Timothy W. Luke

Department of Political Science

Virginia Polytechnic Institute

and State University

Blacksburg, VA

Presented at the annual meeting of the

International Studies Association,

March 18-22, 1997

This paper tentatively tests the depth and breadth of some perplexing new tendencies. With the end of the Cold War, transnational corporate enterprise now reigns more or less supreme as the world's most effective bloc of productive forces as well as its most articulated relations of production. While these facts are never forgotten, this corporate capitalist economy legitimizes its authority among many clienteles around the world by measures of how fully, broadly or deeply it satisfies the wants and needs felt by consumers. One of the few remaining bases of effective anti-systemic resistance in this globalized corporate economy is environmentalism; yet, to gain an audience or tap into a constituency, environmentalism, like transnational corporate capitalism, increasingly is forced to pitch its messages in consumerist terms to win any widespread popular support. While most companies argue that intensive natural resource development is a "wise use" of Nature, most ecological movements assert these moves are really an "unwise abuse" of Nature.¹ In struggling to control the ultimate outcomes of this contested (un)wise (ab)use of Nature, then, corporate capitalism and organized environmentalism are tussling over the conditions of consumption, struggling to define how to best manage the ends and means of global markets. Certainly, not all businesses are mindless polluters, and not all environmentalists are anti-business. Likewise, not all environmentalism is consumerist, and not all consumption is ecological, but there are some intriguing new connections here that merit investigation.²

Therefore, this study explores a series of emergent tendencies, developing out of some unusual elective affinities between mainstream environmentalism and modern consumerism. The discursive battles over the (un)wise (ab)use of Nature in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s pit a broad spectrum of forces against each other, ranging from new social movements committed to fundamentalistic deep ecology to global financial groups devoted to unchecked resource exploitation. In the heat of these battles, however, some once divergent agendas are perhaps becoming more complementary, although these new more collaborative understandings still obscured by the smoke of conflict. Whether we stand at "the end of history" or "the end of Nature," what "wisdom" grounds "wise" or "unwise" use, and which "utilities" determine "use" or "abuse" now seem much less certain or compelling as the battles drag on, allowing us to stand back, study the battlelines, and suggest new tactics to interpret the environmentalism/consumerism nexus.

While many environmental movements explicitly pose as implacable enemies of consumerism, some practices tacitly point toward commonalities with many patently consumeristic interests. The specific groups that will be addressed here are well-known, highly institutionalized mainstream environmental organizations in the United States: the Worldwatch Institute, the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Sierra Club. While this collection of groups is not as diverse as others could be, it represents a good spread of different operational philosophies, ecological goals, and policy orientations. Most importantly, one can detect amidst their various environmental initiatives a remarkably powerful consumeristic bent, even though "wise use" advocates still try to tag them with more radical labels.

In the last analysis, the globalized reach of global exchange coupled with localized ravages of transnational production now are moving many well-entrenched groups on both sides of the business/environmentalism equation to rethink the ends and means of mass consumption. Their initiatives are neither coordinated nor comprehensive. Nonetheless, these developments might permit us to reassess prevailing geo-economic principles in some tentative tests on a national scale of a new globalized form of consumerism running a longside contemporary fast capitalism's globalized producerism. Such tendencies are not necessarily found in every environmental group, and they cannot automatically be described as the intended consequences of any particular environmental philosophy. Even so, joint influences mark the emergence of new assumptions and fresh outcomes.

To explore the links between these tendencies, this investigation will advance in the following fashion. Having introduced these overarching themes, it first will consider the issue of Nature in today's fast capitalist global economy, suggesting that ecology and economy increasingly are becoming (con)fused in the geo-economic discourses guiding many decision-makers today. Second, it suggests that the post-Cold War agendas of American geo-economics and geo-politics reveal new understandings of the Earth's ecologies, which have terraforming pretensions for the coming century. Third, it examines how the megatechnics of global production forged during the Second Industrial Revolution assume that mass consumerism, or what Baudrillard calls "consummativity," functions as a productive force; hence, any contemporary attempt to transform consumer preferences or behaviors during the still on-going Third Industrial Revolution, as mainstream environmentalism does, can constitute a move to further revolutionize/modernize/instrumentalize the means of production. However, this break indicates that modern mass consumption, developing out of consummativity models first tested in the 1880s and 1890s, which have been immensely "consumptive" in their ends, is evolving toward new consummativity models in 1980s and 1990s, becoming now much more "consummational" in its goals. Fourth, it tentatively illustrates how four, well-established environmental groups--Worldwatch, Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, and Nature Conservancy--may express aspects of this unusual new consummational consumerism in their activities. And, fifth, it concludes that mainstream American environmentalism, through its odd consumeristic turns, expresses the highest stages of contemporary capitalist development by pushing governmentality's "conduct of conduct" beyond consumptiveness in these networks of transnational capitalist production toward a more rational consummation of consumption in green industrial metabolisms.

A political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about ecology, environments, and Nature, first surfaced as the social project of "environmentalism" during the 1960s in the United States, but it plainly has become far more pronounced in the 1990s. Not much of this takes the form of general theory, because most of its practices have been instead steered toward analysis, stock taking, and classification in quantitative, causal, and humanistic studies. Nonetheless, one can follow Foucault by exploring how mainstream environmentalism in the United States operates as "a whole series of different tactics that combined in varying proportions the objective of disciplining the body and that of regulating populations."³ The project of "sustainability," whether one speaks of sustainable development, growth or use in relation to Earth's ecologies, embodies this new responsibility for the life processes in the American state's rationalized harmonization of political economy with global ecology as a form of green geo-politics.

