balbwin 2003 nature governmentality foucault ojo4

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Space and Culture

DOI: 10.1177/1206331203253189 2003; 6; 415 Space and Culture

Andrew Baldwin The Nature of the Boreal Forest: Governmentality and Forest-Nature

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The Nature of the Boreal Forest

Governmentality and Forest-Nature

Andrew BaldwinCarleton University

This article addresses the ontological status of nature in environmental politics by taking up thequestion of sustainable forest management in the Canadian boreal. In particular, it draws fromMichel Foucault’s notion of governmentality to argue that the historicity of “forest-nature” is in-dispensable for understanding the politics of sustainable forest management. In the end, it is ar-gued that recent efforts to politicize the boreal should be regarded as an exercise ofknowledge/power that rerepresents the boreal as a space of community and land stewardship, cli-mate regulation, and biological diversity promotion, as opposed to simply a passive space of re-source extraction. The article concludes by addressing some of the political implications of forest-nature for the practice of everyday life.

Keywords: boreal forest; governmentality; cultural geography; sustainable forest; management; hy-brid nature

Forests are not passive objects. Neither are they simply objects of aesthetic expres-sion or the “natural capital” underwriting corporate bond issues. They are unfixed en-tities embedded in complex webs of relations that string together multiple experiencesof expertise, myth, ethics, and history. This is perhaps no more so the case than for theboreal forests of the Canadian north. What was reinvented as a natural space, a source

Author’s NNote: The author would like to thank Fiona Mackenzie, Simon Dalby, and three anony-mous referees for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

space & culture vol. 6 no. 4, november 2003 415-428DOI: 10.1177/1206331203253189©2003 Sage Publications

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of fear and of mercantile importance, through several hundred years of colonial ex-ploration has been transformed over the past three decades into a hotly contested ob-ject of desire. On one hand, the received category of the boreal forest as natural re-source continues to underwrite the corporate practice of industrial forestrythroughout the circumpolar north. Whereas, on the other hand, the boreal forest em-bodies strong mythological appeal; an aesthetic picture routinely invoked by environ-mental groups that weaves together an innocent history and an idealized, remote na-ture associated with northernness. And for indigenous peoples inhabiting the boreal,the spatial formation called the “boreal forest” is representative of a violent past and asubjugated, irreconciled history. As such, the boreal must be viewed foremost as a po-litical space at the center of which one finds the ontological status of nature a questionof pressing concern. This article examines one aspect of this political debate, namely,the social construction of one of nature’s common signifiers: the forest.

My argument hangs on the concept of forest-nature, which, in the first instance, ismeant to signify a presumed essence: a pristine, absolute nature that would existwhether or not humans were on hand to be its witness. This is the nature frequentlyassociated with trees and wilderness, the nature elegantly pictured in glossy maga-zines, and the nature whose evidence many assume can be found in forests. To bettersituate forest-nature, the argument begins with a brief introduction into the so-called“nature debates” currently unfolding within the fields of human geography and cul-tural and environmental studies. But more poignant, this article is concerned with thehistorical process through which the very idea of forest-nature as a constructed objectof political concern has been transformed. In so doing, it draws from Michel Fou-cault’s notion of governmentality to express the manner by which forest-nature be-came the object of political and economic calculation in Progressive Era United States(Demeritt, 2001). It will then show how a new subjectification of boreal forest-nature(and object of political calculation) is emerging with the advent of modern environ-mentalism and with it a range of political implications for the conduct of everydaylife. The article then proposes that we view this subjectification as the formal con-struction of a hybrid nature and an exercise of social power (Escobar, 1999). Throughthis process, we might begin reconceptualizing the boreal as a technological artifactand spatial environment consistent with Donna Haraway’s (1991) conception of thecyborg.

