Take
four emblematic American scenes: the Hall of Biodiversity at the
American Museum of Natural History in New York; Disney’s Animal
Kingdom theme park in Orlando; an ecotour of Yellowstone and Grand
Teton National Parks; the film An Inconvenient Truth. Other than
expressing a common interest in the environment, they seem quite
dissimilar.
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And yet,
as Governing the
Wild makes clear, these sites are all manifestations of green
governmentality, each seeking to define and regulate our understanding,
experience, and treatment of nature.
|
Stephanie Rutherford shows how the museum presents a scientized
assessment of global nature under threat; the Animal Kingdom
demonstrates that a corporation can successfully organize a
biopolitical project; the ecotour, operating as a school for a natural
aesthetic sensibility, provides a visual grammar of pristine national
nature; and the film offers a toehold on a moral way of encountering
nature. But one very powerful force unites the disparate
“truths” of nature produced through these sites, and that,
Rutherford tells us, is their debt to nature’s commodification.
Rutherford’s analysis reveals how each site integrates nature,
power, and profit to make the buying and selling of nature critical to
our understanding and rescuing of it. The combination, she argues,
renders other ways of encountering nature—particularly more
radically environmental ways—unthinkable. |
Governing the Wild
Ecotours of Power
by Stephanie Rutherford
University
of Minnesota Press, 2011
Order
a copy
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