Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Nature Environmental Conservation & Protection

Technonatures

Environments, Technologies, Spaces, and Places in the Twenty-first Century

edited by Chris Wilbert & Damian F. White

Publisher
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2010
Category
Environmental Conservation & Protection, Environmental Policy, Future Studies
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781554581504
    Publish Date
    Apr 2010
    List Price
    $45.99
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781554588206
    Publish Date
    Apr 2010
    List Price
    $42.99

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

Environmentalism and social sciences appear to be in a period of disorientation and perhaps transition. In this innovative collection, leading international thinkers explore the notion that one explanation for the current malaise of the “politics of ecology” is that we increasingly find ourselves negotiating “technonatural” space/times. International contributors map the political ecologies of our technonatural present and indicate possible paths for technonatural futures.
The term “technonatures” is in debt to a long line of environmental cultural theory from Raymond Williams onwards, problematizing the idea that a politics of the environment can be usefully grounded in terms of the rhetoric of defending the pure, the authentic, or an idealized past solely in terms of the ecological or the natural. In using the term “technonatures” as an organizing myth and metaphor for thinking about the politics of nature in contemporary times, this collection seeks to explore one increasingly pronounced dimension of the social natures discussion. Technonatures highlights a growing range of voices considering the claim that we are not only inhabiting diverse social natures but that within such natures our knowledge of our worlds is ever more technologically mediated, produced, enacted, and contested.

About the authors

Chris Wilbert is a senior lecturer in tourism and geography at Anglia Ruskin University, England. He has published on animal geographies with Chris Philo (Animal Spaces, Beastly Places, 2000) and with Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel. More recently he has written on the politics of avian flu, cultural and media aspects of tourism, and environmentalism. He is currently on the editorial board of Society & Animals and Radical Philosophy.

Chris Wilbert's profile page

 

Damian F. White is an assistant professor of sociology in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Social Science at the Rhode Island School of Design. He has held academic posts previously at James Madison University and Goldsmith College University of London. He has published articles on the historical relations between human societies and nature, the green industrial revolution, the “production of nature” debate, the libertarian traditions of the political left, and the public understanding of science. He is the author of Murray Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal (2008) and, with Chris Wilbert, The Colin Ward Reader (forthcoming, 2009).

Chris Wilbert is a senior lecturer in tourism and geography at Anglia Ruskin University, England. He has published on animal geographies with Chris Philo (Animal Spaces, Beastly Places, 2000) and with Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel. More recently he has written on the politics of avian flu, cultural and media aspects of tourism, and environmentalism. He is currently on the editorial board of Society & Animals and Radical Philosophy.

Damian F. White's profile page

Excerpt: Technonatures: Environments, Technologies, Spaces, and Places in the Twenty-first Century (edited by Chris Wilbert & Damian F. White)

Excerpt from the Introduction, Technonatures: Environments, Technologies Spaces, and Places in the Twenty-first Century edited Damian F. White and Chris Wilbert

The expansion of mankind, both in numbers and per capita exploitation of Earth's resources, has been astounding. To give a few examples: During the past three centuries human population increased tenfold to 6000 million, accompanied e. g. by a growth in cattle population to 1400 million (about one cow per average size family). Urbanisation has even increased tenfold in the past century. In a few generations mankind is exhausting the fossil fuels that were generated over several hundred million years. The release of SO2, globally about 160 Tg/year to the atmosphere by coal and oil burning, is at least two times larger than the sum of all natural emissions, occurring mainly as marine dimethyl-sulfide from the ocean . . . Considering these and many other major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term “anthropocene” for the current geological epoch.

– Crutzen and Stoermer (2000)

Increasingly in future . . . the time will come, for example, when massive programmes will have to be set in train to regulate the relationship between oxygen, ozone, and carbon dioxide in the earths atmosphere. In this perspective, environmental ecology could equally be re-named “machinic ecology”, since both cosmic and human practice are nothing if not machinici—indeed they are machines of war, in so far as “Nature” has always been at war with life!

– Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (2000)

Political ecology, at least in its theories, has to let go of nature. Indeed, nature is the chief obstacle that has always hampered the development of public discourse.

– Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature (2004)

. .. far from being dead and buried, nature is currently being practiced anew . .. But that nature is not what we have imagined it to be, fixed in its identity and unrelated to society.

– Steve Hinchliffe, Geographies of Nature (2008)

The Environmental Debate in Changing Times?

 

The current state of “the environmental debate” is in considerable flux at the beginning of the twenty-first century. From European Union countries to Argentina, from India to Canada, or China, Egypt, and beyond, diverse societies find themselves gripped by controversies, dilemmas, and disputes emerging from the incorporation and resistance of human and non-human bodies, ecologies and landscapes into circuits of commodification, property regulation, innovation, patenting, and enclosure. Disputes surrounding nanotechnology, biotechnology, and global warming, and concerns over biodiversity, water resources, and food—to name just a few acute issues—lend credence to the perception that natures, societies, and technologies are being jointly made and remade at dizzying speeds (Braun and Castree 1998). According to many writers (Haraway 1991, 1998; Luke 1997, 1999; Guattari 2000; Braun and Castree 1998), a seemingly unbounded, technologically instilled, and ideologically renewed capitalism appears to be intensifying the creative destruction of diverse ecologies around the globe even as it lurches unsteadily from boom to bust. Yet the movements that have been at the centre of politicizing these processes of remaking—notably the diverse ecological and green social movements that exploded onto the political scene with so much force in the last quarter of the twentieth century—seem politically and intellectually disorientated by such developments. Indeed, if we follow the thoughts of Bruno Latour,”the politics of nature” is increasingly marked by a degree of stagnation (2004, 1).

Latour is of course a leading provocateur whose work is defined by a penchant for the dramatic (see Castree 2006). Yet, at a time when the “environmental question& edquo; is at least rhetorically moving toward centre stage in the political world, the claim that there has concurrently been a loss of confidence, coherence, and vigour among certain manifestations of environmentalism is an assertion that has been reiterated recently by a much broader array of academic and activist voices, from different parts of the globe.

Some have pointed to the nervous and unsteady responses in Europe to the controversies raised by Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and the subsequent Lomborg affair. 1 Others have suggested a certain plateauing of support can be detected in public opinion surveys for mainstream environmental organizations from the UK to Australia (MacNaghten 2003, 63; Davison in this volume). In the United States, it is Shellenberger and Nordhaus's internal critique of the mighty US environmental movement “The Death of Environmentalism” (2005) that has most crystallized concerns. While maintaining that mainstream environmental movements in the US have made important regulatory gains over the last three decades in the fight for basic environmental protection, Shellenberger and Nordhaus have suggested over more recent decades—and with particular reference to global warming—that little further progress has been made. The dominant US environmental groups, they contend, are failing to generate a credible vision of the future or the political alliances that could bring “progress” about. More recently, they have refined this critique (Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2007) to argue that the manner in which much conventional mainstream environmental critique has relied on a narrative which problematizes human agencies within the context of a static and a-historical image of “Nature” has lead to a “politics of limits” that itself has significantly constrained the imaginative capacities to rethink a productive, progressive politics of the environment.

Editorial Reviews

Environmental sociologists and geographers will find this book entertaining and enlightening as well as sugggestive of new ways of looking at the environment.

CHOICE, April 2010

"This anthology probes the changing relationships between society and the natural environment. It examines the popular sense that environmentalists have lost their way. How have they failed to appeal to broad publics? Why have public perceptions of environmental risk and climate change not been translated into political will? Technonatures shows the different ways that nature increasingly reflects human interventions—from medical innovations to agricultural and conservation practice to the continental scale of the impacts of human-introduced pests. This is a book that offers lucid insights and will appeal to a broad audience."

Rob Shields