Class 3: Environmental subjects
Christos Zografos, PhD
Department of Political and Social Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
christos.zografos@upf.edu
Masters in Environmental Studies, 2020-21
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Admin note: the Final Essay
•70% of your final mark
•Can do individual one or group (two students max)
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vTopic: Klein, N. 2016. Let Them Drown. The Violence of Othering in a Warming World.
qYou can read the text or you can watch her presenting her text
v
• Performance criteria:
1.Explain in your own words (i.e. without copy-pasting Klein’s text) (i) what Klein means by
“othering” as a source of clim change vulnerability that is violent, and (ii) what she suggests as
a way of dealing with climate change risks and hazards
2.Evaluate Klein’s argument: do you agree/ disagree with Klein, and why?
•State your opinion and support it with arguments and evidence from other studies (e.g. from our
course) or data/ examples (e.g. info from media)
3.Using class bibliography to support your answers
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Introduction
•Answers to question
•Subjects approach
•Premises on other theories
•Classroom activities
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FORMAT IN PPT = I HAVE UPLOADED ONE FOR THEM TO USE

Today’s reading
Class question
• “According to Robbins and his study, lawn managers who are more aware of the environmental
impacts of chemicals, and are more socially involved and concerned about their communities, are
those who apply more intensively chemicals on their lawns
• “How do Robbins’ middle-class lawn mainteners (“lawn people”) end up using chemicals which they
know that are harmful not only for the environment but also to their own health?
• “Why do they do this to themselves and the environment?”
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Why do they do it?
Three reasons:
1.Hectic lives: no free time
2.Economic/ instrumental logics
3.The good citizen: moral responsibility to the community

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Hectic lifestyles
•“When I first moved here I was traveling a lot so I didn’t have time to do much in my yard. I
thought, my lawn must need something, so I was treating it . . . I think of yard work as a fun
activity . . . But I just don’t have the time anymore.”
•Residents stated, with some degree of pride, how busy they and their families are with careers,
hobbies, sports, and travel
•This often translated into a feeling that they did not have time to worry about lawn chemicals
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Economic/ instrumental logics
•Association of chemicals inputs with housing values suggests instrumental motivations
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•Conserving well the lawn = relatively inexpensive investment for maintaining property values
–Note: this is a socio-ecological system where homeowners are rewarded for environmentally
detrimental behaviour!
•Still: instrumental thinking only a small part of lawn manager-home owner logic
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•Association of chemicals inputs with housing values…
–which reach the homeowner
–as well as neighborhood
•…suggests obvious instrumental motivations

Beyond instrumentalism: community
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•Despite risks, chemicals use = good character; social responsibility
•Ecological character of lawn: collective management
•Most important driver for chemical use: “neighborhood norm” of lawn management
•Decisions to use chemicals: something  owed to neighbors
–“I wouldn’t insult my neighbors by not keeping my house up”
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Image result for lawn community usa suburbia

Despite risks, using chemicals
–Sign of a good character
–Sign of social responsibility
(Also, ecological character (materiality) of lawn: requires collective management otherwise plague
will stay in neighbourhood)
Most important driver for lawn chemical use:
–Sense there is a “neighborhood norm” (rule) of lawn management
Decisions about lawn chemical use in terms of something that they owed to their neighbors
–“I wouldn’t insult my neighbors by not keeping my house up”
NOTES:
Materiality: how material properties of nature may influence human politics (e.g. ways of
organising land management in a community, i.e. collective care); and history
• Consider: ecological character of lawn problems: if you eliminate plague it can move next door,
so next door needs to apply same level of care
Disregard for lawn care: free-riding and moral neglect
Participation in maintenance is a practice of civic good. Disregard for lawn care is, by
implication, a form of free-riding, civic neg- lect, and moral weakness. This is further reinforced
by the ecological character of lawn problems, including mobile, invasive, and adaptive species such
as grubs, dandelions, and ground ivy. These pests, if eliminated in one yard, can easily be
harbored in another, only to return later, crossing property lines, blowing on the wind, and
burrowing underground. Intensive care by one party merely moves problems around; only coordinated
action can control “outbreaks” and achieve uniformity. In this sense, lawn care differs from other
kinds of individual invest- ment in community, such as Christmas lights, painting, or other
efforts. It is a far greater problem, requiring coordinated collective action, at least where green
monocultural results are desired.

