Forest
Content
The Nature of the Boreal Forest
Governmentality and Forest-Nature
Andrew Baldwin Carleton University
This article addresses the ontological status of nature in environmental politics by taking up the question of sustainable forest management in the Canadian boreal. In particular, it draws from Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality to argue that the historicity of “forest-nature” is indispensable for understanding the politics of sustainable forest management. In the end, it is argued that recent efforts to politicize the boreal should be regarded as an exercise of knowledge/power that rerepresents the boreal as a space of community and land stewardship, climate regulation, and biological diversity promotion, as opposed to simply a passive space of resource extraction. The article concludes by addressing some of the political implications of forestnature for the practice of everyday life. Keywords: boreal forest; governmentality; cultural geography; sustainable forest; management; hybrid nature
Forests are not passive objects. Neither are they simply objects of aesthetic expression or the “natural capital” underwriting corporate bond issues. They are unfixed entities embedded in complex webs of relations that string together multiple experiences of expertise, myth, ethics, and history. This is perhaps no more so the case than for the boreal forests of the Canadian north. What was reinvented as a natural space, a source
Author’s Note: The author would like to thank Fiona Mackenzie, Simon Dalby, and three anonymous referees for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. space & culture vol. 6 no. 4, november 2003 415-428 DOI: 10.1177/1206331203253189 ©2003 Sage Publications 415
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of fear and of mercantile importance, through several hundred years of colonial exploration has been transformed over the past three decades into a hotly contested object of desire. On one hand, the received category of the boreal forest as natural resource continues to underwrite the corporate practice of industrial forestry throughout the circumpolar north. Whereas, on the other hand, the boreal forest embodies strong mythological appeal; an aesthetic picture routinely invoked by environmental groups that weaves together an innocent history and an idealized, remote nature associated with northernness. And for indigenous peoples inhabiting the boreal, the spatial formation called the “boreal forest” is representative of a violent past and a subjugated, irreconciled history. As such, the boreal must be viewed foremost as a political space at the center of which one finds the ontological status of nature a question of pressing concern. This article examines one aspect of this political debate, namely, the social construction of one of nature’s common signifiers: the forest. My argument hangs on the concept of forest-nature, which, in the first instance, is meant to signify a presumed essence: a pristine, absolute nature that would exist whether or not humans were on hand to be its witness. This is the nature frequently associated with trees and wilderness, the nature elegantly pictured in glossy magazines, and the nature whose evidence many assume can be found in forests. To better situate forest-nature, the argument begins with a brief introduction into the so-called “nature debates” currently unfolding within the fields of human geography and cultural and environmental studies. But more poignant, this article is concerned with the historical process through which the very idea of forest-nature as a constructed object of political concern has been transformed. In so doing, it draws from Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality to express the manner by which forest-nature became the object of political and economic calculation in Progressive Era United States (Demeritt, 2001). It will then show how a new subjectification of boreal forest-nature (and object of political calculation) is emerging with the advent of modern environmentalism and with it a range of political implications for the conduct of everyday life. The article then proposes that we view this subjectification as the formal construction of a hybrid nature and an exercise of social power (Escobar, 1999). Through this process, we might begin reconceptualizing the boreal as a technological artifact and spatial environment consistent with Donna Haraway’s (1991) conception of the cyborg.
The Nature Debate: Materiality and Representation With the advent of modern environmentalism in the early 1970s came a proliferation of debate within the social sciences over how to incorporate the category of nature into social theory. Through the ensuing years, these debates have come to occupy a significant place within the geographic imagination that, until recently, often equated the politics of environmental protection with the preservation of nature. But nature is more than merely an aesthetic expression or a useful category defining the essence of what is “out there.” It is an essential component of a modernist ontology which, depending on how and in what context it is invoked, can yield very real ideological effects. For example, when we accept that nature is external to human society, we legitimize the assumption that an optimal ecological-knowledge can be readily discerned through scientific enquiry and that such a body of knowledge can be put to practical use in regulating the continuous interchange between the biosphere and the
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practice of daily life. So prevalent is this view within the practice of mainstream environmentalism that to refute it is to attack the moral authority of the environmental political project itself. Yet after careful reading, it becomes very clear that, when we adopt this approach, the spaces in which nature is said to exist—forests and human bodies—are inadvertently purified of their social content. In rerepresenting specific physical spaces with the aesthetic of bourgeois nature, those living within and adjacent to these spaces physically and metaphorically are forced to reinvent themselves vis-àvis this discourse of environmental purity. To this extent, so-called “natural” space becomes depoliticized as the language of political contest is displaced by the technocratic language of environmental management. Canadian forest politics provides a vivid example of this displacement where political struggles over control of Canada’s Pacific coast forests have been too often mediated by the technical language of sustainable forest management, an ideological move which privileges corporate managerialism to the exclusion of indigenous peoples’ history in discussions about forest futures (Braun, 2002). In response, many geographers and environmental theorists writing within the field of poststructural political ecology have begun challenging the ideological effects of an ontologically discrete understanding of nature by critically retheorizing the relationship between human society and the nature metaphor. Does human ingenuity give humans standing outside the realm of nature? Are humans necessarily bound by the dictates of a universal, biophysical reality? Do humans and the biophysical possess distinguishable agencies enabling each to pursue their own objectives independently? In short, what does it mean to protect nature from human intrusion? And perhaps more poignant, what are the political effects of environmental discourses framed in terms of human intrusion and environmental protection? Answers to these questions have taken many forms. Whether these concern the production of nature under capitalism and the concomitant process of asymmetrical development (Smith, 1984), or modernity’s propensity to dominate nature (Leiss, 1994), there can be no doubt the idea of nature is fundamental to any geographical consideration of space. More recently, however, these debates have taken on a decidedly more cultural tone, recognizing more and more the importance of power in shaping the discourses of nature, a move that not only situates the question of nature firmly within relations of power but draws the entire practice of environmental protection into critical view (Braun & Castree, 1998; Keil, Bell, Penz, & Fawcett, 1999; Luke, 1999). Through this methodological lens, struggles to save threatened segments of old growth forest in the past two decades are now thought to be less and less about protecting trees than they are about protecting the meanings attached to, and the cultural identities derived from, culturally significant forests. Within these debates, political ecologists have begun asking whose nature is being represented and protected, what are the material effects of such representations, and, conversely, whose natures are being subjugated in the process (Braun, 2002; Braun & Castree, 1998; Castree, 1995; Escobar, 1996). What this line of enquiry points to is a new approach to human geography that incorporates some of the fundaments of poststructural political ecology by recognizing that the materiality and representation of nature are indistinguishable processes (Escobar, 1999; Peet & Watts, 1996). In this sense, poststructural political ecology borrows heavily from Foucauldian methodology to reveal how natures and bodily behaviors are drawn into existence through the generation of knowledge, and why such practices should be theorized as exercises of power. But as a matter of practicality, this method is also concerned with articulating how the materiality of produced nature (Castree,
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1995; Smith, 1984) is a function of the representational practices that assign meaning to specific visualizations of the biophysical. In other words, the manner in which the biophysical performs in the world (nature’s materiality), what “nature” looks like and how it behaves is, in large measure, a matter of the discourses circumscribing the specific spaces in which nature is said to act: forests or bodies. For instance, through the mid-19th century following the rapid conversion of southern Ontario’s mixed forest to agricultural space, Ontario’s lumber barons began actively reinscribing the Algonquin highland with new meaning. They argued that if left unchecked, the process of land conversion in the highlands would amount to an untold loss of forest value, because the highlands were home to abundant white pines which could otherwise be used to “mast” the English navy. The materiality of this signification persists to this day; the Algonquin highland, once a predominantly coniferous ecosystem, is now dominated by second- and third-growth hardwood forests. Of course, this is a simple illustration that elides other representations of the Algonquin highland, “Algonquin as refuge” or “Algonquin as Island of Hope” (Reid, 1992, p. 45), to name a few. But it nevertheless illustrates a central theme in poststructural political ecology, which is that material analysis cannot be carried out in the absence of discursive analysis. In other words, we cannot fully theorize the materiality of nature without understanding the discursive manner through which nature is first represented (Escobar, 1999).
