Cultural Geography

economics and planning increasingly connect in

innovative ways that are starting to have practical

implications precisely because they are starting

to ask questions about the distant consequences

of local actions (Corbridge, 1998). The links

between environmental degradation and human

rights and the complex cultural contextualiza-

tions of resistance to these forms of develop-

ment suggest the future directions for a cultural

geography sensitive to these matters (Johnston,

1994; Watts, 1998). The Wuppertal Institute’s

imaginative program to ‘green’ the north goes

further to explicitly think about the implications

of changing ‘northern’ consumption and the

possible impacts of such ‘greening’ on the

patterns of southern development (Sachs

et al.,1998).

One of the key themes in this thinking, and in

the larger literature on post-development that

links to such green thinking (Rahnema and

Bawtree, 1997), is the old geographical concern

with the importance of land use considerations.

In particular the use of automobiles in suburbs

and edge cities causes both direct pollution

problems and indirect damage through the vast

amounts of space that roads and car parks require.

Higher density living reduces both, and when

coupled to attempts to provide food

supplies from local organic farms, the total

environmental impact of urban living can be

substantially reduced. Culture, space and envi-

ronment are inseparable. In regard to the concern

with ‘footprints’, ‘environmental rucksacks’ or

the environmental space beyond the urbanized

areas needed to support these geographies of

consumption (Sachs et al., 1998), geopolitics

links directly to the geography of ‘lifestyle’.

The larger cultural politics of these matters

can often also lead to pessimism when the mag-

nitude of instigating such social changes is con-

templated, not least because of the speed with

which corporations have moved to invoke

environmental themes in advertising numerous

ecologically dubious products. Representations

of nature as a challenge to be overcome by the

technical acumen of the sports utility vehicle

driver once again reproduce the dichotomies of

culture and nature in a way that reinforces the

idea of nature as a challenge to be subdued. The

Nissan Pathfinder advertisements of 1999 in

North America, in which ‘nature is more civi-

lized in a Pathfinder’, is emblematic of the

packaging of environment in the sales of danger-

ous and fuel inefficient luxury vehicles. But

these images are cultural constructions and as

such can be contested, as the road protests in

Britain in the 1990s have made evident

(Routledge, 1996).

Nissan commercials are a long way from Peter

Taylor’s (1996) speculations about the possibili-

ties of the cultural changes needed for a ‘deep

green’ hegemony of the future. His suggestion of

the need for a culture of ‘conspicuous asceti-

cism’ as a necessary part of a green future illus-

trates the distance that at least North American

life has to move to become in any meaningful

sense sustainable. Nonetheless tackling themes

such as the advertising representations of nature

and how these are used in constructing identity

has considerable pedagogic potential for a critical

geography (McHaffie, 1997). What such an inte-

gration of themes does offer is a way of linking

culture and environment, representations of

nature and technology and the politics of subjec-

tivity in ways that also engage with the practical

politics of how representation, knowledge and

power are unavoidable in geographical studies.

Pushing such ways of thinking about cultural

geography a little further also suggests both that

matters of spatial scale are unavoidable, and that

big scale issues are often not best tackled by

large scale organizations. The most innovative

changes to American automobile culture are likely

to come as a matter of urban politics. Los Angeles

has apparently finally reached the limit of

tolerance for the disutility of urban automobiles.

The attempts to respond there by mandating

emission limits for vehicles are likely to have

impacts on urban planning and automobile tech-

nologies well beyond southern California.

European cities have also been experimenting

with numerous devices to reduce the impact of

the automobile just as the elites of the cities of

the south embrace the technology as a symbol

of their social success (Paterson, 2000).

But while the sense of shared vulnerability

symbolized by the icon of the spinning blue

marble has considerable political resonance, the

assumption that the vulnerability is shared

frequently obscures powerful discrepancies in

who is currently in danger and how matters

might be rearranged to reduce the hazards to the

most vulnerable (Athanasiou, 1996). This raises

profound questions of justice on a planet with an

unsustainable appropriation of natural resources

(Harvey, 1996). It also forces scholars to think

hard about the categories and definitions they

use and matters of the appropriate scales for

considering politics and justice.

CULTURE, NATURE, GEOPOLITICS

Rethinking scale alone is not enough without a

recognition of the persistent dangers of thinking

ENVIRONMENTAL GEOPOLITICS 505

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