The Nature Debate: Materiality and Representation

With the advent of modern environmentalism in the early 1970s came a prolifera-tion of debate within the social sciences over how to incorporate the category of na-ture into social theory. Through the ensuing years, these debates have come to occupya significant place within the geographic imagination that, until recently, oftenequated the politics of environmental protection with the preservation of nature. Butnature is more than merely an aesthetic expression or a useful category defining theessence of what is “out there.” It is an essential component of a modernist ontologywhich, depending on how and in what context it is invoked, can yield very real ideo-logical effects. For example, when we accept that nature is external to human society,we legitimize the assumption that an optimal ecological-knowledge can be readily dis-cerned through scientific enquiry and that such a body of knowledge can be put topractical use in regulating the continuous interchange between the biosphere and the

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practice of daily life. So prevalent is this view within the practice of mainstream envi-ronmentalism that to refute it is to attack the moral authority of the environmentalpolitical project itself. Yet after careful reading, it becomes very clear that, when weadopt this approach, the spaces in which nature is said to exist—forests and humanbodies—are inadvertently purified of their social content. In rerepresenting specificphysical spaces with the aesthetic of bourgeois nature, those living within and adjacentto these spaces physically and metaphorically are forced to reinvent themselves vis-à-vis this discourse of environmental purity. To this extent, so-called “natural” space be-comes depoliticized as the language of political contest is displaced by the technocraticlanguage of environmental management. Canadian forest politics provides a vivid ex-ample of this displacement where political struggles over control of Canada’s Pacificcoast forests have been too often mediated by the technical language of sustainableforest management, an ideological move which privileges corporate managerialism tothe exclusion of indigenous peoples’ history in discussions about forest futures(Braun, 2002).

In response, many geographers and environmental theorists writing within thefield of poststructural political ecology have begun challenging the ideological effectsof an ontologically discrete understanding of nature by critically retheorizing the re-lationship between human society and the nature metaphor. Does human ingenuitygive humans standing outside the realm of nature? Are humans necessarily bound bythe dictates of a universal, biophysical reality? Do humans and the biophysical possessdistinguishable agencies enabling each to pursue their own objectives independently?In short, what does it mean to protect nature from human intrusion? And perhapsmore poignant, what are the political effects of environmental discourses framed interms of human intrusion and environmental protection? Answers to these questionshave taken many forms. Whether these concern the production of nature under capi-talism and the concomitant process of asymmetrical development (Smith, 1984), ormodernity’s propensity to dominate nature (Leiss, 1994), there can be no doubt theidea of nature is fundamental to any geographical consideration of space.

More recently, however, these debates have taken on a decidedly more cultural tone,recognizing more and more the importance of power in shaping the discourses of na-ture, a move that not only situates the question of nature firmly within relations ofpower but draws the entire practice of environmental protection into critical view(Braun & Castree, 1998; Keil, Bell, Penz, & Fawcett, 1999; Luke, 1999). Through thismethodological lens, struggles to save threatened segments of old growth forest in thepast two decades are now thought to be less and less about protecting trees than theyare about protecting the meanings attached to, and the cultural identities derivedfrom, culturally significant forests. Within these debates, political ecologists have be-gun asking whose nature is being represented and protected, what are the material ef-fects of such representations, and, conversely, whose natures are being subjugated inthe process (Braun, 2002; Braun & Castree, 1998; Castree, 1995; Escobar, 1996).

What this line of enquiry points to is a new approach to human geography that in-corporates some of the fundaments of poststructural political ecology by recognizingthat the materiality and representation of nature are indistinguishable processes (Es-cobar, 1999; Peet & Watts, 1996). In this sense, poststructural political ecology borrowsheavily from Foucauldian methodology to reveal how natures and bodily behaviorsare drawn into existence through the generation of knowledge, and why such practicesshould be theorized as exercises of power. But as a matter of practicality, this methodis also concerned with articulating how the materiality of produced nature (Castree,

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1995; Smith, 1984) is a function of the representational practices that assign meaningto specific visualizations of the biophysical. In other words, the manner in which thebiophysical performs in the world (nature’s materiality), what “nature” looks like andhow it behaves is, in large measure, a matter of the discourses circumscribing the spe-cific spaces in which nature is said to act: forests or bodies. For instance, through themid-19th century following the rapid conversion of southern Ontario’s mixed forestto agricultural space, Ontario’s lumber barons began actively reinscribing the Algo-nquin highland with new meaning. They argued that if left unchecked, the process ofland conversion in the highlands would amount to an untold loss of forest value, be-cause the highlands were home to abundant white pines which could otherwise beused to “mast” the English navy. The materiality of this signification persists to thisday; the Algonquin highland, once a predominantly coniferous ecosystem, is nowdominated by second- and third-growth hardwood forests. Of course, this is a simpleillustration that elides other representations of the Algonquin highland, “Algonquin asrefuge” or “Algonquin as Island of Hope” (Reid, 1992, p. 45), to name a few. But it nev-ertheless illustrates a central theme in poststructural political ecology, which is thatmaterial analysis cannot be carried out in the absence of discursive analysis. In otherwords, we cannot fully theorize the materiality of nature without understanding thediscursive manner through which nature is first represented (Escobar, 1999).

