Generating Green Governmentality A Cultural Critique of Environmental Studies as a PowerKno

A Cultural Critique of Environmental Studies

as a Power/Knowledge Formation

Timothy W. Luke

Department of Political ScienceVirginia Polytechnic Institute

and State University

Blacksburg, VA

In and of itself, Nature is meaningless unless or until particular human

beings assign significance to it by interpreting some of its many ambivalentsigns as meaningful to them. The outcomes of this activity, however, areinescapably indeterminate, or at least, they are a culturally contingentfunction of who decodes which signs when and how they find decisive meaningthere. Because human beings will observe natural patterns differently, chooseto accentuate some, while deciding to ignore others, Nature's meanings alwayswill be multiple and unfixed.1 Such interpretive acts only constructcontestable textual fields, which are read on various levels of expression fortheir manifest and latent meanings. Before scientific disciplines orindustrial technologies turn its matter and energy into products, Naturealready is being transformed by discursive interpretation into \"naturalresources.\" And, once Nature is rendered intelligible through thesediscursive processes, it can be used to legitimize many political projects.

One vital site for generating, accumulating and then circulating such

discursive knowledge about Nature, as well as determining which particularhuman beings will be empowered to interpret Nature to society, is the modernresearch university. As the primary structure for credentialling individuallearners and legitimating collective teachings, graduate programs at suchuniversities do much to construct our understanding of the natural world. Over the past generation, graduate programs in environmental science on manyAmerican university campuses have become the main source of newrepresentations of \"the environment\" as well as the home base for thosescientific disciplines that study Nature's meanings. Indeed, a newenvironmental episteme has evolved over the past three decades, allowing newschools of environmental studies either to be established de novo or to bereorganized out of existing bits and pieces of agriculture, forestry, scienceor policy studies programs.

In turn, these educational operations now routinely produce

professional-technical workers with the specific knowledge--as it has beenscientifically validated--and the operational power--as it is institutionallyconstructed--to cope with \"the environmental crisis\" on what are believed tobe sound scientific and technical grounds. Still, graduate teaching inschools of the environment has little room for other social objectives beyondthe rationalizing performativity norms embedded at the core of the currenteconomic regime. To understand the norms used by this regulatory regime, asLyotard asserts, \"the State and/or company must abandon the idealist andhumanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new goals: in thediscourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal ispower. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find

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truth, but to augment power.\"2

This chapter asks how specialized discourses about Nature, or \"theenvironment,\" are constructed by American university programs in graduate-level teaching and research by professional-technical experts as disciplinaryarticulations of \"eco-knowledge\" to generate performative disciplinary systemsof \"geo-power\" over, but also within and through, Nature in the managerialstructures of modern economies and societies. The critical project of MichelFoucault--particularly his account of how discursively formed disciplinesoperate inside regimes of truth as systems of governmentality--provides abasis for advancing this critical reinterpretation. These continuouslyinstitutionalized attempts to capture and contain the forces of Nature byoperationally deploying advanced technologies, and thereby linking many ofNature's apparently intrinsic structures and processes to strategies of highlyrationalized environmental management as geo-power, develops out ofuniversity-level \"environmental studies\" as a strategic supplement to variousmodes of bio-power defined by existing academic \"human studies\" in promotingthe growth of modern urban-industrial populations.3 Moreover, the rules ofeconomic performativity now count far more materially in these interventionsthan do those of ecological preservation.

The first efforts to realize these goals in the United States began with

the Second Industrial Revolution and the conservation movement over a centuryago as progressively-minded managers founded Schools of Forestry, Management,Agriculture, Mining and Engineering on many university campuses to masterNature and transform its stuff into \"goods\" and \"services.\"4 In theecological upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, however, schools of theenvironment or colleges of natural resources went beyond the conservationistproject when they began training new even more specialized experts inenvironmental science--ranging from ecotoxiology to national parkadministration--needed to define, develop and deploy new varieties of geo-power more broadly in all dimensions of everyday work and play. The missionof redefining and then administering the Earth as \"natural resources,\" as itis articulated, for example, by Yale's School of Forestry and EnvironmentalStudies, expresses these managerial goals very powerfully:

The mission of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies isto provide leadership, through education and research, in themanagement of natural resource systems and in the solution ofenvironmental problems. Through its focused educational programs,the School develops leaders for major institutions concerned withthe earth's environment. Through its research activities, theSchool fosters study in selected areas of particular importancefor resource and environmental management.5The entire planet, then, can be reduced by environmental studies at research

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universities to a complex system of interrelated \"natural resource systems,\"whose constituent ecological processes are left for humanity to operate--efficiently or inefficiently--as the geo-powers of one vast terrestrialinfrastructure. Directed at generating geo-power from the more rationalinsertion of natural and artificial bodies into the machinery of globalproduction, the discourses of a green governmentality produced by graduateprograms in environment studies define many new physical and social ecologieswhere environmental professionals operate as disciplined representatives ofgeo-power and eco-knowledge in diffuse projects of \"ecologicalmodernization.\"6

There are scores of academic programs across the United States that now

purport to offer this kind of comprehensive scientific instruction inenvironmental studies. This brief analysis cannot survey all of them in orderto determine what the general foci of their curricula are or how each specificprogram varies in its substantive concerns. Instead it selects four well-known and highly regarded programs--two at elite private universities, two atrespectable public institutions--from around the nation--one in the Pacificregion at the University of California-Berkeley, one in the Mountain States atColorado State University, one in the Northeast at Yale University, and one inthe South at Duke University. These programs provide highly suggestiveexamples of how the discourses and practices of contemporary universitytraining reimagine Nature as \"the environment\" in their graduate courses ofstudy and professional codes of self-interpretation. While analyses of otherAmerican universities might yield additional insights, these institutionsrepresent many of the most crucial disciplinary tendencies in mainstream academic environmental discourses today.

Most importantly, this investigation suggests university training

discourses comprehensively reframe \"the environment\" as a highly complexdomain far beyond the full comprehension of ordinary citizens or traditionalnaturalists: it instead becomes something to be managed by expertmanagerialists armed with coherent clusters of technical acumen andadministrative practice.7 Reading through the self-representation ofenvironmental studies at these colleges of natural resources or schools of theenvironment in the United States, one sees this ideology at work as deans,directors and department heads promise to prepare prospective students tomaster the ins-and-outs of resource managerialism, risk assessment, and/orrecreationist management. Resources, risks, and recreationists become \"thethree Rs\" of higher education in contemporary environmental studies, givingstudents and faculty specific new foci for their knowledge and grantingspecialized managerial power by administering this green governmentality in

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their mostly technocratic professional activities.

