Are Environmentalists Hysterical or Paranoid?: Metaphors of Care and "Environmental Security"

Ethics and the Environment,5(2)211-227 ISSN: 1085-6633 Copyright © 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. Raymond A. Rogers Are Environmentalists Hysterical or Paranoid? Metaphors of Care and "Environmental Security" INTRODUCTION While there has been an increasing prevalence of security concerns with regard to the environment, there has also been a spate of books by moderate environmentalists engaged in "green-bashing" the more radical discussions of environmental issues (Rogers 1995). Both trends reflect the intensification of the forces of economic globalization that are rendering the world into categories that suit those expanding realities and undermine significant analysis of the relationship between those expanding realities and current environmental problems. The apparent denigration in the title of this article is meant to draw attention to the relationship between representations of environmental issues and economic realities , especially in the context of disagreement, where contested realities are discussed in dramatically different ways by various interests concerned with environmental issues . What is clear in the context of these disagreements is that "ownership" of the issue has significant ramifications for not only understanding the causes of problems, but also for what to do about them. A starting point for this analysis is the increasingly common appearance of the word "security" in the titles of articles and books dealing with environmental issues. Concerns are expressed with regard to "food security," "security of resources," and the more generic "environmental security," among many. Indeed, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency now has an environmental department. What interests me, then, is the significance for human communities and natural communities of the increasing appearance of the word "security"—as represented in the work of such analysts as Thomas Homer-Dixon—and the way the concern for security tends to minimize any Direct all correspondence to: Raymond A. Rogers, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, North York, ON M3J 1P3, Canada; Phone: (416) 736-5113; E-mail: rrogers@yorku.ca 211 212 ETHICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT Vol. 5, No. 2, 2000 analysis of capitalist relations while invalidating those cultures that cause security problems by resisting the incursions of these relations. Debates using the language of "security" raise larger issues as well with regard to the metaphors of care we use in discussing human-nature relations. Representing humans and nature in terms of labor and resources, a common occurrence in global management discourse, locates the environmental crisis within a broader crisis of modernity in which viable conceptions of human identity and nature are undermined by the structures and processes of late capitalism and result in the contemporaneousness of the "death of the human subject" and "end of nature" discussions (Rogers 1994). I will argue that environmental security concerns operate within these increasingly impoverished conceptions of human identity and nature. To get at these contrasting and conflictive views of environmental issues, I will examine current works on environmentalism in terms of psychological conditions characterized in terms of hysteria and paranoia. I will discuss hysteria as a negative category used in condemning the "failures of the uninitiated." Broadly speaking, hysteria can be defined as the pathology linked to the over identification with those around you in the context of a differential in power relationships "in which the ego is constantly being overwhelmed by the products of the illness" (Breuer and Freud 1991, 346). Questions concerned with what has happened to the world therefore arise so that "identifying with those around you" in collective terms is rendered into a social pathology. Specifically, I will highlight Aihwa's Ong's argument in Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline (1987) in which Malay factory women have hysterical fits on the factory shop floor as a form of passive resistance to transformations in identity related to the immersion in the work discipline of capitalism. I will link the concern for "environmental security" with the fact that peasant women who experience three hysterical fits were fired from the factory for "security reasons" (Ong 1987, 205). The term hysteria has a long and complex history (Micale 1995), but for my specific purposes here I am using the phenomenon of hysteria as it appears in response to the expansion of capitalist relations and as...