Foucault, nature, and the environment

Foucault wrote virtually nothing on environmental issues, so despite the vast influence or his writings across the humanities, social sciences, and beyond, only limited direct connections have so far been made between his work and environmental thinking, and it has been the task of interpreters to draw out and elucidate possibilities. However, Foucault certainly made significant contributions to a range of epistemological, political, and ethical inquiries about how nature and things deemed natural have been crucial to European and Western traditions in general, and, therefore, helped excavate some of the intellectual ground lying beneath contemporary environmental debates. His understanding of modern governmentality underlined the emergent relations between the administration of human populations and geographical territories - including the ways in which knowledges of natural terrains and living things were appropriated by the logics of modern governance. His influential conception of a modern biopolitics, which showed how human life has been investigated, tabulated, and administered in increasing detail, also drew attention to how modernity is a time of human intervention and attempted control over the biological realm in general. So, while Foucault was far from being an environmental thinker himself, many or his texts provide insights that are relevant to environmentalism, and it is the task of this essay to elucidate them. This essay will broadly follow the chronological order of Foucault's texts, selecting only those which supply crucial views about nature or the environment, expanding on the most salient issues: it is therefore task-specified rather than offering a total survey of all of Foucault's mentions of nature or environment. I begin however, with some comments on Foucault's histories in general, in order to sketch how his methodologies opened up questions about our suppositions and received histories, and how they are relevant to the skeptical interrogation of the usage of "nature."