On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism

T his study examines how discourses of nature, ecology, or the environment, as disciplinary articulations of"eco-knowledge," might be reinterpreted as efforts to generate systems of "geopower" over, but also within and through, Nature for the governance of modern economies and societies. The thinking of Michel Foucault, particularly his notions of sexuality and bio-power as mediations for discursively formed discipline, provides a basis for this reinterpretation, because many of the terms associated with "the environment" are perplexing until one puts them under a genealogical lens. These dynamics have been at play for nearly a hundred and thirty years-or at least since self-consciously ecological discourses were formulated by George Marsh (1885) or Ernst Haeckel (1866) in the nineteenth century-but their operations are particularly apparent today. While many examples of such tendencies might be mobilized here, this examination of geo-power systems as a mediation of