Governmentality: From Bodies to Things

One very useful point of entry into debates about the material and representationalpolitics of human-nonhuman relations begins with Michel Foucault’s notion of gov-ernmentality and the exercise of biopower (Darier, 1999; Luke, 1995, 1999). AlthoughFoucault did not write specifically about environmental issues, his writings about thebody and about governmentality serve as important segues into these themes. ForFoucault, governmentality describes a process through which direct, sovereign rule as-sociated with monarchical authority was challenged by an emerging “art of govern-ment” in 16th-century Europe, the exercise of biopower, that concerned itself with theself-regulation of one’s body and the regulation of the social body. In this sense, Fou-cault wanted to reveal how it came to be that states successfully brought within theirrange of concerns the behavior of entire populations and to identify the techniquesdeployed by the state in disciplining collective and individual behavior. To do so, Fou-cault showed that the notion of sovereignty based on divine and natural law, the prin-ciple of direct rule, and the family, no longer provided the state-as-sovereign with suf-ficient reason to exist, particularly at a time when divine rule had become subject totremendous scrutiny. Consequently, a new art of government emerged, one whichsought to maintain social control through the “right disposition of things,” and whichopposed the threat of direct corporeal intervention in the manner of its sovereignpredecessor (Foucault, 1977, 1978a). Crucial to understanding this shift, therefore, isthe emergence of a science of government that enabled “things” to come into existence(Foucault, 1978a). In elaborating the ascendance of governmentality, Foucault arguedthat from the 16th to 18th centuries the central “thing” being apprehended was an ab-stract notion of social economy. And it was through this science of statistical repre-sentation of the social economy that “it became possible to identify problems specificto the population” (Foucault, 1978a, p. 99). Up until this point in the history of econ-




omy, the practice of economics had never been considered a matter of social life butwas instead limited to the confines of family life. But after amassing statistics aboutfamily-level economy, the art of government became synonymous with managing theaggregate economy abstracted to the entirety of the social body. It was thereforethrough the statistical rendering of an abstract social economy that it became possibleto speak metaphorically about the health of the entire population. Indeed, populationhealth itself, through its intimate connection to the performance of the aggregateeconomy, could be subsequently witnessed, measured, and disciplined. As such, pop-ulation welfare, knowledge about which derived from the state practice of statisticalrepresentation, became the newly emergent object of governmental rationality.

Accordingly, the art of government, ensuring the “right disposition of things” forFoucault, should be understood as an exercise in biopower, a concern for “the totalityof human beings constituted as a population: health, hygiene, natality, longevity, race”(Foucault, 1989, quoted in Darier, 1999, p. 22). But alongside the idea of biopoweremerges the notion of biopolitics, political struggles over “the control of all aspects ofhuman life, especially the conditions for human biological reproduction” (Darier,1999, pp. 22-23). Taken together, biopower and biopolitics work on the social body intwo ways: individual bodies are normalized according to the behavioural codes thatare said to guarantee personal health, and meanwhile the social body is regulated tomaximize population health. In this sense, governmentality becomes concerned withboth the self-government of one’s body and the government of the social body.