The good citizen: moral responsibility
–
–…imperative to mow in time for high school prom. Limousines came to the cul-de-sac to pick up
several high school students, pictures were taken on front lawns, and everyone wanted their yards
to look perfect
–Suzanne: why she continued lawn chemical treatments even though her dog’s paws were bleeding, she
replied: I guess we didn’t want the yard to look bad when everybody else’s looked so nice . . . You
try to make it look as nice as you can, without offending other people
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•Lawn chemical use as something they felt they had to do to meet the expectations of their
neighbours
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•Reveals: ways in which neighborhood forces (without physical coercion) certain kinds of lawn
management onto individuals
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Disciplining
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•When weeds grow prominent:
–“I would feel really out of place. It’s not only how the yard looks to me, but how it looks to the
neighbors. If it’s not in keeping with the neighborhood [then I’d have to spray more]”
–“[in his mom’s neighbourhood] if you don’t cut twice a week you are a communist!
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•System of monitoring (when to “improve” lawn) that relies heavily on the view of one’s lawn by
neighbors
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System of monitoring (when to “improve” lawn) that relies heavily on the view of one’s lawn by
neighbors

The argument
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‒The maintenance of lawn yard landscapes through environmentally harmful lawn chemicals is an
internalized environmental practice rooted on a socially enforced environmental aesthetic that
associates good citizenship with environmentally harmful activities (use of chemicals)
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•Cos. benefit, but not force anyone
vPower enacted internally through producing a certain kind of “subject”
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The argument (Robbins’):
Maintenance of lawn yard landscapes through environmentally harmful lawn chemicals: internalized
environmental practice…
•…which is:
–Rooted on socially enforced environmental aesthetic
–That associates good citizenship with environmentally harmful activities (use of chemicals)
• Such behaviors benefit the corporate entities that produce, package, and market the goods and
services that maintain such an aesthetic
• But it cannot be said that these companies forced anyone, in any simple way, to act as they do
• Rather, the exercise of power is enacted internally
• Through production of a certain kind of “subject,” whose identity as a good citizen is associated
with a set of specific [harmful/ polluting] environmental activities

Power shaping subjects
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²
² subject to someone else by control and dependence
² tied to one’s own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge
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•Subject (Foucault, 1982): two meanings of word "subject":
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•Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to
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•Q: Who is this subject?
• “turfgrass subjects” (p.115)
• Subject = Lawn People!
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BACKGROUND TO THE APPROACH
•Subjects and subject-making
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Foucault, power and liberalism
•Foucault’s interest:
•Of how power operates
•Emergence of ‘technologies of power’ in modern (roughly 17th century onwards) period (Europe)
•An interest on liberalism: key, modern political doctrine and practice of government
•Liberalism (Britannica)
•Protecting and enhancing freedom of the individual = the central problem of politics
•Government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others
•But government itself can pose a threat to liberty
•Laws, judges, and police are needed to secure the individual’s life and liberty, but their
coercive power may also be turned against him
•Problem: how to avoid (as much as possible) coercion/ authority abusing power but also secure
individual liberty (do as one wants – more or less)?
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Britannica:
•Political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the
central problem of politics.
•Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed
by others,
•but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty.
•As the revolutionary American pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776),
government is at best “a necessary evil.”
•Laws, judges, and police are needed to secure the individual’s life and liberty, but their
coercive power may also be turned against him.
•Problem: how to avoid (as much as possible) coercion/ authority abusing power but also secure
individual liberty (do as one wants – more or less)?

