GOOD PLANETS ARE HARD
TO FINDThe rise in concern about environmental issues
was especially prominent in the 1960s in the
aftermath of the publication of Rachael Carson’s
critique of pesticide technology, a spinoff of
military research too, in Silent Spring(1962).
High profile oil tanker disasters alerted publics
to the hazards of petroleum transport. Poisoning
by mercury effluents in Japan gave the world the
phrase ‘Minimata disease’. Pollution became a
cause that mobilized political constituencies to
demand control over corporate behavior. In the
1960s, too, widespread fascination with the
NASA moon exploration program gave humanity
powerful photographic images of the earth as a
single entity. The theme of an endangered and
unique planet shaped the background report
prepared for the 1972 United Nations conference
on the human environment, titled Only One
Earth(Ward and Dubos, 1972). The cover of the
paperback edition of this volume is, not surpris-
ingly, a NASA photograph of a small blue earth
set against a large, dark and empty sky.
Through the 1970s these cultural themes
played their part in controversies over the poten-
tial impact of planned supersonic air travel and
the first substantial scare concerning ozone
depletion which also focused on CFC propellants
in aerosol cans. The OPEC oil boycott of states
supplying arms to Israel during the October war
of 1973 was followed by large price increases for
petroleum products. The link to matters of
geopolitics was also made when concern about
ozone depletion in the event of a nuclear war was
expressed in the 1970s. This theme was dramati-
cally extended in the early 1980s when the likely
ecological consequences of a nuclear war
between the superpowers gave additional sup-
port to the arguments for nuclear disarmament
and brought climate change research directly
into high politics in the ‘nuclear winter’ debate
(Turco et al., 1983).
Given that the atmosphere we breathe is
measurably different from that which our grand-
parents inhaled, the division between culture and
a nature understood as something separate from
culture is breaking down. Just as technology is
increasingly producing cyborgs and genetically
modified organisms, nature is increasingly con-
structed by cultural activity. Politics is now
about what Beck (1992) calls fabricated uncer-
tainties and risk society, where hazards and
threats escape both the constraints of nationalspaces and the containment of conventional
categories of risk assessment. What then is
natural in these circumstances?
The speed of the urban transformation has
obviously been greatest in the last few decades
in the sprawling megacities of the ‘south’, but
the overall tendency has been for growing
populations to be increasingly urbanized. As
such the demands for resources from afar have
accelerated and the impact on distant environ-
ments has increased (Gadgil and Guha, 1995).
The interconnections that are key to the
processes of globalization are obviously about
the processes of urbanization. Given the acceler-
ating links between the major urban centers of
the world economy, the so-called global cities, it
may now be more helpful to consider matters in
terms of one global city (Magnusson, 1996).
While we obviously do not live in a system that
has the whole planet as one continuous built-up
landscape, the degree of interconnection of
global markets, the ubiquity of the cleverly
named VISA cards, and the worldwide inter-
connection of airline schedules suggests at least
an embryonic single system. Might globalization
be better understood as accelerated urbanization,
with cross-boundary flows of resources and
communications simply reflecting the growth in
scale of the urban appropriation of resources
from various hinterlands? The apparently declin-
ing importance of state boundaries might then be
understood as an update of Moodie’s (1949)
observation of half a century ago that the state
was a political entity that did not fit into classifi-
cations of natural regions. Clearly cities’ hinter-
lands overlap and stretch around the globe.
Understood as the global city, the whole planet
becomes an interconnected hinterland.
Linked to an understanding of globalization as
a process of accelerated interconnections, and
with a sense of common destiny in a single bios-
phere, the possibilities of breaking down the
powerful dualism of nature and culture combine
with the need to overcome the constraints of
urban and rural in political thinking. Thought
about at the largest geopolitical scale, this is also
about rethinking the patterns of resource use that
date from colonial periods. The growth of
European dominance on the world scene is
mirrored in the continuing patterns of resource
extractions from distant places under the rubric
of globalization. The scale of these mining,
farming and fishing activities has expanded
through the twentieth century and integrated
world markets link the urban to the rural much
more quickly in the global city (Redclift, 1996).ENVIRONMENTAL GEOPOLITICS 5033029-ch27.qxd 03-10-02 11:06 AM Page 503