But the health and welfare of the social body cannot be limited merely to disci-plining and normalizing bodies in the interest of the whole, as biopower and biopoli-tics suggest. If modern environmentalism has taught us anything, it is that bodies arenot detached from their material surroundings but are, on the contrary, wholly de-pendent on them for survival. It is at this point in the history of governmentality thatseveral contemporary social theorists have begun using Foucault’s ideas of govern-mentality to theorize the nature-society interface (Luke, 1999). Timothy Luke pro-vides an important insight into how this may be so, building upon Foucault’s idea thatbiopower was not limited merely to bodies. Indeed, Foucault himself wrote thatbiopower “brought life and its mechanisms [italics added] into the realm of explicitcalculation” (Foucault, 1978b, p. 143). For Luke (1995), therefore, it is here that “wecan begin to locate the emergence of ‘the environment’ as a nexus for knowledge for-mation and as a cluster of power tactics” (p. 66). Accordingly, what emerge here are codesof knowledge representing the human interface with the biophysical world whichthemselves become crucial technologies in the exercise of power or, to use Luke’s lan-guage, eco-knowledge/geo-power. This is to say that the apprehension of knowledgeabout how it is that ecosystems are central to human survival (eco-knowledge) be-comes a political technology through which geo-power is exercised. Thus, for Luke, wearrive at the process of “environmentality.” Under this formulation, bodily behaviorand, by extension, the consumptive practices of everyday life are worked on indirectlyby those codes that specify the most appropriate ways in which bodies should engagewith biophysical processes. Here, the daily acts of vegetarianism, the purchase of or-ganic foods, and other identifications that symbolize one’s commitment to an envi-ronmental ethics can all be read as eco-knowledge scripts which work through andnormalize bodily behavior in accordance with the principles of nature and, to the ex-tent that these so-called principles of nature are themselves socially determined, withhistory.




But what also emerges from this conceptualization is the recognition that “the en-vironment” is as much a historical phenomenon as it is a biological one (Escobar,1999; Luke, 1999). This articulation makes sense when one looks to Karl Polanyi’s(1957) definition of “poverty as nature surviving.” Nature here defined is primordial;it harbors the elements of death, disease, and famine, which enact their wrath on thepoor. And poverty is a mode of life that comes to symbolize the dangerous precipicebetween survival and death. But for Luke, the 18th-century agricultural technologiesthat promised to draw humanity back from the edge of death were the immediate re-sult of the “different fields of knowledge concerned with life in general,” namelyknowledge about the human health effects of pestilence and starvation (Foucault,1978b, p. 142). Nature in this sense becomes a critical truth enfolded into the norma-tive discourse of history’s unfolding, where the tension between what is and whatshould be is mediated by a contingent set of knowledges about nature. In other words,those elements of nature considered relevant to the human condition, in this casepestilence and starvation, are only deemed as such by virtue of their relation to his-tory. Luke draws further attention to this historicity of nature when he claims thatecology, although an emerging form of knowledge that took biophysical processes tobe its primary realm of concern in the latter part of the 19th century, did not becomesignificantly politicized until such time as “the productive regime of biopolitics be-came fully globalized.” In contemporary ecological society, the exercise of Luke’s geo-power might be read as humanity coaxed back from the edge of death (from nature)through the application and institutionalization of new, eco-modernizing technolo-gies. Humanity’s relation with nature is, thus, significantly and immutably historical.But it is the subjectification of this nature that is the crucial point in all of this becauseit is the discourse through which the subjectification of nature is rendered meaning-ful that determines how populations, bodies, and natures will be subsequently disci-plined by an institutionalized ecological modernity. All of this is another way of say-ing that what counts as nature in any particular context, political or otherwise, ishistorically constituted by “mythical, textual, technical, political, organic, and eco-nomic” discourses that “collapse into each other in a knot of extraordinary density”(Haraway, 1994, quoted in Braun & Castree, 1998, p. 26).

How this knot is translated politically will be explored below. But before moving tothat discussion, the relation between environmentality and instrumentalism needs tobe addressed. It might be that eco-knowledge/geo-power appears as nothing less thaneco-colonialism in discursive evening wear. That is, it might appear that contemporaryenvironmental discourses are so attractive that they are being consciously appropri-ated by certain actors (states and capitalists) and used to advance private interestsabove those of common concern. Indeed, a sizeable literature on precisely this issue isin wide circulation (Sachs, 1993; Shiva, 1993). But it would be mistaken to conflateLuke’s notion of environmentality with instrumentality. Of course, it can be shownthat capital does engage in discursive politics to advance its interest in resource con-trol, as in the case of British Columbian rainforest politics (Willems-Braun, 1997). Butthe exercise of biopower is something quite different. It refers to the construction ofknowledge, and the act of drawing this knowledge into the “realm of explicit calcula-tion,” not the instrumental creation and subsequent application of knowledge to somepredetermined end. Evaluating the structural processes that enable instrumental greenmanagerialism is something altogether quite different than examining the discursivepolitics of resource control.