These interconnections become even more intriguing in the aftermath of the Cold War. Having won the long twilight struggle against communist totalitarianism, the United States is governed by leaders who now see "Earth in the balance," arguing that global ecologies incarnate what is best and worst in the human spirit. On the one hand, economists, industrialists, and political leaders increasingly tend to represent the strategic terrain of the post-1991 world system as one on which all nations must compete ruthlessly to control the future development of the world economy by developing new technologies, dominating more markets, and exploiting every national economic asset. However, the phenomenon of "failed states," ranging from basket cases like Rwanda, Somalia or Angola to crippled entities like Ukraine, Afghanistan or Kazakhstan, often is attributed to the severe environmental frictions associated with the (un)wise (ab)use of Nature by ineffective strategies for creating economic growth.⁴ Consequently, environmental protection issues--ranging from resource conservation to sustainable development to ecosystem restoration--are getting greater consideration in the name of creating jobs, maintaining growth, or advancing technological development.

Taking "ecology" into account, then, creates discourses on "the environment" that derive not only from morality, but from rationality as well. As humanity has faced "the limits of growth" and heard "the population bomb" ticking away, ecologies and environments became something more than what one must judge morally; they became things that state must administer. Ecology has evolved into "a public potential; it called for management procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytical discourses," as it was recognized in its environmentalized manifestations to be "a police matter"--"not the repression of disorder, but an ordered maximization of collective and individual forces."⁵

Discourses of "geo-economics," as they have been expounded more recently by voices as diverse as Robert Reich, Lester Thurow, or Edward Luttwak, as well as rearticulations of "geo-politics" in an ecological register, as they have been developed by President Bill Clinton or Vice President Al Gore, both express new understandings of the earth's economic and political importance as a site for the orderly maximization of many material resources.⁶ Geo-economics, for example, often transforms through military metaphors and strategic analogies what hitherto were regarded as purely economic concerns into national security issues of wise resource use and sovereign property rights. Government manipulation of trade policy, state support of major corporations, or public aid for retraining labor all become vital instruments for "the continuation of the ancient rivalry of the nations by new industrial means."⁷ The relative success or failure of national economies in head-to-head global competitions typically are taken by geo-economics as the definitive register of any one nation-state's waxing or waning international power as well as its rising or falling industrial competitiveness, technological vitality, and economic prowess. In this context, many believe that ecological considerations can be ignored, or given at best only meaningless symbolic responses, in the quest to mobilize as private property as many of the earth's material resources as possible. This hard-nosed response is the essence of "wise use." In the on-going struggle over economic competitiveness, environmental resistance even can be recast by "wise use" advocates as a type of civil disobedience, which endangers national security, expresses unpatriotic sentiments, or embodies treasonous acts.

Geo-economics takes hold in the natural resource crises of the 1970s. Arguing, for example, that "whoever controls world resources controls the world in a way that mere occupation of territory cannot match," Barnet in 1979 asked, first, if natural resource scarcities were real and, second, if economic control over natural resources was changing the global balance of power.⁸ After surveying the struggles to manipulate access to geo-power assets, like oil, minerals, water, and food resources, he did see a new geo-economic challenge as nation-states were being forced to satisfy the rising material expectations of their populations in a much more interdependent world system.⁹ Ironically, the rhetorical pitch of Reich, Thurow and Luttwak in the geo-economics debate of the 1990s mostly adheres to similar terms of analysis. Partly a response to global economic competition, and partly a response to global ecological scarcities, today's geo-economic reading of the earth's political economy constructs the attainment of national economic growth, security, and prosperity as a zero-sum game. Having more material wealth or economic growth in one place, like the U.S.A., means not having it in other places, namely, rival foreign nations. It also assumes material scarcity is a continual constraint; hence, all resources, everywhere and at any time, are private property whose productive potentials must be subject ultimately to economic exploitation.

Geo-economics accepts the prevailing form of mass market consumerism as it presently exists, defines its many material benefits as the public ends that advanced economies ought to seek, and then affirms the need for hard discipline in elaborate programs of productivism, only now couched within rhetorics of highly politicized national competition, as the means for sustaining mass market consumer lifestyles in advanced nations like the United States. Creating economic growth, and producing more of it than other equally aggressive developed and developing countries, is the sine qua non of "national security" in the 1990s. As Richard Darman, President Bush's chief of OMB declared after Earth Day in 1990, "Americans did not fight and win the wars of the twentieth century to make the world safe for green vegetables."¹⁰ However, not everyone sees environmentalism in this age of geo-economics as tantamount to subversion of an entire way of life tied to using increased levels of natural resources to accelerate economic growth.

These geo-economic readings also have sparked new discourses of social responsibility into life, such as the green geo-politics of the Clinton administration with its intriguing codes of ecological reflexivity. The presidential pledge to deploy American power as an environmental protection agency has waxed and waned over the past quarter century, but in 1995 President Clinton made this green geo-politics an integral part of his global doctrine of "engagement." "To reassert America's leadership in the post-Cold War world," and in moving "from the industrial to the information age, from the Cold War world to the global village," President Clinton asserted "we know that abroad we have the responsibility to advance freedom and democracy--to advance prosperity and the preservation of our planet....in a world where the dividing line between domestic and foreign policy is increasingly blurred....Our personal, family, and national future is affected by our policies on the environment at home and abroad. The common good at home is simply not separate from our efforts to advance the common good around the world. They must be one in the same if we are to be truly secure in the world of the 21st century."¹¹