Governmentality: From Bodies to Things One very useful point of entry into debates about the material and representational politics of human-nonhuman relations begins with Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality and the exercise of biopower (Darier, 1999; Luke, 1995, 1999). Although Foucault did not write specifically about environmental issues, his writings about the body and about governmentality serve as important segues into these themes. For Foucault, governmentality describes a process through which direct, sovereign rule associated with monarchical authority was challenged by an emerging “art of government” in 16th-century Europe, the exercise of biopower, that concerned itself with the self-regulation of one’s body and the regulation of the social body. In this sense, Foucault wanted to reveal how it came to be that states successfully brought within their range of concerns the behavior of entire populations and to identify the techniques deployed by the state in disciplining collective and individual behavior. To do so, Foucault showed that the notion of sovereignty based on divine and natural law, the principle of direct rule, and the family, no longer provided the state-as-sovereign with sufficient reason to exist, particularly at a time when divine rule had become subject to tremendous scrutiny. Consequently, a new art of government emerged, one which sought to maintain social control through the “right disposition of things,” and which opposed the threat of direct corporeal intervention in the manner of its sovereign predecessor (Foucault, 1977, 1978a). Crucial to understanding this shift, therefore, is the emergence of a science of government that enabled “things” to come into existence (Foucault, 1978a). In elaborating the ascendance of governmentality, Foucault argued that from the 16th to 18th centuries the central “thing” being apprehended was an abstract notion of social economy. And it was through this science of statistical representation of the social economy that “it became possible to identify problems specific to the population” (Foucault, 1978a, p. 99). Up until this point in the history of econ-
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omy, the practice of economics had never been considered a matter of social life but was instead limited to the confines of family life. But after amassing statistics about family-level economy, the art of government became synonymous with managing the aggregate economy abstracted to the entirety of the social body. It was therefore through the statistical rendering of an abstract social economy that it became possible to speak metaphorically about the health of the entire population. Indeed, population health itself, through its intimate connection to the performance of the aggregate economy, could be subsequently witnessed, measured, and disciplined. As such, population welfare, knowledge about which derived from the state practice of statistical representation, became the newly emergent object of governmental rationality. Accordingly, the art of government, ensuring the “right disposition of things” for Foucault, should be understood as an exercise in biopower, a concern for “the totality of human beings constituted as a population: health, hygiene, natality, longevity, race” (Foucault, 1989, quoted in Darier, 1999, p. 22). But alongside the idea of biopower emerges the notion of biopolitics, political struggles over “the control of all aspects of human life, especially the conditions for human biological reproduction” (Darier, 1999, pp. 22-23). Taken together, biopower and biopolitics work on the social body in two ways: individual bodies are normalized according to the behavioural codes that are said to guarantee personal health, and meanwhile the social body is regulated to maximize population health. In this sense, governmentality becomes concerned with both the self-government of one’s body and the government of the social body. But the health and welfare of the social body cannot be limited merely to disciplining and normalizing bodies in the interest of the whole, as biopower and biopolitics suggest. If modern environmentalism has taught us anything, it is that bodies are not detached from their material surroundings but are, on the contrary, wholly dependent on them for survival. It is at this point in the history of governmentality that several contemporary social theorists have begun using Foucault’s ideas of governmentality to theorize the nature-society interface (Luke, 1999). Timothy Luke provides an important insight into how this may be so, building upon Foucault’s idea that biopower was not limited merely to bodies. Indeed, Foucault himself wrote that biopower “brought life and its mechanisms [italics added] into the realm of explicit calculation” (Foucault, 1978b, p. 143). For Luke (1995), therefore, it is here that “we can begin to locate the emergence of ‘the environment’ as a nexus for knowledge formation and as a cluster of power tactics” (p. 66). Accordingly, what emerge here are codes of knowledge representing the human interface with the biophysical world which themselves become crucial technologies in the exercise of power or, to use Luke’s language, eco-knowledge/geo-power. This is to say that the apprehension of knowledge about how it is that ecosystems are central to human survival (eco-knowledge) becomes a political technology through which geo-power is exercised. Thus, for Luke, we arrive at the process of “environmentality.” Under this formulation, bodily behavior and, by extension, the consumptive practices of everyday life are worked on indirectly by those codes that specify the most appropriate ways in which bodies should engage with biophysical processes. Here, the daily acts of vegetarianism, the purchase of organic foods, and other identifications that symbolize one’s commitment to an environmental ethics can all be read as eco-knowledge scripts which work through and normalize bodily behavior in accordance with the principles of nature and, to the extent that these so-called principles of nature are themselves socially determined, with history.
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But what also emerges from this conceptualization is the recognition that “the environment” is as much a historical phenomenon as it is a biological one (Escobar, 1999; Luke, 1999). This articulation makes sense when one looks to Karl Polanyi’s (1957) definition of “poverty as nature surviving.” Nature here defined is primordial; it harbors the elements of death, disease, and famine, which enact their wrath on the poor. And poverty is a mode of life that comes to symbolize the dangerous precipice between survival and death. But for Luke, the 18th-century agricultural technologies that promised to draw humanity back from the edge of death were the immediate result of the “different fields of knowledge concerned with life in general,” namely knowledge about the human health effects of pestilence and starvation (Foucault, 1978b, p. 142). Nature in this sense becomes a critical truth enfolded into the normative discourse of history’s unfolding, where the tension between what is and what should be is mediated by a contingent set of knowledges about nature. In other words, those elements of nature considered relevant to the human condition, in this case pestilence and starvation, are only deemed as such by virtue of their relation to history. Luke draws further attention to this historicity of nature when he claims that ecology, although an emerging form of knowledge that took biophysical processes to be its primary realm of concern in the latter part of the 19th century, did not become significantly politicized until such time as “the productive regime of biopolitics became fully globalized.” In contemporary ecological society, the exercise of Luke’s geopower might be read as humanity coaxed back from the edge of death (from nature) through the application and institutionalization of new, eco-modernizing technologies. Humanity’s relation with nature is, thus, significantly and immutably historical. But it is the subjectification of this nature that is the crucial point in all of this because it is the discourse through which the subjectification of nature is rendered meaningful that determines how populations, bodies, and natures will be subsequently disciplined by an institutionalized ecological modernity. All of this is another way of saying that what counts as nature in any particular context, political or otherwise, is historically constituted by “mythical, textual, technical, political, organic, and economic” discourses that “collapse into each other in a knot of extraordinary density” (Haraway, 1994, quoted in Braun & Castree, 1998, p. 26). How this knot is translated politically will be explored below. But before moving to that discussion, the relation between environmentality and instrumentalism needs to be addressed. It might be that eco-knowledge/geo-power appears as nothing less than eco-colonialism in discursive evening wear. That is, it might appear that contemporary environmental discourses are so attractive that they are being consciously appropriated by certain actors (states and capitalists) and used to advance private interests above those of common concern. Indeed, a sizeable literature on precisely this issue is in wide circulation (Sachs, 1993; Shiva, 1993). But it would be mistaken to conflate Luke’s notion of environmentality with instrumentality. Of course, it can be shown that capital does engage in discursive politics to advance its interest in resource control, as in the case of British Columbian rainforest politics (Willems-Braun, 1997). But the exercise of biopower is something quite different. It refers to the construction of knowledge, and the act of drawing this knowledge into the “realm of explicit calculation,” not the instrumental creation and subsequent application of knowledge to some predetermined end. Evaluating the structural processes that enable instrumental green managerialism is something altogether quite different than examining the discursive politics of resource control.
