streets (Philo 1995, 1998; Philo and Wilbert 2000), to Wnancial support
for projects devoted to the urbanization of spaces of nature (Binde 1999). At a
second level, however, a parallel set of ideological constructions and material
relations have depicted urban–nature relations in a very diVerent way. Despite
modern attempts to construct an ideological gulf between cities and nature,
cities remain crucial industrial epicentres through which nature has been used,
exploited, and transformed (see Keil and Graham 1999; Whitehead 2005). As
key spatial hubs within the industrial transformation of the natural world, cities
have been reviled within the environmental movement as dystopic centres of
pollution, vice, and environmental greed.2 Modern states have played an
important role in supporting these ideologies of urban nature. Through teams
of medical experts, planners, and nascent sociologists, states have sought to
address the socio-environmental problems of cities by reconnecting them to the
healing powers of nature (Gandy 2002: ch. 2; Gottleib 1993: 55–9; Harvey
2003b; Swyngedouw and Kaika 2000). From the eighteenth century onwards,
we consequently see the rapid proliferation of urban parkland, environmental
reform programmes, and back-to-nature initiatives, all designed to improve the
quality of urban life and the health and well-being of metropolitan residents.
It is on the basis of these historical reXections that we claim that cities have
provided crucial spatial contexts in and through which the state has sought to
control and regulate socio-natural relations. In many ways the proclivity of
states to use cities to govern nature has been given extra signiWcance in the
contemporary world. The latest United Nations statistics suggest that
although cities now provide a home for approximately half of our planet’s
population, within one generation current urban populations will have
1
See here Binde (1999) for a particular historical and geographical example of this ideological
process; see also Kaika (2005: ch. 2).
2
See Gottleib (1993: ch. 2) on the relationship between the environmental movement in the
US and urban industrialism.
180 Exploring Post-National Natures
doubled (United Nations Centre for Human Settlements 2001; see also
Whitehead 2003). It is on the basis of Wgures such as these that states and
international bodies like the UN are now focusing on cities as key hubs of
post-millennial socio-economic relations with the natural world. It is after all
cities that are consuming the majority of the world’s energy needs, cities that
are the largest sources of atmospheric pollution, and cities that are the
dominant consumers of water. Much has already been written on the role
of cities as economic and Wnancial centres in and through which a new
geography of globalization is being forged (see Brenner 2004). The use of
the city as a spatial focus for contemporary state nature is perhaps expressed
most clearly in the concept and practices of the sustainable city. The idea of
the sustainable city Wnds its origins in the international discourses of sustain-
able development, which Wrst started to emerge in the 1970s. In essence, the
idea of sustainable urban development takes the principle of a balance being
established between social justice, economic growth, and environmental
conservation, which is emphasized within the discourses of sustainable
development, and applies it to urban space. While much has already been
written on the emergence of sustainable urban development and its associ-
ated planning and policy regimes,3 little attention has been given to the role
of the sustainable city as a governmental link between the state and nature. In
order to explore the role of sustainable cities in the constitution of contem-
porary state–nature relations, the remainder of this section focuses on the
development of a sustainable cities inquiry in Australia. As this section
shows, attempts to govern nature through cities raises signiWcant questions
concerning which natures should be framed by the state and the most
appropriate tools to use in this political process.
3
For an extensive overview of diVerent practical and philosophical interpretations of the
sustainable city, see Girard et al. (2003).
4
Medialaunch, 2003 Sustainable Cities Inquiry Launched at Sandhurst Club Wednesday
August 24, 105.
Exploring Post-National Natures 181
cities in the nation. If nature played an important role in shaping the early
geography of Australian urbanism, it was not long before these newly emer-
ging cities started to shape their surrounding natural environments. The early
expansion of many Australian cities was based upon the supply of agricultural
goods from their pastoral hinterlands (Forster 2004: 1–10).7 The ready supply
of pastoral products such as wool, livestock, and wheat saw Australian cities
develop into centres of expertise within the processing and transformation of
the produce of nature. According to Cronon (1991), agricultural cities (like
Australia’s early colonial settlements) provide markets and a relative concen-
tration of the expert skills and technology needed to transform agricultural
products. Through large-scale investments in grain mills, slaughterhouses,
and even lumberyards, agricultural cities become crucial spatial interfaces, or
7
Due to the relatively late timing of industrialization in Australia, the country has never really
had a signiWcant subsistence agricultural sector. With no major peasant agricultural systems,
Australian agriculture has always been geared towards commercial framing. It was in the socio-
economic context of the almost immediate emergence of commercial agriculture that Australia’s
towns and cities developed as market places and spaces of exchange for agricultural goods
(see here Neutze 1977: ch. 1).
