Biopolitics of Global Environment

The paper aims to problematize the prevailing conception of the global ‘environment’. Firstly, following Michel Foucault’s understanding of power, this paper presumes the inescapable power-effects of all knowledge, and of all truth-claims. Secondly, any description of an environmental problem is entangled with specific imaginaries of how society is, and, specifically, how it ought to be. Thus, the “saving of the planet” is a profoundly political project. It is now rationalized that populations, societies and individuals need to be trained to the point where they are sustainable enough, and resilient enough, until the ‘right kind of being’ is achieved. What this means in practice is derived from how the environment is constructed, or defined, to us. Thus far, the global environmental prescriptions have been complicit with and supportive of the growth of neoliberal systems of governance and depoliticized instruments of power.

From the production of ‘environment’ as global and all-encompassing it occurs that these prescriptions and their implications are biopolitical in nature. Thus, I’m going to analyze the construction of the ‘environment’ and its problematique as a part of what Foucault called “the regulatory biopolitics of the population". The paper focuses attention specifically on the implicit social order environmental prescriptions embrace.