I. Environments and Geo-Power

Surveying the very focalized public representations made about \"the

environment\" or \"natural resources\" at American universities with adistinguished \"school of the environment\" or an outstanding \"college ofnatural resources\" can indicate a great deal. Because so many environmentalprofessionals and natural resource workers from all over the world now arebeing trained in these academic settings, one gains an important sense of howtheir professional practices both are shaped by, and, in turn, shape academicenvironmental discourse. Investigating the recruitment language used toenlist students for graduate study in their ecological curricula and analyzingthe formal categories deployed to understand natural resources in theclassrooms at such schools of the environment, then, permits us to reappraisewhat \"the environment\" means at these schools and which \"natural resources\"are valorized at such colleges.

As actions on the behalf of Nature have shifted from the avocational

register of belle-letteristic naturalist writings into the professional-technical knowledge codes of environmental science, larger public discoursesabout ecological degradation, resource waste or environmental remediation alsohave changed significantly. On the one hand, many see this shift as positive: scientific personnel with positivistic technical knowledges allegedly now canidentify ecological problems objectively as well as design efficient solutionsfor the most pressing ones. On the other hand, this change is regarded byothers with suspicion: a spirit of \"shallowness\" occludes the enchantments ofNature in the dark shadows of anthropocentrism, capitalism, and statism as\"the environment\" often is treated as being little more than terrestrialinfrastructure for global capital.8 How \"the environment\" is understood todayby most government bureaus, major corporations, and interest groups derivesfrom discursive frameworks of technoscientific training that are propagated by\"schools of the environment\" or \"colleges of natural resources\" at majorresearch universities.

Technoscientific knowledge about the environment, however, is, and

always has been, evolving in response to changing interpretive fashions,shifting political agendas, developing scientific advances, and meanderingoccupational trends. Changes in those discursive principles of exclusion orinclusion, which are used to determine when to study, how to study it, what toexclude, where to include, or why, often cannot be pinned precisely. Instead,such variations designate \"a will to knowledge that is anonymous,polymorphous, suspectable to regular transformations, and determined by theplay of identifiable dependencies.\"9

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This polymorphous combination of anonymous scientific environmental

knowledge and organized market and/or state power is disclosed most baldly bythe stated purposes of Berkeley's Environmental Science, Policy and Managementfaculty in the Division of Resource Institutions, Policy, and Management. That is, schools of the environment or colleges of natural resources areengaged quite concretely in \"how current and historical configurations ofsocial, economic, and political institutions, as well as cultural values leadto different environmental outcomes and consequences for the composition,level, and distribution of social well-being\" inasmuch as their students,teachers and administrators \"study and contribute to the formation of naturalresource policy, the administration and management of natural resourcesinstitutions, and issues of territory, property, and sovereignty at differenttemporal, spatial, and institutional scales.\"10

As Berkeley's mission statement indicates, the channels of authorityflowing within transnational corporate enterprise or modern nation-states havenot carried many ideas, for example, from biocentric deep ecology into morewidespread practice in either official American environmental policies orestablished academic teachings. Notions associated with anthropocentricshallow ecologies, however, have fused more coherently and cohesively in thepower effects of such social formations. Their power, as Foucault indicates,\"traverses and produces things....It needs to be considered as a productivenetwork which runs through the whole social body, much more than a negativeinstance whose function is repression.\"11 Schools of environmental studiesand colleges of natural resources now provide one of the vital intellectualnetworks in which the relations of this productive power shape the categoriesof knowledge. In accord with the prevailing regimes of truth ininstrumentalist technoscience, academic centers of environmental studiesreproduce those bodies of practice and types of discourse, which the topexecutive personnel now managing most of the contemporary American state andsocial institutions, regard as \"objective,\" \"valid,\" or \"useful.\"

From the concepts and categories embedded in mission-defining languages

and practice-determining beliefs used by schools of the environment orcolleges of natural resources, one can get a feel for the raw understandingsof \"environments\" and \"natural resources\" shared by many environmentalprofessionals in government, business and academe. By reconsidering how theseacademic institutions and their graduates discursively construct \"theenvironment,\" as Foucault suggests, one can attempt \"to define the way inwhich individuals or groups represent words to themselves, utilize their formsand meanings, compose real discourse, reveal and conceal in it what they arethinking or saying, perhaps unknown to themselves, more or less than they

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wish, but in any case leave a mass of verbal traces of those thoughts, whichmust be deciphered and restored as far as possible to their representativevivacity.\"12

At the conjunction of life, labor, and language in discourses of

environmental studies, one finds an analytic of power/knowledge \"which showshow man, in his being, can be concerned with the things he knows, and know thethings that, in positivity, determine his mode of being\"13 in highly focalizedacademic constructions of \"the environment.\" The environment, if one followsFoucault's lines of reasoning, must not be understood either as the naturallygiven sphere of all ecological processes that human power keeps under controlor as a mysterious domain of obscure terrestrial events which human knowledgeworks to explain. Instead, it emerges as a historical artifact that islargely constructed by technoscientific interventions, because it cannotremain an occluded reality that is difficult to comprehend. In this greatnetwork of technical interventions into Nature, the simulation of spaces, theintensification of resources, the incitement of discoveries, the formation ofspecial knowledges, the strengthening of controls, and the provocation ofresistances all can be linked to one another as \"the empiricities\" of academicenvironmental studies.14

II. The Three \"Rs\" of Eco-Managerialism

The scripts of green governmentality embedded in environmental studies

are rarely rendered totally articulate by scientific and technical discourses. Yet, there are elaborate systems for guiding political activity in thesescripts. The advocates of more radical ecological movements, like deepecology, ecofeminism or social ecology, dimly perceive the destructive biasesin these scripts in their frustrations with \"reform environmentalism,\" whichweaves logics of geo-power in and out of the technocratic eco-managerialismthat has defined mainstream of environmental science and traditional naturalresource policy-making.15 The three foci of eco-managerialist interventionshave coaligned in schools of the environment as the theories and practices ofresource, risk, and recreationist managerialism.