Exploring Post-National Natures 183
9
We are thinking particularly here of William Light’s famous plan for Adelaide in 1836.
10
For an excellent overview of Australian urban planning history, see Hamnett and Freestone
(2000).
11
The Garden City Movement was really galvanized by the writings and philosophies of
Ebenezer Howard. Interestingly, Peter Hall (1996: 89) is quick to point out that Howard’s idea of
a Garden City was far from unique or wholly original. It appears, for instance, that Howard
himself had been heavily inXuences by Light’s vision for Adelaide in the nineteenth century.
Exploring Post-National Natures 185
One of the most consistent and inXuential critics of post-war urban devel-
opment in Australia was Max Neutze. As head of the Urban Research Unit
at the Australian National University, Neutze was highly critical of the
wastefulness and pollution-ridden conditions associated with many Austra-
lian cities.12 Crucially, in his critique of Australian urbanism, Neutze (1977:
ch. 8) called for greater federal state involvement in urban planning and
management.13 In many ways the writings and ideas of Neutze underpin
many of the goals and desires of the contemporary SCI. Up until the
Whitlam Labour government (of 1973–5), urban policies had been largely
coordinated through state and local governments (see Forster 2004: 22).14
Given the emerging scale of the urban-environmental crisis facing Australia,
however, it was felt by writers such as Neutze that urban issues had reached
far beyond the remit of any one state or local government jurisdiction. It was
because of this that the Whitlam administration created the federal Depart-
ment of Urban and Regional Development and placed the governance of
cities Wrmly back on the political agenda of the nation-state. In partnership
with state and local government, this new department started to shape urban
development through Wnancial inducements and the enforcement of existing
town planning legislation. While representing a landmark moment within
Australian federal involvement in urban spaces, the Department of Urban
and Regional Development deployed a fairly conventional approach to the
governance of cities. Utilizing land purchases, development orders, and
Wnancial inducement mechanisms the department (in partnership with state
authorities) sought to control urban–nature relations by manipulating met-
ropolitan spatial expansion. While relatively successful in the short term,
such forms of federal interventions were to prove ineVective at governing the
types of urban–nature relations that became synonymous with Australian
cities at the end of the twentieth century.
12
See Otago University, ‘Max Neutze 1934–2000 Urban Researcher and University
Professor’ at <http://www.library.otago.ac.nz/exhibitions/rhodes_scholars/max_neutze.html>
accessed 11 November 2005.
13
Neutze envisaged a decentralized pattern of urban development, which would reduce car
dependency in Australia and improve the general living conditions associated with urban areas.
While he was primarily concerned with improving the social conditions of urban life (see Otago
University, op cit.), his ideas would have a profound impact on the role of the federal govern-
ment in managing urban–nature relations in Australia.
14
The main form of federal intervention in urban space before the early 1970s came through
the Department of Post-war Reconstruction. Before the Whitlam government, federal interven-
tion in urban policy was restricted to telephonic and postal services provisions and airport
policies (Neutze 1977: 224).
186 Exploring Post-National Natures
These sentiments illustrate how the Sustainable Cities Inquiry reXects the
latest expression within the long historical struggle between Australian cities
and Australian nature. At the heart of this struggle is a desire to conserve
Australian ecological heritage while not undermining the ‘Australian’s way
of life’. As with any reference to national lifestyles, it is diYcult to ascertain
within the literature and plans surrounding the Inquiry precisely what an
Exploring Post-National Natures 187
Australian way of life is. Looking more closely through the various submis-
sions to the Inquiry, however, it is possible to discern what this lifestyle might
entail. Despite passing references to Aboriginal cultures and needs, it is clear
that the Australian way of life prioritized within the Inquiry is distinctively
white and metropolitan in its style and substance. It is a lifestyle that is tied
into a range of Australian national myths regarding the openness and free-
doms of Australian society (which is mirrored of course in the open, spatial
expansiveness of the nation), which are associated with an entrepreneurial
and industrious post-colonial culture. The conundrum the Inquiry conse-
quently sought to address is how to preserve this supposedly distinctive set of
cultural traditions, while also conserving a series of natural assets which,
while often threatened by the expansionist logics of metropolitan life, are also
an intrinsic part of Australia’s heritage.
