The Global/Local Politics of the Great Bear Rainforest

Abstract

For all its challenges to and disruptions of the divisions within academic disciplines, the study of environmental politics remains constrained by the assumption of sovereignty, especially as sovereignty is expressed in the spatial jurisdictions of the modern state. The practice of environmental politics, however, is not nearly so bounded by these jurisdictions. Not only do environmental struggles frequently evade or cross territorial boundaries, but they often constitute new political spaces and institutions that effectively reshape forms of sovereign authority. Through a close reading of the campaign against clearcut logging in the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia, this article identifies and explores some of the challenges posed by the forms of authority that are being constituted through these struggles. It argues that if the study of environmental politics fails to critically engage the spatial assumptions of modern sovereignty and to focus more specifically on the ways in which environmental movements necessarily subvert these assumptions, it faces a real danger of misunderstanding what may be the most important effects of environmental politics on contemporary political life.