The mission statements and core curricula of such educational operations

identify and initiate the discursive practices which encircle \"theenvironment\" or \"the resources\" their training gives students knowledge-of andpower-over as professionals. The association of resource managerialism/riskassessment/recreationist administration in range management at Berkeley,environmental toxicology at Duke, or visitor management strategies at ColoradoState with \"the environment\" as a terrestrial infrastructure givesprofessionals the discursive practices they need in \"the delimitation of afield of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of

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knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts andtheories.\"16

A. Resource Managerialism

Resource managerialism can be read as a geo-power/eco-knowledge of

modern governmentality. While voices in favor of conservation can be found inEurope early in the nineteenth century, the real establishment of this stancecomes in the United States with the Second Industrial Revolution from the1880s through the 1920s and the closing of the Western Frontier in the1890s.17 Whether one looks at John Muir's preservationist programs or GiffordPinchot's conservationist codes, an awareness of modern industry's power todeplete natural resources, and hence the need for systems of conserving theirexploitation, is well-established by the early 1900s. Over the past ninedecades, the fundamental premises of resource managerialism have not changedsignificantly. At best, this code of eco-knowledge only has become moreformalized in bureaucratic applications and legal interpretations.

Keying off of the managerial logic of the Second Industrial Revolution,

which empowered technical experts, or engineers and scientists, on the shopfloor and professional managers, or corporate executives and financialofficers, in the main office, resource managerialism imposes corporateadministrative frameworks upon Nature in order to supply the economy andprovision society through centralized state guidance. These frameworks assumethat the national economy, like the interacting capitalist firm and household,must avoid both overproduction (excessive resource use coupled with inadequatedemand) and underproduction (inefficient resource use coming with excessivedemand) on the supply-side as well as overconsumption (excessive resourceexploitation coming with excessive demand) and underconsumption (inefficientresource exploitation coupled with inadequate demand) on the demand side.To even construct the managerial problem in this fashion, Nature is

reduced--through the encirclement of space and matter by national as well asglobal economies--to a system of geo-power systems that can be dismantled,redesigned, and assembled anew on demand to produce \"resources\" efficientlyand when and where needed in the modern marketplace. As a cybernetic systemof biophysical systems, Nature's energies, materials, and sites are redefinedby the eco-knowledges of resource managerialism as manageable resources forhuman beings to realize great material \"goods\" for sizeable numbers of somepeople, even though greater material and immaterial \"bads\" also might beinflicted upon even larger numbers of other people, who do not reside in orbenefit from the advanced national economies that basically monopolize the useof world resources at a comparative handful of highly developed regional andmunicipal sites. Echoing California-Berkeley's declaration that environmental

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studies boil down to mobilizing the biological, physical and social sciencesto address the major social and political effects of current and futureanthropogenic environmental problems, Yale's Dean Cohon tells would-beenvironmental studies enrollees that their professional power/knowledge willbe crucially significant in the coming years: \"Your role in helping toprotect and manage the integrity and survival of natural systems and humanhealth globally could not be more important. Since so much is now in humanhands, people are needed, more than ever, who are focused, informed, anddedicated to learning.\"18

Here, environmental sciences infrastructuralize the Earth's ecologies. The Earth becomes, if only in terms of technoscience's operationalassumptions, an immense terrestrial infrastructure. As the human race's\"ecological life-support system,\" it has \"with only occasional localizedfailures\" provided \"services upon which human society depends consistently andwithout charge.\"19 As the environmentalized infrastructure oftechnoscientific production, the Earth generates \"ecosystem services,\" orthose derivative products and functions of natural systems that humansocieties perceive as valuable.20 This complex system of systems is what mustsurvive; human life will continue only if such survival-sustaining servicescontinue. And, as Colorado State's, Yale's, Berkeley's or Duke's variousgraduate programs all record, these infrastructural outputs include: thegeneration of soils, the regeneration of plant nutrients, capture of solarenergy, conversion of solar energy into biomass,accumulation/purification/distribution of water, control of pests, provisionof a genetic library, maintenance of breathable air, control of micro andmacro climates, pollination of plants, diversification of animal species,development of buffering mechanisms in catastrophes, and aestheticenrichment.21 Because it is the terrestrial infrastructure of transnationalenterprise, the planet's ecology requires highly disciplined reengineering toguide its sustainable use. In turn, the academic systems of greengovernmentality will monitor, massage, and manage those systems which produceall of these robust services. Just as the sustained use of any technology\"requires that it be maintained, updated and changed periodically,\" so toodoes the \"sustainable use of the planet require that we not destroy ourecological capital, such as old-growth forests, streams and rivers (with theirassociated biota), and other natural amenities.\"22

This infrastructuralization of the environment can be illustrated in

Colorado State's Forest Science recruitment brochure, which casts itsknowledge as being dedicated to \"Valuing our Forests and Natural Resources\"both inside the classroom and outside in the mountains. To imagine what

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forests are and do, the Department of Forest Science asks:

Have you ever stopped to think how the health of our forests

affects your own life? Without forests, there would be no woodfor homes or fiber for countless paper products we use every day. Forests also help maintain watersheds and keep our air free ofharmful pollutants. And, for centuries, forests have been a veryspecial place where people go to see and enjoy nature. Whetheryou live in a city or small town, forests impact your life in manyways.23

Forests are represented as open infrastructural networks, or quasi-subjectiveagencies whose health, growth, and location are quasi-objective structuresneeded by human beings as building materials, watershed maintenancemechanisms, air cleaners, or human enjoyment zones.

Moreover, the environmental infrastructure of our forests \"need people

who can understand and manage them\" but, as Colorado State claims, \"only withwell-educated professionals can we ensure that our resources will be availablefor the benefit of present and future generations.\"24 So to rightly managethis vital green infrastructure it provides four concentrations of discursiveunderstanding and applied practice--forest biology, forest fire science,forest management, and forest-business--to prepare environmentalprofessionals. Learning about forests \"from actual experience, not just fromtextbooks,\" Forest Science pledges comprehensive training as forest biologyfocuses \"on the biology of trees and the ecology of forest;\" forest firescience examines \"fire as a forest management tool\" as students \"learn howprescribed fire can be used to enhance wildlife habitat, prepare seedbeds,control forest insects and disease, and reduce fuel hazards;\" forestmanagement concentrates on how state and commercial agencies exploit \"forestproductivity, economics, and conservation, along with the latest in computer-based management tools;\" and, forest-business teaches business applications\"if you seek employment with a private timber company, or you wish to developyour own forest business.\"25

Colorado State's Forest Science Program, therefore, promises to open

doors to professional-technical jobs that oversee the technoscientific nexusof discipline/sovereignty/territoriality in managing forest resources asstudents either are able \"to qualify as a professional forester and work withtraditional national and international resource organizations\" or find avenuesthat \"pursue employment in fields such as land use planning, youth agencyadministration, natural resource communications, mining reclamation, business,law enforcement, or conservation biology.\"26 Indeed, forest science is asystem of discursive truth production by which environmental professionals\"learn to manage forests for maximum growth; to protect forests from fires anddisease; and to conserve forest, soil, and water resources,\" because such

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knowing mediations of power do provide \"a truly unique and rewardingopportunity\"27 to exercise their professional-technical power/knowledgeecologically.

