Who gets to speak for the environment, how and to what ends?

Abstract

Etienne Benson’s book Surroundings (2020) details the emergence and history of the now ubiquitous signifier ‘the environment’. Today, the environment performs all manner of work cognitively and normatively, as Benson shows. His book ends with a plea that diversity be fostered in the immediate environments people inhabit. However, this unremarkable aspiration is foiled by two absences in his otherwise fine book. One is a proper treatment of social power and how, discursively and materially, powerful people and organisations routinely diminish existing environmental variety. The other is the ‘gigantism’ associated with twenty-first century capitalism and technoscience. Benson’s analysis, in the end, misses key drivers affecting the content and affects of the environment as a signifier.