Domination, violence, accumulation

A third theme in green thought makes stronger claims about the ecological nature of the state, and builds on the two previous points about sovereignty and rationality. This to suggest that, at the very least, historically existing states have engendered environmental degradation as part of their normal operations and internal logic.

Regarding the state as an instrument of domination, Bookchin is the best known exponent of this view. He suggests (1980; 1982), for example, that the state is the ultimate hierarchical institution which consolidates all other hierarchical institutions. Such institutions of domination simultaneously involve the domination of some humans by others and the domination of non-humans by human societies. More concretely, the political form which states entail is one which sets in train a set of ecologically unsustainable practices. In an argument which has much in common with historical sociologist accounts (Mann 1986; Tilly 1990), Carter thus suggests that the State is part of the dynamic of modern society which has caused the present environmental crisis. He outlines a ‘environmentally hazardous dynamic’, where ‘[a] centralized, pseudo-representative, quasi-democratic state stabilizes competitive, inegalitarian economic relations that develop ‘non-convivial’, environmentally damaging ‘hard’ technologies whose productivity supports the (nationalistic and militaristic) coercive forces that empower the state’ (Carter 1993). State-building is often closely associated with interstate competition, and the military projects involved themselves engender envi­ronmental degradation, but also have historically led states to create mechanisms to promote accumulation to provide resources for warfare, and this accumulation, or economic growth, is what at the heart of much of the unsustainable nature of modern societies.

Latterly, writers including Rutherford (1999) and Luke (1999) have extended our vocabulary on domination and environmental politics, by drawing on the work of Foucault, notably his work on governmentality. These writers provide the theoretical tools and grammar for writers on environmental politics to explore the links between certain forms of knowledge (e.g. science, technology, economy, security) and subjectivity (e.g. citizen, consumer, worker) associated with modern forms of state power. These forms of power are not always experienced as external sources of domination by a centralized state apparatus; modern forms of power are experienced as a multiple series of localized tactics that touch on every aspect of our lives. Examining the development of a new form of power during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Foucault introduced the term ‘biopower’ to convey a form of power focused on the fostering of life and the care of populations (Burchell etal. 1991).

Rutherford (1999) has put forward three propositions on how we might frame our understanding of environmental politics and the role of the governmentality. The first is that the concern with ecological problems and the environmental crises can be viewed as a development of what Foucault described as the ‘regulatory biopolitics of the population’. The second is that this contemporary biopolitics has given expression to a mode of governmental rationality that is related to the institutionalization of new areas of scientific expertise, which in turn is based on a bio-economic understanding of global systems ecology. Finally, this relatively recent articulation of biopolitics gives rise to new techniques for managing the environment and populations that can be termed ‘ecological governmen- tality’. In our context here, these elements in a Foucauldian approach are best understood as useful ways of understanding the political dynamics of risk society, ecological modernization, and the ‘greening of the state’, which we discuss below.