Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

“Where eagles dare” is an ethno-fable about the conversion of the toxic Rocky Mountain Arsenal to wildlife nature preserve, supplemented by an academic and personal subsurface guide that considers Arsenal remediation beneath the surface.

Landscapes are often discursively constructed as wildernesses through an erasure of the histories of people in the landscape. Current representations of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands as an Edenic wilderness are no different. What is unusual about conceptualizations of Bikini Atoll as a pristine wilderness is that it is the site of a recent history of colonial appropriation and massive landscape transformation through nuclear-weapons testing. Although people both outside and within the Bikinian community regularly represent the atoll as a kind of paradise, there are strong differences of opinion regarding what the future uses of the atoll should be. This is because there is a sharp division between representations of the atoll as a pristine wilderness with visually pleasing landscapes and seascapes that need to be preserved and locally produced representations of the atoll as an Eden with an abundance of useable natural resources.

The environmental–racial order in northern New Mexico is maintained through a process of racial triangulation in which Anglos, Native Americans, and Hispanos are valued relative to one another along axes of environmental stewardship and victimization (Kim C J, 1999, “The racial triangulation of Asian Americans” Politics and Society 27 105–138). Both axes involve the juxtaposing of three long-standing images: (1) Spanish injustices to the Indians; (2) the inability of Mexicans to manage their land properly; and (3) Indians being preeminent environmental stewards. In contrast to Kim's formulation of racial triangulation, however, the axes also involve imagery that contradicts these images: the debauched, poverty-stricken Indian; and European culture as a despoiler of the environment. Also in contrast to Kim's formulation, racial triangulation can involve the creation of new identities. In the 1960s Hispano activists began claiming to be heirs to a hybrid culture that included elements of both Native American and Spanish cultures. While this claim to hybridity enabled the creation of new oppositional discourses, the reconciling of contradictory imagery by historicizing the discourses and by other means undermines the new Hispano oppositional discourses as well as Hispano identity itself. Racial triangulation is thus a fluid and contested process in which identity formation and the interchange between predominant and oppositional discourses are constitutive of power relations. Contradictory imagery in the discourse facilitates the maintenance of the environmental–racial order, even as it enables subordinates to challenge their racialized positions and to effect change in the distribution of material wealth, rights, and privileges.

In British Columbia, Canada, industrial sustained-yield forest regulation was embraced together with a system of forest tenures governing private access to public forest lands in the mid-19408. This approach has underpinned forest exploitation and regulation ever since, despite sometimes significant reforms over the years. Yet this approach to forest policy has also come under fire in recent years because of pervasive signs of economic, social, and environmental exhaustion. In this paper I analyze the political circumstances surrounding adoption of this particular approach to governing forest access and forest use in the province of British Columbia. In particular, I draw on historical documentation related to two key provincial Royal Commissions on Forestry conducted in the 1940s and 1950s. These commissions provided an arena for debating alternative approaches to forest regulation in the province, and resulted in a series of recommendations that were key influences on postwar forest policy. Drawing on the debate and particularly on the positions adopted by socialists and trade unionists, I link the politics of forest regulation to the politics of class struggle and class compromise in early postwar British Columbia. This serves the purpose of highlighting important, alternative ideas about forest use values and exchange values that contrast with those that underpin conventional, commodity-oriented forestry in the province, as well as with contemporary alternatives to mainstream forestry. It also serves the purpose of exploring the organization of political consent around industrial, sustained-yield forestry, treating this model of regulation not as something ‘natural’, but rather as something politically contingent and negotiated. And finally, I examine seldom explored links between the politics of producing and regulating nature, and the politics of class struggle under capitalism more generally.

Bruno Latour's Politics of Nature (2004, Harvard University Press) argues for a new ‘common sense’ for political ecology that disabuses it of any foundational grounding in nature. In this paper I interrogate Latour's project in relation to struggles that might be termed ‘subaltern political ecologies’. I argue that Latour's account of the political as bearing on the ‘progressive composition of the world’ offers insights for engaging with the inventiveness of subaltern political activity. I suggest that subaltern political ecologies offer both resources and challenges to the project of reworking the common sense of political ecology. To demonstrate this, I engage with the struggles against unequal social and material relations of the 18th-century Irish peasant movement, the Whiteboys. I follow the movement of their forms of political activity to London's dockside spaces. I suggest two skills that subaltern political ecologies ‘add’ to the politics of ‘heterogeneous associations’: the configuring of strategic arrangements of humans and nonhumans in antagonistic ways and the making of solidarities as ongoing interventions in the constitution of networks. This reworking of key political processes as active engagements in world-building activities seeks to foreground forms of political identity and agency which have often been marginalised, ignored, or dismissed.

In this paper I argue for building dialogues between scientific and Maasai knowledge articulations, utilizing knowledge of wildebeest as an example. By locating Maasai and scientific knowledges regarding a particular subject (wildebeest) in relation to each other—in discourse and in practice—my intention is to create the space for their active engagement. I strive to (1) expose the situatedness, strengths, and weaknesses of both Maasai knowledge and scientific knowledge, and (2) illustrate the conditions within which collaborative dialogues can be constructed between the situated knowledges or knowledge spaces embodied by Maasai and conservation scientists. In doing so I hope to contribute to a shift in theoretical debates regarding knowledge integration for natural-resource management, away from ‘building bridges’ and towards the building of dialogues.

In this paper we discuss the geographical contexts within which nations are reproduced. Although geographers have carried out much interesting and insightful work in their studies of nationalism, we contend that the majority of authors have tended to focus on the way in which particular sites and landscapes come to represent nations. Less attention has been directed towards the geographical concepts and processes that inform the ongoing reproduction of nations. We elaborate on the potential for geographers to explore more systematically the way in which key geographical concepts such as place and scale are imbricated in the reproduction of nations. We do so, first, at a conceptual level before, second, discussing empirical evidence that is drawn from an oral history research project based in Wales. We conclude by arguing that geographers should be at the forefront of attempts to comprehend better the multiple places and scales of the reproduction of the nation.

This paper is about narratives of regional identity. In it I look at how they are formed and at the complex (and at times contradictory) cultural and political uses to which they are put. I examine the poetry of Basil Bunting, in particular his sonata Briggflatts as an example of a narrative of regional identity. Bunting's life and poetry are used to cast light on many of the important themes that can be identified in the literature on regionalism including the uses of history in identity formation, issues of landscape and language, and issues of universalism versus particularism in social–political practice. I draw on Bunting's subtle, complex, and pluralistic sense of his Northumbrian home-world to challenge those advocates of the ‘relational region’ who see places as simply the local articulation of global flows and who present any concern with local culture and identity as atavistic and archaic. I suggest that, by focusing on the enduring importance of dwelling, Bunting's poetry demonstrates the progressive potential of regional narratives while avoiding recourse to a crude metaphysics of scale. I show how poetry is a means of developing narratives of local and regional identity in ways which transcend the dichotomies with which social scientists in general—and geographers in particular—perennially struggle.