Central problem of modern government
•Iverson and Painter, 2005:
• Foucault identified the ‘conduct of conduct’ as the central problem of modern government
• To deal with the central paradox of liberal government:
‒liberalism asserts sovereignty of free individual,…
‒…yet government requires that individual behaviour be (externally) regulated – undesirable for
liberalism
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Iverson and Painter in https://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/2007/05/15/key-term-conduct-of-conduct/
Conduct of conduct = conducting (leading, driving, controlling) the behaviour (conduct) of citizens
(subjects)

Foucault: exercising power
•Power can be exercised in more subtle ways than outright oppression + coercion
•i.e. by establishing normalised and ‘deviant’: behaviours (homosexuality), processes (democracy is
inefficient), actions (stealing = crime), persons (lepers=unhealthy), places (Africa is dangerous,
e.g. disease, crime, jungle), etc.
•People integrate these as personal principles that guide their behaviour -> (as – liberal –
government) you no more need to punish or compensate
•They become subjects: individuals subjected (to the will/ desires of authority) through ties to
own identity by self-knowledge (e.g. who you think you are)
lIn this way governments (those ‘in power’) discipline behaviour, people (in general) or certain
groups, etc. without coercion
•Source: http://www.michel-foucault.com
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The conduct of conduct = central problem of modern government
The concept of “man”: fundamental point of ref for human science inquiry. The double essence of
“man”
oMan as an object
oMan as a subject
oHistorical review: the impossibility of “man”
But why taken for granted for so long?
oA conceptual prerequisite for productive citizens (17-18^th cent. Europe)
•Body and soul can be manipulated and reformed
oInstitutions of discipline: Panopticon (surveillance cameras)
Seeking the “deviant”: pathological populations
oBiopolitics of reformers: principles of welfare state
o“Power-knowledge”
oSubjectivation: classify and shape individual human beings into “subjects” of various kinds – e.g.
heroic-ordinary, normal-deviant)

Making subjects: self-disciplining technologies
•Central problem of modern govt. (Foucault): “the conduct of conduct”
–Modern governments develop technologies of power to achieve it
•Panopticon: what is it?
–Prisoner feels he’s been watched and has to behave at all times in case guard is watching (Sharpe,
2009)
–By feeling he’s been watched all the time he internalises the rule of discipline (behave as he is
required)
–Guard doesn’t even need be there!
Presidio Modelo prison, Cuba (Source: Friman, 2005)
Question: What’s this??
Source: /thefunambulist.net//thefunambulist.net/
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Governmentality
Term used to describe:
• Way in which governments try to produce citizens (subjects) best suited to the ends and
objectives of governments
–A style of exercising power
•Organised practices through which subjects are governed (Mayhew, 2004)
–Mentalities, rationalities, techniques
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Source: https://adrianblau.files.wordpress.com

Used to mean several things, such as:
•The “how” of governing (Jeffreys & Sigley, 2009)
–Calculated means of directing how we behave and act
•But also: Way in which governments try to produce citizens (subjects) best suited to the ends and
objectives of governments
–A style of exercising power
•And: Organised practices through which subjects are governed (Mayhew, 2004)
–Mentalities, rationalities, techniques
SEE ALSO: Foucault on Power (1981): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYoub1mfk5k

Governmentality
•Style of governing that includes the active consent and willingness of individuals to participate
in their own governance
•Or else: the governing of people’s conduct through “positive means”
‒Not sovereign power: abide by laws and regulations of centralised power (e.g. royal power)
‒Not disciplinarian power: learn what to do and not to do; through punishment and reward (through
institutions that exercise authority, e.g. the prison, school)
‒Yes: the willing participation of the governed (consent and self-regulation)
•Objective: the control of population (and resources)
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•Governing that includes the active consent and willingness of individuals to participate in their
own governance
•Or else: emphasizes the governing of people’s conduct through positive means rather than the
sovereign power to formulate the law. In contrast to a disciplinarian form of power,
governmentality is generally associated with the willing participation of the governed
•Not sovereign power: abide by laws and regulations of centralised power
•Not disciplinarian power
•Characteristic of modern period where power exercised through disciplinary means in a variety of
institutions (e.g. penitiary system, schools)
•Power exercised by those who represent authority
•Teaches you through reward and punishment the rules you must follow in your life as a citizen
(power-and-knowledge)
•What is more: knowledge created in institutions is then used to control populations (e.g.
university, demography, anthropology for governing populations through controlling them, e.g. in
colonies; surveillance systems, etc.)
•Yes: the willing participation of the governed
Three Minute Thought: What Is Governmentality?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvWsIR5_bOs

