Watersheds in Marxist Ecofeminism
Pamela Odih
Language: English
Pages: 466
ISBN: 1443866024
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The neoliberal environmental governance of river conservation, coupled with the organizational modernization imposed and sustained by the European Union’s water directives, engenders Other Spaces of feminist ecological alignment. The riparian landscapes of urban cities are manifestations of political and ideological rationalities operating under the constraints of capitalist markets, and are saturated by the contradictions of neoliberal environmental science. Neoliberal rationalities configure river waterways as "sites", the dimensions of which are analogous to Michel Foucault’s account of spatial heterotopias as polymerous relations of propinquity between junctures. Many of the modernising initiatives instituted by the European Union’s Water Framework Directive can be discerned as biopolitical neoliberal regimes governing local river spaces, through the enfolding into "spaces of emplacement" and the "sites" of programmatic calculation, financialisation of the domestic sphere, and market-based neoliberal environmental science. Primarily informed by organizational ethnographies, extensive interviews and ethnographic observations of river restorations, this book empirically examines how the relationally embodied heterochronies of ecological activism challenge the programmatic rationalities of the European Union’s river "government", namely its shifting assemblages of formal and informal agencies, practices and institutions that variously and differentially align the self-regulating ability of subjects with the design, objectives and scope of the European Union’s neoliberal regime of river governance.
This book’s analysis of the complex inter-governmental networking eliding the local governance of rivers with voluntary sector community-outreach and European Union directives identifies new locations of ecological activism precipitated by political affinities, which have become simultaneously public and private. The capacity of river heterotopias to intersect the public and private spheres of urban cities emphasises the intrinsic reproductive labour time of river restoration; for, as Foucault suggests, the heterochronies of urban heterotopia are one and the same time "outside of time", while also constituting "a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place". The book shows that the intersecting heterochronies of the urban river space confirm this Other Space as an intriguing gendered heterotopia.
reason is the only criterion in the world of the atom. (Marx 1841/2006:135) Marx’s account of time as experienced through the self-conscious apprehension of sensuous nature is consistent with an Enlightenment mind-body dualism within which nature is subjugated to the reasoning cognition of the mind. When we compare Marx’s account of time as “conscious sensuousness” with Ann Yearsley’s account of the pragmatics of time embodied in the reproductive labour of women, it is evident that Marx’s nature
water status should be pursued for each river basin, so that measures in respect of surface water and groundwaters belonging to the same ecological, hydrological and hydrogeological system are coordinated. (European Parliament 2000:6) In Western Europe, river restoration is largely governed by the Water Framework Directive, and this European Union (EU) legislation directly impacts on the activities of river conservation charities. Established on 23 October 2000, the Water Framework Directive
policy fulfilments is the framing of river restoration “as a way of improving the ecosystem services offered by rivers and this is one of the key drivers for the release of river restoration-related government funding in the UK” (ibid:252). In 2012, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) established the Catchment Restoration Fund, which provides financial support for voluntary sector groups to: (1) “restore natural features in and around watercourses”; (2) “reduce the
power and domination” 76 Introduction (Fairclough 2001: 230). Critical discourse analysis also ascribes semiotic dimensions to social practice as Fairclough (ibid: 234) expresses; “semiosis figures in representations. Social actors within any practice produce representations of other practices, as well as (‘reflexive’) representations of their own practice”. A further feature of interpretive structuralism is the transformative capacity of agency, for it is argued that “structures may be
thing they should be doing, which it probably is; but in the landscape we are living now it’s not good, they just get blown down…We lost one of the big poplars over there recently, we lost a lot, a few trees come down. Surprised we ain’t lost a tree; no one said we got a tree down at the moment. Couple came down over Christmas they chopped [them] up. You got to manage these things. Interviewer: And what sorts of things hinder the management of these things? What sort of things facilitate and what