Picturing Nature

Returning to the idea of forest-nature introduced at the beginning of this argu-ment, David Demeritt’s disentanglement of this “knot of extraordinary density” is il-lustrative. Not only is Demeritt able to unveil a specific subjectification of forest-na-ture at a specific moment in space-time, he does so while counterarguing theinstrumentalist critique (Demeritt, 2001). To do so, Demeritt shows how early carto-graphic representations depicting total forest coverage in the United States were usedby early American conservationists, such as United States Forest Service chief GiffordPinchot, to represent American forests as a singular ontological whole. Up until thistime, the American identity had been synonymous with a frontier mentality that ide-alized the industriousness of early American settlers and the success at pushing backthe wilderness frontier. Converting forests into arable land symbolized this ideal. Butnot long after constructing these forest maps, the prevailing image of progress beganfalling out of favor with the American public. With the advent of the aggregate forestmap, it could be shown visually for the first time that aggregate forest coverage in theUnited States had been dramatically reduced over time, a move which lent credibilityto the conservationists’ claim that existing rates of harvest must be curtailed to fore-stall a forest famine. Using such visualizations, nature was depicted, materially andmetaphorically, as existing beyond the threshold of human activity, whose limitswould be soon transgressed if current practices remained unchanged. It was throughthis dualist, visual representation that forest-nature was “brought . . . into the realm ofexplicit calculation” and “made [eco]knowledge/[geo]power an agent in the transfor-mation of life” (Foucault, 1978b, p. 143).

Yet for the purpose of my analysis, the crucial point in Demeritt’s intervention isthe way in which he invokes the notion of governmentality in discourses about forest-nature. He demonstrates how, through the act of subjectifying forest-nature, conser-vationists and silviculturalists were able to render U.S. forests the objects of expert, sci-entific control, a move which depoliticized any a priori interests that might havepreviously inscribed the forest with meaning (DeLuca & Demo, 2001; Ferguson, 1990;Willems-Braun, 1997). And more important still, Demeritt reveals the historicity offorest-nature, the idea that only through the statistical (and technological) enumera-tion of forests could their underlying “nature” be revealed. In other words, renderingvast tracts of forest as natural space was possible only with the advent of the enumer-ating technologies and representational practices deployed in the subjectification offorest-nature, technologies which were themselves the products of a unique politicalhistory.1 In the end, with the help of Demeritt’s argument, we see that forest-naturewas rendered as such due to the “multiple dimensions” constituting it at that time: thepolitical economic context in which it came about (U.S. industrialism), the moral con-tent of the conservationists’ arguments (aggregate forests as representative of anAmerican ideal), and the textual quality and aperspectival objectivity that accompa-nied the construction of maps.

Revis(ion)ing the Boreal

Turning to a contemporary example, the recent politicization of the Canadian bo-real forest illustrates how a new subjectification of the boreal is emerging alongside the




practice of modern environmentalism. In recent decades, the forest-nature of theCanadian boreal has been dramatically transformed, and not simply through the ma-terialist interventions decried by the environmental community. No longer is borealforest-nature passively produced through the institutional arrangements associatedwith sustained yield forestry and the logic of Fordist production (Hayter, 2001, p. 127;Sandberg, 2001, p. 290). Nor can it be regarded simply as an ideological artifact en-listed in the practice of Canadian nation building, despite that the ideology of theCanadian North continues to wield significant mainstream cultural appeal. Instead,the boreal forest is now the subject of an intense political imbroglio that draws to-gether a highly politicized indigenous peoples’ movement, an environmental move-ment that places the boreal firmly within the climate change and biodiversity dis-courses, and a state-capitalist enterprise still committed to maximizing fiber yieldsunder conditions of “increasing scarcity” and “competitiveness.”

In geographical terms, the term boreal enumerates a circumpolar space encom-passing the forested regions of the northern hemisphere. In the North American set-ting, the boreal spans a significant portion of the Canadian North, stretching from theAtlantic Ocean in the east to the Arctic Ocean in the north, while bisecting 12 subna-tional political jurisdictions (8 provinces, 3 territories, and 1 state). It is home to nu-merous indigenous communities irreversibly transformed through European colonialpractices, and it continues to be of incalculable importance to the Canadian stapleseconomy. In its southern latitudes, the boreal is home to multiple tree species, bothconiferous and deciduous of commercial and noncommercial value, whereas in thenorth, boreal forests consist mainly of coniferous tree species. Culturally, the borealhas featured prominently in Canadian mythology as a recurring object of Canadianlandscape painting and narrative for well more than a century. But this is simply one,albeit extremely cursory, description of the boreal.

