Biopolitics of Nature

My research focuses on the implicit social order environmental prescriptions embrace. From the production of ‘nature/environment’ as global and all-encompassing it occurs that these prescriptions and their implications are biopolitical in nature. Thus, I analyze the construction of the ‘nature/environment’ and its problematique as a part of “the regulatory biopolitics of the population”. The concept of biopolitics is still understood today as a form of politics that works by promoting ‘human well-being’. In this paper I’m going to entertain an idea of re-evaluating this side of biopolitics. Because, it seems that during the recent decades the very nature of biopolitics has changed from its modernist origins to become a form of politics that privileges the life of the non-human biosphere over the life of the human being. The power of environmentalism is an outcome of this shift. As we know, biopolitics emerged and was possible only with the constitution of population as a field of knowledge, and thus, as a domain of regulation and intervention, as the population became an independent, objectifiable, measurable entity. This was made possible by the rise of human sciences, demography and other statistical assessments. When we now try to understand the biopolitics of environmentalism and its desire to manage global nature and the earth, we see that ‘global environment’ has now been created by the environmental sciences the same way as human sciences created the population. As it was with the population before, ‘nature/environment’ has now come to be regarded as a discrete totality, an object of knowledge and a sphere within which certain types of intervention and management are made possible. Through biopolitical practices of assessment, environmental sciences have now produced a kind of “fictive object” – much like the global climate – known as the biosphere, as both an intelligible and calculable entity, which is stripped of its place-based specificity. This allows a governing from a distance. Through endeavours of “mapping, measuring, organizing, quantifying” and above all representing particular – and downplaying other – aspects of nature, the need for environmental management and the need to regulate human life have been created. The usefulness and preferability of human actions are not, anymore, evaluated by their impact on human well-being, but in relation to their impact on the biosphere, as these impacts are interpreted by the environmental science of the moment. Societies are taught to sacrifice aspirations to transform their environments for purpose of meaningful forms of development and instead accept the ‘necessity’ of adaption to the ‘apocalyptic’ of impending global environmental disaster. This way certain kinds of interventions into lives of populations that previously could not have been justified by the well-being of populations themselves are now made possible by reference to ‘environment’, by the use of ecopolitical techniques. It becomes that, while deepening the post-political condition (e.g. issues are placed under technocratic management and consensual policy-making of global institutions), biopower seems to have brushed away other levels of politics, and, in the process, made its own reach ever wider as ‘ecopower’.