B. Risk Managerialism

As Beck suggests, this risk managerialism is now an integral part of the

self-critical production and reproduction of globally thinking, but locallyacting, capitalism.28 Schools of environmental studies train students toconceptually contain, actuarially assess, and cautiously calculate the manydimensions of ecological risk in their ecotoxiology, environmental assessment,or ecoremediation courses. Yet, the fictive assumptions of such modellingtechniques only constitute a scientized first take for the sweep ofreflexivity. They do not, and indeed cannot, capture the depth, scope,duration, or intensity of the damage they pretend to measure.29

Colorado State's Department of Fishery and Wildlife Biology, forexample, casts itself as an international leader in the areas of riskassessment and analysis. Combining practical laboratory experiences and fieldstudies, it suggests that areas of growing emphasis are risk analysis-centeredconcerns, like integrated resource management, conservation biology, andenvironmental risk analysis.30 This quantitative surveillance and evaluationfocus in risk analysis also can be found in the other graduate programs'curricula.

Yale's graduate course, Ecological Resource Risk Assessment andManagement, for example, hints that related course work in statistics,ecotoxicology, and environmental chemistry will help its enrollees tounderstand the impact of pollution, disease, and ecological managementpractices on the health of ecosystems. However, \"assessment of risk of anadverse impact on an ecological resource caused by one or more chemical,biological, or physical stressors, and monitoring the status and trends of anecological resource are priority needs of contemporary environmentalmanagement.\"31 Likewise, Duke's highly economistic reading of environmentalstudies stresses the benefits and costs of policies relating to sustainingresource productivity and maintaining environmental quality in its riskanalyses. Its graduate course, Survey of Environmental Health and Safety,directs the attention of students toward \"environmental risks from theperspective of global ecology, biology, chemistry, and radiation\" such that\"the nature and scope of environmental hazards\" might be addressed by itsunderstanding of \"risk assessment and management strategies,\"32 the economicsand ecologies of risk, then, create tremendous new opportunities for cadres ofeducated professionals to work productively as better resource managers.

Risk management at colleges of natural resources presumes its

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calculations \"are based on a (spatially, temporally, and sociallycircumscribed) accident definition\" or that its analyses truly do \"estimateand legitimate the potential for catastrophe of modern large-scaletechnologies and industries.\"33 Superfund site after supertanker spill aftersuperstack bubble, however, indicate that this degree of managerial knowledgeis precisely what risk management sciences at schools of environmental studiesfail to produce, \"and so they are falsifications, and can be criticized andreformed in accordance with their own claims to rationality.\"34 This trendtoward developing a fully self-conscious risk managerialism grounded ineconomistic trade-offs also surfaces fully in the curriculum of the YaleSchool of Forestry and Environmental Studies, whose recent strategicrestructuring commits it fully to risk assessment methods because thesetechniques are \"redefining forestry to encompass all of the social andpolitical factors which we know from experience to be fundamental to goodforest management.\"35

These visions of environmental science recapitulate the logic of

technical networks as they already are given in the states and markets of theexisting world-system. Rather than the environment surrounding humanity, thefriction-free global marketplace of transnational capital is what envelopesNature. Out of its metabolisms are produced ecotoxins, biohazards,hydrocontaminants, aeroparticulates, and enviropoisons whose impacts generateinexorable risks. These policy problematics unfold now on the global scale,because fast capitalism has colonized so many more sites on the planet as partand parcel of its own unique regime for sustainable development. As Yale'sDean Cohon asserts:

The challenge we all face now, as you know, is not limited

to one resource in one nation, but extends to the protection ofthe environment worldwide. The fabric of natural and humancommunities is currently torn or tattered in many places. Thereis hardly a place on earth where human activity does not influencethe environment's current condition or its prospects for thefuture.36In turn, well-trained environmental professionals must measure, monitor ormanage these risks, leaving the rational operations of global fast capitalismwholly intact as \"risks won\" for their owners and beneficiaries, while riskanalyses performed by each environmental school's practitioners and programsdeal with the victims of \"risks lost.\"

C. Recreationist Managerialism

Schools of environmental studies also must prepare their students for

more tertiary uses of Nature as recreational resources. As the USDA saysabout its managed public lands, the natural environment is \"a land of manyuses,\" and mass tourism, commercial recreation, or park administration all

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require special knowledges and powers to be conducted successfully. Insteadof appraising Nature's resources as industrial production resource reserves,recreationist managerialism frames them as resource preserves for recurringconsumption as positional goods, scenic assets, or leisure sites. The entireidea behind national parks or protected areas is to park certain unique sitesor particular undeveloped domains beyond the continuous turnover of industrialexploitation for primary products or agricultural produce. Yet, therecreational pursuits of getting to, using, and appreciating such ecologicalassets are mass produced through highly organized sets of practices. Consequently, recreationist managerialism \"develops expertise in managingpublic lands and waters and in providing quality outdoor recreationexperiences to their visitors.\"37

As Colorado State University's Department of Natural Resource Recreation

and Tourism puts it, \"there is an exciting trend to establish park and outdoorrecreation programs worldwide.\"38 So this graduate program moves beyondundergraduate studies of \"recreationists and tourists\" to examine otherpublics, like \"concessionaires, private land owners, policy-makers, agencypersonnel, communities, and special interest groups,\" which need to be managedas part of providing \"quality outdoor recreation experiences\" to visitors ofparks and protected areas.39 This focus upon \"the human dimensions of naturalresources\" in recreationist management, in turn, permits this disciplinaryunit to tout its Human Resources Survey Research Lab to prospective enrollees,assuring them that this \"state of the art telephone survey lab helps todevelop skills in measuring preferences, perceptions, and behaviors amongoutdoor recreationists.\"40

Armed with this sort of knowledge about recreationist management,graduates are assured secure professional placement with some power centerbecause the program \"is oriented to employment with federal and stateagencies, counties, and municipalities.\"41 Beyond the recreationistmanagement functions of governmental resource management agencies, thisgraduate program also underscores a U.S. Department of Commerce study thatforecasts tourism will be the world's largest industry by 2000. Hence,prospective students are assured how easily recreationist managerial knowledgecan be pitched to \"that sector of the tourism industry that is dependent onnatural resources: park and recreation concessionaires, adventure and tourguide companies, private campgrounds and hunting/fishing preserves,destination resorts, ecotourism establishments, and tourism development boardsand advertising companies\"42 to embed green governmentality into privatesector pursuits.

