Spatial Politics in Practice: The Style and Substance of Environmental Direct Action (original) (raw)
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ALTERNATIVES TO RESISTANCE? COMPARING DEPOLITICIZATION IN TWO BRITISH ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT SCENES
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2020
Processes of politicization and depoliticization are increasingly studied in relation to urban contexts and cities have been depicted as incubators of social movements. What has been largely ignored is why in some cities forces of politicization or depoliticization are stronger than in others. To address this caveat, this paper compares two British cities-Manchester and Bristol-which have historically been central hubs of environmentalism, but that currently face similar depoliticizing forces: austerity, anti-squatting laws, police repression, and activists' disillusion with environmentalism. Curiously, these conditions have had very different impacts on each environmental scene. In Manchester they have caused environmental resistance to become replaced almost entirely by non-confrontational 'alternatives.' In Bristol, alternative emerge in synergy with environmental resistance. The comparison thus suggests that Bristol is more conducive to maintaining environmental resistance under depoliticizing conditions. Findings suggest this difference can be attributed to two features of the physical urban environment, including city size. Historically, these differences were not decisive. Yet with dwindling environmentalist energy in the UK, the number of environmentalist hubs has been reduced. This has prompted a reputational snowball that increasingly concentrates environmental resistance in the one city that best imbues the environmental movement from broader depoliticizing forces.
State Transformation in the High North: Cases of environmental justice struggles
This is a study in the art and science of fundamental systems transformation. The study is hypothesis-generative, based upon qualitative research. The cases are selected from one ongoing process of state transformation at the Arctic fringe of Europe. An indigenous rights struggle feeds into the ongoing re-constitution of the body of law. The study contributes to an ongoing re-thinking of concepts and methods in European Political and Social Sciences. The struggle for rights is also a struggle for proofs, which feeds into ongoing re-constitution of the body of knowledge. Positive findings describe my attempts to observe some possible causal mechanisms whereby the indigenous human rights movement has enjoyed some limited success in its effort to decolonize the four states that have divided and conquered Sápmi, the homeland of the Sámi (formerly known as Lapps), the only group within the EU recognized by the UN as an indigenous people. Negative findings describe my attempts to observe some limitations of my own observational capacity. Many questions of relevance to subaltern interest groups remain under-researched and under-documented: There is a great deal of colonial bias that must still be overcome, not only within European political science at large, but also within my own limited contribution, even though I strive to overcome such bias. Seven empirical chapters, discuss two single-case studies: Alta Watershed, ca. 1970-1980, and Deatnu Watershed, ca. 1980-2012. The empirical foundation is qualitative data from field observation and historical archives, which is put ino context with some quantitative data from official registers. The different chapters operate within different disciplines: two are geographical, two are sociological, one is historical, one large one is anthropological, and one should be regarded traditional political science. Although multi-disciplinary, my empirical research continues what I call the major research tradition in the field. This focuses on collective action and social ecology, and informs human rights policies. The theoretical discussion addresses observations by colleagues within another, rival, tradition, which emphasizes coercive force and geo-strategy, and serves public security policies. Transformative social movements need to be aware that both traditions remain limited by a heritage of colonial bias. They also need to be aware that both traditions may be used in a complimentary manner, to help overcoming either fatalism or over-optimism. The thesis concludes that transformative social movements need to avoid the dual pitfalls of naïve idealism and naïve realism, and pursue critical realism.
There has been some debate in recent years concerning the effectiveness of the work undertaken by environmental philosophers in helping us to address the ecological crisis that, arguably, we are facing. Working broadly within the pragmatist tradition, a small number of environmental philosophers are maintaining that the discipline needs to become more practical in focus and should engage more directly with issues that concern environmentalists. However, a review of the literature reveals few studies that examine in any depth the ways in which environmentalists construct and use philosophical frameworks. This thesis attempts such an investigation by developing arguments from environmental pragmatism and applying socio-environmental theory developed by environmental sociologists. By analysing interview data gathered during an eighteen-month period of study at four ‘protest camps’ in south-east England in 1999 and 2000, the thesis explores the frameworks and discourses that the activists use to justify the moral case for protecting the piece of land they are occupying. Viewed within the rise of direct action environmentalism in Britain in the 1990s, these activists appear to express more radical notions of environmental value than might ‘reformist’ environmental campaigners. As such, the activists provide interesting case studies in light of some of the frameworks currently being proposed by environmental philosophers. By applying environmental sociological theory that questions any conceptual divide between society and nature, this study also challenges conventional sociological approaches to research that neglect the material aspects of our existence at the expense of considering only our social constructions of the world. The attempt is made, by using frameworks developed from critical realism and coevolutionary theory, to understand the broader social, political and environmental context within which the activists’ philosophies develop. By employing these observations, this study reflects on the activists’ ethical and political frameworks and, moreover, by engaging with several key debates within environmental philosophy, seeks to understand some of the deeper problems facing environmentalists.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2009