More recently, with the advent of global environmental discourse in the 1990s, theclimate change and biological diversity discourses have become indispensable tools inthe reconstruction and representation of the boreal. As the climate change debaterages, the boreal forest, as with forests the world over, has been actively enlisted by theenvironmental community in the struggle to mitigate the effects of carbon dumpingin the upper atmosphere through either carbon storage or the sequestering of way-ward atmospheric carbon. Bolstered by loads of statistical data about the boreal’s ca-pacity to store carbon, the argument goes that any large-scale industrial intrusion intothe boreal ecosystem, whether oil and gas prospecting, forestry, or hydroelectric de-velopment, will result in untold climatic effects. Similarly, by asserting that the borealis biologically diverse, the environmental community argues that our greatest chanceof adapting to future environmental change rests with leaving the boreal in an “intact”condition. No longer, therefore, is the environmental resistance to industrial develop-ment driven simply by the ideological need to preserve nature for nature’s sake, as wasthe case in Demeritt’s theorization of Progressive Era United States when the threat ofan eroding wilderness was easily associated with the collapse of the American frontiermyth and the collapse of American society itself. Instead, through the practices of rep-resenting the boreal as a central agent in any global climate change or biodiversitystrategy, boreal forest-nature moves from being merely an ideological or aesthetic ex-pression associated with the presence of trees to an active political agent in the moreserious matter of securing an ecologically modern future. In being recreated throughthe scientific discourses of climate change and biodiversity, the materiality of borealforest-nature and its legitimacy as a space in which human interaction should be min-




imized becomes inextricably linked to its capacity to regulate planetary climate andguarantee a genetically diverse biosphere through perpetuity.

Subjectification of Boreal Forest-Nature Under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)

But alongside climate change and biodiversity, sustainable forest management hasemerged out of the environmental political struggles of the 1980s and 1990s as an-other very powerful political technology. In the same way that the boreal has been rep-resented through the climate change and biodiversity discourses, so too is it being re-constituted by the discourse of sustainable forest management. One effort to defineand operationalize the principles of sustainable forest management is found in theforest certification practices of the FSC. The FSC is a global sustainable forestry man-agement (SFM) standard developed by several environmental groups in the early1990s to compete directly with state and multilateral efforts to curtail the negative so-cioecological effects of deforestation. At its core, the FSC is a consensus model whichseeks to bring together interested stakeholder groups—environment, community/in-digenous, and industry—to negotiate how SFM should be conducted in forest ecosys-tems around the globe. It consists of a set of voluntary, global principles, but also re-quires that subregional standards be developed to take better account of the uniquesociopolitical and ecological conditions that constitute that particular space (FSC,2000).2 Forest product producers conforming to the FSC standards earn the right toattach the FSC logo to their products. As such, the FSC concept trades on the twinpremise that consumers are motivated to mobilize their purchasing power to some ap-parently ethical end and that they garner sufficient market demand to achieve thatend.3

However promising the FSC might at first appear, it is not without its critics. A sus-tained elaboration of this critique extends well beyond the scope of the present analy-sis. Suffice it to say, however, that most of the FSC’s problems stem from that fact thatits legitimacy is measured in terms of profitability. This critique becomes starkly ap-parent when the effect of the FSC framework on indigenous peoples’ and communityand workers rights is taken into account. To the extent that the FSC model infuses thatpractice of indigenous knowledge into the practice of sustainable forestry, one canread the commodification of indigenous experience. In more practical terms, the le-gitimacy of indigenous identity in the periphery, manifest through the practice of sus-tainable forestry, is contingent on steady market demand for FSC-certified forestproducts in core economies.

