Environmental Discourse

Abstract

Environmental discourses are frameworks of meanings about the biogeophysical world and its natural and social qualities. Drawing on a range of intellectual positions in the humanities and social sciences since the 1980s, environmental discourse has come to describe the social process of mediation in the construction of knowledge through which the world is rendered recognizable and meaningful, but also acted upon. This engages with the social and spatial situatedness of environmental knowledge, its earthly connection, and associated issues of materiality and nonhuman capacities to act. Environmental discourse features in different ways on the research agendas of political ecology, environmental justice, ecological Marxism, and new materialism. While these agendas diverge in empirical focus and theoretical diagnosis, they share the vision of knowledge as always entangled in a wider range of material practices and uneven power relations and reject scientific approaches that see environmental knowledge production as the process of unbiased, disinterested examinations of reality.