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Picturing Nature Returning to the idea of forest-nature introduced at the beginning of this argument, David Demeritt’s disentanglement of this “knot of extraordinary density” is illustrative. Not only is Demeritt able to unveil a specific subjectification of forest-nature at a specific moment in space-time, he does so while counterarguing the instrumentalist critique (Demeritt, 2001). To do so, Demeritt shows how early cartographic representations depicting total forest coverage in the United States were used by early American conservationists, such as United States Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot, to represent American forests as a singular ontological whole. Up until this time, the American identity had been synonymous with a frontier mentality that idealized the industriousness of early American settlers and the success at pushing back the wilderness frontier. Converting forests into arable land symbolized this ideal. But not long after constructing these forest maps, the prevailing image of progress began falling out of favor with the American public. With the advent of the aggregate forest map, it could be shown visually for the first time that aggregate forest coverage in the United States had been dramatically reduced over time, a move which lent credibility to the conservationists’ claim that existing rates of harvest must be curtailed to forestall a forest famine. Using such visualizations, nature was depicted, materially and metaphorically, as existing beyond the threshold of human activity, whose limits would be soon transgressed if current practices remained unchanged. It was through this dualist, visual representation that forest-nature was “brought . . . into the realm of explicit calculation” and “made [eco]knowledge/[geo]power an agent in the transformation of life” (Foucault, 1978b, p. 143). Yet for the purpose of my analysis, the crucial point in Demeritt’s intervention is the way in which he invokes the notion of governmentality in discourses about forestnature. He demonstrates how, through the act of subjectifying forest-nature, conservationists and silviculturalists were able to render U.S. forests the objects of expert, scientific control, a move which depoliticized any a priori interests that might have previously inscribed the forest with meaning (DeLuca & Demo, 2001; Ferguson, 1990; Willems-Braun, 1997). And more important still, Demeritt reveals the historicity of forest-nature, the idea that only through the statistical (and technological) enumeration of forests could their underlying “nature” be revealed. In other words, rendering vast tracts of forest as natural space was possible only with the advent of the enumerating technologies and representational practices deployed in the subjectification of forest-nature, technologies which were themselves the products of a unique political 1 history. In the end, with the help of Demeritt’s argument, we see that forest-nature was rendered as such due to the “multiple dimensions” constituting it at that time: the political economic context in which it came about (U.S. industrialism), the moral content of the conservationists’ arguments (aggregate forests as representative of an American ideal), and the textual quality and aperspectival objectivity that accompanied the construction of maps.
Revis(ion)ing the Boreal Turning to a contemporary example, the recent politicization of the Canadian boreal forest illustrates how a new subjectification of the boreal is emerging alongside the
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practice of modern environmentalism. In recent decades, the forest-nature of the Canadian boreal has been dramatically transformed, and not simply through the materialist interventions decried by the environmental community. No longer is boreal forest-nature passively produced through the institutional arrangements associated with sustained yield forestry and the logic of Fordist production (Hayter, 2001, p. 127; Sandberg, 2001, p. 290). Nor can it be regarded simply as an ideological artifact enlisted in the practice of Canadian nation building, despite that the ideology of the Canadian North continues to wield significant mainstream cultural appeal. Instead, the boreal forest is now the subject of an intense political imbroglio that draws together a highly politicized indigenous peoples’ movement, an environmental movement that places the boreal firmly within the climate change and biodiversity discourses, and a state-capitalist enterprise still committed to maximizing fiber yields under conditions of “increasing scarcity” and “competitiveness.” In geographical terms, the term boreal enumerates a circumpolar space encompassing the forested regions of the northern hemisphere. In the North American setting, the boreal spans a significant portion of the Canadian North, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Arctic Ocean in the north, while bisecting 12 subnational political jurisdictions (8 provinces, 3 territories, and 1 state). It is home to numerous indigenous communities irreversibly transformed through European colonial practices, and it continues to be of incalculable importance to the Canadian staples economy. In its southern latitudes, the boreal is home to multiple tree species, both coniferous and deciduous of commercial and noncommercial value, whereas in the north, boreal forests consist mainly of coniferous tree species. Culturally, the boreal has featured prominently in Canadian mythology as a recurring object of Canadian landscape painting and narrative for well more than a century. But this is simply one, albeit extremely cursory, description of the boreal. More recently, with the advent of global environmental discourse in the 1990s, the climate change and biological diversity discourses have become indispensable tools in the reconstruction and representation of the boreal. As the climate change debate rages, the boreal forest, as with forests the world over, has been actively enlisted by the environmental community in the struggle to mitigate the effects of carbon dumping in the upper atmosphere through either carbon storage or the sequestering of wayward atmospheric carbon. Bolstered by loads of statistical data about the boreal’s capacity to store carbon, the argument goes that any large-scale industrial intrusion into the boreal ecosystem, whether oil and gas prospecting, forestry, or hydroelectric development, will result in untold climatic effects. Similarly, by asserting that the boreal is biologically diverse, the environmental community argues that our greatest chance of adapting to future environmental change rests with leaving the boreal in an “intact” condition. No longer, therefore, is the environmental resistance to industrial development driven simply by the ideological need to preserve nature for nature’s sake, as was the case in Demeritt’s theorization of Progressive Era United States when the threat of an eroding wilderness was easily associated with the collapse of the American frontier myth and the collapse of American society itself. Instead, through the practices of representing the boreal as a central agent in any global climate change or biodiversity strategy, boreal forest-nature moves from being merely an ideological or aesthetic expression associated with the presence of trees to an active political agent in the more serious matter of securing an ecologically modern future. In being recreated through the scientific discourses of climate change and biodiversity, the materiality of boreal forest-nature and its legitimacy as a space in which human interaction should be min-
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imized becomes inextricably linked to its capacity to regulate planetary climate and guarantee a genetically diverse biosphere through perpetuity.
Subjectification of Boreal Forest-Nature Under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) But alongside climate change and biodiversity, sustainable forest management has emerged out of the environmental political struggles of the 1980s and 1990s as another very powerful political technology. In the same way that the boreal has been represented through the climate change and biodiversity discourses, so too is it being reconstituted by the discourse of sustainable forest management. One effort to define and operationalize the principles of sustainable forest management is found in the forest certification practices of the FSC. The FSC is a global sustainable forestry management (SFM) standard developed by several environmental groups in the early 1990s to compete directly with state and multilateral efforts to curtail the negative socioecological effects of deforestation. At its core, the FSC is a consensus model which seeks to bring together interested stakeholder groups—environment, community/indigenous, and industry—to negotiate how SFM should be conducted in forest ecosystems around the globe. It consists of a set of voluntary, global principles, but also requires that subregional standards be developed to take better account of the unique sociopolitical and ecological conditions that constitute that particular space (FSC, 2000).2 Forest product producers conforming to the FSC standards earn the right to attach the FSC logo to their products. As such, the FSC concept trades on the twin premise that consumers are motivated to mobilize their purchasing power to some apparently ethical end and that they garner sufficient market demand to achieve that end.3 However promising the FSC might at first appear, it is not without its critics. A sustained elaboration of this critique extends well beyond the scope of the present analysis. Suffice it to say, however, that most of the FSC’s problems stem from that fact that its legitimacy is measured in terms of profitability. This critique becomes starkly apparent when the effect of the FSC framework on indigenous peoples’ and community and workers rights is taken into account. To the extent that the FSC model infuses that practice of indigenous knowledge into the practice of sustainable forestry, one can read the commodification of indigenous experience. In more practical terms, the legitimacy of indigenous identity in the periphery, manifest through the practice of sustainable forestry, is contingent on steady market demand for FSC-certified forest products in core economies. Notwithstanding the materialist critique of the FSC, however, theorizing the FSC using Foucault’s notion of governmentality draws into view more than simply the distributional effects of the scheme. The subjectification of boreal forest-nature through the FSC model can be theorized as the process by which new elements in forest-nature are historicized and drawn into the “realm of calculation” (Foucault, 1977). As such, one begins to understand forest-nature in a considerably different way than was the case when forest-nature was constructed statistically and cartographically more than a century ago (Demeritt, 2001). In these early formulations, statistical representation of forest-nature underwrote a management paradigm that identified “normal” growth rates for entire forests which were, in turn, used by foresters to prescribe “annual allowable cuts” and guarantee aggregate forest productivity. But with the advent of re-
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mote sensing and satellite imaging technologies, new biophysical properties constituting forest-nature, properties such as thermodynamic climate-forest interactions and carbon storage and sequestration capacity, are being apprehended and used to normalize a new set of appropriate human-forest interactions. Some forest ecologists argue that anthropogenic disturbances in boreal ecosystems are minimizing the forest’s capacity “to store and cycle energy and material flows” and that to avoid catastrophic transformations in forest composition it is “energy and material flows” that must be managed (Kronberg & Watt, 2000, p. 262), not simply “normal” growth rates, “annual allowable cuts,” and “maximum sustained yields.” Indeed, a whole new forest science is emerging alongside the SFM conceptual framework, and with it a more “advanced” regime of truth about forest-nature grounded in the eco-knowledge claims of ecosystems science. But another crucial dynamic plays a part in the subjectification of forest-nature under the FSC regime, namely the dynamic of community involvement, including aboriginal participation, in the construction of FSC standards. Thus, the criteria of social equity must coexist alongside ecological science in rendering a forested space certifiable under the FSC regime. In other words, the history of colonial oppression and exploitation in the boreal landscape must be retold, and to some extent resolved, as the FSC standard-setting body negotiates a forestry standard for the Canadian boreal. These histories therefore become vitally important components of the eco-knowledges used in the reconstruction of boreal forest-nature, and by entering into the “realm of calculation” become important factors in the historicization of forest-nature. From this initial evaluation of the subjectification of forest-nature, we can now begin reconstructing boreal forest-nature as an exercise of social geo-power in which the assemblage of knowledges that politicize the boreal—either through the climate change, biodiversity, or sustainable forest management discourses—have the effect of reinscribing the boreal space with new meaning. No longer is the boreal an abstract economic value or simply a myth or an unproblematic meta-history defining Canadianness. It emerges through this new eco-knowledge discursive regime as a space of multiple epistemologies and hybrid nature (Escobar, 1999).
