A New Global Paradigm for Environmental Change: Environmental Infrastructure

This paper will present ways of questioning the supposedly universal character of the environment and environmental change. Simultaneously, it will challenge the dichotomy between the Western and the non-Western world as part of our critique of the historical process of globalization. While modern societies are thought to construct and use artificial infrastructure, non-Western and pre-modern peoples are held to manage and use natural resources. The idea that Western people, armed with science and technology, seek to harness or destroy Nature and replace it by Culture, places the West in the realm of Culture. The complementary idea that non-Westerners live by Nature and in Nature assign the pre-modern and non-West to the kingdom of Nature. Both dichotomies in effect argue that environmental dynamics in the Non-West and West are fundamentally different and hide as much about the global and local processes of environmental change as they reveal. Recently, the boundaries and the very category of Nature have become questioned. For example, forests in the Americas, Southeast Asia, and Africa that had been presumed to be primordial have revealed thousands of sites with urban and rural ruins, as well as other signs of human settlement and use. The concept of “environmental infrastructure” facilitates a focus on the gray zone between Nature and Culture. The term “infrastructure” stresses the utilitarian value that humans ascribe to it and also allows room for environmental agents (human and non-human) to shape or re-shape it mentally as well as physically. The adjective “environmental” highlights that human control, use, and agency are neither absolute nor exclusive. Thus, unlike conventional artificial infrastructure, which is controlled, designed and created by humans, environmental infrastructure is not confined to the realm of Culture.