The SCI was established primarily to gather intelligence on behalf of the
Commonwealth government as to how urban development in Australia
could be made to be more socially and ecologically sustainable. In order to
gather this intelligence the Standing Committee on Environment and Heri-
tage (2003) initially produced a discussion paper outlining the key issues
facing Australian cities and setting out a series of questions regarding the
future direction which urban development in the country should take. This
paper was circulated to a range of diVerent interested parties—including
urban planners, architects, engineers, conservationists, transport policy-
makers, and energy supply oYcers—who provided written submissions
responding to its ideas and recommendations.15 This process was followed
by a series of public hearings, which were held throughout Australia.16 These
public hearings were chaired and led by members of the Standing Committee
on Environment and Heritage and provided a context within which a range
of experts could be consulted and questioned on what they perceived to be
the best strategies for achieving sustainable development in Australian cities.
By locating these hearings within a range of diVerent Australian cities, the
Standing Committee hoped to be able to exploit good practices within
particular cities and thus promote them at a national level. In all 192 written
submissions were received by the Inquiry and Wfteen public hearings con-
vened. These hearings were supported by inspection visits on behalf of the
Committee to diVerent urban projects in Australia and a series of ‘roundtable
events’ in and though which discussions over the most appropriate strategies
for sustainable urban development could be held (Parliament of the Com-
monwealth of Australia 2005: 24).
15
Electronic versions of the submissions are available online at: <http://www.aph.gov.au/
house/committee/environ/cities/subs.htm> accessed 21 November 2005.
16
Full transcripts of these public hearings are available at: <http://www.aph.gov.au/house/
committee/environ/cities/hearings.htm> accessed 21 November 2005.
188 Exploring Post-National Natures
The initial discussion paper outlined the speciWc objectives of the Inquiry.
These were to consider:
1 the environmental and social impacts of sprawling urban development;
2 the major determinants of urban settlement patterns and desirable pat-
terns of development for the growth of Australian cities;
3 a ‘blueprint’ for ecologically sustainable patterns of settlement, with par-
ticular reference to eco-eYciency and equity in the provision of services
and infrastructure;
4 measures to reduce the environmental, social, and economic costs of
continuing urban expansion; and
5 mechanisms for the Commonwealth to bring about urban development
reform and promote ecologically sustainable patterns of settlement.
(House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment and
Heritage 2003: 3)
This broad set of objectives reveals the growing governmental ambitions of
the Australian national state to order urban space. In contrast to the rela-
tively limited forms of federal intervention within urban areas evident since
the end of the Second World War, the federal state now appears to want to
plan urban development in a much more holistic and integrated way. In light
of these ambitions we argue that the SCI reXects a kind of mobile ‘centre of
calculation’ through which the federal state is attempting to absorb a range
of strategies, tools, and technologies that could be used to govern its metro-
politan districts.
remote wilderness spaces that occur at great distances from cities and civil-
ization. However, within Australian state and federal policies bushland has
a very speciWc meaning. In New South Wales, for example, the State Envir-
onmental Planning Policy deWnes Bush as ‘land on which there is vegetation
which is either a remainder of the natural vegetation of the land or, if altered,
is still representative of the structure and Xoristics of the natural vegeta-
tion’.17 In some instances bushland can be deWned beyond associated vege-
tation to include soils, rocks, and stones.18 When understood in these more
speciWc terms, the Bush is perhaps best thought of as a remnant of Australia’s
Wrst nature—or nature that exists in a state that has not been signiWcantly
altered by human intervention.
There are two important implications of understanding bushland as eco-
logical remnants of Wrst nature. First, it alerts us to the role of the Bush
within Australian national foundation legends and myths. At one level, it is
important within the Australian imagination because of its association
with a primordial ecological past. As the work of Kay SchaVer (1990),
however, illustrates, the Bush is also an important part of the story of the
Australian nation’s struggle against a harsh and often treacherous environ-
ment, and the victories of the bushman and the colonizer.19 The preservation
of bushland on both counts appears important to the conservation of a
very particular sense of Australian heritage. Secondly, this ‘residual’ deWni-
tion means that bushland is not something that is necessarily located at
a distance from large metropolitan centres. The large number of urban
bushland preservation councils currently operating in Australia, for example,
attests to the fact that these facets of residual, Wrst nature can exist
either within or on the fringes of urban centres. It is precisely because of
this often-close spatial association between bushlands and cities that the SCI
explored how urban policy could be used as a means to protect, regulate, and
conserve the particular cultural and ecological values associated with bush-
land areas.
The nature of urban bushland relations in Australia was expressed most
clearly by the Chief Executive of Engineers Australia at a public hearing in
Canberra:
Increasing population, the movement of people from the Bush to the coast and the
recent property boom in Australia have all had impacts upon urban expansion.
17
Nature Conservancy Council New South Wales 2005 at: <http://www.nccnsw.org.au/
bushland/topics/deWnition/> accessed 23 November 2005.
18
Ibid.