By becoming an agency of environmental protection on a global level, the United States sees itself reasserting its world leadership after the Cold War. As the world's leader, in turn, America stipulates that it cannot advance economic prosperity and ecological preservation without erasing the dividing lines between domestic and foreign policy. In the blur of the coming Information Age and its global villages, the United States cannot separate America's common good from the common goods of the larger world. To be truly secure in the 21st century, each American's personal, family, and national stake in their collective future must be served through the nation's environmental policies. Secretary of State Christopher confirmed President Clinton's engagement with the environment through domestic statecraft and diplomatic action: "protecting our fragile environment also has profound long-range importance for our country, and in 1996 we will strive to fully integrate our environmental goals into our diplomacy--something that has never been done before."¹²

These efforts to connect economic growth with ecological responsibility, however, are stated most systematically in Vice President Al Gore's environmental musings. To ground his green geo-politics, Gore argues that "the task of restoring the natural balance of the Earth's ecological system" could reaffirm America's longstanding "interest in social justice, democratic government, and free market economics."¹³ The geo-powers unlocked by this official ecology might even be seen as bringing "a renewed dedication to what Jefferson believed were not merely American but universal inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."¹⁴ At another level, however, Gore argues that America's global strategies after the Cold War must reestablish "a natural and healthy relationship between human beings and the earth," replacing the brutal exploitation of Nature with an "environmentalism of the spirit."¹⁵

Gore's program for earth stewardship takes a unique geo-economic turn when he calls for a Global Marshall Plan to embed sustainable development at the heart of his green geo-politics. In that historic post-WWII program, as Gore notes, several nations joined together "to reorganize an entire region of the world and change its way of life."¹⁶ Like the Marshall Plan, his new Global Marshall Plan would "focus on strategic goals and emphasize actions and programs that are likely to remove the bottlenecks presently inhibiting the healthy functioning of the global economy...to serve human needs and promote sustained economic progress."¹⁷ In other words, the green geo-politics of this Global Marshall Plan provides a justification for advancing Strategic Environmental Initiatives. That is, the U.S. should be "embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action--to use, in short, every means to halt the destruction of the environment and to preserve and nurture our ecological system."¹⁸ At the end of the Cold War, we cannot simply show interventionist state bureaucracies to the door nor can we allow them to remobilize society around dangerous geo-economic programs of mindless material development. On the contrary, we must bring the state back in to manage production and consumption by being mindful of "the e-factor," or "ecology" as efficiency and economy.¹⁹

The ecological sustainability of consumption is remolded here into an economic growth ideology. Sustaining Nature by preserving consumption from it ecosystems in this green geo-politics becomes now one essential goal among many in his Strategic Environmental Initiative, which will focus on "the development of environmentally appropriate technologies."²⁰ Unsustainable development is largely caused, Gore suggests, by older, inappropriate, anti-environmental technologies. A global campaign is needed to find substitutes for them, and the United States must lead this mobilization to heal its economy and, of course, the environment. Gore says the right things about changing our economic assumptions about mindless consumerism, but his bottom line for sustainable development is found in sustaining American business, industry and science through more mindful forms of consumption. As the world's leading capitalist economy, Gore concludes "the United States has a special obligation to discover effective ways of using the power of market forces to help save the global environment."²¹

In the final analysis, ecologically sustainable development, as Makower observes, boils down to another expression economic rationality. It is "a search for the lowest-cost method of reducing the greatest amount of pollution" in the continued turnover of consumer-centered production processes.²² Almost magically, sustainable development can become primarily an economic, and not merely an environmental, calculation. The initiatives taken by some businesses to prevent pollution, reduce waste, and maximize energy efficiencies are to be supported. Ecology can win, but only if it can reaffirm on a higher, more perfect register most of fast capitalism's existing premises of technology utilization, managerial centralization, and profit generation now driving advanced corporate capitalism.

These maneuvers are not taken simply to preserve Nature, mollify green consumers, or respect Mother Earth; they are done to enhance corporate profits, national productivity, and state power, because "the e-factor" is not simply ecology--it also is efficiency, excellence, education, empowerment, enforcement, and economics. As long as realizing ecological changes in business means implementing an alternative array of instrumentally rational policies, such as finding lower-cost methods of energy use, supply management, labor utilization, corporate communication, product generation or pollution abatement, sustainable development also will maintain the economy. Gore's new stewardship through sustainable development may not be strictly ecological, but his green geopolitics cultivates the image, at least, of being environmentally responsible.²³ This compromise allows one to work "deliberately and carefully, with an aim toward long-term cultural change, always with an eye toward the bottom line, lest you get frustrated and discouraged in the process" so that these "environmentally responsible businesses can be both possible and profitable."²⁴

While many remember 1968 for the May events in Paris, a far more significant development unfolded during December on the flight of Apollo 10 to the Moon and back. Even though this space craft did not actually land on the lunar surface, its crew provided the first photographs and video images captured by human beings on an astronautical mission into space. The impression made these images of a sun lit, cloud-swatched blue/green/brown ball floating in the dark cosmos is still recasting humanity's sense of place; indeed, the quite common circulation of these and many other similar images now constitutes a thematic center for new "astro" panoptic disciplinary discourses. Because we can see Earth from space, like aliens arriving on Mars or Venus, our worldwatching abilities from a space craft presumably empowers such technoscientific worldwatchers with special worldacting responsibilities to craft space on Earth by reaching for its most optimal ecologized performance as "Spaceship Earth." At some point during the next century, human beings might, as some astronautical scientists advocate today, terraform Mars, a Jovian moon or some asteroids. Until then, however, environmentalists and others speaking ex cathedra from this photographically-mediated astropanopticon advance their own unique and varied projects for terraforming the Earth.