Boreal Hybridity In the end, what this tells us is that those controlling the environmentalization process are not only in control of how nature is historicized, but are also responsible for delimiting what counts as nature. But to assume that the environmentalization process is universal in form and conforms to a standard method disregards the possibility of politics tout court, for it is precisely the fact that knowledge is partial that lies at the core of political contest! This is why Donna Haraway’s (1994) categorical imperative to query what counts as nature is so important. Representations of nature are partial and must be recognized as such, despite how useful they may be for social movements seeking at wresting control of space from the territorializing tendencies capital and state practices. By posing her politics in this way, Haraway is consciously constructing a politics that does not originate with any rigidly defined subject position. Instead, she is critical of subject positions, such as “laborer” and “objectified woman,” that construct themselves as victims, because victimhood, according to Haraway, implies that some
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original state of being has been apprehended, violated, exploited, or transgressed. Implicit in political projects, like Marxism and radical feminism, lurks some notion of “original unity” and the promise of returning its devotees to a Utopic, original state of being. These identifications trade on many of the modern dualisms—self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female—that imply “otherness” and therefore domination. To counterpose a politics founded on dualism, Haraway (1991) offers the cyborg metaphor. The cyborg embodies a fusion of human and machine and therefore “skips the step of original unity, or identification with nature in the Western sense” (p. 151). Here, the cyborg is freed from any historical identifications, a move that Haraway underscores by putting to work the metaphor of cyborg writing. For Haraway, “cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them [cyborgs] as other” (p. 175). Thus, the cyborg might be a useful metaphor for reconceptualizing the boreal. Of course, boreal forest-nature does not embody the fusions of human and machine. Rather, it is a comparatively mundane ecosystem when one considers the spectacular mega-fauna that constituted the rainforest debates of the 1980s and 1990s. But what is more, the boreal, as with all forests, is composed not of singularity, totality, or original unity, but of multiplicity, historicity, and mutability. Therefore, through the recent politicization of the boreal and the subjectification of subaltern forest-natures, more generally, we are witness to a cyborg rewriting of space, a marking of the world, that uses not only the tools of ecological science but also the telling of aboriginal history and other histories of exploitation in recreating the meaning of space. To the extent that we can acknowledge this project as occurring through the FSC, the historicization of forest-nature through the FSC process is a conscious move by the environmental community to reinvent forest-nature, at least temporarily, based on the principle of socioecological inclusivity.
Conclusion So in the final analysis, why should we be concerned with how forest-nature is represented? Representations of nature matter because they generate very real material effects. When constructed as a natural resource, we are asked to assign value to a tree independent of the forest in which it stands. In mainstream political economy in which forests are identified as the true sources of value underwriting corporate bond issues, aggregate forest health becomes dutifully governmentalized through the discourses of conventional silviculture. But what the case of boreal forest-nature can reveal to us (socioecological inclusivists) is that the manner in which forests are represented does matter. By appropriating the tools that marked “nature as other,” namely the tools of scientific objectivity, and fusing these with other epistemologies in the spirit of inclusivity, the material effects of “tree as natural resource” are diminished while forestry becomes simultaneously the practice of community and land stewardship, climate regulation, and biodiversity promotion, and not simply the practice of resource extraction. This is made even more evident through the practice of FSC forest certification in which the meaning of forest-nature becomes an exercise in geo-power; forestnature is governmentalized, but the social relations inhering in the “tools” that “mark the world” are democratized.
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But democratizing the process by which forest-nature is governmentalized is not the exclusive consequence of the environmentality of forest-nature, for governmentality also implies the normalization of bodily behavior. In the case of environmentality, bodily behavior through the practice of everyday living is normalized according to what counts as nature. And if we take the foregoing argument seriously, we might begin discussing more meaningfully how normalizing the conduct of everyday living in accordance with the precepts of nature is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is an ethical and moral imperative. The political implications of this are clear. When consumers are encouraged to consume forest products manufactured from FSC-certified timber, they are simultaneously being asked to advocate the redress of colonial dominations inscribed in forest-natures, endorse the climate-regulating effects of northern forests, and acknowledge that biodiversity is an essential component of life. All of these seem to be perfectly innocuous values deserving of our consumptive attention; after all, who could ever claim to be against life? But the uncritical embrace of ethical consumption overlooks the cultural specificities that work through the “ethical commodity” form. In the case of ethical forest products derived from Canadian boreal forest-nature, consumers need to ask whose nature is conveyed through the FSC-certified commodity form and whose identity is being protected.
Notes
1. Here, Demeritt (2001) notes a point of curiosity. The methods used in the acquisition of forest statistics borrowed heavily from those techniques used in early-19th-century census taking. It was exactly this same political technology that Foucault’s art of government relied on in the governmentalization of the state and the exercise of biopower. 2. For those unfamiliar with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), there does exist an FSC governance structure and a corresponding set of rules, including a dispute settlement mechanism, which prescribes how stakeholders must negotiate forestry standards for particular regional ecosystems. 3. Among the many pitfalls with the FSC idea is that the ethical priority to which the FSC regime is directed differs from region to region. For example, in Canada, the socioecological issues addressed through FSC certification might be deforestation and distribution rights to aboriginal communities, whereas in another region of the globe, the move toward FSC certification may be to counteract illegal logging and the trade of high conservation-value species. What this means is that the comparability of FSC wood products is very difficult. Read differently, however, this may also be the FSC’s strength. The model, in effect, globalizes sustainable forestry management (SFM), but leaves open for whom and to what purpose the regime may be directed. In other words, it is not exclusively a tool for corporate green managerialism, nor is it fully wedded to an ailing development model that attempts to eradicate poverty by increasing household incomes through export production. Instead, the credibility of the FSC model hinges on regional and subregional difference, a move that might legitimize regional discursive power formations in the liberation of postcolonial space.
References
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Castree, N. (1995). The nature of produced nature: Materiality and knowledge construction in Marxism. Antipode, 27(1), 12-48. Darier, E. (1999). Foucault and the environment. In E. Darier (Ed.), Discourses of the environment (pp. 1-33). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. DeLuca, K., & Demo, A. (2001). Imagining nature and erasing class and race: Carleton Watkins, John Muir and the construction of wilderness. Environmental History, 6(4), 541-560. Demeritt, D. (2001). Scientific forest conservation and the statistical picturing of nature’s limits in Progressive-Era United States. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19, 431459. Escobar, A. (1996). Constructing nature: Elements for a poststructural political ecology. In R. Peet & M. Watts (Eds.), Liberation ecologies (pp. 46-68). London: Routledge. Escobar, A. (1999). After nature: Steps to an antiessentialist political ecology. Current Anthropology, 40, 1-30. Ferguson, J. (1990). The antipolitics machine: “Development,” depoliticization and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Forest Stewardship Council. (2000). Statutes. Retrieved March 11, 2003, from http://www.fscoax.org/principles.htm Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1978a). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (pp. 87-104). London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Foucault, M. (1978b). History of sexuality: An introduction (Vol. 1). New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1989). Michel Foucault—Résumé des cours 1970-1982. Paris: Collège de France/Julliard. Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, monsters: The reinvention of nature. London: Free Association Books. Haraway, D. (1994). A game of cat’s cradle: Science studies, feminist theory and cultural studies. Configurations, 2(1), 59-71. Retrieved March 11, 2003, from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v002/2.1haraway.html Hayter, R., & Holmes, J. (2001). The Canadian forest industry: The impacts of globalization and technological change. In M. Howlett (Ed.), Canadian forest policy: Adapting to change (pp. 127-156). University of Toronto Press: Toronto. Keil, R., Bell, D. V. J., Penz, P., & Fawcett, L. (1999). Editors’ introduction. In R. Keil, D. V. J. Bell, P. Penz, & L. Fawcett (Eds.), Political ecology: Global and local (pp. 1-16). London: Routledge. Kronberg, B., & Watt, M. (2000). The precariousness of North American boreal forests. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 62, 261-272. Leiss, W. (1994). The domination of nature. Kingston, UK: Queen’s-McGill Press. Luke, T. W. (1995, Fall). On environmentality: Geo-power and eco-knowledge in the discourses of contemporary environmentalism. Cultural Critique, 57-81. Luke, T. W. (1999). Environmentality as green governmentality. In E. Darier (Ed.), Discourses of the environment (pp. 121-151). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Peet, R., & Watts, M. (1996). Liberation ecology: Development, sustainability and environment in an age of environmental triumphalism. In R. Peet & M. Watts (Eds.), Liberation ecologies (pp. 1-45). London: Routledge. Polanyi, K. (1957). The great transformation. Boston: Beacon. Reid, R. (1992). Ontario’s provincial parks: Islands of hope. In L. Labatt & B. Littlejohn (Eds.), Islands of hope: Ontario’s parks and wilderness. Willowdale, MA: Firefly. Sachs, W. (1993). Global ecology and the shadow of development. In W. Sachs (Ed.), Global ecology: A new arena of political conflict. London: Zed. Sandberg, A., Lawson, J., & Levy, M. (2001). Perpetual revenues and the delights of the primitive: Change, continuity, and forest policy regimes in Ontario. In M. Howlett (Ed.), Canadian forest policy: Adapting to change (pp. 279-315). University of Toronto Press: Toronto. Shiva, V. (1993). The greening of the global reach. In W. Sachs (Ed.), Global ecology: A new arena of political conflict. London: Zed.