The obligation to supervise human recreationists rightly in \"the conduct

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of their conduct\" within the natural environments is aptly summarized byYale's Dean Cohon, who characterizes environmental studies as almost anothermode of police work, or \"helping to protect and manage the integrity andsurvival of natural systems and human health globally,\" because recreationistmanagement, like all environmental studies, needs skilled people \"who arefocused, informed, and dedicated to leading.\"43 Discourses of greengovernmentality give dedicated students the right disciplinary paths forleading others to the right kind of information produced by professionalschools of the environment. Their power/knowledge foci, in turn, authorizeand legitimate the acts taken by \"a corps of professionals\" whose policing ofanthropogenic environmental crises will bring about more positive recreationalexperiences.

D. The Three Rs and Careerist Legitimation

The discursive reconstruction of the environment around these \"three Rs\"

as an ensemble of technocratic sites for managerialist intervention, accordingto such graduate schools, is quite significant, because, as Yale's Dean ofForestry and Environmental Studies suggests, their faculties have a longhistory of socializing \"generations of leaders of government agencies,university faculties, and private forest products companies.\"44 Moreover,such training purports to engage \"the broad range of issues of environmentalconservation and protection\" through \"the inclusion of biological, physical,and social science perspectives to provide basis for realistic, effectiveapproaches to what are often subtle and complex issues.\"45

One sees the performativity agenda operating at each one of these

graduate schools of the environment. Berkeley's now allegedly much moreperformative Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management wasformed from a merger of five pre-existing, and much less performative,academic units: Conservation and Resource Studies, Entomological Sciences,Forestry and Resource Management, Plant Pathology, and Soil Science. Therhetoric of its recruitment claims \"each former department had worldrecognized expertise in disciplines relevant to natural resource andenvironmental issues,\" but that now, united as one, the Berkeley operationcreates \"a single academic unit which combines both disciplinary andinterdisciplinary graduate education\" capable of integrating \"the biological,social, and physical sciences to provide advanced education in basic andapplied environmental sciences\" as well as conducting \"research into thestructure and function of ecosystems at the molecular through the ecosystemlevels and their interlinked human social systems.\"46 Such discursive framingof the environment as an integrated system of systems has, like those used byBerkeley's distinguished faculty, the multidisciplinary scope to help \"raise

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the environmental and scientific literacy of all students on the Berkeleycampus\" as well as to develop among its graduate classes \"the intellectualleadership required to conserve and wisely manage the earth's resources.\"47To certify the \"diversity of its programs and employability of its

graduates,\" the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke also openlydiscloses \"the placements and activities of Environment graduates\" as thatprospective professionals might assess \"the effectiveness and marketability\"of its programs.48 Like California-Berkeley, Yale, and Colorado State, Dukewants to prove how resource/risk/recreationist managerialism pay off forrising new professionals. Because professional-technical employment is thekey validation of such preparation for managing terrestrial infrastructures,the Nicholas School takes great pains to show how avidly its graduates aresought by public, private and non-profit organizations as \"environmentalprofessionals.\" Despite a very competitive labor market, Duke asserts \"ninetypercent of the graduates secured a position directly or closely related totheir environmental training following graduation,\" while it also found 73different organizations hiring first-year students as summer interns.\"49

Those who continue to imagine all environmentalists as some sort ofcountercultural resistance fighters only need to consult the Nicholas Schoolof the Environment at Duke to get a sense of where academic environmentalstudies actually lead. While some of its graduates--only 16 percent--end upworking for advocacy nonprofits, like the Rain Forest Alliance, World WildlifeFund, or Chesapeake Bay Foundation, many also find positions with staid groupslike Worldwatch, the Nature Conservancy or the National Geographic Society. Another 32 percent work for federal and state governments, and 42 percent workfor private consulting and industrial firms, like ABT Association, ERM, Inc.,ICF Kaiser International, General Motors, Texaco, or Westvaco Corporation.50 The key validation of academic environmental studies at Duke is whollycareerist: good placement and respectable salaries for newly graduatednatural resource professionals. Marketability of their labor equalseffectiveness for their education. The performative truths such schoolsimpart must be valid; otherwise, big business, federal agencies, and globalNGOs would not drop by to recruit their graduates. Their training inEcotoxicology and Risk Assessment, Resource Economics or Forest ResourceManagement does not stress post-anthropocentric deep ecology; likewise, theNicholas School will not count holistic New Age Deep Ecology Studies among itsin-house graduate programs. Technoscientific truths are those tied toreproducing environmental studies as the coda of careerist knowledge andprofessional power.

As Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies flatly exclaims,

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these educational institutions deploy curricula and employ faculty to serveboth academic and applied markets with their knowledge. Consequently,different power and knowledge formations in the state and corporate sectorsare continuously interwoven through environmental studies: \"some of thefaculty's work is research-oriented, and some is management-oriented, asbefits our dual role as a graduate school and a professional school. The worktakes place in forests and wilderness areas, in the inner city andmultinational corporations, and in libraries and laboratories, around theglobe.\"51 In these curricula and their professional tracking, the discoursesof resource managerialism/risk assessment/recreationist administration become,as Foucault argues, \"embodied in technical processes, in institutions, inpatterns for general behavior, in forms of transmission and diffusion, and inpedagogical forms which, at once, impose and maintain them.\"52 Environmentalstudies graduates, then, find in their professional labor the callings ofgreen governmentality--mediated through their formal knowledges ofenvironmental study and implemented through their institutionalized powersover natural resources. Under this managerial regimen, power/knowledgesystems bring \"life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicitcalculations,\" making the disciplines of environmental knowledge anddiscourses of managerial power into many concrete networks devoted to the\"transformation of human life.\"53