This astropanopticon has effects: the reaffirmation of environmental vigilance in geo-economic discourses in the 1980s and 1990s arguably is altering the behavior of some corporate and state agencies toward Nature. Because the Earth, as Al Gore asserts, is in the balance, the raw externalization of some environmental costs to generate economic benefits is becoming less common in some countries around the world, if not in fact then, at least, as principle. Yet, this more refined internalization of ecological debits and credits also implicitly articulates a new understanding about Nature. One must push past the gratifying green glow emanating from documents like the Brundtland Report or Agenda 21 in which humanity often appears ready to call an end to war against Nature in order to launch a new era of peaceful coexistence with all the Earth's wild expanses and untamed creatures. In fact, these initiatives, like many other visions of sustainable development, balanced growth or ecological modernization, simply underscore the validity of Jameson's take on postmodernity. That is, our postmodern condition flows out of transnational networks of global production and consumption, a situation in which "the modernization process is complete and Nature is gone for good."²⁵ Gore's Strategic Environmental Initiative culminates in the infrastructuralization of the planet.

The wild autogenic otherness or settled theogenic certainty of "Nature" is being replaced by the denatured anthropogenic systems of "the environment." The World Commission of Environment and Development admits humanity is unable to fit "its doings" into the "pattern of clouds, oceans, greenery, and soils" that is the Earth. The hazards of this new reality cannot be escaped, but they "must be recognized--and managed."²⁶ Through astropanoptic technoscience, "we can see and study the Earth as an organism whose health depends on the health of all its parts," which gives us "the power to reconcile human affairs with natural laws and to thrive in the process."²⁷ This reconciliation rests upon understanding "natural systems," expanding "the environmental resource base," managing "environmental decay," or controlling "environmental trends."²⁷ As the Rio Declaration asserts, Earth's "integral and interdependent nature" can be, and then is, redefined as "the global environmental and developmental system" in which what was once God's wild Nature becomes technoscientific managerialists' tame ecosystems.²⁸

The hazards of living on Earth cannot be avoided or escaped, but Earth itself can be escaped in rededicating human production and consumption to hazard avoidance by reimagining Nature as terrestrial infrastructure. The astropanopticon's epiphany of seeing the Earth from space--remember the Brundtland Report's opening line, "In the middle of the 20th century, we saw our planet from space for the first time" has ironically become a self-fulfilling prophecy by exerting "a greater impact on thought than did the Copernican revolution of the 16th century."²⁹ Like those humans of our spacefaring future who will not let Mars, be Mars, Luna, be Luna, or some other off-world, be a world-off, Earth no longer can be allowed to just be the Earth. Instead Terra is being terra(re)formed by seeing for the first time from space its "natural ecosystems" and "environmental resource base" which humans can see, study and manage in their quest to optimize the processes of surviving and thriving. The Preamble to Agenda 21 reverberates the impact of these thoughts for the Brundtland Report's future historians:

Plainly, the Preamble to Agenda 21 could as easily be named the Terraforming Compact inasmuch as its basic sentiments sum up "humanity's" managerial imperatives in the Earth's infrastructuralization, integrating environmental and developmental systems in "global partnership" to better protect all ecosystems and improve living standards for all through technoscientic terraforming.

Under this terraforming horizon, what seems little more than an a pious aside in Agenda 21, in fact, reveals a great deal more. When this document would have us recognize "the integral and interdependent Nature of the Earth," it emphasizes how the Earth is "our home."³¹ Terraforming, then, is a form of globalized "home building," whose processes and progress should be monitored from two sets of now commonly-denominated books: the registers of oikonomia as well as the ledgers of oikologos. The infrastructuralization of the Earth reimagines it as a rational responsive household in which economically action commodifies everything, utilizes anything, wastes nothing, blending the natural and the social into a single but vast set of household accounts whose performativities must constantly weigh consumption against production at every level of analysis from suburbia to the stratosphere in balancing the terrestrial budgets of ecological modernization. The infrastructuralization of Nature through environmentalizing movements and discourses propels contemporary societies and economies beyond the autogenic giveness of Nature into terraformative anthropogenesis, dissolving the formal boundaries between inside/outside, Nature/Culture, or earth/economy. As Baudrillard observes, "it implies practical computation and conceptualization on the basis of a total abstraction, the notion of a world no longer given but instead produced--mastered, manipulated, inventoried, controlled: a world, in short, that has to be constructed."³²

The workings of "the environment" as a concept now bring many contemporary terraforming efforts to rescue the Earth's ecology back to the sources of its original meanings. To note this ironic conjunction does not uncover some timeless semantic essence; it merely reaccentuates aspects in the term's origins that accompany it from its beginnings into the present. As a word, environment is brought into English from Old French, and in both languages "an environment" is a state of being produced by the verb "environ." And, environing as a verb marks a type of strategic action, or activities associated with encircling, enclosing, encompassing or enveloping. Environing, then, is the physical activity of surrounding, circumscribing, or ringing around something or someone. Its first uses denote stationing guards, thronging with hostile intent, or standing watch over a place or person. To environ a site or a subject is to beset, beleaguer or besiege. Consequently, an environment--either as the means of these activities or the product of such actions--should be treated in a far more liberal fashion.