Notwithstanding the materialist critique of the FSC, however, theorizing the FSCusing Foucault’s notion of governmentality draws into view more than simply the dis-tributional effects of the scheme. The subjectification of boreal forest-nature throughthe FSC model can be theorized as the process by which new elements in forest-natureare historicized and drawn into the “realm of calculation” (Foucault, 1977). As such,one begins to understand forest-nature in a considerably different way than was thecase when forest-nature was constructed statistically and cartographically more thana century ago (Demeritt, 2001). In these early formulations, statistical representationof forest-nature underwrote a management paradigm that identified “normal” growthrates for entire forests which were, in turn, used by foresters to prescribe “annual al-lowable cuts” and guarantee aggregate forest productivity. But with the advent of re-




mote sensing and satellite imaging technologies, new biophysical properties constitut-ing forest-nature, properties such as thermodynamic climate-forest interactions andcarbon storage and sequestration capacity, are being apprehended and used to nor-malize a new set of appropriate human-forest interactions. Some forest ecologists ar-gue that anthropogenic disturbances in boreal ecosystems are minimizing the forest’scapacity “to store and cycle energy and material flows” and that to avoid catastrophictransformations in forest composition it is “energy and material flows” that must bemanaged (Kronberg & Watt, 2000, p. 262), not simply “normal” growth rates, “annualallowable cuts,” and “maximum sustained yields.” Indeed, a whole new forest scienceis emerging alongside the SFM conceptual framework, and with it a more “advanced”regime of truth about forest-nature grounded in the eco-knowledge claims of ecosys-tems science.

But another crucial dynamic plays a part in the subjectification of forest-natureunder the FSC regime, namely the dynamic of community involvement, includingaboriginal participation, in the construction of FSC standards. Thus, the criteria of so-cial equity must coexist alongside ecological science in rendering a forested space cer-tifiable under the FSC regime. In other words, the history of colonial oppression andexploitation in the boreal landscape must be retold, and to some extent resolved, as theFSC standard-setting body negotiates a forestry standard for the Canadian boreal.These histories therefore become vitally important components of the eco-knowl-edges used in the reconstruction of boreal forest-nature, and by entering into the“realm of calculation” become important factors in the historicization of forest-na-ture.

From this initial evaluation of the subjectification of forest-nature, we can now be-gin reconstructing boreal forest-nature as an exercise of social geo-power in which theassemblage of knowledges that politicize the boreal—either through the climatechange, biodiversity, or sustainable forest management discourses—have the effect ofreinscribing the boreal space with new meaning. No longer is the boreal an abstracteconomic value or simply a myth or an unproblematic meta-history defining Canadi-anness. It emerges through this new eco-knowledge discursive regime as a space ofmultiple epistemologies and hybrid nature (Escobar, 1999).

Boreal Hybridity

In the end, what this tells us is that those controlling the environmentalizationprocess are not only in control of how nature is historicized, but are also responsiblefor delimiting what counts as nature. But to assume that the environmentalizationprocess is universal in form and conforms to a standard method disregards the possi-bility of politics tout court, for it is precisely the fact that knowledge is partial that liesat the core of political contest! This is why Donna Haraway’s (1994) categorical im-perative to query what counts as nature is so important. Representations of nature arepartial and must be recognized as such, despite how useful they may be for socialmovements seeking at wresting control of space from the territorializing tendenciescapital and state practices.

By posing her politics in this way, Haraway is consciously constructing a politicsthat does not originate with any rigidly defined subject position. Instead, she is criti-cal of subject positions, such as “laborer” and “objectified woman,” that constructthemselves as victims, because victimhood, according to Haraway, implies that some




original state of being has been apprehended, violated, exploited, or transgressed. Im-plicit in political projects, like Marxism and radical feminism, lurks some notion of“original unity” and the promise of returning its devotees to a Utopic, original state ofbeing. These identifications trade on many of the modern dualisms—self/other,mind/body, culture/nature, male/female—that imply “otherness” and therefore dom-ination. To counterpose a politics founded on dualism, Haraway (1991) offers the cy-borg metaphor. The cyborg embodies a fusion of human and machine and therefore“skips the step of original unity, or identification with nature in the Western sense”(p. 151). Here, the cyborg is freed from any historical identifications, a move that Har-away underscores by putting to work the metaphor of cyborg writing. For Haraway,“cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence,but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them [cyborgs] asother” (p. 175).