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Andrew Baldwin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University, and a writer/editor for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development.
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Governmentality and Forest-Nature
Andrew Baldwin Carleton University
This article addresses the ontological status of nature in environmental politics by taking up the question of sustainable forest management in the Canadian boreal. In particular, it draws from Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality to argue that the historicity of “forest-nature” is indispensable for understanding the politics of sustainable forest management. In the end, it is argued that recent efforts to politicize the boreal should be regarded as an exercise of knowledge/power that rerepresents the boreal as a space of community and land stewardship, climate regulation, and biological diversity promotion, as opposed to simply a passive space of resource extraction. The article concludes by addressing some of the political implications of forestnature for the practice of everyday life. Keywords: boreal forest; governmentality; cultural geography; sustainable forest; management; hybrid nature
Forests are not passive objects. Neither are they simply objects of aesthetic expression or the “natural capital” underwriting corporate bond issues. They are unfixed entities embedded in complex webs of relations that string together multiple experiences of expertise, myth, ethics, and history. This is perhaps no more so the case than for the boreal forests of the Canadian north. What was reinvented as a natural space, a source
Author’s Note: The author would like to thank Fiona Mackenzie, Simon Dalby, and three anonymous referees for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. space & culture vol. 6 no. 4, november 2003 415-428 DOI: 10.1177/1206331203253189 ©2003 Sage Publications 415
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of fear and of mercantile importance, through several hundred years of colonial exploration has been transformed over the past three decades into a hotly contested object of desire. On one hand, the received category of the boreal forest as natural resource continues to underwrite the corporate practice of industrial forestry throughout the circumpolar north. Whereas, on the other hand, the boreal forest embodies strong mythological appeal; an aesthetic picture routinely invoked by environmental groups that weaves together an innocent history and an idealized, remote nature associated with northernness. And for indigenous peoples inhabiting the boreal, the spatial formation called the “boreal forest” is representative of a violent past and a subjugated, irreconciled history. As such, the boreal must be viewed foremost as a political space at the center of which one finds the ontological status of nature a question of pressing concern. This article examines one aspect of this political debate, namely, the social construction of one of nature’s common signifiers: the forest. My argument hangs on the concept of forest-nature, which, in the first instance, is meant to signify a presumed essence: a pristine, absolute nature that would exist whether or not humans were on hand to be its witness. This is the nature frequently associated with trees and wilderness, the nature elegantly pictured in glossy magazines, and the nature whose evidence many assume can be found in forests. To better situate forest-nature, the argument begins with a brief introduction into the so-called “nature debates” currently unfolding within the fields of human geography and cultural and environmental studies. But more poignant, this article is concerned with the historical process through which the very idea of forest-nature as a constructed object of political concern has been transformed. In so doing, it draws from Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality to express the manner by which forest-nature became the object of political and economic calculation in Progressive Era United States (Demeritt, 2001). It will then show how a new subjectification of boreal forest-nature (and object of political calculation) is emerging with the advent of modern environmentalism and with it a range of political implications for the conduct of everyday life. The article then proposes that we view this subjectification as the formal construction of a hybrid nature and an exercise of social power (Escobar, 1999). Through this process, we might begin reconceptualizing the boreal as a technological artifact and spatial environment consistent with Donna Haraway’s (1991) conception of the cyborg.
The Nature Debate: Materiality and Representation With the advent of modern environmentalism in the early 1970s came a proliferation of debate within the social sciences over how to incorporate the category of nature into social theory. Through the ensuing years, these debates have come to occupy a significant place within the geographic imagination that, until recently, often equated the politics of environmental protection with the preservation of nature. But nature is more than merely an aesthetic expression or a useful category defining the essence of what is “out there.” It is an essential component of a modernist ontology which, depending on how and in what context it is invoked, can yield very real ideological effects. For example, when we accept that nature is external to human society, we legitimize the assumption that an optimal ecological-knowledge can be readily discerned through scientific enquiry and that such a body of knowledge can be put to practical use in regulating the continuous interchange between the biosphere and the
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practice of daily life. So prevalent is this view within the practice of mainstream environmentalism that to refute it is to attack the moral authority of the environmental political project itself. Yet after careful reading, it becomes very clear that, when we adopt this approach, the spaces in which nature is said to exist—forests and human bodies—are inadvertently purified of their social content. In rerepresenting specific physical spaces with the aesthetic of bourgeois nature, those living within and adjacent to these spaces physically and metaphorically are forced to reinvent themselves vis-àvis this discourse of environmental purity. To this extent, so-called “natural” space becomes depoliticized as the language of political contest is displaced by the technocratic language of environmental management. Canadian forest politics provides a vivid example of this displacement where political struggles over control of Canada’s Pacific coast forests have been too often mediated by the technical language of sustainable forest management, an ideological move which privileges corporate managerialism to the exclusion of indigenous peoples’ history in discussions about forest futures (Braun, 2002). In response, many geographers and environmental theorists writing within the field of poststructural political ecology have begun challenging the ideological effects of an ontologically discrete understanding of nature by critically retheorizing the relationship between human society and the nature metaphor. Does human ingenuity give humans standing outside the realm of nature? Are humans necessarily bound by the dictates of a universal, biophysical reality? Do humans and the biophysical possess distinguishable agencies enabling each to pursue their own objectives independently? In short, what does it mean to protect nature from human intrusion? And perhaps more poignant, what are the political effects of environmental discourses framed in terms of human intrusion and environmental protection? Answers to these questions have taken many forms. Whether these concern the production of nature under capitalism and the concomitant process of asymmetrical development (Smith, 1984), or modernity’s propensity to dominate nature (Leiss, 1994), there can be no doubt the idea of nature is fundamental to any geographical consideration of space. More recently, however, these debates have taken on a decidedly more cultural tone, recognizing more and more the importance of power in shaping the discourses of nature, a move that not only situates the question of nature firmly within relations of power but draws the entire practice of environmental protection into critical view (Braun & Castree, 1998; Keil, Bell, Penz, & Fawcett, 1999; Luke, 1999). Through this methodological lens, struggles to save threatened segments of old growth forest in the past two decades are now thought to be less and less about protecting trees than they are about protecting the meanings attached to, and the cultural identities derived from, culturally significant forests. Within these debates, political ecologists have begun asking whose nature is being represented and protected, what are the material effects of such representations, and, conversely, whose natures are being subjugated in the process (Braun, 2002; Braun & Castree, 1998; Castree, 1995; Escobar, 1996). What this line of enquiry points to is a new approach to human geography that incorporates some of the fundaments of poststructural political ecology by recognizing that the materiality and representation of nature are indistinguishable processes (Escobar, 1999; Peet & Watts, 1996). In this sense, poststructural political ecology borrows heavily from Foucauldian methodology to reveal how natures and bodily behaviors are drawn into existence through the generation of knowledge, and why such practices should be theorized as exercises of power. But as a matter of practicality, this method is also concerned with articulating how the materiality of produced nature (Castree,
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1995; Smith, 1984) is a function of the representational practices that assign meaning to specific visualizations of the biophysical. In other words, the manner in which the biophysical performs in the world (nature’s materiality), what “nature” looks like and how it behaves is, in large measure, a matter of the discourses circumscribing the specific spaces in which nature is said to act: forests or bodies. For instance, through the mid-19th century following the rapid conversion of southern Ontario’s mixed forest to agricultural space, Ontario’s lumber barons began actively reinscribing the Algonquin highland with new meaning. They argued that if left unchecked, the process of land conversion in the highlands would amount to an untold loss of forest value, because the highlands were home to abundant white pines which could otherwise be used to “mast” the English navy. The materiality of this signification persists to this day; the Algonquin highland, once a predominantly coniferous ecosystem, is now dominated by second- and third-growth hardwood forests. Of course, this is a simple illustration that elides other representations of the Algonquin highland, “Algonquin as refuge” or “Algonquin as Island of Hope” (Reid, 1992, p. 45), to name a few. But it nevertheless illustrates a central theme in poststructural political ecology, which is that material analysis cannot be carried out in the absence of discursive analysis. In other words, we cannot fully theorize the materiality of nature without understanding the discursive manner through which nature is first represented (Escobar, 1999).