An environmental act, even though the connotations of most contemporary greenspeak suggests otherwise, is a disciplinary move.³³ Environmentalism in these terms strategically polices space in order to encircle sites and subjects captured within these enveloping maneuvers, guarding them, standing watch over them, or even besieging them. And, each of these actions aptly express the terraforming programs of sustainable development. Seen from the astropanopticon, Earth is enveloped in the managerial designs of global commerce, which environmentalize once wild Nature as now controllable ecosystems. Terraforming the wild biophysical excesses and unoptimized geophysical wastes of the Earth necessitates the mobilization of a worldwatch to maintain nature conservancies and husband the worldwide funds of wildlife. Of course, Earth must be put first; the fully rational potentials of second nature's terraformations can be neither fabricated nor administered unless and until earth first is infrastructuralized.³⁴

This is our time's Copernican revolution: the anthropogenic demands of terraforming require a biocentric worldview in which the alienated objectivity of natural subjectivity resurfaces objectively in managerial theory and practice as "ecosystem" and "resource base" in "the environment." Terraforming the Earth environmentalizes a once wild piece of the cosmos, domesticating it as "humanity's home" or "our environment." From narratives of world pandemics, global warming, or planetary pollution, global governance from the astropanopticon now runs its risk analyses and threat scenarios to protect Mother Earth from home-grown and foreign threats, as the latest security panics over asteroid impacts or X-File extraterrestrials in the United States express in the domains of popular culture. Whether it is space locusts from Independence Day or space rocks snuffing out Dallas in Asteroid, new security threats are casting their shadows over our homes, cities, and biomes for those thinking geo-economically in the astropanopticon.

From such sites of supervision, environmentalists see from above and from without, like the NASA-eyed view of Earth from Apollo spacecraft, through the enveloping astropanoptic designs of administratively controllable terraformed systems.³⁵ Encircled by enclosures of alarm, environments can be disassembled, recombined, and subjected to expert managers' disciplinary designs. Beset and beleaguered by these all-encompassing interventions, environments as ecosystems and terraformations can be redirected to fulfill the ends of new economic scripts, managerial directives or administrative writs.³⁶ How various environmentalists might embed different instrumental rationalities into the policing of ecosystems is an intriguing question, which will be explored below.

To preserve the various ecologies of the planet on a global scale, as many environmental groups assert, the inhabitants of each human community must rethink the entire range of their economic and technological interconnections to their local habitats, as national discourses of green geo-politics and grey geo-economics illustrate, in terms of how they are meshed into the regional, national, and international exchange of goods and services. Beginning this strategic review immediately poses the question of protecting all existing concrete "bioregions" in first nature, or the larger biosphere of the planet, within which the ecologies of any and all human communities are rooted. Bioregions historically have constituted the particular spatial setting of human beings' social connections to specific lands, waters, plants, animals, peoples, and climates from which their communities culturally constitute meaningful places for themselves in the "first nature" of the natural biosphere.³⁷

The "domination of nature" is not so much the total control of natural events in the environment as much as it is the willful disregard of such localized ecological conditions in building human settlements.³⁸ The abstract "technoregions" constructed within the human fabrications of "second nature," or the always emergent technosphere of the planet, within which modernizing human communities are now mostly embedded, operate by virtue of environmental transactions that often are over, beyond, or outside of rough equilibria of their natural habitats. These transactions create new anthropogenic ecological contexts, which typically generate an artificial hyperecology of an ultimately unsustainable type.³⁹ A great deal of time and energy might be expended in core capitalist countries upon environmental regulations, resource surveys, ecological studies, and conservation policies, but these initiatives almost always are consumerist campaigns, aiming to reform the costs and regulate the benefits of these unsustainable flows of goods and services through the hyperecologies of second nature.⁴⁰

Consumer society constitutes an entirely new system of objects out on the terrains of second nature. Baudrillard shrewdly aspires to be recognized as second nature's Linneaus, asserting that second nature plainly has a fecundity or vitality of its own:

Finding a rationality and systematicity in this quickening procession of products, Baudrillard believes his new technified taxonomies for every object (products, goods, appliances, gadgets, etc.) of the system permits us to plumb the system of objects propounded by contemporary economies of mass production/mass consumption. To do so, however, one must push past the silences of the silent majorities, and decipher the meanings of mass consumption as the consuming masses reveal them. Exploring consumption of objects in particular might disclose "the processes whereby people relate to them and with the systems of human behavior and relationships that result thereform," and thereby allowing anyone to reach "an understanding of what happens to objects by virtue of their being produced and consumed, possessed and personalized."⁴²

Here is where habitus emerges from the systems of objects and objects of systems compounded with the technosphere. Bourdieu asserts habitus emerges out of "the capacity to produce classifiable practices and works, and the capacity to differentiate and appreciate these practices and products (taste), that the represented social world, i.e., the space of life-styles, is constituted."⁴³ Yet, the dual dimensionality of habitus as a structured and structuring structure parallels the properties of habitat, which when taken in environmental terms, provides a scheme of systems generating classifiable practices and products as well as a scheme for systems of appreciating and comprehending within and amidst specific settings. Consequently, the habitats of second nature out on the technoregionalized ranges of anthropogenic technospheres are formed out of habitus, or the system of distinctive signs in practices and works driving lives styled by the system of objects.

