Exploring Post-National Natures: Nature in the Shadow of the State

From the beginning of this book we have consistently emphasized that our multi-faceted understanding of states cannot be simplistically equated with a nationally scaled and territorially bound institution. Despite this stated aim, in many of the preceding chapters we have described a series of ways in which state natures have been produced at a national level. Whether it has been through water supply networks, national mapping and land-use surveys, nationalized pollution monitoring networks, or nationwide judicial frameworks, we have described how nature has been framed at a distinctly national scale. While exploring the national framing of nature we have seen how the national centralization of ecological knowledge and the territorial framing of the natural world have transformed the social experience, understanding, and ability to transform nature. A closer inspection of our descriptions of the nationalization of nature within the modern state, however, revels that the process of nationalization is never quite as national as it may seem. Attempts to produce a national picture or vision of nature are always based upon more localized practices and conventions than may be immediately apparent. It is our contention that attempts to manage and regulate nature through the multifarious processes of nationalization are best conceived of as the unfulfilled desire of numerous state regimes. This statement has two implications. First, it indicates that nationally based strategies for the control and regulation of nature are only one among a series of scales in and through which states can potentially manage nature. Secondly, it suggests that states could develop other (non-national) territorial strategies in their evolving historical relationships with the natural world. This final chapter is devoted to exploring these alterative sites and moments of contemporary state–nature relations. We begin by considering the rise of sustainable cities as alterative (‘post-national’) territorial strategies in and through which states are attempting to manage contemporary social relations with nature. As sub-national, decentralized territorial units, sustainable cities provide an interesting spatial and institutional perspective on contemporary manifestations of state nature. Drawing on the example of Australia’s Sustainable Cities Inquiry, we consider how states attempt to regulate nature through the control and administration of urban space.

Between Laboratory and Leviathan: Technological Development and the Cyborg State

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 first 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 technological 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 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).

Nature and the State Apparatus

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 different 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 referring 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). 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. The state apparatus, in this sense, comprises an agglomeration of different 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 possess ‘some degree of operational autonomy’ (Brenner 2004: 49). The state apparatus ranges, therefore, from those bureaucracies charged with conducting 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.

Seeing Double: Thinking about Natures and States

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 contemporary 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, challenges 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 definite article when referring to ‘the’ state. Reference to ‘the’ state, however innocently 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 reification of a definitive 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 broadly be defined as a Foucauldian school (Hobbes 1996: 82) of political theory, notions of the state are anathema to the careful and systematic study of the governmental technologies, modes of calculation, and institutional procedures through which socio-political power is realized. At an ontological level, it is argued that even if vestiges of the mythical abstractions (or ‘fantastic topologies’) associated with state theory persist, the power of states to shape the political, economic, and social worlds has been seriously undermined. Much of the purported reduction in the state’s sovereign power has been associated with the rise of globalization and the associated socio-ecological relations and transactions that now routinely traverse national territories.

Mapping the Land: Spatializing State Nature

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). 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 unimproved 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 flats. Perhaps what is most unusual about these figures 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 figures 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. Despite their seemingly routine character, however, what interests us about these figures are the links they reveal between nature, the state, and space (or more specifically land). The figures presented above have two things in common: first, they are all statistics about the natural world, which have been organized through specific 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 significant one. We claim that historically the idea of land has provided different nation-states with a mechanism for making sense of nature and for ordering it spatially. In light of the historical perspective on nature–state relationships provided by Chapter 3, this chapter analyses how state–nature interactions are mediated and played out within space. While recognizing the diverse range of ways in which state–nature relations have been spatialized over time, here we focus our attention on one crucial site of state nature—the land-use map.

The Moments of Nature–State Relations

A key consideration when explicating the character of nature–state relations is their historical geographies, or what we may term their key ‘moments of mutual association’. But despite the obvious importance of nature and the environment for shaping the character of the state and the equally crucial role played by physical and environmental processes in reproducing political forms, it seems clear to us that the majority of work in history and historical geography has tended to separate the two themes from one another: at one extreme lie studies of the changing political form of the state; at the other, an environmental history that is usually concerned with the history of the environment for its own sake. The not immodest aim of this chapter is to forge a more productive link between these two academic traditions. We attempt to do this through illustrating the key moments that have helped to structure nature–state relations. In talking about moments, we do not refer simply to particular times or periods that have been crucial for the forging of nature–state relations. Our emphasis on the notion of moments does not seek to give primacy to temporal issues as such. Rather, in referring to nature–state moments, we emphasize the characteristic or indicative associations that have existed between states and natures. We seek to stress, therefore, a range of different types of association that have been important in structuring nature–state relations. Obviously, the issue of time is important since the character of nature–state relations would have been extremely different in the Greek polis when compared with the state of high modernity. The degree to which nature could be modified obviously varied between the two time periods, as did its potential impact on political processes. Even within the modern period, the character of nature–state relations has varied considerably. Changing technologies and political and ecological ideologies have ensured a different repertoire of associations between states and natures throughout the whole of the modern period. But it is not the issue of time per se that explains these different associations; rather, it is the differing ideological, technological, and material relations that exist between specific states and natures at particular points in time.

States and Natures: An Introduction

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 continues 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 official political nomenclature. Skimming through the glossy colour pages of our atlas, 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 find 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 geographical 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 contemporary 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.