Increasingly, they find their lives crimi-nalised

Negative assessments, even if empirically grounded, are consistently la-belled as unproductive and destructive

The question of what happens to local people is one that remains poorly ad-dressed in conservation literature

ebsites

the increased manage-ment of protected areas by private for-profit companies (Levine, this issue);and increased emphasis on ecotourism as a means of achieving economicgrowth, community prosperity and biodiversity conservation

ail to explain the central reasons whyneoliberalising nature (as opposed to any other phenomena) is a `rational' or desirableproject for those who advocate and undertake it

Actuallyexisting neoliberalisms' are not the same as textbook `neoliberal ideology

I came to realise that constructing systematic and substantiveanswers to my four questions (especially the last three) was surprisingly difficult todo. This revealed a seeming paradox. The literature I was reading by the authorsnamed above was conceptually lucid and empirically rich: in short, full of insightsabout neoliberalism's environmental `logics', modes of operation, outcomes, and evalu-ations. Yet, for all this, comparing across individual pieces of research proved to be amajor challenge. The root of the problem, I will argue, is that the authors whose work Ireview here are using the same terms ˆ `neoliberalism' and `neoliberalisation' ˆ to referto and judge phenomena and situations that are not necessarily similar or compar-able.

onditions necessary for capitalto exploit the region’s natural and human resources were made possible throughthe state’s mediation of capital and nature by way of a state – private timber monopolyconstructed under the rationale that this would benefit local communities

The invocation of a “politics of inevitability” make this political project especiallyinteresting in its encounter with the nonhuman world

neoliberalization as a process instead of neoliberalism as a “thing.

e scrutinize both the causes and socionaturaleffects of this fourfold agenda and the ideology that undergirds it

neoliberalism is but the most recent embodiment of awell-established cycle of movement and reconfiguration, investment and production,and scouring, destruction, and abandonment

apitalist era

eoliberal capitalism drives the politics,economics and culture of the world system, providing the context and direction forhow humans affect and interact with non-human nature and with one another.

inextricable logic and ongoingmomentum behind global economic, political, cultural and environmental relations.

the existence of livinghuman individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physicalorganisation of these individuals and their consequent relationship to therest of nature

Digital media have be-come a challenge to cinema history, and texts that offer versions of historythrough cinema now take into account the effect of these technologies:the global reconfiguration of film production, an anastomosis of formerlyexperimental and popular forms through genre explorations of horror,science fiction, surrealism, and special effects.

The injection of time exposes how the desire to animate and pre-serve the past “as it was” becomes impossible and counterproductive toacknowledging change as difference.

becoming entailschange and differentiation,

hinking counter-historically is expressive of viewing practices thatresist linear, exegetical, and coherent conceptions of the world throughconsiderations of time

gone visual.

The ongoing problem of what constitutes his-tory through cinema has had to address two questions: “What is history”and “What is cinema”? This book seeks to link these questions under therubric of counter-history, which I define as an escape from formal historyto a world of affect, invention, memory, art, reflection, and action.

criticsandartistsregardthecinemaasasignificantmediumforreevaluatingthenature andstatusoftheimageas4guidetothe uses,and particularlythedisadvantages,ofhistoryforthepresent andfuture.Cinemaand Counter-History,asitstitlesuggests,proposesthat,inthe latetwentieth and early twenty-first centuries, visualmedia have contributedto,and continuetocontributeto,anexpanded and alteredunderstandingofwhat constitutes historical thinking.

The long effortby state governments to coerce people to “do the green thing” can be replaced with “softpower” – the stealthy decentralization of responsibility to communities and individualsthat induces them to do it of their own apparent volition.

even the most well-meaning efforts to aid marginalized people typically – andperhaps inevitably – involve speaking on their behalf, an effort that is ultimately self-defeating and something of a paradox (Robbins 2006a). Spivak argues that such effortsultimately and ironically render the subaltern only more silent (Spivak 1995). Spivakargues, as a result, that instead of learning, scholars need to unlearn

Can a non-indigenous observer effectively participate in an effort to write ecology from the point ofview of the colonized? Is it right, or even desirable, that researchers play such a role? Arethey even able to?

On the other hand, the sharp hatchet of deconstruction cuts both ways. If scientificaccounts of environmental change, including that of the political ecologist, are forged inthe political context of discourse/power/knowledge, to what degree can the claims of criti-cal environmental researchers, especially those from American/Anglo-European training,be viewed as an instrument of postcolonial hegemony and control?