In these new spaces, terraformative hyperecologies can be monitored to judge their relative success or failure in terms of abstract mathematical measures of consumption, surveying national gains or losses by the density, velocity, intensity, and quantity of goods and services being exchanged for mass consumption. Here one finds geo-economists pushing for wiser uses of all biotic assets in all anthropogenic exchanges. Consumption is outsourced from many different planetary sites by using varying levels of standardized energy, natural resources, food, water and labor inputs drawn from all over the Earth through transnational commodity, energy, and labor markets.⁴⁴ Geo-economic forms of state power and/or market clout, in turn, allegedly will provide the requisite force needed to impose these costs on the many outside for the benefit of the few inside. By substituting "Earth Days" for real ecological transformation, the hyperecologies of transnational exchange are successfully repacking themselves in green wrappers of ecological concern; but, they still often involve the profligate waste of energy, resources, and time to maintain the abstract aggregate subjectivity of "an average consumers" enjoying "the typical standard of living" in the developed world's cities and suburbs. Yet, if this is indeed happening, then how did these patterns develop?

As large firms claimed a monopoly over planning purposive-rational action in the work place in the Second Industrial Revolution over a century ago, individuals and families increasingly accepted new disciplinary definitions given by the state and corporate capital to their individual ecological wants and private material goals. Organic needs for air, drink, food, clothing, shelter, and productive labor, hitherto defined by the homespun crafts of the pre-capitalist or entrepreneurial capitalist household in Earth's many bioregions, underwent rapid commercial redefinition through scientifically engineered transformations by embedding incessantly commodified satisfactions for organic needs within everyone's purchasing of corporate products. These rationally designed corporate interventions into the ecological reproduction of society, in turn, enabled the aggregate planning system of corporate production "to organize the entire society in its interest and image" in the diverse technoregions of corporate design.⁴⁵ Such systems of mass production presume a regime of mass consumption: masses of consumers consuming massed arrays of energy, information and material to close the circulation and accumulation of capital posed by mass production.⁴⁶

Few consumers, however, are aware of the frightful significance lurking in the roots of their most prized economic labels. To consume, following from the Latin consumere, means to take up completely or lay hold of altogether. It also is to devour, waste, destroy, squander, or devastate. Consumers make away with food, drink, land, capital, or wealth, wearing out by use or spending without heed. Consumers exhaust exchangeable value or devour useful goods. Consumers counterbalance producers, or those who, in keeping with the Latin producere, lead, bring forth, extend or promote things. Producement leads to consumptiveness, the consumptuous follow from the producent. What has been brought forth must be taken up: production presumes consumption, and consumption assumes production. As a result of this collaboration, Horkheimer notes that

Starting first in the affluent upper-class core and middle-class suburbs of the major industrial cities and then spreading unequally at various rates of speed into more marginal market zones in the inner-city ethnic neighborhoods, racial ghettos, small towns and rural areas in advanced capitalist states, the new consumerist forms of personality and society emerged on the diverse terrains of corporate technoregions from within the bioregional wreckage of the pre-capitalist and bourgeois social orders. Whether it is defined as "Americanization," "development," "modernization," or "progress," the Second Industrial Revolution granted to the managers of corporate capital and the state power to decide the ground rules of a new ecology.⁴⁸ They planned what particular material packages and behavioral scripts could be produced and provided in their various technoregions along a multiple spectra of quality and quantity-graded and limited-quantity alternatives to the masses of consumers. Consumers simply exercise their "free choice" among many buying alternatives sourced through corporate hyperecology. In turn, individuals would not look beyond these packaged material alternatives or back to more organically-grounded bio-regions for more natural options. Hyperecologies deliver the commodified need-satisfactions required to fulfill individual need-definitions as each consumer might have imagined them. Massed consumption by the consuming masses is brute energy, information, and matter consumption as corporations and technoscience roughly organize it. Through this developmental path, the individual personality becomes an integral part of the collective means of production, and the modern family becomes yet another service delivery node in the hyperecologies of this global fast capitalism culture.

This circuit of economic reproduction expresses the essential logic of "consummativity" that now anchors the transnational economic system. Instead of maintaining the irreducible tension between the "public" and "private" spheres that liberal economic and legal theory hold to be true for the individual contingency of rational living, the public and private have collapsed in circuits of identity all across the coding systems of corporate-managed consummativity, while the collective imperatives of the firm and/or the state are internalized by individuals as personalized lines of consumption in the family, firm and mass public.⁴⁹ Such linkages, in turn, allow the state and firm to more closely regulate the economic and ecological existence of individuals inasmuch as most persons allegedly now desire the "needs" extended to them as the rewarding reified scripts of normal behavior by the media, mass education or professional experts and as the packages of mass-produced material goods made available by corporate manufacture and commerce. Yet, these individual "needs" also are simultaneously required by the contemporary state and corporate firm. The aggregate possibility for economic growth and the specific quality of commodity claims, implied by these individual needs taken en masse, are the productive forces guaranteeing further development in today's transnational corporate system of capitalist production.

The underlying codes of consummativity in corporate capitalism rarely manifest themselves openly. They are masked instead as an on-going democratic social and economic revolution "rooted in the democratic alibi of universals," like convenience, modernity, growth, utility or progress. As Baudrillard suggests, consummativity presents itself,

As inchoate mass demands for a better "standard of living" illustrate, corporate capital still can pose successfully as a revolutionary vanguard for those who want more bananas, autos, oranges, and washing machines out of life. Speaking on behalf of deprived consumers and challenging the apparently more oppressive stratification, inequality, and material deprivation of all other forms of precapitalist or anticapitalist society, fast capitalism offers hyperecological promises of complete economic democracy, social equality and material abundance through consumption. This pledge, in turn, is legitimated by the expansive corporate collateral of new sparkling material goods, exciting cultural events, and satisfying social services.