19
In this volume, SchaVer describes the construction of an Australia national identity that is
deWned in relation to the ability to survive the adversities of nature. SigniWcantly, as SchaVer
recognizes, this national identity is typically associated with the masculine stereotypes of the
bushman—this, of course, tends to have a marginalizing inXuence on the role that women are
ascribed in Australian cultural history.
190 Exploring Post-National Natures
Australian cities are experiencing signiWcant new urban development and redevelop-
ment in existing suburbs.20
The often unregulated suburban expansion of Australian cities is of course
not an unusual feature of contemporary urbanization. In Australia, however,
such forms of spatial expansion have been linked to the increasing erosion of
peripheral bushlands, leaving fragments of Bush surviving within urban
districts. The pernicious eVects of urban expansion on bushlands tend to be
experienced in four main ways (see Nature Conservancy Council of New
South Wales 1997: ch. 2):
1 Urban expansion can lead directly to Bush clearances, whereby remnant
ecologies are deliberately removed to make way for new urban development.
2 Incremental urban expansion within limited belts can, while not leading to
the complete destruction of Bush, undermine the ecological balance of a
bushland system and weaken the integrity of the environment as a whole.
3 The consolidation, or inbuilding, of existing urban districts can remove
fragments of Bush that have previously survived urban expansion.
4 A much overlooked dimension of the urban erosion of bushland is that of
‘Bush degradation’, which essentially results from the spillover eVects of
urban development. These range from the impacts of stormwater drainage
on bushland soil to the damage that urban-based chemical pollution can
cause to the Xora and wildlife of the Bush.
In addition to the value of bushland to the Australian national conscious-
ness, the contemporary loss of Bush as part of the quartet of processes
described above has been opposed for a variety of diVerent reasons. The
primary argument made for the preservation of bushland tends to pertain to
its role in preserving biodiversity. Accordingly, the aforementioned State
Environmental Planning Policy (Bushland in Urban Areas)21 for New South
Wales states:
Remnant bushland areas can play an important part in the conservation of plant and
animal species, particularly in maintaining representative samples of plant communi-
ties over their whole range. They provide permanent or temporary habitat for wildlife,
particularly for birds. While their habitat value depends on the area’s size, location
and general condition, numbers of small bushland areas linked together can act as
wildlife corridors, allowing for the movement of many species, particularly non-Xying
mammals. (Quoted in Nature Conservancy Council of New South Wales 1997:
foreword)
In this sense, it is clear that in addition to embodying an important fragment
of primordial nature, bushland also provides a crucial ecological context
20
Commonwealth Government of Australia, House of Representatives Standing Committee
on Environment and Heritage—Reference: Sustainable Cities, Thursday, 31 March 2005,
Canberra (OYcial Committee Hansard, Canberra, 2005), EH 1.
21
SEPP 19.
Exploring Post-National Natures 191
within which a range of natural objects and systems depend. In relation to the
intrinsic biological value of the Bush, it is also argued that bushland can
provide an important context for scientiWc research and education:
Natural areas may be used as living laboratories for the study of subjects such as
biology, zoology, ecology and biogeography. Some contain important geological
formations. The existence of these areas within cities and towns is valuable for
educational purposes since they are readily accessible to schools, universities and
adult education centers. (Quoted in Nature Conservancy Council of New South
Wales 1997: foreword)
As living laboratories, it is also clear that the in the long term bushlands
could have signiWcant economic value within the development of Australian
bioscience and genetic research.
Given the value attributed to bushland in Australia, it should perhaps
come as little surprise that a number of prominent Bush preservation groups
(including Bush Forever and Save the Bush) now operate in the country.
These groups and campaigns have been calling for more concerted state
intervention in Bush conservation programmes. At present Australian bush-
land is regulated and controlled through a series of diVerent policies and acts
of legislation. These policies include the National Strategy for the Conserva-
tion of Biological Diversity, the Environmental Planning and Assessment
Act 1979, and the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974. Given the link
between bushland and urban areas, many campaign groups have been calling
for national policies targeted more speciWcally at urban bushland. Where
urban bushland policies do currently exist in Australia, they tend to be
addressed at a state rather than a federal level. Prominent examples of
state-led urban bushland initiatives include Perth’s Bush Forever Strategy
and New South Wales’ Urban Bushland Committee. Many of these state-
based Bush initiatives want greater federal involvement and guidance on
urban bushland management. There are two main reasons for this. First,
and at a practical level, federal state involvement in urban bushland policy is
seen as important because of the federal ownership issues that surround
many Bush areas. Secondly, the involvement of the federal state is believed
to be particularly advantageous when urban bushland relations cross over
and intersect state boundaries. It was in the light of these issues that the SCI
sought to explore the diVerent ways in which the federal state could marshal
urban bushland preservation policy at an all-Australian level.