In exploring the relationshipsbetween producers and environmental systems, there is sometimes a tendency to imaginethat women are closer to nature and that their knowledge of the environment is not onlydifferent than that of men, but uniformly more accurate.

women are motivated to social and political action differently than men

capitalists

While not allof contemporary political ecology is explicit in its allegiance to materialism, much of thework at least tacitly assumes many materialist precepts. Among these, the most prominentassertions are that (1) social and cultural relationships are rooted in economic interactionsamongst people and between people and non-human objects and systems, (2) exogenousimposition of unsustainable extractive regimes of accumulation results in environmentaland social stress, and (3) production for the global market leads to contradictions anddependencies

ommon property theory, green materialism, peasant studies, feminist devel-opment studies, discourse theory, critical environmental history, postcolonial theory, andactor-network theory

the tools of cultural ecology and hazards, though crucialfor describing such ecological systems and problems systematically, are insufficient forasking and answering the pressing multi-scale questions of development-era environmen-tal change.

bsence of an integrated set of critical con-cepts, methods, and theories from which to explain problems and upon which to buildalternatives

political role of the researcher in representing and interacting with the groupswith whom they work had so far received little discussion in human–environment study

But why are markets changing? And what is the overall relationshipbetween markets, state authority, local power, and ecological cycles of production anddecline? The interactions between state institutions, coercive social relationships, commod-ity markets, subsistence, and natural resources were dynamics that required new theoreticaltools and categories, not simply a longer list of causes. This is especially true if the analystwants not only to describe changing human–environment interactions, but to change themas well

The contextualforces that create unequal vulnerability and differential response, therefore, fall outside theconcerns of traditional hazards research.

Ideas and actions most pro-ductively coexist, rather than compete

roblematic

by rendering colonial domination an environmental inevitability, the practice of colonial-ism comes to appear apolitical

attitudes do not lead to new environmental actions, behaviors, or rules systems;instead, new environmental actions, behaviors, or rules systems lead to new kinds of people

here are better,

Indeed, the tradi-tion of conservation in the United States is largely based on the understanding that collec-tive control of environmental resources is necessary for fair and sustainable distribution

Land tenure laws, which set the terms for land conversion and cash cropping,are made by the Kenyan and Tanzanian states. Commodity markets, which determineprices for Kenyan products and the ever-decreasing margins that drive decisions tocut trees or plant crops, are set on global markets.

continue to find their way to consumers in thefirst world, even as their global prices fall, constraining producers who must increase pro-duction, planting more often and over greater areas, further changing local ecologicalconditions.

private holdings and investment in export cereal grains on theKenyan side of the border have led to intensive cropping and the decline of habitat.

epping back from the savanna, however, and gazing across the Serengeti–Maraecosystem both in time and in space, habitat loss and wildlife decline appear more complexand more connected to the daily lives and routines of urban people in the developed world

This chapter exploresthe ways in which zombie movies, not just early on butright up to the present, have linked living death to white-ness, framing the figure of the zombie not as the blackOther but as the white Self.

Itwas one such faith, Vaudou, observed in secret by slaveslaboring in the French colony on Saint-Domingue, thatrecast the zombie as a dead body reanimated by a sorcererand pressed into perpetual servitude.

Congolese terms used for the spirit of a deadperson and a fetish charm

a theory of connectionin which relationality and movement defines ontology rather than autonomy and objectification.

deas about Indigenous culture,tradition, and sacredness—might actually reproduce liberalism, settler colonialism, andheteropatriarchy rather than dismantle and transcend the violence of these structures of power

Smith shows us that decolonization is a dynamic struggle that is worked outand contested between a cacophony of living beings, structures, forces, and dreams. In other words,decolonization is a thoroughly historical and material struggle

a project of inter-reflexivity, a strugglefor decolonization premised on the accountabilities we form in lively relation to each other. Theact of (re)making our accountability in relationship to water and (re)claiming our relationaltheories of water culture remind us that we are water based, that we have water memory.

shape the complex and contradictory cacophonies of these struggles, which abound withdynamic materialities and forces that exceed the internal locus of individual healing and the limitedagenda of viewing academic research as a vocation for consciousness raising.

When certain elements of a political discoursedominate or overpopulate that discourse, historical and material complexities that refuse theteleological undercurrents of dominant strands suffer marginalization,

to envision and build alternative futures where water is protected and liberated

language to challenge and resist

[Water] is not merely a resource to be managed, nor just a prod-uct to be valued and consumed, but actively shapes new geogra-phies

where neither nature nor humanity everachieves absolute sovereign authority, but both continue to makeand remake each other

a process between man and nature, a process by which man,through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls themetabolism between himself and nature. [. . .] He sets in motionthe natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs,head, and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of naturein a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement heacts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simul-taneously changes his own nature

hrough the hydrosocial cycle weseek to transcend the dualistic categories of ‘water’ and ‘society’,and employ a relational-dialectical approach to demonstrate howinstances of water become produced and how produced water rec-onfigures social relations. We argue that unravelling this historicaland geographical process of making and remaking offers analyticalinsights into the social construction and production of water, theways by which it is made known, and the power relations thatare embedded in hydrosocial change