In recent years, urban research has become increasingly concerned with the social, political and economic implications of the techno-political and socio-scientific consensus that the present unsustainable and unjust environmental conditions require a transformation of the way urban life is organized. In the article, I shall argue that the present consensual vision of the urban environment presenting a clear and present danger annuls the properly political moment and contributes to what a number of authors have defined as the emergence and consolidation of a postpolitical and postdemocratic condition. This will be the key theme developed in this contribution. First, I shall attempt to theorize and re-centre the political as a pivotal moment in urban political-ecological processes. Second, I shall argue that the particular staging of the environmental problem and its modes of management signals and helps to consolidate a postpolitical condition, one that evacuates the properly political from the plane of immanence that underpins any political intervention. The consolidation of an urban postpolitical condition runs, so I argue, parallel to the formation of a postdemocratic arrangement that has replaced debate, disagreement and dissensus with a series of technologies of governing that fuse around consensus, agreement, accountancy metrics and technocratic environmental management. In the third part, I maintain that this postpolitical consensual police order revolves decidedly around embracing a populist gesture. However, the disappearance of the political in a postpolitical arrangement leaves all manner of traces that allow for the resurfacing of the properly political. This will be the theme of the final section. I shall conclude that re-centring the political is a necessary condition for tackling questions of urban environmental justice and for creating egalibertarian socio-ecological urban assemblages. Well, my dear Adeimantus, what is the nature of tyranny? It's obvious, I suppose, that it arises out of democracy (Plato, The Republic). The Labour Party's crowning achievement is the death of politics. There's nothing left to vote for (Noel Gallagher, Oasis rock star, The Independent 11 November 2006: 37). The end of the socialist alternative, then, did not signify any renewal of democratic debate. Instead, it signified the reduction of democratic life to the management of local consequences of global economic necessity. The latter, in fact, was posited as a common condition which I am grateful for comments of and discussions with my colleagues in the School of Environment and
The project analysed in this article and the drama it generated is one subject of a larger research project I am undertaking that explores concepts of environmental justice in Australian environmental laws. A version of this paper was first presented at the 2012 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in New York at a legal geographies panel convened by Melinda Harm Benson and Robyn Bartel. I am grateful to them for the opportunity to expose this work to an eminent audience. I am also thankful for the comments and suggestions offered by the referees who reviewed the paper, for the editorial assistance and encouragement of Melbourne Law School Research Assistant Clare McIlwraith, and the exceptional teamwork of the editors and assistants of this journal. Finally, thanks also to Alison Trowbridge and Peter Douglass for helping locate research materials held in libraries in rural Australia. Cet article explique et explore comment un projet con-troversé de gestion des déchets dans le village rural de Molong, en Australie, a été approuvé sous la critiquée –et maintenant abrogée– Partie 3A de l'Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 de la Nouvelle-Galles du Sud. Il adopte l'approche de la géographie juridique pour montrer de quelle manière la mise en place de la loi sur l'aménagement du territoire a radi-calement transféré le pouvoir politique et juridique –de la communauté vers le gouvernement et le promoteur– et a changé l'échelle de préoccupation environnementale –du local au régional. La loi, et plus particulièrement l'échelle géographique imposée, a miné l'argumentaire ainsi que la place de la création et de l'imagination du groupe communautaire qui s'opposait au développement. Elle permet au processus décisionnel centralisé de négliger les impacts environnementaux du projet reconnu par la Cour pour la terre et l'environnement de Nouvelle-Galles du Sud dans la décision Hub Action Group v Minister for Planning. Cela illustre le déséquilibre des pouvoirs inhérent aux lois sur l'aménagement territorial déterminantes pour l'État. Cette étude révèle les injustices spatiales et scalaires qui sont présentées en tant que composantes du concept de justice environnementale. Ce concept, d'ailleurs, est lui-même réinterprété à la lumière des récentes recherches académiques qui repensent la sig-nification de l'espace. À cet égard, l'essai étend les fron-tières, et la communauté, de la justice environnementale. This paper explains and explores how a controversial waste development in the rural town of Molong, Australia was approved under the maligned, and since repealed, Part 3A of the New South Wales (" NSW ") Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979. It adopts a legal geography approach to demonstrate how the activation of the planning law both dramatically shifted political and legal power from the community to the government and proponent, and altered the scale of environmental concern from the local to the regional. The law, and in particular, the imposed geographic scale, undermined the argumentative position, place creation and imagination of the community group opposing the development. It allowed centralized decision making to disregard the environmental effects of the project that were acknowledged by the NSW Land and Environment Court in the case Hub Action Group v. Minister for Planning. It illustrates the entrenched power imbalance in state-significant development laws. The inquiry uncovers spatial and scalar injustices, which are presented as being a component of the concept of environmental justice, with that concept reinterpreted in light of recent scholarship that rethinks the meaning of space. In this respect the paper extends the boundary of, and the community for, environmental justice.
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS. New Geographical and Social Constituencies, New York-London, Springer, 2015
A change in the way humans relate to nature could be the starting point for a new politics, which will also affect relations among humans. A new approach would help to radically transform the production system, not because it is unjust in the usually considered social terms, but because it endangers nature and humanity. So far, the citizens’ grassroots organizations have failed to win broad consensus and political power in the representative institutions. When the time comes to transform the single environmental issue into an electoral platform, environmentalists lose unity and effectiveness since they lack a common political vision and an ensuing strategy. On the other hand European politics is rapidly transforming because the challenge brought by so-called populist movements. We need to transform activists’ shared emotions and attitudes into political ideologies and platforms. Moreover, a new educational process and a new science politics are necessary to reform environmental policy.