At a public hearing in Perth (Western Australia) on 31 March 2005, the SCI
sought to explore the potential for urban-based bushland management through
consultation with members of the Urban Bushland Council for Western Aus-
tralia.22 The Inquiry’s focus on Western Australia stems from two factors: Wrst,
22
Commonwealth Government of Australia, House of Representatives Standing Committee
on Environment and Heritage—Reference: Sustainable Cities, Thursday, 31 March 2005, Perth
(OYcial Committee Hansard, Canberra, 2005).
192 Exploring Post-National Natures
Perth’s status as a biodiversity ‘hotspot’; and secondly, the prominent role of the
Bush Forever campaign in the state. While the Inquiry was keen to learn
the practices of bushland conservation in Perth, what most interests us about
the discussion at the public hearing are the concerns that were raised between the
issues of national heritage, biodiversity, and nature conservation. One represen-
tative of the Urban Bushland Council of Western Australia explained the
importance of bushland in and around Perth in the following terms:
We know that this region is biodiverse and rich because most of the species here—75
to 80 per cent of the plants that occur in this south-west region—do not occur
anywhere else on the face of the earth. That means they are endemic to the region.
There are some species endemic to the metropolitan region.23
Urban expansion in Perth and associated forms of Bush clearance are obvi-
ously a major threat to the area’s biological diversity and in extreme events
could lead to species extinction events. It was in the context of the threat to the
area’s unique biodiversity that the Urban Bushland Council for Western
Australia, and the associated Bush Forever campaign, rose to national prom-
inence in the Australia. In the Inquiry’s hearings into urban bushland manage-
ment, however, the meaning and nature of biodiversity came under question.
Following the presentation of the Urban Bushland Council for Western
Australia’s submission to the Inquiry, a member of the Standing Committee
on Environment and Heritage, who had travelled to Perth, questioned the
notion of biodiversity:
I want to test two propositions. My observation is that on the eastern seaboard—
Sydney, Melbourne and my home town of Geelong—there is an increase in vegetation
in the urban area with the introduction of urban population and the introduction of
trees . . . given that generally speaking there is more vegetation in an urban situation
with the urban dweller, how do you respond to that situation.24
The point being made was that with the introduction of an increasingly
diverse array of urban gardens, parkland areas, and woodlands, urban
expansion was a cause of an increase in, not an erosion of, biodiversity. The
underlying sentiment within this observation was the question of why the
federal government should become involved in the management of urban
biodiversity when all urban areas have intrinsic forms of biodiversity associ-
ated with them. In response, the Urban Bushland Council for Western Aus-
tralia representatives reasserted that urban expansion had caused a loss of
vegetation cover. Unperturbed, the federal government representative asked:
What evidence have you got for that? If you look at the total urban situation, if you
just Xy over it and have a look at the amount of vegetation there is there in terms of
trees in backyards et cetera, and compare it with the former.25
23
Commonwealth Government of Australia, House of Representatives Standing Committee
on Environment and Heritage—Reference: Sustainable Cities, Thursday, 31 March 2005, Perth
(OYcial Committee Hansard, Canberra, 2005). EH 44.
24 25
Ibid, EH 44. Ibid, EH 45.
Exploring Post-National Natures 193
In these sentiments we see the relationship between urban space, the Bush,
and biodiversity starting to be reconWgured. The issue is whether the aggre-
gate increase in biological assets associated with the artiWcially generated
ecological spaces of cities can act as a counter-balance to the loss of
biodiversity associated with the metropolitan despoliation of bushland. In
riposte, the Urban Bushland Council for Western Australia defended its
interpretation of biodiversity:
A lot of that [artiWcial urban biodiversity] is not original; a lot of that is introduced
species, which require looking after. The original species looked after themselves here
for millions and millions of years . . . in technical terms biodiversity has a very speciWc
meaning . . . if people plant jarrah trees and tuarts, which grow naturally in this part of
the world and are good to have in your garden, that is a good thing to do. But we are
talking about the remnants of the original vegetation.26
The crucial thing to notice within these debates is that despite the argument
that was made for the preservation of bushland because of its associated
biodiversity, it is not biodiversity but the preservation of remnant ecologies
that continues to inform Bush conservation in ecology. For example, it is
possible to imagine the construction of a city—replete with zoological gar-
dens and parks—that was far more biologically diverse than any piece of
bushland. This city could, however, be built potentially anywhere in the
world. But the preservation of bushland in Australia continues to be pre-
Wgured by a desire to preserve what is ecologically unique about in situ
national nature.
