Vital ecosystem security: Emergence, circulation, and the biopolitical environmental citizen

Abstract

This paper provides an account of ‘vital ecosystem security’. The central claim is that ‘vital ecosystem security’ and the processual ontology of ‘complex adaptive becoming’ provide useful terms with which to think environmental citizenship biopolitically within the contingent matrix of climate change. The paper identifies how complex adaptation, the operative form of vital ecosystem security, defines an emerging form of environmental citizenship, which can be found operating at the interface of a new type of forestry and the global carbon cycle. The specific case developed here concerns the boreal forest of northern Canada.