in what Michael Curry (1992) calls, following
Kant, architectonic terms. The impulse to
universal claims to correct knowledge is always
in danger of linking up to authoritarian aspira-
tions to manage the globe (Gill, 1995). The cor-
porate agenda at the UNCED meetings in Rio in
1992 was obviously partly about linking con-
cerns with global danger to management by the
rich and powerful (Chatterjee and Finger,
1994). The temptation to survey and control
environments from afar is a colonial temptation
both for environmentalists who advocate
enhanced policies of resource management
(Luke, 1997), and for military technologists
who want to use remote sensing and satellite
technology to ‘monitor’ environmental change
(Deibert, 1999). Linked to financial panopti-
cons (Ó Tuathail, 1997), the project of global
mastery by the urban colonial system that has
caused so much damage in the first place moves
a few steps further.
Nonetheless there is also considerable
intellectual activity that points in the direction of
innovative thinking about the big questions in
geography. The political ecology literature has
begun to link up with the critical literature in
cultural studies and the debates about the social
construction of science in potentially very
productive ways (Braun and Castree, 1998).
McHaffie (1997) has suggested the importance
of understanding the politics of representation
around themes of advertising and corporate
specifications of globality. Harvey (1996) makes
the question of justice as an integral part of envi-
ronmental thinking unavoidable, but does not
work the geopolitical scale explicitly into his
thinking. Local ecological knowledge challenges
assumptions of jurisdiction and control from the
other end of the geographical scale (Doubleday,
1993). Much remains to be done in problematiz-
ing questions of property and sovereignty, to
mention only the most obvious spatial categories
that are in question at both the macro scale of
globalization, and the micro scale of genetically
modified organisms and the debates about
patenting genes (Miller, 2001). What local
community means in a global marketplace is
becoming ever more dubious despite its ritual
invocation by politicians and activists of all
political stripes.
Relating this point to the discussion of the pro-
duction of nature and the fabrication of uncer-
tainties brings us back to Glacken’s (1967)
theme of the earth as the divinely designed home
of humanity. Clearly the expansion of the scaleof economic activity through the twentieth
century has changed the terms of this discussion.
Humanity, or perhaps more precisely that part of
humanity that is making most of the consequen-
tial political and economic decisions, is effec-
tively now redesigning the planet. Discourses of
architectural deities have to be replaced by dis-
courses of artificial habitat. The implications of
such a shift are profound, but they follow from
the contemporary scale of human activity and the
recognition of the theme of the single lonely
planet. Culture and nature are now unavoidably
matters of geopolitics.
What is clear from this attempt to think about
geopolitics at the largest scale is the irony of the
current situation where urban assumptions
about both culture and nature are so inappropri-
ate as guides to what Barbara Ward and René
Dubos (1972) called ‘the care and maintenance
of a small planet’. The required cultural shift to
recognition of the biosphere as an entity to be
lived in, rather than as a planet to be lived on,
challenges the boundaries in the geographical
discipline just as much as it challenges larger
ontological schemes of modern politics (Dalby,
2002). Such a line of argument suggests that
crucial questions for the discipline are con-
fronted here at the very largest scale, that of the
planet as a whole. Traditions of the discipline
focusing on the earth as the home of humanity
need to be rethought as a result of such onto-
logical refocusing. Questions of the practicali-
ties of dwelling in a finite but changing planet
and the possibility of harmonious or sustainable
living are within the ambit of traditional
disciplinary concerns. But the assumptions of
modernization as the answer have long since
lost connection with the pressing matters of
what the big geographical questions ought to be
on an endangered planet.
The geopolitical view has always been a
modern one, an architectonic impulse to view
the whole from a distance with the intention of
managing it for various purposes, which has
shaped practical knowledge construction in
many disciplines (Agnew, 1998). The conse-
quences of modern attempts to manage a com-
plex unruly world by simplifying, conquering
and rendering it an orderly landscape are pre-
cisely the impulses that are often aggravating
current difficulties (Scott, 1998). Recent cri-
tiques of colonialism provide ample warning
against the appropriation of crisis narratives by
the world’s political elites to justify various
political strategies to reorder the landscape by506 GEOPOLITICAL CULTURES3029-ch27.qxd 03-10-02 11:06 AM Page 506