Governmentality: From Bodies to Things One very useful point of entry into debates about the material and representational politics of human-nonhuman relations begins with Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality and the exercise of biopower (Darier, 1999; Luke, 1995, 1999). Although Foucault did not write specifically about environmental issues, his writings about the body and about governmentality serve as important segues into these themes. For Foucault, governmentality describes a process through which direct, sovereign rule associated with monarchical authority was challenged by an emerging “art of government” in 16th-century Europe, the exercise of biopower, that concerned itself with the self-regulation of one’s body and the regulation of the social body. In this sense, Foucault wanted to reveal how it came to be that states successfully brought within their range of concerns the behavior of entire populations and to identify the techniques deployed by the state in disciplining collective and individual behavior. To do so, Foucault showed that the notion of sovereignty based on divine and natural law, the principle of direct rule, and the family, no longer provided the state-as-sovereign with sufficient reason to exist, particularly at a time when divine rule had become subject to tremendous scrutiny. Consequently, a new art of government emerged, one which sought to maintain social control through the “right disposition of things,” and which opposed the threat of direct corporeal intervention in the manner of its sovereign predecessor (Foucault, 1977, 1978a). Crucial to understanding this shift, therefore, is the emergence of a science of government that enabled “things” to come into existence (Foucault, 1978a). In elaborating the ascendance of governmentality, Foucault argued that from the 16th to 18th centuries the central “thing” being apprehended was an abstract notion of social economy. And it was through this science of statistical representation of the social economy that “it became possible to identify problems specific to the population” (Foucault, 1978a, p. 99). Up until this point in the history of econ-
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omy, the practice of economics had never been considered a matter of social life but was instead limited to the confines of family life. But after amassing statistics about family-level economy, the art of government became synonymous with managing the aggregate economy abstracted to the entirety of the social body. It was therefore through the statistical rendering of an abstract social economy that it became possible to speak metaphorically about the health of the entire population. Indeed, population health itself, through its intimate connection to the performance of the aggregate economy, could be subsequently witnessed, measured, and disciplined. As such, population welfare, knowledge about which derived from the state practice of statistical representation, became the newly emergent object of governmental rationality. Accordingly, the art of government, ensuring the “right disposition of things” for Foucault, should be understood as an exercise in biopower, a concern for “the totality of human beings constituted as a population: health, hygiene, natality, longevity, race” (Foucault, 1989, quoted in Darier, 1999, p. 22). But alongside the idea of biopower emerges the notion of biopolitics, political struggles over “the control of all aspects of human life, especially the conditions for human biological reproduction” (Darier, 1999, pp. 22-23). Taken together, biopower and biopolitics work on the social body in two ways: individual bodies are normalized according to the behavioural codes that are said to guarantee personal health, and meanwhile the social body is regulated to maximize population health. In this sense, governmentality becomes concerned with both the self-government of one’s body and the government of the social body. But the health and welfare of the social body cannot be limited merely to disciplining and normalizing bodies in the interest of the whole, as biopower and biopolitics suggest. If modern environmentalism has taught us anything, it is that bodies are not detached from their material surroundings but are, on the contrary, wholly dependent on them for survival. It is at this point in the history of governmentality that several contemporary social theorists have begun using Foucault’s ideas of governmentality to theorize the nature-society interface (Luke, 1999). Timothy Luke provides an important insight into how this may be so, building upon Foucault’s idea that biopower was not limited merely to bodies. Indeed, Foucault himself wrote that biopower “brought life and its mechanisms [italics added] into the realm of explicit calculation” (Foucault, 1978b, p. 143). For Luke (1995), therefore, it is here that “we can begin to locate the emergence of ‘the environment’ as a nexus for knowledge formation and as a cluster of power tactics” (p. 66). Accordingly, what emerge here are codes of knowledge representing the human interface with the biophysical world which themselves become crucial technologies in the exercise of power or, to use Luke’s language, eco-knowledge/geo-power. This is to say that the apprehension of knowledge about how it is that ecosystems are central to human survival (eco-knowledge) becomes a political technology through which geo-power is exercised. Thus, for Luke, we arrive at the process of “environmentality.” Under this formulation, bodily behavior and, by extension, the consumptive practices of everyday life are worked on indirectly by those codes that specify the most appropriate ways in which bodies should engage with biophysical processes. Here, the daily acts of vegetarianism, the purchase of organic foods, and other identifications that symbolize one’s commitment to an environmental ethics can all be read as eco-knowledge scripts which work through and normalize bodily behavior in accordance with the principles of nature and, to the extent that these so-called principles of nature are themselves socially determined, with history.
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But what also emerges from this conceptualization is the recognition that “the environment” is as much a historical phenomenon as it is a biological one (Escobar, 1999; Luke, 1999). This articulation makes sense when one looks to Karl Polanyi’s (1957) definition of “poverty as nature surviving.” Nature here defined is primordial; it harbors the elements of death, disease, and famine, which enact their wrath on the poor. And poverty is a mode of life that comes to symbolize the dangerous precipice between survival and death. But for Luke, the 18th-century agricultural technologies that promised to draw humanity back from the edge of death were the immediate result of the “different fields of knowledge concerned with life in general,” namely knowledge about the human health effects of pestilence and starvation (Foucault, 1978b, p. 142). Nature in this sense becomes a critical truth enfolded into the normative discourse of history’s unfolding, where the tension between what is and what should be is mediated by a contingent set of knowledges about nature. In other words, those elements of nature considered relevant to the human condition, in this case pestilence and starvation, are only deemed as such by virtue of their relation to history. Luke draws further attention to this historicity of nature when he claims that ecology, although an emerging form of knowledge that took biophysical processes to be its primary realm of concern in the latter part of the 19th century, did not become significantly politicized until such time as “the productive regime of biopolitics became fully globalized.” In contemporary ecological society, the exercise of Luke’s geopower might be read as humanity coaxed back from the edge of death (from nature) through the application and institutionalization of new, eco-modernizing technologies. Humanity’s relation with nature is, thus, significantly and immutably historical. But it is the subjectification of this nature that is the crucial point in all of this because it is the discourse through which the subjectification of nature is rendered meaningful that determines how populations, bodies, and natures will be subsequently disciplined by an institutionalized ecological modernity. All of this is another way of saying that what counts as nature in any particular context, political or otherwise, is historically constituted by “mythical, textual, technical, political, organic, and economic” discourses that “collapse into each other in a knot of extraordinary density” (Haraway, 1994, quoted in Braun & Castree, 1998, p. 26). How this knot is translated politically will be explored below. But before moving to that discussion, the relation between environmentality and instrumentalism needs to be addressed. It might be that eco-knowledge/geo-power appears as nothing less than eco-colonialism in discursive evening wear. That is, it might appear that contemporary environmental discourses are so attractive that they are being consciously appropriated by certain actors (states and capitalists) and used to advance private interests above those of common concern. Indeed, a sizeable literature on precisely this issue is in wide circulation (Sachs, 1993; Shiva, 1993). But it would be mistaken to conflate Luke’s notion of environmentality with instrumentality. Of course, it can be shown that capital does engage in discursive politics to advance its interest in resource control, as in the case of British Columbian rainforest politics (Willems-Braun, 1997). But the exercise of biopower is something quite different. It refers to the construction of knowledge, and the act of drawing this knowledge into the “realm of explicit calculation,” not the instrumental creation and subsequent application of knowledge to some predetermined end. Evaluating the structural processes that enable instrumental green managerialism is something altogether quite different than examining the discursive politics of resource control.