III. Environmental Studies as Heterogeneous Engineering

The \"three Rs\" of environmental studies now implicitly acknowledge how

thoroughly most human ecologies on Earth are \"a sociotechnical order.\" As Lawsuggests, the networks of humans and machines, animals and plants, economiesand ecologies, which now constitute our environment, are mixed media of powerand knowledge: \"what appears to be social is partly technical. What weusually call technical is partly social. In practice nothing is purelytechnical. Neither is anything purely social.\"54 Approaching the environmentas terrestrial infrastructure, at the same time, admits that the professional-technical graduates of environmental studies programs are in many ways trainedto operate as \"heterogeneous engineers.\" That is, he/she must work \"not onlyon inanimate physical materials, but on and through people, texts, devices,city councils, architectures, economics, and all the rest,\" such that ifhis/her designs are to work as a system, then he/she always must traveleffectively \"between these different domains, weaving an emergent web whichconstituted and reconstituted bits and pieces that it brought together.\"55

Too few articulations of environmental studies acknowledge these basic

operational conditions, but they form the sociotechnical terrains upon whichenvironmental studies experts must negotiate their professional worklives

15

through in order to heterogeneously engineer Earth's ecologies as theinfrastructures of anthropogenic environments. Transforming the raw stuff ofNature into natural resources, while minimizing the associated risks of suchprocessing and maximizing the aggregate access of recreationists to yet-to-beor never-to-be transformed Nature, is a constant challenge for heterogeneousengineers from the environmental science disciplines to pull off with anyaplomb. The green fixations of so many conventional environmentalists makesit difficult, if not impossible, for environmental studies to recognize all ofthe natural/artificial networks that its practitioners must tend as essentialparts with a complex system for their projects of heterogeneous engineering. Owning up to full immensity of these tasks, however, leads those who would bethe tenders of Nature to the project of \"terraforming,\" or reshaping the Earthso completely that it obviously becomes an essentially sociotechnicalplanetary order.

The Earth, then, no longer is allowed to exist or evolve as such;

instead it is consigned to the hands of terraforming professionals withgraduate training in the environmental sciences. Duke University asserts \"themission of the School of the Environment is education, research and service tounderstand basic environmental processes and to protect and enhance theenvironment and its natural resources for future generations.\"56 Thisengagement at \"protecting\" and \"enhancing\" the environment to transmit itsnatural resources to future generations is seconded by California-Berkeley,whose Ecosystem Sciences mission statement virtually writes the jobdescription of terraforming technicians: \"Ecosystem Sciences are concernedwith quantitative understanding of ecosystem properties and processes, and thecontrols on these features. Central to this mission is a full partnershipbetween physical and biological scientists, leading to an integratedunderstanding of ecosystem structure and function, and the extension of thesefindings in modeling and implementation activities.\"57 The labor ofenvironmental studies professionals must be dedicated to protecting andenhancing the performativity of our environments.

Whatever surrounds our increasing performative global economy must alsobecome as operationally adaptable, flexible, and productive, as Colorado Statelabels them, through the problem-solving knowledges of riparian management,land rehabilitation, habitat evaluation, range economics, biotelemetricsurveillance, wood engineering, resource interpretation, or visitorstrategies. While students may enter schools of environmental studies andcolleges of natural resources in search of wisdom from Aldo Leopold or JohnMuir, they mostly leave as adept practitioners of ecosystemmanagement/analysis, ecological risk analysis, and recreation resource

16

administration.58 Forests, range lands, waters, game animals, and soils allare integral components in terrestrial infrastructures for the vastmachineries of commodity production, circulation, consumption, andaccumulation, which are, in turn, terraforming the unruly ecologies of Earthto suit their mainly commercial requirements. Because, as the Dean of Yale'sSchool argues, \"there is hardly a place on Earth where human activity does notinfluence the environment's current condition or its prospects for thefuture,\" environmental studies and colleges of natural resources producetechnoscientific experts, or those new \"cadres of educated professionals,\" orwho truly believe \"that the best hope for developing sound knowledge andworkable management solution for environmental problems is to bring scienceand policy together.\"59

Truths about ecology are not objective timeless verities, but rather are

the operationalized findings of continuously evolving practices forheterogeneous engineering as they have been constructed by major researchuniversities. These institutions are sites where \"truth,\" or \"a system oforder procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation,and operation of statements,\"60 arises from knowledge formations, like thedisciplines of environmental science, to help steer power formations, like thedecision-making bureaux of liberal democratic states and capitalist firms. AsFoucault asserts, \"there are manifold relations of power which permeate,characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of powercannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without theproduction, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. Therecan be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discoursesof truth which operates through and on the basis of this association.\"61 Environmental science, then, should reveal multiple traces of this vital cycleof cogeneration by which power charges truthful knowledges even as truthfulknowledges mediate power in the scope and substance of its discursiveconstruction at schools of environmental studies and colleges of naturalresources.

VI. Conclusion: Environmentality as Governmentality

This investigation's approach to some specific environmental discourses

circulating through modern research universities may offend some in theacademy because it asks how involved, and in what ways have academiciansbecome implicated, in causing the current ecological crisis, even though theymight believe themselves to be ameliorating it. The cultural politics ofenvironmental discourse, however, can be studied most effectively by followingthe actors back to their sites of professional-technical training at schoolsof environmental studies or colleges of natural resources. This is where the

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heterogeneous engineering cultures of mainstream environmentalists--orconventional understandings manifest in the acts and artifacts of these socialgroups--are both produced and reproduced. As this discussion illustrates,here is where one can discover how and why environmental studies are shaped byits disciplines of heterogeneous engineering as every environmentalprofessional gets his or her education to protect and manage the Earth. A fewmay be engaged, on the one hand, by dreams of preservationist restorationecology, but most others are devoted, on the other hand, to vast projects ofconservationist eco-rationalization in which Nature's forests, lands, andwaters technocratically are to be reengineered as vast terrestrialinfrastructures for resource/risk/recreationist managers to administer.62

There are limitations to this analytical approach. On one level, it

cannot delve beneath the manifest intentions of such schools and colleges asthey portray themselves in their own literature. One must assume that theyare what they profess to be, and actually do what their documents promise. Ona second level, it cannot catch any resistances or all deviations from theofficial institutional line, which clearly are always afoot in any academicinstitution. Many courses carry bland descriptions of totally conformistapproaches, but their instructors and students may very well follow none ofthem when their classes actually convene. And, on a third level, it does notconsider how state or corporate power centers, in the last analysis, oftenwill ignore or belittle academic knowledge, because its guidance contradictswhat their organizational powers can, or will, in fact, do against allinformed advice to act otherwise. So well-trained professionals, even whenarmed with sound science, can be flouted to serve the expedient goals of farmore naked power agendas. Nonetheless, even this very tentative survey of theprofessional-technical practices fostered at schools of environmental studiesdiscloses a great deal about how technoscience discourses frame regimes ofdiscipline in the everyday workings of governmentality.

