Sticks and Stones: Environmental Narratives and Discursive Regulation in the Forestry and Mining Sectors

Abstract

As visibly extractive industries reliant on the material and semiotic commodification of nature, forestry and mining have come to be popularly viewed as "environmental pariahs." Yet forestry and mining continue to be successfully profitable enterprises despite a significant increase in environmental awareness and activism in the latter half of the twentieth century. To understand the relative stability and growth of these sectors in the face of overt contradictions arising from their use of the environment, this article revisits the work of regulation theorists who asked similar questions about the persistence and maintenance of capitalism in general.Two case studies are presented-forestry in British Columbia and gold mining in California and Nevada-which demonstrate how the political economy of forestry and mining is subject to contradictions arising out of the technological and organizational mechanisms through which nature is appropriated during production. Analysis of the case studies shows that the regulation of these contradictions is increasingly achieved through the deployment and cooptation of sustainability narratives. The case studies therefore juxtapose the recent proliferation of sustainability narratives within the forestry and mining sectors with the sectors' persistent challenge to concepts of sustainable development.

Mineral policy at a crossroads? Critical reflections on the challenges with expanding Sweden’s mining sector

“…The discursive moment scrutinized here holds in itself one of several keys to a thorough understanding of what is happening in Swedish mining politics today. The approach is similar to that of Bridge (2003), who sees the study of a particular discourse (in his case, mining legislation) as a normative struggle regarding how a particular territory should be ordered (see further Cox, 2005;Lefebvre, 1991;Smith, 1991;Yeung, 2002).…”

Comparative Analysis of Hydraulic Fracturing Wastewater Practices in Unconventional Shale Development: Newspaper Coverage of Stakeholder Concerns and Social License to Operate

“…For instance, there is an opportunity for researchers to investigate why organizational legitimacy seems to be challenged more in some times and places than in others, or why some operators and some regulators receive more scrutiny than others. It may also be worthwhile to connect with research on "discursive regulation" [85], which has shown, for instance, how forestry and mining companies strategically deploy sustainability narratives as a way of regulating their own contradictions.…”

Governing Nature: The Reregulation of Resource Access, Production, and Consumption

“…That is, how institutions and governance structures are fashioned through the concrete politics of differentially constrained agents in specific places. Such a`downsizing' of theory requires the development of an intermediary language that can capture the messiness and contingency of everyday life while still maintaining the coherence provided by a broader theoretical frame (see Bridge and McManus, 2000).…”