The Nature of the State: Excavating the Political Ecologies of the Modern State

by Mark Whitehead, Rhys Jones, Martin Jones

The twin categories of the state and nature collectively embody some of the most fundamental reference points around which our lives and thinking are organized. Despite their combined significance, however, the complex relationships that exist between modern states and nature remain under-theorized and are relatively unexplored. Through a detailed study of different sites, moments, and framing strategies The Nature of the State challenges the ways in which geographers and social scientists approach the study of state-nature relations. The authors analyse different instances of state-nature interaction from all over the world, considering the geo-politics of resource conflicts, the operation of natural history museums, the organizational practices of environmental departments and ministries, the regulation of genetic science, and contemporary forms of state intervention within issues of climate change. Introducing original research into the different institutional, spatial, and
temporal strategies used by states to frame the natural world this book provides a critical overview of the latest political and ecological theories and addresses a wide range of pressing socio-environmental debates.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 11, 2007

About the author

Mark Whitehead is a Professor of Human Geography whose research interests span urban studies, sustainability, and the impacts of the psychological sciences on public policy.

Mark has authored and edited 10 books, has written for The Guardian and Western Mail newspapers, and has blogged for the Psychology Today magazine.

Mark is currently the Director of Recruitment and Admissions in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences. He is also on the Editorial Board of the journal Environmental Values.

Reviews

[fabio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent read. The authors make an effort to draw out the complexities of socionatural relations by analyzing several case studies of the state arbitrating the ethical, economic and political issues in modern environmentalism, nationalist struggles, biotechnology and even museography. Their analytic framework is quite interesting and frankly heterodox, trying to develop a political ecology of the state that conjoins the 1980s critical tradition with a then-emerging Latourian perspective on bringing nature into politics through sociotechnical assemblies.

The authors provide a unique lens through the notion of 'moments', which collate and configure the 'framings' of nature by the state in territorial space, landed property and microbiological patents. Through the mediation of technical devices, infrastructures and legal forms, the authors propose populating the border of states and nature with hybrid entities, boundary objects and cyborg states that show how deeply intertwined these two categories really are.

Unfortunately, the examples are all gathered from Euroamerican contexts, where the solidity of the state, albeit contingent and co-produced by its framings of nature, seems to emerge triumphantly. It would have been nice to see the authors grapple with colonial and postcolonial situations, where the socionatural relations and the power of the state often seem less settled.