import resources precisely because they do not
coincide with the geography of the resources that
are used within their boundaries. The traditional
geopolitical focus on the spatial circumstances of
disputes over access and boundaries or control
over key geostrategic features emphasized
military matters and particular spaces. In so far as
resources are understood as natural phenomena
with a complicated geography, access to them in
the Cold War linked the spatial control themes to
discussions of nature (Lipschutz, 1989). Although
frequently used as rationalizations for other
political actions the geopolitical arguments about
resources remain especially powerful when
petroleum supplies are in question, especially in
the Middle East. This argument was usually sub-
sumed in a larger formulation of the importance
of maintaining western control over the oceans
to ensure trade routes and military supply lines
around the world. Extended to a discussion of the
interactions of nature and humanity at the largest
of scales these trade patterns now show the global
reach of the resource use by consumers in the
largest of cities (Redclift, 1996). Prawns from
fish farms, fuel in taxicabs, vegetables flown
across the world, the flowers at Kensington
Palace when Princess Diana died, are all taken for
granted items of London life which come from
distant locations and depend on a particular
geopolitical order for their provision.
This extension of the scale of analysis is one
of the themes that distinguishes some earlier
geopolitics from current arguments:The perspective of the old geopolitics focused on one
particular segment of territory, the state, and on the sin-
gle-minded pursuit of what were regarded as being its
best interests even if these led, as all too often they did,
to confrontation and war. Its recurring themes were space
and power and the relationship between the two. The
perspective of the new geopolitics on the other hand, is
global, and its fundamental proposition is that the world
as a whole is the proper unit for the addressing of those
issues which have global repercussions. There is no such
thing as the solution of a ‘local’ issue seen in isolation
and out of its wider context. (Parker, 1998: 55)While this is a broad generalization, the impor-
tant point that many of the analyses of critical
geopolitics have been making in the last decade
is that the common sense and taken for granted
geographical specifications of political identity
that structure discussions of these things are part
of what needs to be analyzed (Ó Tuathail, 1996).
The cultural categories through which environ-
mental and geopolitical matters are discussed are
important to understanding how politics works.Cultural change is about political change, not
least because the language and categories of
what are acceptable behaviors, and who is
empowered to act and make decisions, are part of
the cultural repertoire available for debate. Many
of these themes are especially clear in current
discussions about globalization which update
and extend the assumptions built into earlier
geopolitical thinking. Parker’s comment about
the change of scale needs careful explication if
the old geopolitics of statist conceit is not to once
again constrain the political imaginary.
The collapse of the obvious distinctions
between local and distant, large and small, us and
them, is much of what the discussion about
globalization is about. Although it is understood
sometimes narrowly as a matter of the ideological
logic of neoliberalism, with the repeated
ideological theme of its inevitability (Harvey,
2000), or alternatively as a matter of the cultural
homogenization brought about through market
integration and the export of American movies and
television programs, globalization is also about the
cultural impacts of the change in spatial sensibili-
ties. This is often resisted by calls for the restriction
of immigration and the protection of geographi-
cally distinct cultures in tropes that emphasize
orderliness with everything fixed in its place, and
assumptions of stable organic communities.
The urban aesthetic of orderliness and the
necessity to civilize wilderness have had other
powerful manifestations in recent history. The
fascination with English style lawns in North
America has produced a cultural naturalization
of this constructed artifact of status and political
stability which effectively aestheticizes lawns at
the cost of environmental health (Feagan and
Ripmeester, 1999). The European colonial
project in Africa was frequently about the desire
to bring orderliness to what were understood to
be chaotic landscapes. But this was a European
sense of orderliness which suggested that
wilderness be tamed and organized to be pro-
ductive in terms of specifically European mod-
els of agriculture and property (Doty, 1996).
Native understandings of landscape and ecology
did not fit into these productivist specifications
of land as resource and of monoculture as the
highest form of the agricultural art. The dispos-
session of those who did not fit the colonial
managers’ landscape sensibilities was simply
part of the process of ‘improvement’.
Postcolonial states often continue such policies,
using urban based expert knowledge to render
rural ecologies into resource producing regions
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