Greening Without Conflict? Environmentalism,NGOs and Civil Society in China

This article argues that the specific features and dynamics of China’s environmentalism can be attributed to two factors: the ‘greening’ of the Chinese state at the time when environmentalism emerged, and the alternating politics of toleration and strict control of social organizations. As a result, environmentalism has developed in a gradual way, encompassing the various forms of ‘green’ NGOs that we see in the West and the ex–socialist states of Eastern and Central Europe. Yet, on the other hand, environmentalism was also robbed of the opportunity, as well as the immediate urgency, to openly confront the government. This is where it deviates from environmentalism in the West and the former Eastern–bloc countries.     

Canada and the British Empire

Britain attempted to create an informal empire in the Middle East and used the British Middle East Office to sponsor development work precisely to attain a significant influence in the region, one that would salvage a fair share of rapidly declining imperial power. Environmental initiatives, many of them focusing on forestry, composed a key element of this programme. However an informal empire did not ensue. This led the Foreign Office, and many historians, to overlook the importance of the BMEO. This article explores how the environmental reforms proposed by British advisers radically changed land use in the Middle East between 1946 and 1970, and left behind a remarkable legacy of conservation.     

White environmental subjectivity and the politics of belonging

In a society dominated by a colorblind approach to racial difference, racial categories are often viewed as unchanging and constructed in a time past. This article examines the making of racial categories and subjectivities in everyday perceptions and portrayals of place and belonging related to environmentalism. It examines the ways in which middle-class white people, who engage regularly with Latino immigrants, simultaneously construct the racial category of ‘white’ and affirm their own belonging in Boulder, Colorado through an exclusionary discourse of environmentalism. In Boulder, immigrants and non-immigrant Latinos are often portrayed as unaware of environmentalism, not interested in environmentalism, and/or too busy or poor to participate in environmentalism. In interviews, white residents of the city reproduce discourses of privilege and exclusion through environmental discourses and reinforce their own white environmental subjectivity as the norm. The insider/outsider division established through environmental discourse in Boulder is a specific example of how exclusion is enforced through the racialization of ‘natural’ spaces and environmental activities and how environmentalism itself is an important articulation of difference.     

Edward Harold Fulcher Swain's Vision of Forest Modernity

Edward Harold Fulcher Swain (1883–1970) developed a unique idea about the importance of forests, advocating the creation of a new society based upon forests, and he pursued policies to implement his unique vision of forestry when he served as the Director of Queensland's Forestry Board from 1918 to 1924 and the Forestry Commissioner for New South Wales from 1935 to 1948. Swain's beliefs developed out of a combination of his Australian experiences and connections with foresters in the British Empire and America. When he could not convince Australian elites about the need to create a forest-based society, he asked foresters at the 1947 Empire Forestry Conference in London to assert the primacy of forestry in land management in the British Empire. Many foresters positively received parts of Swain's argument, but his ideas could never be fully implemented in the British Empire because of the dominance of agrarian doctrines of development in post-Second World War colonial planning and the rapid process of decolonization. Swain's life sheds light onto current debates among historians about the origin and legacy of forestry in Australia and the British Empire. His ideas, many that parallel the basic tenets of modern environmentalism, require historians to rethink the relationship between Empire forestry and environmentalism.     

Laissez-faire governance and the archetype laissez-faire city in the USA: exploring Houston

This article explores the governance of Houston, the archetype laissez-faire city in the USA. The research examines the complexity of Houston's minimal government intervention rhetoric, which in practice involves extensive federal, state and local government involvement in economic development in combination with a disinterest in social service and income maintenance programmes. This governance strategy is outlined through an examination both of regional public policy and local public finances. The analysis illustrates that Houston's local governance has historically been based on a management approach that attempts actively to minimize costs for potential investors to locate in the City, through public intervention, while at the same time generating an unattractive urban environment for the socially marginalized — hence the disinterest in social services. Thus, despite the local laissez-faire rhetoric, government intervention in Houston's growth has been vital and has produced the extraordinary impacts usually expected from public involvement in local economic development. The foundations of this local governance strategy are both predicted and advocated by the public choice approach, a theoretical framework whose emphasis on inter-municipal competition advances management tactics based on maintaining low taxes and low expenditures on public welfare. The research also shows, however, that Houston is unique, when compared to other economically successful US cities, in following such an extreme approach of this management strategy.     