The contribution that weseek to make through this paper is to define and mobilize thehydrosocial cycle as a socio-natural process by which water andsociety make and remake each other over space and time

onceptualize the hydrosocial cycle as a socio-natural process by whichwater and society make and remake each other over space and time. We argue that unravelling this his-torical and geographical process of making and remaking offers analytical insights into the social con-struction and production of water, the ways by which it is made known, and the power relations thatare embedded in hydrosocial change

The extraction and looting of natural resources by war machines goeshand in hand with brutal attempts to immobilize and spatially Ž x whole cate-gories of people or, paradoxically, to unleash them, to force them to scatter overbroad areas no longer contained by the boundaries of a territorial state. As a polit-ical category, populations are then disaggregated into rebels, child soldiers, vic-tims or refugees, or civilians incapacitated by mutilation or simply massacred onthe model of ancient sacriŽ ces, while the “survivors,” after a horriŽ c exodus, areconŽ ned in camps and zones of exception

ar is no longer waged between armies of two sovereign states. It is wagedby armed groups acting behind the mask of the state against armed groups thathave no state but control very distinct territories; both sides having as their maintargets civilian populations that are unarmed or organized into militias. In caseswhere armed dissidents have not completely taken over state power, they haveprovoked territorial partitions and succeeded in controlling entire regions thatthey administer on the model of Ž efdoms, especially where there are mineraldeposits

n this sense, contemporary wars are more reminiscent of thewarfare strategy of the nomads than of the sedentary nations or the “conquer-and-annex” territorial wars of modernity

claim of sovereignty and legit-imacy from the authority of its own particular narrative of history and identity.This narrative is itself underpinned by the idea that the state has a divine right toexist; the narrative competes with another for the same sacred space.

The most accomplished form of necropower is the contempo-rary colonial occupation of Palestine

It involves the setting of boundaries and internal frontiersepitomized by barracks and police stations; it is regulated by the language of pureforce, immediate presence, and frequent and direct action; and it is premised onthe principle of reciprocal exclusivity.

This controlpresupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of thepopulation into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological caesura betweenthe ones and the others.

it is possible to develop a reading of politics, sovereignty, and the subject dif-ferent from the one we inherited from the philosophical discourse of modernity

First, the human negates nature (a negation exteriorized inthe human’s effort to reduce nature to his or her own needs); and second, he orshe transforms the negated element through work and struggle. In transformingnature, the human being creates a world; but in the process, he or she also isexposed to his or her own negativity. Within the Hegelian paradigm, humandeath is essentially voluntary. It is the result of risks consciously assumed by thesubject. According to Hegel, in these risks the “animal” that constitutes the humansubject’s natural being is defeated

My concern isthose Ž gures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for auton-omy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the materialdestruction of human bodies and populations.

Theromance of sovereignty, in this case, rests on the belief that the subject is themaster and the controlling author of his or her own meaning.

ultimate expression of sover-eignty is the production of general norms by a body (the demos) made up of freeand equal men and women

I start from the idea that modernity wasat the origin of multiple concepts of sovereignt

biopower sufŽ cient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political,under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the Ž ght against terror, makes the mur-der of the enemy its primary and absolute objective?

To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mor-tality and to deŽ ne life as the deployment and manifestation of power.

e essay distances itself from traditional accounts of sovereignty found in the discipline ofpolitical science and the subdiscipline of international relations

by today's standards, may not represent typical examples of advanced cinematography, they do set an important precedent for black African cinema

here isno question as to whether tropical heat reduces efficiency. Prone to endemic diseases such as malaria, river blindness, parasitic worms, leprosy, and more—much ofwhich modern medicine could contain—the enormous drain of financial resources that goes into the provision of medicine and other preventive measures provides noantidote for black Africa's economic illness. This predicament is now complicated by the AIDS epidemic that is ravaging Africa's population

part from the complication created by humans, other factors hinder Africa's economic development and social growth. Black Africa's tropical climate (in oppositionto the temperate regions) is hostile to many aspects of economic growth. Rainfall, for example, is one of Africa's major problems

nontemperat

. In this section I focus on a further aspect of complexity, that ofinterconnection, which I interpret in two ways: established categories of value are notdiscrete, as presented in Eurocentric environmental valuation, but are interconnected

n this section I draw on indigenous, local settler, and scientificknowledge and experience in order to illustrate the variability of values associated withwater and water places, and to address the binary of indigenous/scientific knowledgethat is established in Western environmental management

in Australia; major continental populations.''His personal response to the event suggests that the value of this variability is notsimply ecological: rather, ecological significance is coupled with scientific interest anda personal sense of wonder at the response of the system to flooding

