GEOPOLITICS AND THE PROBLEM

WITH NATURE

Geopolitics is about the largest scale considera-

tions of power and space in human affairs. From

the beginning of the twentieth century in the

writings of Halford Mackinder, Rudoph Kjellen

and Friedrich Ratzel through to the end of the

century volumes by Samuel Huntington (1996)

and Zbigniew Brzezinski (1997), empires, civili-

zations and states have been understood as the

primary territorial entities in competition for

power, space and influence (Dodds and

Atkinson, 2000). But this tradition, understood

as one concerned with great power rivalries and

struggles for influence and control across a

variegated and contested global political space,

has also been one in which large scale assump-

tions about nature and the natural environment

have been unavoidably present. They are so both

because they imply assumptions about the philo-

sophical questions of humanity, its place and

purpose in a larger cosmos, and hence the appro-

priate organization of human affairs at the largest

scales; and also because matters of power poli-

tics and superpower rivalry have always been

about the expropriation of resources and the

destruction of environments in the search for

military and economic supremacy. As critical

geopolitics writers made clear in the 1990s,

geopolitical views are about the construction of

the planet as an object of knowledge: practices of

knowing the world as a whole that facilitate its

division and administration (Agnew, 1998;

Ó Tuathail, 1996).

Such imperial vision was in the past frequently

the prerogative of emperors, generals, political

elites and map makers in capital cities. Whether

it was environmental determinism or organicist

models of states in competition, the links

between traditional geopolitics and questions of

nature are far more direct than many formula-

tions of either geography or politics often

suggest. But now, as the twenty-first century

opens, humanity is becoming an urban species

and the geopolitical view of a planet to be divided

and ruled is interconnected with urban thinking;

nature has been turned into a global environment

which has to be managed in the interests of

western consumers (Luke, 1999). Now geopolitics

is also about the administration of the natural

world through management practices of science,

ecology and, yes, geography. Where Mackinder

(1904) argued that political space was closed at

the end of the nineteenth century, geopolitics

now also implicitly assumes that nature is now

known, explored, enclosed, divided up, a matter

for management by the globalized urban culture

that dominates human affairs (Dalby, 2002). The

implications for this shift require some funda-

mental rethinking of the premises for cultural

geography, and some careful self-reflection on

the cultural identities of the geographers who

write the planet in such ways.

The argument in this chapter emphasizes that

the urban culture within which most geographers

live, and which usually specifies itself as sepa-

rate from wild untamed nature, is also one that

has a long colonial history of drawing bound-

aries and dividing nature into spaces which can

be administered and altered to make them

27

Environmental Geopolitics – Nature,

Culture, Urbanity

Simon Dalby

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