Power and knowledge are pervasive forces whose agents often move inquite different channels sometimes tied to interlocked, but at other times notthoroughly networked, social structures. Universities provide an unusualopportunity to view them working more in unison and out in the open as theformal knowledges needed by power centers are imparted to new generations inthe ruling, owing, knowing, or controlling elites; and, at the same time,those specific power agendas required to define, implement or reproduceknowledges and their truth systems quickly get adopted through universityprograms of study and research. Therefore, this analysis has only begun theexamination of discursive frames and conceptual definitions for commontheoretical notions, like \"the environment,\" \"environmental studies,\" or

18

\"environmental sciences.\" Nonetheless, contemporary American universities aregiving Nature a new look as \"the environment\" by transforming their formalknowledges about its workings into the professional-technical practices of amanagerialistic \"environmentality\" in their schools of the environment orcolleges of natural resources.

The heterogeneous engineers behind fast capitalism's environmentalizingregime must advance eco-knowledges to activate their command over geo-power aswell as operationalize a measure of operational discipline over environmentalresources, risks, and recreationists in their reconstruction of contemporarygovernmentality as environmentality. Like governmentality, the disciplinaryarticulations of environmentality now center upon establishing and enforcing\"the right disposition of things\" by policing humanity's \"conduct of conduct\"in Nature and Society. Nature loses any transcendent aura, however, as itsstuff appears preprocessed in the academy as mere \"environments\" full ofexploitable, but also protectable, \"natural resources\" that university facultyand post-graduate students study continuously in order to rationalize howparticular research-oriented and management-oriented applied sciences can getdown to the business of administering their geo-power processes as terrestrialfast capitalism's \"natural resource systems.\"

19

1.

References

See George Marsh, The Earth as Modified by Human Action (New York: C.Scribner's Sons, 1885); and, Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie derOrganismen (Berlin: Reimer, 1866). For some sense of the diversity inreading Nature's meanings, see also Ronald Bailey, Eco-Scam: The FalseProphets of Ecological Apocalypse (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993);Daniel B. Botkin, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); John S.Dryzek, Rational Ecology: Environment and Political Economy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Garrett Hardin, Living Within Limits: Ecology,Economics and Population Taboos (New York: Oxford University Press,1993); Barry Lopez, Crossing Open Ground (New York: Vintage, 1989); MaxOelschlaeger, Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to theEnvironmental Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); GarySnyder, The Old Ways (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1977); EdwardO. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1992); and, Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophila: A Study of EnvironmentalPerception Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press,1974).

2.Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 46.

3.For a preliminary overview of these processes, see Michel Foucault, TheHistory of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage,1980), 140-141. The notion of governmentality is developed in MichelFoucault, \"Governmentality,\" The Foucault Effect: Studies inGovernmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 93-98.

4.

See Samuel P. Hayes, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), and for additionaldiscussion about the assumptions used in professional environmentalisttraining today see Penelope Revelle and Charles Revelle, TheEnvironment: Issues and Choices (Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1988);and, Eugene Bucholz, Principles in Environmental Management: TheGreening of Business (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1993), 29-30. A recent defense of technoscientific ecology can be found inWallace Kauman, No Turning Back: Dismantling the Fantasies ofEnvironmental Thinking (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

20

5.Bulletin, Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies,1996-1997 (New Haven: Yale University, 1996), 10. A usefulconsideration of the power wielded by environmental professionals asmanagers can be found in Harold Perkin, The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World (London: Routledge, 1996); and,Frank Fischer, Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise (London: Sage,1990).

6.See Timothy W. Luke, \"On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledgein the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism,\" Cultural Critique,31 (Fall 1995), 57-81. And, for a very useful discussion of \"ecologicalmodernization,\" see Maarten A. Hajer, \"Ecological Modernization asCultural Politics,\" Risk, Environment & Modernity, ed. Scott Lash,Bronislaw Szerszynski & Brian Wynne (London: Sage, 1996), 246-268.

7.

For additional discussion of these distinctions, see Anna Bramwell,Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1989); Robert Paehlke, Environmentalism and the Futureof Progressive Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); and,Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward anEcocentric Approach (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).

8.For additional discussion see Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: AHistory of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of WisconsinPress, 1989); Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living asif Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1985); and,Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundationsfor Environmentalism (Boston: Shambhala, 1990).

9.

Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essaysand Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 200-201.Graduate Study, 1997-98: Department of Environmental Science, Policy,and Management ( Berkeley: University of California, 1996), 2-3.

10.

11.Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, 119. One can read cleardiscursive declarations, echoing Foucault's insights, when, for example,the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies admits that it\"brings together faculty studying the social, legal, and political

21

arrangements which so strongly influence the state of naturalcommunities\" so that it can actively develop \"relationships with a broadrange of private corporations, as well as projects and research relatingto industrial environmental management\" as \"the springboard to many moreventures in the future,\" Yale School of Environmental Studies, 2.

12.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the HumanSciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 353.

13.14.

Ibid., 354.

Ibid., 362-363. Here, one encounters the closure of discursivetotalities. As Foucault observes, \"the analysis of thought is alwaysallegorical in relation to the discourse that it employs. Its questionis unfailingly: what was being said in what was said?\" However, thedissection of discursive fields must determine the material and culturalconditions of their operations, asking \"what is this specific existencethat emerges from what is said and nowhere else?\" See Michel Foucault,The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 27-28.

15.

For discussion, see Timothy W. Luke, \"Green Consumerism: Ecology andthe Ruse of Recycling,\" In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics andthe Environment, ed. Jane Bennett and William Chaloupka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 19332), 154-172.

16.17.

Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory and Practice, 199.

David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise ofCorporate Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1977).

Bulletin, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, 9.

John Cairns, Jr., \"Achieving Sustainable Use of the Planet in the NextCentury: What Should Virginians Do?\" Virginia Issues & Answers, 2, no.2 (Summer 1995), 3.

20.

W. E. Westmen, \"How Much are Nature's Services Worth?,\" Science, 197,(1978), 960-964.

18.19.

22

21.22.23.

Cairns, \"Sustainable Use,\" 3.Ibid., 6.

Department of Forest Science, Colorado State University (Ft. Collins,1996), 2.Ibid.Ibid., 3-4.Ibid., 4.Ibid.