Governmentality and nature: environmentality (Agrawal, 2005)
•How the state can achieve control of forest resources and populations
•Forest communities in India: the Kumaonis
•Fierce opposition to colonial and government control of forests (arson)
•Key concession of authorities: allow them to govern and control forest
•BUT in exchange: Kumaoni responsibilities:
‒track and categorise forests (help map): do census of forest resources
‒work with residents to establish forest management rules
•Instruments of state forestry control: with maps and census of forest resources, state foresters
can expand commercial use of forest resources and state profit (state objective: control of natural
resources)
•The results of self-governance
‒Change in attitudes about forest: it is now valuable (must be conserved)
‒Change attitudes about themselves: they see themselves as the kind of people who protect forests
(instead of burning them)
‒Change of unruly behaviour: they are now governable, and indeed governed (another state objective:
control the population)
•Self-responsibility: way to include as citizens (state subjects)
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How the state can achieve control of forest resources
 Forest communities in India (Kumaonis) that fiercely opposed colonial and government control of
forests (even arson)
Key concession of colonial (and later Indian) authorities: to allow local communties to govern and
control forest (decentralisation of authority) BUT hand-in-hand with promulgation of local
responsibilities:
Obligation to: track and categorise forests in the region; work with residents to establish rules;
do census of forest resources
All these: instruments of control (e.g. map and classification; rules) useful for state foresters
to expand commercial use of forest resources and state profit
System of self-governance + change in attitudes about forest and themselves
Protect forest: becomes an important value and goal (previously not) for Kumaonis -> forest: a
value on its own (previously not)
Kumaonis come to see themselves: the kind of people who protect forests
SELF RESPONSIBILITY AS WAY TO ‘INCLUDE’ AS CITIZENS (SUBJECTS)
The argument (Robbins, 2012):
Increased participation in environmental regulation and enforcement produces environmental
subjectivities,
i.e. environmental subjects: people who facilitate the policing of nature for extraction or
conservation/ capitalist profit or colonial wealth-creation

The argument (Robbins, 2012)
•Increased participation in environmental regulation and enforcement produces environmental
subjectivities, …
•i.e. environmental subjects: people who facilitate the policing of nature for extraction or
conservation, capitalist profit or colonial wealth-creation
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Activity: mystery quotation
1.Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU
2.Then: read this quotation (Halsey, 2004):
‒But I want to suggest that structural economic power relies for its efficacy not simply on the
relations between government, law, and the economy, so much as on the flows of pleasure which
invest the population at any one time.
‒Not only is it profitable to be environmentally destructive (in the sense of mining, manufacturing
cars, clearfelling forests) it feels good too (in the sense of purchasing a gold necklace, driving
on the open road, looking at a table, chair, or house constructed from redwood, mahogany, mountain
ash or the like).
3.Figure out the point of view of the person behind the quotation
‒Explain it
‒And justify it to the class
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10. Mystery quotation
Test how well students can apply their understanding of an issue or theoretical position. After
they’ve explored a topic, show them a quotation about it they’ve never seen before. Their task is
to figure out the point of view of the person behind the quotation – and justify it to the class.
Students can debate this issue in small breakout groups before beginning a whole-class discussion.
20 min: watch video and prepare explanation
12 min (3 min per group): explain quotation in the class (approx. 500 words of text – if you write
it down)
10 min: we recap