Under modern corporate capitalism, the plannable life course of all individuals qua "consumers" becomes a capital asset in that the consummative mobilization of production in any given market directly boosts the productivity, profitability and power of corporate capital's increasingly automated industries. Within the hyperecologies of second nature, corporate capital finds in consummativity

As a result, the disciplinary managerial planning of corporate capital now can generate new hierarchies of status, power, and privilege out of hyperecology's economic democracy of mass consumption by developing different "consumption communities" around distinct grades of material objects and professional services.⁵² Creating and then serving even newer modes of desire in these symbolic communities perpetually drives the transnational market's hyperecologies of endless growth. Allegedly competing capitalist firms increasingly produce very similar goods and services using very similar techniques and structures planned out on a massive scale to satisfy the desires of individual subjects that their "competing lines" of products now necessarily presume will exist. Subjectivity is encoded directly and indirectly in manufactured materiality. The increasingly homogenized object world in systems of corporate markets concomitantly is invested with rich, heterogeneous symbolic/imaginary differentiations in order to provide individual subjects with codes that they and others can distinguish the various relative status grades of community and personality across and within these consumption communities as marketing codes for the system of objects.

Baudrillard observes, "the fetishization of the commodity is the fetishization of a product emptied of its concrete substance of labor and subjected to another type of labor, a labor of signification, that is, of coded abstraction (the production of differences and of sign values). It is an active, collective process of production and reproduction of a code, a system, invested with all the diverted, unbound desire separated out from the process of real labor."⁵³ Just as exchange value once outstripped and mastered use value, so too now has sign value overcome exchange value in contemporary corporate hyperecologies. "Fetishism is actually attached," in Baudrillard's analysis, "to the sign object, the object eviscerated of its substance and history, and reduced to the state of marking a difference, epitomizing a whole system of differences."⁵⁴ Under the profit horizon of corporate capital, the consciousness-engineering industries of advertising and activism spend millions of dollars and hours to carefully construct codes that differentiate the sign values of commodified objects. And, the varying psychodemographic means of steering individuals to these artificially defined and symbolically differentiated manufactured goods and packaged services--through direct mail, magazine ads, television dramas, radio give-aways, peer pressure, fashion discourse, or public education--conduct the power of capital through the symbolic codes of consumption. The objects of the system create and sustain the system of objects.

In these modernized spaces, "all are free to dance and enjoy themselves, just as they have been free, since the historical neutralization of religion to join any of the innumerable sects. But freedom to choose an ideology--since ideology always reflects economic coercion--everywhere proves to be the freedom to choose what always is the same."⁵⁵ By accepting such ephemeral ideologies of identity and purpose for living hyperecologically, all classes of consumers consign themselves to "finding their salvation in objects, consecrated to a social destiny of consumption and thus assigned to a slave morality (enjoyment, immorality, irresponsibility) as opposed to a master morality (responsibility and power)."⁵⁶ And, in internalizing the expectations of these packaged choices of imposed consumption, as they are tied directly to "discretionary income" and "leisure time," individuals purposely accept new kinds of collective hyperecological responsibilities. If they do not shop until they drop, shops will drop. In an important sense, individual subjects occupy the key niche in contemporary hyperecologies as they closely control their own behavior (or serve as cultural complements of administrative activism), and they ceaselessly consume products (or function as predictable units of production for the corporate sector).

Global fast capitalism purposely has stimulated the propagation of consumption, not primarily as the rewards for accepting a life of material abundance in an affluent society, but rather mostly as constant investment in a new productive force. Hyperecologies are systems of sustainable development for the objects of this system of objects. "The consumption of individuals," as Baudrillard states, "mediates the productivity of corporate capital; it becomes a productive force required by the functioning of the system itself, by its process of reproduction and survival. In other words, there are only these kinds of needs because the system of corporate production needs them. And the needs invested by the individual consumer today are just as essential to the order of production as the capital invested by the capitalist entrepreneur and the labor power invested in the wage laborer. It is all capital."⁵⁷ Under the hyperecological imperatives of transnational exchange, all individuals as "consumers" become capital assets inasmuch as their consummative mobilization directly boosts the productivity, profitability, and power of corporate capital's increasingly globalized industries. On the horizon made by corporate capitalism's consummative order, the social affirmation of increasing permissiveness, whose codes always accelerate the rationally organized exploitation of desire to increase or rationalize productivity, acquires as much importance in maintaining social cohesion under corporate capitalism as the values of ascetic self-discipline, personal frugality and individual sacrifice once did in the productivist order of entrepreneurial capital.⁵⁸

In some sense, Baudrillard's political economy of the sign explores the discontinuities or ruptures coming with the Third Industrial Revolution supplanting the Second Industrial Revolution. After having determined how contemporary systems of objects operate, Baudrillard illustrates how the object of the system during the Second Industrial Revolution was coping with the obscene overproduction of cartelized, professionalized, organized, multinationalized industrial production, or the endless replication of standardized exchange values, through orders of mass consumption. Wasteful excessive overproductive industries requires markets organized around overconsumption, excess, and waste. The object of the system within this system of objects is an apparent impossibility: endless growth. And, the endlessness of growth requires growing ends without end in order to charge and center the hyperproductive engines of modern industry. Thus, all of the enterprises tied to private property must embed their private properties in every property associated with private enterprise.