Thus, the cyborg might be a useful metaphor for reconceptualizing the boreal. Ofcourse, boreal forest-nature does not embody the fusions of human and machine.Rather, it is a comparatively mundane ecosystem when one considers the spectacularmega-fauna that constituted the rainforest debates of the 1980s and 1990s. But whatis more, the boreal, as with all forests, is composed not of singularity, totality, or orig-inal unity, but of multiplicity, historicity, and mutability. Therefore, through the recentpoliticization of the boreal and the subjectification of subaltern forest-natures, moregenerally, we are witness to a cyborg rewriting of space, a marking of the world, thatuses not only the tools of ecological science but also the telling of aboriginal historyand other histories of exploitation in recreating the meaning of space. To the extentthat we can acknowledge this project as occurring through the FSC, the historicizationof forest-nature through the FSC process is a conscious move by the environmentalcommunity to reinvent forest-nature, at least temporarily, based on the principle ofsocioecological inclusivity.

Conclusion

So in the final analysis, why should we be concerned with how forest-nature is rep-resented? Representations of nature matter because they generate very real material ef-fects. When constructed as a natural resource, we are asked to assign value to a tree in-dependent of the forest in which it stands. In mainstream political economy in whichforests are identified as the true sources of value underwriting corporate bond issues,aggregate forest health becomes dutifully governmentalized through the discourses ofconventional silviculture. But what the case of boreal forest-nature can reveal to us(socioecological inclusivists) is that the manner in which forests are represented doesmatter. By appropriating the tools that marked “nature as other,” namely the tools ofscientific objectivity, and fusing these with other epistemologies in the spirit of inclu-sivity, the material effects of “tree as natural resource” are diminished while forestrybecomes simultaneously the practice of community and land stewardship, climateregulation, and biodiversity promotion, and not simply the practice of resource ex-traction. This is made even more evident through the practice of FSC forest certifica-tion in which the meaning of forest-nature becomes an exercise in geo-power; forest-nature is governmentalized, but the social relations inhering in the “tools” that “markthe world” are democratized.




But democratizing the process by which forest-nature is governmentalized is notthe exclusive consequence of the environmentality of forest-nature, for governmen-tality also implies the normalization of bodily behavior. In the case of environmental-ity, bodily behavior through the practice of everyday living is normalized according towhat counts as nature. And if we take the foregoing argument seriously, we might be-gin discussing more meaningfully how normalizing the conduct of everyday living inaccordance with the precepts of nature is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is anethical and moral imperative. The political implications of this are clear. When con-sumers are encouraged to consume forest products manufactured from FSC-certifiedtimber, they are simultaneously being asked to advocate the redress of colonial domi-nations inscribed in forest-natures, endorse the climate-regulating effects of northernforests, and acknowledge that biodiversity is an essential component of life. All ofthese seem to be perfectly innocuous values deserving of our consumptive attention;after all, who could ever claim to be against life? But the uncritical embrace of ethicalconsumption overlooks the cultural specificities that work through the “ethical com-modity” form. In the case of ethical forest products derived from Canadian boreal for-est-nature, consumers need to ask whose nature is conveyed through the FSC-certifiedcommodity form and whose identity is being protected.

Notes

1. Here, Demeritt (2001) notes a point of curiosity. The methods used in the acquisition offorest statistics borrowed heavily from those techniques used in early-19th-century census tak-ing. It was exactly this same political technology that Foucault’s art of government relied on inthe governmentalization of the state and the exercise of biopower.

2. For those unfamiliar with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), there does exist an FSCgovernance structure and a corresponding set of rules, including a dispute settlement mecha-nism, which prescribes how stakeholders must negotiate forestry standards for particular re-gional ecosystems.

3. Among the many pitfalls with the FSC idea is that the ethical priority to which the FSCregime is directed differs from region to region. For example, in Canada, the socioecological is-sues addressed through FSC certification might be deforestation and distribution rights to abo-riginal communities, whereas in another region of the globe, the move toward FSC certificationmay be to counteract illegal logging and the trade of high conservation-value species. What thismeans is that the comparability of FSC wood products is very difficult. Read differently, how-ever, this may also be the FSC’s strength. The model, in effect, globalizes sustainable forestrymanagement (SFM), but leaves open for whom and to what purpose the regime may be di-rected. In other words, it is not exclusively a tool for corporate green managerialism, nor is itfully wedded to an ailing development model that attempts to eradicate poverty by increasinghousehold incomes through export production. Instead, the credibility of the FSC model hingeson regional and subregional difference, a move that might legitimize regional discursive powerformations in the liberation of postcolonial space.

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Andrew Baldwin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography and Environmen-tal Studies, Carleton University, and a writer/editor for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin pub-lished by the International Institute for Sustainable Development.




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