difficulties. The further elaboration of work on
political ecology has strengthened the links
between the rural and the urban (Peet and Watts,
1996). Cultural geography has begun to think
about nature in innovative ways as recent work
on youth culture in particular suggests. Work by
Cindy Katz (1998) on teenagers in rural Sudan
and urban New York makes links between the
processes of globalization in very different
circumstances. The confrontation between rural
English residents and the itinerant caravans of
‘new age travelers’ has emphasized the impor-
tance of conceptions of nature and landscape in
contemporary politics (Hetherington, 1998). But,
with the obvious exception of such work as
Joanne Sharp’s (2000) consideration of the con-
struction of American identities in the Cold War
discourses of popular geopolitics, the new cultural
geography has yet to be extended in any great
detail to the largest of scales and linked to the
spatial concerns with geopolitics. Likewise this is
only beginning in the theoretical discussions of
political ecology (Braun and Castree, 1998).
Extending the themes of both cultural geo-
graphy and political ecology to the largest scale
emphasizes the importance not only of under-
standing capitalism as simultaneously construct-
ing space and nature, as Neil Smith (1990) has
argued, but of conceptualizing human urban
culture as an increasingly important ‘natural’
force changing the biosphere. In Bruno Latour’s
(1993) terms we have to think in terms of hybrids
now, or as the argument in this chapter suggests
following Latour’s inspiration, in terms of a
single planet sized hybrid where artificial factors
increasingly shape ecosystems and change the
composition of the biosphere overall. The impli-
cations of such an ontological shift, this chapter
suggests, are not just deconstruction of the
nature–culture and urban–rural dichotomies, but
a recognition of the geopolitical situatedness of
social entities in a single changing planetary
ecosystem. The emergence of such a planetary
understanding of interconnections has significant
implications for geographical thinking in the new
millennium. Mackinder (1904) suggested that
the end of the nineteenth century marked the end
of the ‘Columbian’ age, in that most of the globe
had been explored and drawn into the European
dominated global economy. Now the concern
with ozone holes, climate change, ocean fish
stock depletion, declining biodiversity and other
‘environmental’ hazards extends this concern
with various limits and suggests the end of the
age of assumptions of infinite economic opportu-
nity based on natural resource exploitation.Put bluntly in the vernacular: the widespread
cultural assumptions that ‘we’ are ‘here’ in a
specific place ‘on’ earth has to be exposed for
the powerful political illusion that it has so long
been. We are not on earth. We are earth. We are
not ‘here’, safe in our cities. We are intercon-
nected through a complex web of economic
activities and communications, which are also
ecological actions, to remote supplies of
resources, as well as to distant factories, which
have complex consequences in a way that
ensures that our actions ‘here’ are inevitably
also actions ‘there’. The implications of such
understandings inevitably mean challenging the
geopolitical categories that so inaccurately
specify the political identity that legitimates ‘us’
in our various places while simultaneously
obscuring the consequences of the interconnec-
tions that make ‘our’ urban based political eco-
nomy possible. The converse argument is likewise
crucial: invocations of the global danger of envi-
ronmental threats can also be used to once again
invoke the colonial necessity for ‘us’ to intervene
to ‘manage’ change in particular places that may
or may not meet the expectations and approval
of whoever lives ‘there’. This is where geo-
politics connects directly to matters of ‘global’
environmental management (Dalby, 2002).GEOPOLITICSThe complex politics of the cultural specifications
of our identity as geographers unavoidably link
relatively new concerns with cultural studies
analyses in the discipline to the older themes of
political geography. Earlier geographical analyses
of the struggles for world power understood that
geography is an important factor. Mackinder’s
famous heartland argument is formulated in part
in terms of the drainage patterns of Eurasia.
Moodie noted that while human geographers
focus on geographical regions as their unit of
analysis, ‘the areal unit of the political geogra-
pher is the State’ (1949: 13), which rarely
coincides with natural regions. The mismatch
between states and environments has long been a
matter of concern, although the particular pre-
occupation with attempting to derive comprehen-
sive regional designations for the earth’s surface,
that informed Moodie’s writing, has declined in
importance as the new geography shifted focus
away from regional themes.
Nonetheless the important implication in these
formulations is the frequency with which states500 GEOPOLITICAL CULTURES3029-ch27.qxd 03-10-02 11:06 AM Page 500