Abstract
Stephanie Rutherford employs Foucault’s concept of governmentality to explore the workings of contemporary environmental discourses in the United States. Arguing that power operates primarily through non-coercive, productive channels, Governing the Wild shows how ‘nature’ is construed and obscured at four emblematic sites. The American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Biodiversity ‘attempts nothing less than an inventory of nature’ (p. 2) in order to make total scientific management of life the only imaginable solution to species decline. Disneyland packages and sells environmentalism as both a product and as a mode of being (consumer) in its larger project of making everything about consumption. An ecotour of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks provides a supposedly direct and unmediated interaction with ‘wild nature’ when in fact it is resource-intensive in its fossil fuel use, dependent on erasures of Native history, and available only to the rich. Lastly, Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ creates an expert on a mission to stop global warming, one whose authority is based on science as a universal truth claim. Few critical theorists would argue with these analyses. Indeed, Rutherford’s insightful readings are based on an engagement with the existing literature on museums, theme parks, ecotourism, and visual culture.
‘Green governmentality,’ then, is a valuable extension of a concept to a realm that Foucault himself did not address directly. (It would also have made a better title, as Rutherford takes on a broader concept than ‘the wild,’ and ‘ecotours of power’ doesn’t make much sense.) At the same time, this is well-tilled and tended soil, rendered productive over 30 years by science studies scholars (Haraway, Latour), environmental historians (Price, Spence), and sociologists (Luke, Gottlieb). Rutherford’s point that the way in which these four emblematic sites erase power differences and politics (between North and South, but also those rendered natural through capitalism in the neoliberal moment) ultimately leaves political changes unimaginable is a familiar, solid critique of American environmentalisms. It is an unsurprising and sad fact that it has not largely filtered out of the academy.
Yet this book is unlikely to win any converts among mainstream environmentalists who believe that driving hybrids and buying organic coffee is the route to ecological health, and it is also unlikely to be picked up by those who are not the environmentalist white bourgeois subjects normalized within the discourses critiqued by Rutherford. The language of this book is suffused with theory-speak and shorthand references that would only be understood by those in the humanities or social sciences (‘The Festival of the Lion King brings together race, colonial imaginings, and the Western gaze in a short and happily consumable jamboree’ [p. 57]). This is a shame, because the case studies in themselves have the potential to be excellent teaching tools for undergraduates and graduate students in fields such as Environmental Studies and the rash of ‘Sustainability Studies’ programs opening on campuses in North America and Europe.