Material Politics by Andrew Barry

Author:Andrew Barry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-08-10T04:00:00+00:00

In this chapter I focus on the idea of impact, and the emergence of disputes over the question of what the impact of pipeline construction had been or might be in the future. This focus on impact directs us towards the relationship between two distinct ways of thinking about the relations between politics, materials and the environment. On the one hand, as I have suggested, the idea of impact has become critical to the discourse and practice of a responsible corporation. Negative environmental impacts are expected to be anticipated, minimised or reduced through a variety of what Bulkeley and Watson, following Foucault, call ‘modes of governing’ that include, for example, disposal, diversion, eco-efficiency and recycling (Bulkeley and Watson 2007: 2740, see also Lemos and Agrawal 2006, Bridge and Perreault 2009). Reinstatement can be seen as another environmental mode of governing in these terms. On the other hand, the notion of impact points to a very different approach to the study of environmental government that dwells not so much on the discourse or practice of modes of governing, but on the materiality of the environment that it is intended will be managed. Impact implies the existence of a material force that has a physical effect on something else, such as the impact of aircraft noise on a town, or the impact of chemical pollution from a metallurgical factory on a nearby farm (cf. Callon 1998b: 245). This latter sense of the term impact directs us towards an interest in the nature of the materiality and force of things that have an impact, as well as the persons and materials that are impacted upon (Bennett 2005, Braun 2008b, Braun and Whatmore 2010, Gregson and Crang 2010: 1028).

In this chapter I develop two arguments that draw together these two contrasting accounts of impact: one concerns environmental impact as an object of modes of governing; the other concerns the materiality of things that are the cause or consequence of impacts. I argue, first of all, for the importance of distinguishing between two ways in which impacts can be understood. One way of conceptualising impact is in the terms of what I will call a measured impact (cf. Barry 2005).5 This idea points to how environmental problems are constituted as ‘impacts’ through multiple methods and techniques, including modelling, sampling, epidemiological studies and direct observation (Callon 1998b: 259, Latour 1999: 24–79, Landström et al. 2011). Scientists concerned with the problem of environmental impacts do not aim to grasp such issues in all of their complexity; their work is expected to enact impacts in forms that render them amenable to management. Impacts do not exist independently of their enactment. Rather, by understanding an event such as traffic noise or river pollution as a (possible) ‘impact’, it is given a new existence. It becomes something about which information should be produced, in order to determine whether it should be treated as an impact or not. In this way, scientific research on environmental impacts can be likened to a

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