The desire to preserve original facets of nature in Australia involved the
reclassiWcation of other natures in the Inquiry as unwanted weeds:
When you bring new things into that a lot of them actually become environmental
weeds. We now have 1,700 environmental weed species in Western Australia alone.
They are becoming rampant; they are just exploding . . . So what started out as garden
species and plant species that were brought in here in good faith have now become
major problems in their own right.27
What interests us most about the debates that surround urban bushland
preservation and biodiversity is their relationship to state intervention.
Through the SCI, various urban bushland councils are invoking the Austra-
lian state as the key institution with responsibility for regulating the bound-
ary between biodiversity and remnant ecologies, between precious facets of
nature and weed species. In an urban context, of course, the boundary
between original and second natures is particularly diYcult to recognize
and police. But once again it is the institutional capacity and power of the
state that marks it out as the body that can delimit and frame nature.
This example, however, also serves to illustrate the inherent artiWciality of
state natures. Ironically, it is the remnant ecologies of the Bush—with their
26 27
Ibid, EH 45. Ibid, EH 46.
194 Exploring Post-National Natures
28
Commonwealth Government of Australia, House of Representatives Standing Committee
on Environment and Heritage—Reference: Sustainable Cities, Thursday, 17 June 2004,
Canberra (OYcial Committee Hansard, Canberra, 2005), EH 4.
29
For more on the idea of an ecological footprint, see Wackernagel and Rees (1996).
Exploring Post-National Natures 195
see the vision of the holistically re-engineered city Wrst emerging. Drawing on
the case of Melbourne’s 2030 Programme,30 Malcolm Palmer of Engineers
Australia envisioned the sustainable city in the following way:
I guess the reason we focused on Melbourne 2030 was that it was a good package in
that it addressed a range of issues to do with sustainable urban development. For
example the urban growth boundary—that is throwing a ring around Melbourne. It
also talked about liveable communities, having various buildings in local communi-
ties that have all of the facilities, childcare, schools and housing . . . It also talked
about local transport and the number of trips people make . . . Also sustainable
building design and other ways people who are living in urban areas can contribute
to sustainable development. In essence the package represented a holistic approach to
sustainable development.31
The invocation of Melbourne’s radical 2030 urban development plan by
Engineers Australia is instructive with regard to how we understand the re-
engineering of cities. The Wrst thing to notice within these comments is the
clear link between urban re-engineering and spatial planning. At one level,
the role of spatial planning in sustainable urban development pertains to the
control of unregulated urban sprawl at the peripheries of cities. It is, of
course, the spatial spread of cities that has been associated with the new
energy-intensive city—with its dependence on automobiles for transporting
people over ever longer distances to work and leisure (Hall 1998). But beyond
the territorial control of urban expansion, spatial planning is also perceived
to have a crucial role in the rational ordering of urban land use and functions.
The tighter integration of urban life within medium-density developments is
thought to be crucial to the achievement of more sustainable cities and the
reduced ecological footprints of large conurbations. Stopping urban expan-
sion, however, will not necessarily reduce urban energy consumption. Only,
it is claimed, will the careful spatial integration of home, work, leisure, and
service needs reduce the need for personal mobility within the city and
prevent wasteful energy use. Of course, the holistic restructuring of urban
space in this way requires signiWcant interventions on behalf of planning
authorities, house-builders, and engineers. While perceived to be good for the
environment, the SCI did recognize that this new planned intensiWcation of
urban space would lead to signiWcant social resistance. Mr Kerr of the
Standing Committee on Environment and Heritage consequently noted:
One of the issues that interests me is community resistance to intensiWcation. The
phenomenon has occurred in many cities notwithstanding that, from an overall
30
Melbourne 2030 is an innovative planning vision developed to guide urban and regional
growth in and around Melbourne using the principles of sustainable urban development.
31
Commonwealth Government of Australia, House of Representatives Standing Committee
on Environment and Heritage—Reference: Sustainable Cities, Thursday, 17 June 2004,
Canberra (OYcial Committee Hansard, Canberra, 2005), EH 4.
196 Exploring Post-National Natures
It is on these broad terms that the Sustainable Cities Inquiry explored urban
design as a way of regulating urban–nature relations.
Through consultation with engineers, designers, and architects, the
Inquiry established that urban design could contribute to sustainability in
two main ways. First, through the more eVective design and construction of
new buildings it was hoped that energy demands could be minimized. In
many hot Australian cities such design strategies focused on the best ways to
ensure natural cooling. In this context, a representative from the Conserva-
tion Council of Western Australia suggested to the Inquiry that:
32
Commonwealth Government of Australia, House of Representatives Standing Committee
on Environment and Heritage—Reference: Sustainable Cities, Thursday, 31 March 2005, Perth
(OYcial Committee Hansard, Canberra, 2005), EH 15.
