| The recent emergence of the term "ecological citizenship" is indicative of a widespread belief that democracy offers fertile ground for cultivating individual and collective commitments to ecological care. In many cases, however, efforts to theorize relationships between democracy and ecology are compromised by a superficial treatment of the political sphere, coupled with a failure to recognize that political subjectivity and conceptions of nature are already closely intertwined. As such, theorists of ecological citizenship have predominantly concerned themselves with the narrow question of how to inculcate ecological responsibility within a set of existing or reconfigured democratic norms. The dissertation argues for a more rigorous treatment of the relationship between ecology and citizenship, drawing upon the political theory of Hannah Arendt to explore the links between identity, nature, justice, political speech, and the public sphere.;These theoretical arguments are developed through an analysis of the conflict over hydroelectric projects on the Bio Bio River, in southern Chile. The conflict brings together distinct discourses of nature in the context of a polity that is struggling with the radical transformation of citizenship in the wake of dictatorship and economic globalization. Central to the story of the Bio Bio are the Mapuche people's efforts to recover their ancestral territory and define a new relationship with the Chilean state. The Mapuche's connection with nature has become a key source of legitimacy in the articulation of their political claims, and their mobilization presents a significant challenge to the dominant society's understandings of both citizenship and human-environment relationships. The analysis of the Bio Bio conflict begins with an examination of the cultural roots that inform Chilean and Mapuche understandings of nature. This is followed by an exploration of the various conceptions of nature advanced by the major players in the Bio Bio controversy, and of the geographical imaginaries that reflect and inform these competing visions. The case of the Bio Bio demonstrates that ecological citizenship is best understood as a field of contest among different ways of politicizing the environment and of being political in relation to nature. |
