Environmental Discourse

Discourse is a powerful concept that geographers and others have used to appreciate how nature and the environment—things that are typically thought to be self-evident, presocial, and taken for granted as being outside of, or beyond, politics—are invested with meaning, power, and politics. Thinking of environmental objects (such as a forest, landscape, and nature) as discursive products (i.e., as things made and remade through material and conceptual social labor and connected to deeply situated knowledges and experiences) has greatly opened up geographical understandings of both the “environment” and environmental practice.

The study of the environment as discourse and of environmental discourses (discourses about the environment) has produced many critical insights into the social, political, and historical conditions and processes through which nature and the environment are made meaningful and visible to us as material entities, as well as about the manner in which environmental practices are made meaningful as viable possibilities. These include, for instance, insights into the manner in which concepts of “nature” and “wilderness” have been made and remade through colonial registers of meaning and used as powerful frameworks for dispossession in colonial contexts. The concept has also, in more general terms, enabled critical insights into how the manner in which the environment is made meaningful, incorporated into modes of production, and defined through environmental practice are intimately connected to (and constitutive of) practices of racialization, gendering, sexualization, and class distinction. In moral terms, the study of environmental discourse has helped geographers understand how and why it is—and through what strategies—that environments and the people living in them can come to be conceived in ways that authorize and legitimize their incorporation into regimes of extraction and other modes of production and consumption. For instance, these can include environments as sacrifice zones, places of recreation, or wilderness enclosures.