See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage,1992), 20-50. Beck argues that advanced industrial societies arecharacterized by a shift from logics of wealth distribution to ones ofrisk distribution. Hence, for Beck, environmental studies are involvedintimately in reflexive modernization as their practitioners ask, \"Howcan the risks and hazards systematically produced as part ofmodernization be prevented, minimized, dramatized or channeled....Howcan they be limited and distributed away so that they neither hamper themodernization process nor exceed the limits of that which is tolerable,\"20.

24.25.26.27.28.

29.

On the one hand, \"science has become the protector of a globalcontamination of people and nature;\" but, on the other hand, risks lieacross the narrow specializations of traditional positive science,making necessary the development of interdisciplinary knowledges likeenvironmental studies. Indeed, environmental studies programs emerge insome sense, because risks are so pervasive. That is, they always, \"lieacross the distinction between theory and practice, across the bordersof specialties and disciplines, across specialized competencies andinstitutional responsibilities, across the distinction between value andfact (and thus between ethics and science), and across the realms ofpolitics, the public sphere, science and the economy, which areseemingly divided by institutions,\" Beck, Risk Society, 70.

30.Department of Fishery and Wildlife Biology, Colorado State University

23

(Ft. Collins, 1996), 3.

31.32.33.

Bulletin, Yale School of Forestry and Environment Studies, 31.Duke Nicholas School of the Environment Bulletin, 101.

Ulrich Beck, \"Risk Society and Provident State,\" Risk, Environment &Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, ed. Scott Lash, Bronislaw Szerszynski& Brian Wynne (London: Sage, 1996), 32.

34.35.

Ibid., 33.

Bulletin, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, 2. Thestatistical surveillance regime of governmentality within states, asFoucault maintains, emerges alongside monarchical absolutism during thelate seventeenth century. Intellectual disciplines, ranging fromgeography and cartography to statistics and civil engineering, have beenmobilized to inventory and organize the wealth of populations interritories by the state. Now they also are being turned to questionsof risk assessment. For additional discussion, see Graham Burchell,Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, The Foucault Effect: Studies inGovernmentality, 1-48. A very useful example of sustainability thinkingconjoined with professional-technical environmentality can be found inThaddeus C. Trzyna, A Sustainable World: Defining and MeasuringSustainable Development (IUCN/California Institute of Public Affairs,1995).

36.37.

Ibid.

Department of Natural Resource, Recreation and Tourism, Colorado StateUniversity (Ft. Collins, 1996), 2.

38.39.40.41.

Ibid., 1.Ibid.Ibid.Ibid.

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42.43.44.45.

Ibid.

Yale School of Environmental Studies, 9.Yale School of Environmental Studies, 1.Ibid.

46.

Graduate Study, 1997-98: Department of Environmental Science, Policyand Management, 1.Ibid., 2.

Duke, Employment Profile Letter, 1.Ibid.

Ibid. Each of the Nicholas School's disparate fields has a definiterole to play in the heterogeneously contrived management of the Earth'sterrestrial systems. And, in turn, all of the School's individualgraduate programs--Forest Resource Management; Resource Ecology; Waterand Air Resources; Environmental Toxicology, Chemistry, and RiskAssessment; Resource Economics and Policy; and, Coastal EnvironmentManagement--disclose openly both attained salary ranges and median payfor their 1995 graduates to give a sense of how the labor markets valuethe highly trained labor of the many diverse vocations needed forterrestrial infrastructure management. These placements illustrate howthe School's administrators, faculty and students as heterogeneousengineers \"have proven that we are among the best at what we do,\" whichis, in addition to publishing research and processing students,realizing \"wise and sustained management of our natural resources and abetter environment for this and future generations,\" see Duke NicholasSchool of the Environment Bulletin, 1996-97: 7.

47.48.49.50.

51.52.53.

Bulletin, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, 1.Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory and Practice, 200.Foucault, History of Sexuality, 143.

25

54.John Law, A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology andDomination, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1991), 10.

55.56.57.

Ibid., 9.

Duke Nicholas School of the Environment Bulletin, 9.

Graduate Study, 1997-98: Department of Environmental Science, Policyand Management, 2.

Heterogenous reengineering as infrastructure poses an ironiccontradiction between the autochthonous dynamics of Earth's ecologiesand the actions of artifice circulating through human economies,technologies, and societies. The twin, but contradictory, objectives ofprotecting and enhancing the environment bedevil schools of theenvironment as the protective impetus of restoration ecology bumps upagainst the enhancing agendas of ecosystemic economics. Moreover, theanthropogenic origins of so many environmental problems as well asfundamental uncertainty over how pristine many environments actuallyevery were prior to their integration into the world capitalist systemmakes land rehabilitation, riparian restoration, or wildlifepreservation a very inexact science. And, for the infrastructuralmanagerialism of heterogeneous engineers, the lack of definitiveecological data in certain series longer than a decade at best orcentury at most makes any sort of optimization modelling of nutrientcycling, yield maximization, or population dynamics on a global scaleessentially an exercise in technocratic fantasy. Both agendas forenvironmental practice remain in contention for the hearts and minds ofstudents and faculty in environmental studies, since there is much truthin the preservationists desire \"to let it be\" when they discuss theEarth's ecologies, even though the conservationists' desire to use Earthecologies in support of more Promethean projects, like \"be all that yoube,\" tend to prevail at many colleges of natural resources. For morediscussion of how material practices shape space, see David Harvey,Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell,1977), 150-175.

58.

59.Bulletin, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, 9.

26

60.

Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings,1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 133.Ibid., 95.

For the emerging sciences of industrial ecology, thisinfrastructuralization of Earth is carried to its logical conclusion. As Frosch asks, \"let us consider, industry, indeed, the whole ofhumanity and nature, as a system of temporary stocks and flows ofmaterial and energy.\" Ultimately, then, if industrial ecology comes todominate environmental studies, then all ecological questions may becometied to \"a framework for thinking about materials and their flows in thecontext of industrial waste, about the balancing of costs andenvironmental impacts in possible future states of industry, and about amethod of policy examination.\" Therefore, he asserts,

My model for policy choice among industrial ecosystemsis statistical mechanics, which has developed verysuccessfully to study systems consisting of a largenumber of interacting elements--particularly systemsin which the large number of elements and possibleinteractions present an otherwise almost insuperablechallenge to understanding the behavior of the wholesystem.

See Robert A. Frosch, \"Toward the End of Waste: Reflections on a NewEcology of Industry,\" Daedalus 124, no. 3 (Summer 1996), 201, 211, and210.

61.62.

27