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Picturing Nature Returning to the idea of forest-nature introduced at the beginning of this argument, David Demeritt’s disentanglement of this “knot of extraordinary density” is illustrative. Not only is Demeritt able to unveil a specific subjectification of forest-nature at a specific moment in space-time, he does so while counterarguing the instrumentalist critique (Demeritt, 2001). To do so, Demeritt shows how early cartographic representations depicting total forest coverage in the United States were used by early American conservationists, such as United States Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot, to represent American forests as a singular ontological whole. Up until this time, the American identity had been synonymous with a frontier mentality that idealized the industriousness of early American settlers and the success at pushing back the wilderness frontier. Converting forests into arable land symbolized this ideal. But not long after constructing these forest maps, the prevailing image of progress began falling out of favor with the American public. With the advent of the aggregate forest map, it could be shown visually for the first time that aggregate forest coverage in the United States had been dramatically reduced over time, a move which lent credibility to the conservationists’ claim that existing rates of harvest must be curtailed to forestall a forest famine. Using such visualizations, nature was depicted, materially and metaphorically, as existing beyond the threshold of human activity, whose limits would be soon transgressed if current practices remained unchanged. It was through this dualist, visual representation that forest-nature was “brought . . . into the realm of explicit calculation” and “made [eco]knowledge/[geo]power an agent in the transformation of life” (Foucault, 1978b, p. 143). Yet for the purpose of my analysis, the crucial point in Demeritt’s intervention is the way in which he invokes the notion of governmentality in discourses about forestnature. He demonstrates how, through the act of subjectifying forest-nature, conservationists and silviculturalists were able to render U.S. forests the objects of expert, scientific control, a move which depoliticized any a priori interests that might have previously inscribed the forest with meaning (DeLuca & Demo, 2001; Ferguson, 1990; Willems-Braun, 1997). And more important still, Demeritt reveals the historicity of forest-nature, the idea that only through the statistical (and technological) enumeration of forests could their underlying “nature” be revealed. In other words, rendering vast tracts of forest as natural space was possible only with the advent of the enumerating technologies and representational practices deployed in the subjectification of forest-nature, technologies which were themselves the products of a unique political 1 history. In the end, with the help of Demeritt’s argument, we see that forest-nature was rendered as such due to the “multiple dimensions” constituting it at that time: the political economic context in which it came about (U.S. industrialism), the moral content of the conservationists’ arguments (aggregate forests as representative of an American ideal), and the textual quality and aperspectival objectivity that accompanied the construction of maps.
Revis(ion)ing the Boreal Turning to a contemporary example, the recent politicization of the Canadian boreal forest illustrates how a new subjectification of the boreal is emerging alongside the
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practice of modern environmentalism. In recent decades, the forest-nature of the Canadian boreal has been dramatically transformed, and not simply through the materialist interventions decried by the environmental community. No longer is boreal forest-nature passively produced through the institutional arrangements associated with sustained yield forestry and the logic of Fordist production (Hayter, 2001, p. 127; Sandberg, 2001, p. 290). Nor can it be regarded simply as an ideological artifact enlisted in the practice of Canadian nation building, despite that the ideology of the Canadian North continues to wield significant mainstream cultural appeal. Instead, the boreal forest is now the subject of an intense political imbroglio that draws together a highly politicized indigenous peoples’ movement, an environmental movement that places the boreal firmly within the climate change and biodiversity discourses, and a state-capitalist enterprise still committed to maximizing fiber yields under conditions of “increasing scarcity” and “competitiveness.” In geographical terms, the term boreal enumerates a circumpolar space encompassing the forested regions of the northern hemisphere. In the North American setting, the boreal spans a significant portion of the Canadian North, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Arctic Ocean in the north, while bisecting 12 subnational political jurisdictions (8 provinces, 3 territories, and 1 state). It is home to numerous indigenous communities irreversibly transformed through European colonial practices, and it continues to be of incalculable importance to the Canadian staples economy. In its southern latitudes, the boreal is home to multiple tree species, both coniferous and deciduous of commercial and noncommercial value, whereas in the north, boreal forests consist mainly of coniferous tree species. Culturally, the boreal has featured prominently in Canadian mythology as a recurring object of Canadian landscape painting and narrative for well more than a century. But this is simply one, albeit extremely cursory, description of the boreal. More recently, with the advent of global environmental discourse in the 1990s, the climate change and biological diversity discourses have become indispensable tools in the reconstruction and representation of the boreal. As the climate change debate rages, the boreal forest, as with forests the world over, has been actively enlisted by the environmental community in the struggle to mitigate the effects of carbon dumping in the upper atmosphere through either carbon storage or the sequestering of wayward atmospheric carbon. Bolstered by loads of statistical data about the boreal’s capacity to store carbon, the argument goes that any large-scale industrial intrusion into the boreal ecosystem, whether oil and gas prospecting, forestry, or hydroelectric development, will result in untold climatic effects. Similarly, by asserting that the boreal is biologically diverse, the environmental community argues that our greatest chance of adapting to future environmental change rests with leaving the boreal in an “intact” condition. No longer, therefore, is the environmental resistance to industrial development driven simply by the ideological need to preserve nature for nature’s sake, as was the case in Demeritt’s theorization of Progressive Era United States when the threat of an eroding wilderness was easily associated with the collapse of the American frontier myth and the collapse of American society itself. Instead, through the practices of representing the boreal as a central agent in any global climate change or biodiversity strategy, boreal forest-nature moves from being merely an ideological or aesthetic expression associated with the presence of trees to an active political agent in the more serious matter of securing an ecologically modern future. In being recreated through the scientific discourses of climate change and biodiversity, the materiality of boreal forest-nature and its legitimacy as a space in which human interaction should be min-
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imized becomes inextricably linked to its capacity to regulate planetary climate and guarantee a genetically diverse biosphere through perpetuity.