33
Commonwealth Government of Australia, $168.5 million for Built Environment in 2004.
Media Release on behalf of Hon Dr David Kemp, MP (Federal Minister for Environment and
Heritage) (Canberra, 13 May 2003).
Exploring Post-National Natures 197
We could have an urban environment where people are trying to do the right thing
and not use air-conditioners unnecessarily—and that is often a comfort factor as well;
I think it needs to be recognized that it is sometimes more comfortable to live in
a home where there is satisfactory natural cooling rather than excessive use of air-
conditioners—but if neighbouring properties have their air-conditioning blasting
away the noise would come into the home that was trying to capture the breezes.34
We Wnd the idea of designing cities and houses that eVectively ‘catch
the breeze’ or harness natural sunlight fascinating. In the Wnal report of
the Inquiry, entitled Sustainable Cities, the House of Representatives Stand-
ing Committee on Environment and Heritage set out how it intended to
regulate the design of new urban buildings. Consequently, through a series
of new energy ratings, building codes of practice, construction material
guidelines, and mortgage incentives, the Australian state is quite literally
trying to re-orientate its cities within nature (Parliament of the Common-
wealth of Australia 2005: ch. 7). Secondly, the Inquiry also explored
ways in which eYcient design could be incorporated into Australia’s
existing urban fabric. The retroWtting of new energy eYciency devices and
insulation materials onto buildings, in addition to new policies on energy
prices, has seen the Australian government delve ever more deeply into the
domestic sphere in its attempts to structure social relations with local and
international environments (Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia
2005: ch. 8).
Our reXections on the unfolding history of urban–nature relations in
Australia have been designed with two intentions in mind. First, they illus-
trate the ways in which the state can use a variety of sub-national territor-
ies—like sustainable cities—to frame and manage socio-natural relations.
Secondly, they also show the often banal and highly subtle ways in which
states can attempt to assert their inXuence over socio-natural relations. In the
case of the sustainable city, then, we see how planning regulations, energy
eYciency ratings, and building codes of practice can all be used to structure
socio-natural relations. To us, the contemporary emergence of sustainable
cities reXects a new territorial strategy in and through which states are
attempting to regulate and frame nature through urban centres. In the case
of Australia, the fact that sustainable cities continue to be constructed in the
shadow of the state can be seen both in the desire to create cities that are
‘distinctively Australian’ and in the enduring recognition that is evident
throughout the SCI that only the federal state, with its unique institutional
capacity and spatial reach, can coordinate an eVective programme of sus-
tainable urban development.
34
Commonwealth Government of Australia, House of Representatives Standing Committee
on Environment and Heritage—Reference: Sustainable Cities, Thursday, 31 March 2005, Perth
(OYcial Committee Hansard, Canberra, 2005), EH 31.
198 Exploring Post-National Natures
35
For a detailed discussion of the role and operation of the IPCC, see Skodvin (2000).
202 Exploring Post-National Natures
global climate change negotiations reveal that far from putting an end to the
state framing of nature, attempts to generate international action on global
warming have actually created an intensiWed arena of state inXuence within
environmental policy-making.
Greenhouse
gases 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002
CO2 430,636 430,496 429,475 424,251 417,251 446,660 438,858 443,122 452,984 460,272 467,548 472,005 471,402
CH4 38,320 38,971 37,824 38,030 38,038 38,284 38,212 38,471 38,328 38,466 38,051 37,145 35,853
N2 0 39,924 41,164 40,614 40,871 39,828 41,025 40,775 42,010 41,838 42,877 42,995 43,000 43,005
HFCs 351 355 359 355 482 671 450 755 1,181 1,452 2,005 2,759 3,561
PFCs 1,808 1,423 799 631 355 337 243 252 270 258 346 452 414
SF6 333 356 358 370 416 601 683 729 605 405 493 795 738
Total 511,371 512,766 509,428 504,670 496,369 527,588 519,221 525,340 535,205 543,729 551,438 556,157 554,972
Note: CO2 levels estimated without allowance for land use, land-use change or forestry.
Source: Based on United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (2005); see http://www.unfccc.int.
Exploring Post-National Natures 205
36
DEFRA ‘How will climate change aVect your region?’ at: <http://www.ukcip.org.uk./
climate_impacts/location.asp> accessed 15 December 2005.
37
DEFRA ‘How will climate change aVect your organization?’ at: <http://www.ukcip.
org.uk./resources/sector/ci_sec.asp> accessed 15 December 2005.