I draw on this empirical research in order to move beyond a generic analysis ofvaluing nature to a study of a particular place and the conditions that make that place.Following Anderson

first, that the variabilityof Australian water regimes is valued; and, second, that values are themselves charac-terised by variability, in that they are diverse, changing, and complex. These two pointsform the structure of the two substantive empirical sections of the paper

leads to marginalisation of knowl-edge and experience of nature that do not conform to this way of knowing the world

Thinking and practice of environmental valuation emerge from northern temperatelandscapes and human experiences and practices in those landscapes (Gibbs, 2009a).Through Eurocentric thinking, European nature is defined as temperate ˆ moderateand constant, without extremes or excesses (Gregory, 2001) ˆ and temperate nature isnormalised. Nontemperate natures are ``diagnosed as abnormal, pathological, and even`unnatural' natures'' (Gregory, 2001, page 89). In colonial and postcolonial settings,such as Australia, landscapes have been ordered and transformed by European ideasand practices (Gibbs, 2009a); ``progressively shaped and moulded with the elaborationof European colonialism and capitalism'

hought

favour a narrow approach thatseparates and categorises values in order to apply a common metric and to comparepotentially competing interests

trend inenvironmental and natural resource management to assess the values of nature

Anunspokendialogueofpushandpullamongcountless beingsfollowingtheirindividualpathssomehowmanagestokeepthewholeinaconstantstateofflow.

world was less globalized.

Ancient

These bifurcated water disasters are all the more tragic becauseearly Tamil people, whose cultural and linguistic heritage continuesproudly in today’s residents, had developed an elegant system forcapturing and holding the rain that fell during monsoons, saving itfor the dry season. Their method also replenished groundwater andminimized erosion from the heavy rains. And it supported ratherthan devastated wetland habitats.

oldertraditions.

corporationswere grantedlegal per-sonhoodwithallthe rightsthatimplies.AccordingtoIndigenousbeliefs,waterisactuallyalive,whilecorporationsarenot.

s commoninancient thinking worldwide

Butitisalsoinclinedtolingertoadegreethatwouldshock mostofusbe.causeourconventionalinfrastructurehaserasedsomanyofitsslowphases, insteadconfiningwaterandspeedingitaway.Slowstagesareparticularlypronetoourdisturbance becausetheytendtobeintheflatterplaces—oncefloodplainsandwetlands—whereweareattractedtosettl

Otherwaterdetectiveswewillmeetinthisbookusemagneticimaging,satellite data,chemicalanalysis,soilcoresamples,anthropologicalresearch, biology, ecology, andmoretoferretoutwhatwaterisdoing.

umanshave soughttocontrol ourenvironment throughouthis-tory.

AlthoughatthatmomentIknewlittleabouthydrology,thescienceofwater, onsomeinstinctuallevelIunder-stoodthatthiswasafreeriver.Andevery otherriverI'dknownwasmarkedly subdued.

thatmuchofthewa-terweseetoday,especiallyinindustrialized countries,isnotinitsnaturalstate.Humans’effortstocontrolithave createdgiantlakesbehinddams;deeply scoured, fast-flowingrivers;straightened,nar-row creeksfarbelowtheirbanks; arrow-straightcanalsthat deliverirrigationwatertofarms.We'vealsoerasedmanylakesandswampsentirely.

Whenthatsoundisconstant,hesays,especiallyinthemiddleofthenight,it’sacreekimprisonedinasewerpipe,notsomebodyflushing.

t’sasmallsignofwater'shiddenlife,theactionsthislife-sustainingcompoundcontinuestopursue, despite our illusionthatwe controlit.

bottled water's exemptionfrom the Compact’s diversion ban may allow private interests to bypass the Compactand take Great Lakes water out of the public trust

The Compact exemptsremoval of water in small containers (i.e., commercial bottled water) or water includedin other products (e.g., beverages, paint) from its out-of-basin diversion restrictions(CGLC 2005b). It does not specify a threshold volume for regulation of withdrawals ora process by which to do so but, rather, leaves this to the individual states (Squillace2007).

These agree-ments have evolved from an emphasis on data coilection to more comprehensive watermanagement policies and procedures.

Evenwiththiswiderange,however,thetypicalenergyrequirementsforprocessingwater,even extensive processing,aresmallrelativetotheenergy associatedwiththeplastic bottleanditsproduction

two primary sources: municipal water systems (often called “processed” or “purified” or“municipal” water) and surface-water and groundwater systems (often called “spring”water).

Ifallbottledwater requiredanaverageof38gramsofPETperliter,approximately3.8milliontonsofPETwererequiredtoproducethe100billionliters ofbottledwatercontainerssoldworldwidein2008.Ifallbottledwaterproducersshiftedtowardthelightest bottles,PET productioncouldbereducedbyaround30percent.

Gleickand Coole