Subjectification of Boreal Forest-Nature Under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) But alongside climate change and biodiversity, sustainable forest management has emerged out of the environmental political struggles of the 1980s and 1990s as another very powerful political technology. In the same way that the boreal has been represented through the climate change and biodiversity discourses, so too is it being reconstituted by the discourse of sustainable forest management. One effort to define and operationalize the principles of sustainable forest management is found in the forest certification practices of the FSC. The FSC is a global sustainable forestry management (SFM) standard developed by several environmental groups in the early 1990s to compete directly with state and multilateral efforts to curtail the negative socioecological effects of deforestation. At its core, the FSC is a consensus model which seeks to bring together interested stakeholder groups—environment, community/indigenous, and industry—to negotiate how SFM should be conducted in forest ecosystems around the globe. It consists of a set of voluntary, global principles, but also requires that subregional standards be developed to take better account of the unique sociopolitical and ecological conditions that constitute that particular space (FSC, 2000).2 Forest product producers conforming to the FSC standards earn the right to attach the FSC logo to their products. As such, the FSC concept trades on the twin premise that consumers are motivated to mobilize their purchasing power to some apparently ethical end and that they garner sufficient market demand to achieve that end.3 However promising the FSC might at first appear, it is not without its critics. A sustained elaboration of this critique extends well beyond the scope of the present analysis. Suffice it to say, however, that most of the FSC’s problems stem from that fact that its legitimacy is measured in terms of profitability. This critique becomes starkly apparent when the effect of the FSC framework on indigenous peoples’ and community and workers rights is taken into account. To the extent that the FSC model infuses that practice of indigenous knowledge into the practice of sustainable forestry, one can read the commodification of indigenous experience. In more practical terms, the legitimacy of indigenous identity in the periphery, manifest through the practice of sustainable forestry, is contingent on steady market demand for FSC-certified forest products in core economies. Notwithstanding the materialist critique of the FSC, however, theorizing the FSC using Foucault’s notion of governmentality draws into view more than simply the distributional effects of the scheme. The subjectification of boreal forest-nature through the FSC model can be theorized as the process by which new elements in forest-nature are historicized and drawn into the “realm of calculation” (Foucault, 1977). As such, one begins to understand forest-nature in a considerably different way than was the case when forest-nature was constructed statistically and cartographically more than a century ago (Demeritt, 2001). In these early formulations, statistical representation of forest-nature underwrote a management paradigm that identified “normal” growth rates for entire forests which were, in turn, used by foresters to prescribe “annual allowable cuts” and guarantee aggregate forest productivity. But with the advent of re-
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mote sensing and satellite imaging technologies, new biophysical properties constituting forest-nature, properties such as thermodynamic climate-forest interactions and carbon storage and sequestration capacity, are being apprehended and used to normalize a new set of appropriate human-forest interactions. Some forest ecologists argue that anthropogenic disturbances in boreal ecosystems are minimizing the forest’s capacity “to store and cycle energy and material flows” and that to avoid catastrophic transformations in forest composition it is “energy and material flows” that must be managed (Kronberg & Watt, 2000, p. 262), not simply “normal” growth rates, “annual allowable cuts,” and “maximum sustained yields.” Indeed, a whole new forest science is emerging alongside the SFM conceptual framework, and with it a more “advanced” regime of truth about forest-nature grounded in the eco-knowledge claims of ecosystems science. But another crucial dynamic plays a part in the subjectification of forest-nature under the FSC regime, namely the dynamic of community involvement, including aboriginal participation, in the construction of FSC standards. Thus, the criteria of social equity must coexist alongside ecological science in rendering a forested space certifiable under the FSC regime. In other words, the history of colonial oppression and exploitation in the boreal landscape must be retold, and to some extent resolved, as the FSC standard-setting body negotiates a forestry standard for the Canadian boreal. These histories therefore become vitally important components of the eco-knowledges used in the reconstruction of boreal forest-nature, and by entering into the “realm of calculation” become important factors in the historicization of forest-nature. From this initial evaluation of the subjectification of forest-nature, we can now begin reconstructing boreal forest-nature as an exercise of social geo-power in which the assemblage of knowledges that politicize the boreal—either through the climate change, biodiversity, or sustainable forest management discourses—have the effect of reinscribing the boreal space with new meaning. No longer is the boreal an abstract economic value or simply a myth or an unproblematic meta-history defining Canadianness. It emerges through this new eco-knowledge discursive regime as a space of multiple epistemologies and hybrid nature (Escobar, 1999).
Boreal Hybridity In the end, what this tells us is that those controlling the environmentalization process are not only in control of how nature is historicized, but are also responsible for delimiting what counts as nature. But to assume that the environmentalization process is universal in form and conforms to a standard method disregards the possibility of politics tout court, for it is precisely the fact that knowledge is partial that lies at the core of political contest! This is why Donna Haraway’s (1994) categorical imperative to query what counts as nature is so important. Representations of nature are partial and must be recognized as such, despite how useful they may be for social movements seeking at wresting control of space from the territorializing tendencies capital and state practices. By posing her politics in this way, Haraway is consciously constructing a politics that does not originate with any rigidly defined subject position. Instead, she is critical of subject positions, such as “laborer” and “objectified woman,” that construct themselves as victims, because victimhood, according to Haraway, implies that some
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original state of being has been apprehended, violated, exploited, or transgressed. Implicit in political projects, like Marxism and radical feminism, lurks some notion of “original unity” and the promise of returning its devotees to a Utopic, original state of being. These identifications trade on many of the modern dualisms—self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female—that imply “otherness” and therefore domination. To counterpose a politics founded on dualism, Haraway (1991) offers the cyborg metaphor. The cyborg embodies a fusion of human and machine and therefore “skips the step of original unity, or identification with nature in the Western sense” (p. 151). Here, the cyborg is freed from any historical identifications, a move that Haraway underscores by putting to work the metaphor of cyborg writing. For Haraway, “cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them [cyborgs] as other” (p. 175). Thus, the cyborg might be a useful metaphor for reconceptualizing the boreal. Of course, boreal forest-nature does not embody the fusions of human and machine. Rather, it is a comparatively mundane ecosystem when one considers the spectacular mega-fauna that constituted the rainforest debates of the 1980s and 1990s. But what is more, the boreal, as with all forests, is composed not of singularity, totality, or original unity, but of multiplicity, historicity, and mutability. Therefore, through the recent politicization of the boreal and the subjectification of subaltern forest-natures, more generally, we are witness to a cyborg rewriting of space, a marking of the world, that uses not only the tools of ecological science but also the telling of aboriginal history and other histories of exploitation in recreating the meaning of space. To the extent that we can acknowledge this project as occurring through the FSC, the historicization of forest-nature through the FSC process is a conscious move by the environmental community to reinvent forest-nature, at least temporarily, based on the principle of socioecological inclusivity.
Conclusion So in the final analysis, why should we be concerned with how forest-nature is represented? Representations of nature matter because they generate very real material effects. When constructed as a natural resource, we are asked to assign value to a tree independent of the forest in which it stands. In mainstream political economy in which forests are identified as the true sources of value underwriting corporate bond issues, aggregate forest health becomes dutifully governmentalized through the discourses of conventional silviculture. But what the case of boreal forest-nature can reveal to us (socioecological inclusivists) is that the manner in which forests are represented does matter. By appropriating the tools that marked “nature as other,” namely the tools of scientific objectivity, and fusing these with other epistemologies in the spirit of inclusivity, the material effects of “tree as natural resource” are diminished while forestry becomes simultaneously the practice of community and land stewardship, climate regulation, and biodiversity promotion, and not simply the practice of resource extraction. This is made even more evident through the practice of FSC forest certification in which the meaning of forest-nature becomes an exercise in geo-power; forestnature is governmentalized, but the social relations inhering in the “tools” that “mark the world” are democratized.
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But democratizing the process by which forest-nature is governmentalized is not the exclusive consequence of the environmentality of forest-nature, for governmentality also implies the normalization of bodily behavior. In the case of environmentality, bodily behavior through the practice of everyday living is normalized according to what counts as nature. And if we take the foregoing argument seriously, we might begin discussing more meaningfully how normalizing the conduct of everyday living in accordance with the precepts of nature is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is an ethical and moral imperative. The political implications of this are clear. When consumers are encouraged to consume forest products manufactured from FSC-certified timber, they are simultaneously being asked to advocate the redress of colonial dominations inscribed in forest-natures, endorse the climate-regulating effects of northern forests, and acknowledge that biodiversity is an essential component of life. All of these seem to be perfectly innocuous values deserving of our consumptive attention; after all, who could ever claim to be against life? But the uncritical embrace of ethical consumption overlooks the cultural specificities that work through the “ethical commodity” form. In the case of ethical forest products derived from Canadian boreal forest-nature, consumers need to ask whose nature is conveyed through the FSC-certified commodity form and whose identity is being protected.
Notes
1. Here, Demeritt (2001) notes a point of curiosity. The methods used in the acquisition of forest statistics borrowed heavily from those techniques used in early-19th-century census taking. It was exactly this same political technology that Foucault’s art of government relied on in the governmentalization of the state and the exercise of biopower. 2. For those unfamiliar with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), there does exist an FSC governance structure and a corresponding set of rules, including a dispute settlement mechanism, which prescribes how stakeholders must negotiate forestry standards for particular regional ecosystems. 3. Among the many pitfalls with the FSC idea is that the ethical priority to which the FSC regime is directed differs from region to region. For example, in Canada, the socioecological issues addressed through FSC certification might be deforestation and distribution rights to aboriginal communities, whereas in another region of the globe, the move toward FSC certification may be to counteract illegal logging and the trade of high conservation-value species. What this means is that the comparability of FSC wood products is very difficult. Read differently, however, this may also be the FSC’s strength. The model, in effect, globalizes sustainable forestry management (SFM), but leaves open for whom and to what purpose the regime may be directed. In other words, it is not exclusively a tool for corporate green managerialism, nor is it fully wedded to an ailing development model that attempts to eradicate poverty by increasing household incomes through export production. Instead, the credibility of the FSC model hinges on regional and subregional difference, a move that might legitimize regional discursive power formations in the liberation of postcolonial space.
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Andrew Baldwin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University, and a writer/editor for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development.
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