Mighty morphin’ power networks

As it becomes increasingly clear that the world’s ecosystems are collapsing en masse, that climate change is unleashing enormous and dramatic alterations across the globe, that many resources have been mined to the point of exhaustion, that the world’s oceans have been severely depleted, and that a host of other problems (e.g. deforestation and soil erosion) are not going away anytime soon and much of political geography has, not surprisingly, turned to environmental problems and predicaments. The artificial division between society and nature has gradually melted under the impetus of social constructivism, and ‘environmental’ problems are revealed as fundamentally political ones that revolve around the differential access to and exercise of power. Shannon O’Lear offers a concise summary of these issues that is designed as a text for students, which carries much weightier implications. Much of the clarity of her exposition, no doubt, is due to the fact that its intended audience may not be steeped in the academic rhetoric that so often obfuscates rather than reveals these issues. Much of her account revolves heavily around issues of scale, which, like nature, has been denaturalized and revealed as power relation. The focus on scale both reflects and has amplified the relational turn in human geography, offering a useful lens through which the processes and geographies of globalization may be apprehended in relational and topological terms. O’Lear’s volume points to a multiscalar understanding of environmental politics, in which the local and the global are not held in mutual opposition but are inseparably united. Finally, Environmental Politics serves not simply as a tocsin about impending environmental doom, but as an exemplar in which the philippics of space, nature, society, morality, and power are hopelessly entangled. Environmental politics has, arguably, moved to the forefront of political geography, as it should. Anyone seeking to acquaint themselves with this set of issues would do well to use this volume as a point of departure.