ABSTRACT
Once upon a time, the totality of human culture could be described as consisting of many individual cultures. This is no longer an appropriate image; contemporary human culture consists of many discourses. In some ways, this makes it much harder to analyse, for our vocabulary is plagued with boundedness - we speak of units, fields, sectors and distinctions - and discourses, as we have seen, often appear unbounded. But it can also be liberating, for it reduces the need for analysts to delineate their objects of analysis, and enables them instead to study how cultural things (perceptions, assumptions, values, perspectives) cluster around focal issues. In this chapter, I make no attempt to consider the full range of cultural things that might be said to ‘belong’, in some sense, to environmentalist discourse. I focus mainly on a prominent feature of that discourse, the global debate in which the environment is
treated as a resource. The relationship of this debate to the wider environmentalist discourse is considered at the end of the chapter.