206 Exploring Post-National Natures
new coastal and river Xood defence systems, greater investment in wildlife
conservation, and the need for new health-care strategies.
What interests us most about risk management frameworks for climate
change is the way they once again emphasize the role of the state in being able
to forecast and manage ecological risk. This management is, of course, not
simply a question of actually taking action on averting climate change, but
also depends on displaying competence in planning and thinking through the
consequences of global warming. In this context, the juxtaposition of malaria
infection with sagging electricity cables in the UK’s risk management frame-
work serves not only to raise public awareness about the terrifying dangers of
climate change (i.e. the arrival of malaria) but to illustrate the state’s insti-
tutional capacity to think of—and by deWnition control—some of the most
mundane side-eVects of global warming (i.e. sagging electricity cables). The
juxtaposition of the most dramatic and the most mundane aspects of climate
change reXect what Ulrich Beck (1992b) has described as the ‘discursive
management of risk’, which is routinely practised by large hazard bureau-
cracies like states and multinational corporations. The discursive manage-
ment of risk is not so much about averting risk but of managing it politically.
It is the use of such discursive strategies that is enabling states to take greater
and greater responsibility for ecological risks that are more and more beyond
their control.
The various relationships that we have outlined between states and climate
change reXect what Held et al. (1999: 396–9) have described as the ‘enmesh-
ing’ of nation-states in global nature. The enmeshing of states within global
environmental issues emphasizes how states are both used to implement and
monitor globally sanctioned policies and agreements, but also how states can
use international political forums to further their own environmental inter-
ests and values. The idea of national enmeshment also appears to imply that
even within global environmental threats like global warming, it is nations
who will ultimately experience its consequence, through losses of territory,
agricultural productivity, or population (Held et al. 1999: 397). It appears
that in this increasingly global era of ecological risk nation-states are utilizing
a whole series of territorial and non-territorial strategies to try and frame and
manage nature.
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!"#$%&'()%#*+)*+#,*'--.%-)/+%0-'*1%
Index
morality 27–8, 164, 169 framing 15, 54–5, 61–8, 69–75, 80–1,
Morgan, Elystan 73 117–46
Morgan, J. Pierpont 80 globalization of 198–200
Morgan, Reverend Dyfnallt 69 Hobbes on 25–7
Morocco 6 land and 86
Morris, Jan 8 Marxist view of 43
Mosby, J. E. 107 myths and 10–11, 18–19
Mother Earth journal 29–30 neo-Marxist theories of 45
Murdoch, J. 52 people’s estrangement from 29
myths 10–11, 18–19, 26 simpliWcation of 157–8
society and 34–5, 166–8, 175
NAEI (National Atmospheric Emissions surveys 101, 104–7, 151
Inventory) 160–1, 162, 163 territorialization of 47
nanotechnology 39 third 163
nation-states 1, 10–11, 13 urbanism and 12, 178–88, 180–97,
climate change policies 203 188–94
conservation 83 uses of term 13, see also conservation;
contestation and 68 environmentalism
cybernations 53–4, 162, 175–6 nature reserves 47
land use 86 nature-state relations see state-nature
natural history museums and 81 relations
spatiality of 88–116 neo-Malthusians 46
Westphalian model 50, see also states neo-Marxism 44–5
National Farm Survey 109–10 neo-Weberians 35–6, 37, 48
national natures 117–46 Netherlands 58, 61–8, 86, 118
national parks 16, 83, 89, 112–15, 191 Neumann, Roderick 47, 114
national security 7, 94, 95 Neutze, Max 185, 194
National Trust (UK) 99 New Zealand 16, 121, 129–36
nationalism 10, 17, 59, 63–4, 68, 69–75 Nietzsche, Friedrich 30
nationalization 6, 111, 177 Nigeria 6, 46
natural disasters 2–4, 46, 63, 205 Nixon, President Richard 122, 123
natural history museums 17, 59, 75–6, nuclear power 39
77–84, 85
natural resources 6, 30 O’Brien, Jay 46
conXict over 5–6 OVe, Claus 119
contestation 70–5 oil 7, 46
exploitation of 4–5, 39, 83 Olwig, Kenneth 11–12
legislation 43 ontology 51, 53, 77
management of 34, 37–8, 121, Ophuls, William 201
129–36 Osborn, H. F. 82
Maoris and 134 overXows 15, 203, 205
mapping 90, 96 ozone depletion 198, 199
search for scarce 61
urban consumption of 180 Paine, Thomas 30
nature: Palmer, Malcolm 195
administration 34–8, 119 Papua New Guinea 6
centralized knowledge 15–16 Paris Commune (1870) 42
232 Index