Time to Grow Up? Canadian Understandings of Revolutionary Cuba to the Missile Crisis of 1962

The Cuban missile crisis was a moment during the Cold War when rhetoric, brinkmanship, and politics intersected with notions of masculinity, empire and colonization to nearly disastrous ends. The crisis occurred at a moment of transition in Canada in which Canadians were profoundly concerned over the state of Canadian–Cuban relations and Canada’s place in the world. This article examines how previous understandings and preconceptions of “Cuba”—such as feminized and infantilized images of Cuban leader Fidel Castro in political cartoons and editorials in newspapers – influenced how Canadians understood the crisis, their nation and how the Canadian government should interact with other powers. While both negative and positive images of Castro and Cuba were present in Canadian public discussion, Canadians utilized the same imagery to argue that their government should act in its own best interests after the missile crisis.     

世界范围内的环境保护主义:一种不同的观点

亚克西姆·纳德考(Joachi m Radkau)不仅是德国最重要的环境史学家,而且代表了一代人对1970年代环境事件的看法。本文意欲从更加年轻一代的观点出发,补充亚克西姆·纳德考的观点。1970年代的环境保护主义者经常用他们那个时代的议程作为自我证据,但是年轻一代的环境保护主义者倾向于采取一种更加批判的态度来看待此问题,即从后来发生的事实的角度来看待。因此,过去的环境议程常常被年轻的一代看作是强迫的和错误指导的议程。环境保护主义者经常从一个宽泛的环境问题中选择几个问题给予特别的关注,而历史学家需要仔细地研究是什么指导了环境保护主义者的选择。因此,不仅仅将环境保护主义看作是知识分子的事业,而且看作是他们的一种生活方式,并且进一步考察环境议程与环境保护主义者的日常生活是如何联系起来的。这是一件有意义的事情。此外,环境史学家需要注意环境争论中不同的国家特色。许多国家都发展出了完全不同的具有国家特色的环境保护主义,尽管近年来世界环境保护主义出现了趋向一致的倾向,但是这些不同的国家发展道路还没有褪色到足以被忽视的地步。最后,本文呼吁,要对环境意识从一代向下一代的转变给予更多的关注。将来的环境保护主义也许与今天的环境保护主义有相当大的区别,或许环境保护主义将来根本就不存在了。进一步仔细观察,环境保护主义是一个不稳定的、脆弱的事物。     

Biodiversity and sectoral responsibility in the development of Swedish Forestry Policy, 1988-1993

In 1993 the Swedish parliament deregulated national forestry policy and established an environmental goal in parallel with the previous, long-standing goal of high wood production. This paper shows how the change occurred in the context of major changes in Swedish environmental policy during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Within a short time, new environmental legislation and the introduction of legal protection for small forest and agricultural habitats of high ecological value reoriented national forestry policy, away from an overriding focus on wood production to an increased awareness of nature conservation and biodiversity preservation. Reflecting a major compromise with the state, forest owners have gained greater freedom to manage their land, but must also improve environmental conditions while achieving high wood production, a policy known as 'freedom under responsibility'. The paper explains how both the parliament and industry supported increased nature conservation and biodiversity to maintain forest health and support the forestry industry, by favouring responsible resource use and not simply protection from human influence.     

Biodiversity and Sectoral Responsibility in the Development of Swedish Forestry Policy, 1988–1993

In 1993 the Swedish parliament deregulated national forestry policy and established an environmental goal in parallel with the previous, long-standing goal of high wood production. This paper shows how the change occurred in the context of major changes in Swedish environmental policy during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Within a short time, new environmental legislation and the introduction of legal protection for small forest and agricultural habitats of high ecological value reoriented national forestry policy, away from an overriding focus on wood production to an increased awareness of nature conservation and biodiversity preservation. Reflecting a major compromise with the state, forest owners have gained greater freedom to manage their land, but must also improve environmental conditions while achieving high wood production, a policy known as ‘freedom under responsibility’. The paper explains how both the parliament and industry supported increased nature conservation and biodiversity to maintain forest health and support the forestry industry, by favouring responsible resource use and not simply protection from human influence.     

Naturalizing the state and symbolizing power in Russian agricultural land use

Land is intertwined with politics: both as a sine qua non for the territorial state, as well as a spatially limited natural resource through which geopolitical power and advantage are articulated and enacted. This remains the case, notwithstanding the emergence of global and planetary frameworks for land management towards collective environmental and developmental goals. Indeed, such frameworks contend with narratives and practices that not only treat land as a strategic national resource, but entangle it with the very ontology of statehood itself. This study examines such state-natures through the case of Russian agricultural land use. Analyzing governmental discourse from 2000 to 2020, it examines how in the extensive cultivation of agricultural land has come to be a hallmark of twenty-first century vertical and horizontal symbolic state-making: both as an instrumental means of enhancing the state's geopolitical power, as well as a means by which state is reified as environmentally sovereign and self-subsistent. So doing, the study complements a growing body of work in critical environmental geopolitics that has tended to eschew state-based analysis, or else leave the state underproblematized. As I argue, considering how the state is made natural, in turn helps to understand how nature is politically if not ontologically entangled in geopolitical thought and practice—in ways that attempts to act upon and indeed bring about wider-scale environmental subjects must contend.     