TAKE AWAY POINTS
•In closing
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Green governance: sovereign power
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•Green governance (Political Ecology): power over nature and society (Peet et al., 2011)
²
1.Sovereign environmental power
‒Capacity (of state and its institutions) to legitimately impose their will; e.g. Mayor Rizzo
getting rid of benches, park guards
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²Note: sovereign environmental power= capacity to
‒Dominate and multiply environmental problems (e.g. land degradation)
‒But also: control degradation, e.g. through regulation (nature reserve)
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•Source: mechanicsofpower.wordpress.com
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We think of this type of power as ‘sovereign’ because, it is seen as being legitimately exercised
(i.e. authority; having authority to exercise power)
•To enclose resources: mechanism that justifies and enforces control
•E.g. “property” when given force of law, so that private owners and state have power (“sovereign
right”) to enforce exclusion
Environmental problems (and their possible solutions) are inevitably entangled with questions of
power and governance. To enclose common resources, as we described previously, for example, it is
essential that there is a mechanism that justifies and enforces control, as where “property” is
given the force of law so that “private” owners and the state have the power to enforce exclusion.
Capacity to dominate or subjugate is obviously essential to the promulgation of environmental
problems as well as to the control of environmental degradation through regulation.
Consider, for example, the monopoly of force required to take control of large areas of land for
surface mining, to exclude traditional or nearby inhabitants, and to enforce exclusive rights to
exploit the land through large-scale construction of open
pits, the removal of mountain tops, or the saturation of the land with acids for insitu leaching of
minerals. Such power is further extended by stifling or controlling resistance to the health and
ecosystem costs such development entails, either through the legal protection of the rights to
exploit the land, or more dramatically through the collaboration of state force to put down or
silence opposition. Consider, for example, the rapacious destruction of Appalachian landscapes and
communities through wholesale mountaintop removal mining, leaving toxic environments and
worked-over communities in its wake, with little room for community resistance or legal recourse
(Burns 2007). This is raw sovereign environmental power in its crudest and commonest form around
the world.
Needless to say, such socio-environmental force has historically been confronted by its corollary:
popular or state power to restrict, control, or exclude environmentally or socially destructive
practices. The roots of formal modern environmental regulation lie in such forms of power, as where
a spate of environmental laws in the United States in the late twentieth century challenged the
power of corporations to emit air and water pollution or to dump hazardous wastes indiscriminately,
all practices common throughout the two centuries prior (Colten and Skinner 1996). The roots of
many if not all of these reforms developed from local and regional resistance, leading most
recently to anti-toxins campaigns fought in the name of “environmental justice” (Szasz 1994).

Green governance: governmentality
2.
2.Internalised power: Power can also be exercised internally
‒through construction of subjects who by understanding themselves in particular ways (e.g. “good
citizens”) voluntarily (without coercion) serve state projects – e.g. produce nature in ways
desired by state, corporations
‒E.g. turfgrass subjects or Lawn People
3.
•Copyright: David Hayward (source: geotimes.co.id)
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The way power is exercised within – rather than over – individuals, communities and societies. As
people come to understand themselves, regulate their activities, and help oversee the actions of
others, they are not merely the objects of external force, but are themselves embodied power.
Foucault observes, “individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application” (Foucault
1980: 98) and further suggests that government (or sovereign) power depends upon the extension of
the state itself
through internalization and acceptance of individuals as state subjects, a condition he refers to
as “governmentality” (Foucault 1991).
More on internalised power:
2.Internalised power: power also expressed on how individuals come to obey + take for granted
“property” laws
•Internalising control & authority as normal/natural
•Hence, neither questioning nor resisting it
Foucault: governmentality
Government power depends upon extending the state through internalisation and acceptance of
individuals as state subjects
Way power exercised within individuals
Also: communities and societies

Course overview: what did I learn?
•Activity: Sketchnoting
1.Breakout room: groups of 3 persons (8 groups)
2.Sketch a picture that represents what you have learned/ or one thing you have learned with this
course (20 min)
‒Use this freeware: https://awwapp.com/b/ubngq7qzuxkca/#
‒One of you access it, and then invite the other two via the green ”Invite” button and link on the
top of the screen
‒Start sketching!
‒Finally, save your sketch via “Export board”
3.Then, present your sketch in class with zoom’s “Share screen” – each group will have 3 min to
present
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