Pepperoni or Broccoli? On the Cutting Wedge of Feminist Environmentalism

Feminist environmentalism has become a significant intellectual and social policy force across fields as diverse as public health, political economy, philosophy, science, and ecology. Feminist environmental theory and activism together are challenging and redefining foundational principles, from animal rights to the environmental economy of illness and well-being, from global political economy to the role of Big Science as the primary arbiter of the state of the environment. Animal rights is one of the most intellectually challenging and innovative areas of intellectual activity and social activism, and within feminist environmentalism is one of the most radical subfields. This paper provides an overview of activity in this subfield, starting from the observation that feminist environmental scholarship and grassroots activism on animal rights pivot around three concerns: elucidating the commonalities in structures of oppressions across gender, race, class, and species; developing feminist-informed theories of the basis for allocating "rights" to animals; and exposing the gendered assumptions and perceptions that underlie human relationships to nonhuman animals. At the same time, the serious contemplation of animal rights makes a considerable contribution to destabilizing identity categories and adds new dimensions to theorizing the mutability of identity.     

世界范围内的环境保护主义:在市民运动和政府决策之间

本文通过概述西方环境保护主义在市民与政府之间的发展历程,认识到环境保护主义在不同的时代有不同的讨论议题与内容,而不同的人群对于谁才是环境保护主义者的精英分子也有不同的看法。1970年前后是环境保护主义的转折点,从那时起,环境保护主义关注的议题由单一的要素转向一个综合的网络,并形成了全球范围的广泛联系,在大众运动和广泛的社会关注之下,环境保护主义的政治力量越来越多地显示出来。     

Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese exploration of Sakhalin Island: cartography and empire

In 1808–1809, a Japanese cartographer named Mamiya Rinzō (1775–1844) traveled to Sakhalin Island, called Kita Ezo or Karafuto by the Japanese, to map the land and document its inhabitants and natural features. In the seventh month of 1809, according to the lunar calendar, Mamiya arrived at Deren, a Chinese outpost along the Amur River in the Heilongjiang region. When Mamiya mapped Sakhalin and central Heilongjiang, he employed Western cartographic sciences to guard Japanese sovereignty by delineating national borders between Russia, China, and Japan; but he also ‘anticipated empire’ in a manner reminiscent of European powers. His maps placed Sakhalin on a universally recognizable grid and emptied the land of its inhabitants, who were formally relegated to the pages of illustrated ethnographies. Mamiya's activities, as well as those of cartographer Inō Tadataka (1745–1818), suggest a global early modern experience with cartography and ethnography, one in which Japan emerged as a periphery of calculation and deployed cartographic tools to construct nation and empire.     

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES: STATE POLICIES,FOREST CLASSIFICATIONS,AND DEFORESTATION IN THE GARHWAL HIMALAYAS

Prominent environmental scholars and activists in India have posited that environmental crises in the Indian Himalayas result primarily from adopting forestry practices that override local communities and argue that the region can be sustained only when the state allows local communities to practice indigenous forest management. This paper challenges those critiques: focusing on the Garhwal Himalayas, it shows that forestry practices involve contestation and negotiation between the state and local communities and argues that environmental scholars fail to recognize how particular classes have shaped forest use and management practices and played a central role in determining environmental sustainability for local communities.     

Knowledge making and corporate environmentalism from the perspective of the egg tray

ABSTRACT

In the 1990s, there was a change in capitalist thinking on environmental issues in many global settings, which materialised in what has been termed corporate environmentalism. Beginning with a history of the moulded fibre egg tray and one of its primary manufacturers, this is a case study of how corporate environmentalism came about and was enacted as a confluence of corporate priorities, environmental concerns, production processes, materials, and the development of new measuring tools. Unlike the many environmental history studies that emphasise the role of NGOs and policy developments, this study begins in the business world. More specifically, it is based in the making of environmental knowledge in the form of life cycle assessments and environmental accounts and in the environmental reframing of materials like moulded pulp and plastic. In this way it is the story of how it became reasonable for a manufacturer of egg trays to choose the slogan, ‘Choose Fibre. Save Nature’.     

A state of suspended animation: Urban sanitation and water access in Nogales,Sonora

With its hilly terrain and fast-paced growth, Nogales, Sonora, located on the US-Mexico border, is an extremely challenging place for sanitation and potable water provision wherein access to basic services is highly uneven. The labor demands of maquiladoras (typically, foreign-owned assembly plants) draw a steady influx of newcomers to the city, many of whom must turn to land “invasion” to create spaces for affordable housing. With tacit government approval, invasions occur on inexpensive, often topographically precarious land. Officials tend to frame these spaces as “illegal,” and, by extension, those who inhabit them, as existing outside the realm of formal governance. Despite such views, in this paper we understand the distinctions drawn between so-called formal and informal urban governance to unfold along two key axes: regularization of informal land titles and piped water and sanitation. We show how colonia residents feel caught in a state of suspended animation between hope for full urban service provision and trepidation that it will ever reach them. This ambiguity is visible in residents' and government officials' interactions with each other and the public services landscape, and in the unevenness of services provision. We critique the claim that such ambiguousness reflects an instrumental approach within official planning. Instead, we draw from state theory within political geography and political ecology to show how ‘the state’ is an emergent effect of the processes of inclusion and exclusion, an effect constantly destabilized by Nogales's precarious physical geography and uneven urban services grid. Reconceptualizing authority and ambiguity holds quite different implications for the struggle for urban services provision.     

JUST WAIT UNTIL THERE'S A DROUGHT: MEDIATING ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES FOR URBAN GROWTH

Pro-development water managers from a southern Californian jurisdiction secured voter approval for importing water supplies by mediating a six year drought. Through reorganized water management structures, unsustainable technological practices, and “crisis” discourses, water managers overcame residents' historic resistance to imported water by defining it as insurance against a “natural” emergency, not a social mechanism for growth. The research suggests how the environmental crisis can advance development-oriented state agencies' hegemony. Given the otherwise general advocacy of environmentalism and “slow-growth in the empirical setting, water managers” success in overturning sustainable water development regimes reveals potential contradictions within the “environmentalist” landscape.     

Transitions in Payments for Ecosystem Services in Guatemala: Embedding Forestry Incentives into Rural Development Value Systems

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programmes increasingly reflect multiple stakeholder demands and rarely operate in market form. In Guatemala, the earliest forestry incentives — a form of PES — benefited larger landowners and functioned as subsidies for both extractive forest production and ecosystem services. Smallholders and indigenous communal land managers in Guatemala campaigned for PES programmes to meet their needs, leading to the creation of a second programme that focuses on improving rural development, coupled with ecosystem services. This article examines how these historically marginalized groups have used PES as an opportunity to engage with the state and demand embedded development that more strongly reflects their values of forests and their desired relationship with the Guatemalan state. As a result of this activism, these Guatemalan forestry incentives reach smallholders more successfully than PES programmes in many other countries. However, more far-reaching changes in land use are tempered by power imbalances and structural inequalities that are unaddressed and, in fact, reinforced by PES programmes, such as underfunding, narrow conceptions of land ownership, and unequal representation.     

英国近代早期“政治性的四旬斋”运动探微

在英国近代早期的特殊时代氛围下,原本作为基督教的宗教斋戒仪式的四旬斋被赋予了浓重的政治和经济色彩,被冠之为“政治性的四旬斋”。在当时的社会公共生活中,四旬斋备受国家立法的关注和重视。究其实质,“政治性的四旬斋”首先是近代英国政府所奉行的重商主义对内政策的重要组成部分;其次,该政策亦是当时英国囿于国情和外部国际环境压力所采取的一种无奈之举;最后,其不过是对宗教改革之前的英国民众饮食文化传统的一种变相恢复而已。关于其实施后果,该运动对当时英国政治、经济生活及民众日常生活都产生了一定影响。它既在客观上促进了英国渔业的发展,并刺激了英国航海业乃至海军的发展,还在一定程度上通过限制富人的消费改善了穷人的生活境况。但囿于其非常化、权宜性和理想化色彩过重的缺陷,它的影响最终是较为有限的。     

Nuisance Talk and the Propriety of Property: Middle Class Discourses of a Slum‐Free Delhi

Abstract: This paper examines the narratives through which associations of private property owners in Delhi depict slums as zones of incivility and “nuisance.” In tracing how this “nuisance talk” travels into and gains legitimacy in popular and state visions of urban space, the paper shows the role of discourse in justifying and enacting exclusionary urban imaginaries. As a lay term, nuisance is widely used to identify forms of aesthetic impropriety. But, as a primary element of environmental law, nuisance operates discursively as a catchall category allowing diverse private grievances to be expressed in terms of environmental welfare and the public interest. The widening depiction of slums as nuisances hence reworks the public/private divide, inserting once local codes of civility into the core of public life. By examining how nuisance talk circulates between property owners' associations, the media, and the government, the paper shows how slum demolitions have become widely read as a form of environmental improvement.