These superintensive trends of factor utilization in consumptive consummativity are where mainstream environmentalism and transnational enterprise now are fighting over the terms and scope of Nature's (un)wise (ab)use in environmentalized sites of struggle today during the informationalization campaigns of the Third Industrial Revolution. Will some sort of qualitative refinement or another type of quantitative expansion anchor further/future forms of rationalization of the mass consumption regime behind global fast capitalism? Hyperecology continuously has sustained capitalist social relations by drawing in more and more the necessary inputs for its technosphere as raw masses of materiale from further and further recesses in the biosphere. Nonetheless, this mass consumption of raw and refined mass also can be made more rational by admitting to its environmental failings; that is, it uses much more energy than it produces, it destroys its own ecological base, it does not meet local needs in local habitats, it destroys multiculture in favor of monoculture, and it tends toward chaotic carelessness. Reducing these excesses to "better consumption" gives mainstream environmentalism the operational option to reconstruct anew transnational exchange as another more perfect form of geo-economic productive force from within.

Consummativity seems to be evolving, therefore, with some types of transnational capital in the Third Industrial Revolution after the 1960s. It pushes beyond the economic exhaustion of mere consumptiveness, devouring fixed definite stocks of product, in order to complete or perfect the processes of production as consummation, generating fluid flows of performative improvements in the completion of the market's perpetual motion machines of creative destruction. Consumer as consummator might bring to perfection or accomplish in full completion more informationalized cycles of systemic global exchange, moving them away from purely engerized or materialized cycles of valorization. Exhaustible stocks of natural resources--defined and appropriated as mere matter--become inexhaustible systems of natural resourcing--recast as information, molecular codes, space, or sign values. Consummation resonates with meanings from its Latin origins, or the consummatus: that which brings forth the highest, the supreme, or the perfect in finished completion to the utmost degree. Since the 1960s, one key modality of imagining such perfection or realizing this supreme rationality has been an inchoate, albeit vital, sense of ecology, the environment or sustainability.

Something major has shifted, then, since 1968. Global fast capitalism no longer masses production or consumption as narrowly as it once did. New distributed networks of outsourcing, product platforming, and global marketing are hollowing out once broad massive firms, massed consumer markets, and mass production systems in many complex layers and skeins of narrow niche enterprises, markets, and producers by informationalizing their craft. Informationalizing these economies also "informs" new sign and/or information-driven consumption logics; indeed, consumption is coevolving, at least in some areas or industries, with new niched informationalized firms into the terraforming regime of consummation.

Sophisticated environmentalism now aims then to abate fast capitalism's consumptive characteristics in favor of accentuating its consummational potentialities. Industrial capitalism classically has been a regime of consumptivity--wasteful, expensive, costly--that must now undergo the rigorous restructuring of ecological modernization. And, today's modernizing ecologies assume the acceptance of consummativity might be reshaped to serve the informational ends of consummation--as economic actions fully fulfilled, perfected, organized ecologically--in the newly environmentalized (re)production of transnational exchange.

New desires first come to light in most regions for many people in aesthetically or ethically charged sign value differentia, liberating new wishes and mobilizing fresh wants, both to justify corporate capitalist firms' industrial consumption of natural resources and to mobilize new mass produced products fabricated from these natural resources.⁵⁹ Such recombinantly imagineered needs perhaps are late capitalism's only truly "renewable resource" of any importance, and this constant revitalization of human wants with fresh images and objects of desire can drive the terraformative hyperecologies of sustainable development. In these hyperecologies, the material culture of corporate capitalism makes culture material by ever-accelerating new sign values or informational goods in the turnover of mass consumption.⁶⁰

Consumer goods, as they are produced under the logic of consummativity, constitute powerful object-codes, articulating a sophisticated sign and meaning system that coding-subjects use to encode and decode both their behaviors and material objects with meaning.⁶¹ Consumer goods, as a result, provide a vitally important field to put all sorts of cultural meanings into public and private discourses as forces of social change or cultural continuity, which artists and activists, for example, always have exploited in valorizing commodities with their peculiar aestheticized or moralizing imagination. Aesthetic modernism and new social movements have been the major sources of new ends for corporate hyperecologies for nearly a century, and their powers remain intact today. Insurgent systems manifest and latent meaning, on the other hand, also give artists and activists tremendous opportunities to challenge the established object-codes of late capitalism, testing both the media and the messages that the hyperecologies of late capitalism use to integrate individuals and society into its reproduction.⁶² There is no reason why they cannot or should not now become green--as many artists and activists have asked for nearly a generation. Consummation as well as consumptivity requires informationalized surveillance to detect demand and then confirm its satisfaction in highly accurate loops of telemetry. Perfection of product environmentally, as Gore asserts, rather than the waste of factors anti-environmentally can drive profitability for all of the world's producers by centering product-improvement strategies upon "green" goals, which artists and activists are enjoining consumers to embrace.

It is through these object-codes and their aestheticized means of mass propagation that art and activism influence the ecology of global fast capitalism. The real facticity of transnational capitalism gains continuous (re)expression through the number, style, design, shape and color of mass produced material objects adduced by the imagination of commercialized arts and design. Likewise, the codes of desire, need, and want are (re)denominated moralistically in ethical terms, first, to attract and, then, to keep individuals expressing their personal desires in terms of scientifically designed and organizationally produced material satisfactions.⁶³ Without artists and activists, the consummative society could not endlessly redynamicize its unrelenting production of newer goods, trendier products, and fresher images consumptively. Yet, as the efforts of many environmental activisms indicate, it also need not be grounded upon the superexhaustive use of Nature and its ecosystemic resources.⁶⁴ The destruction of Nature, in part, begins in every individual instrumentalized imagination mobilized by the market or the firm to make individuals always desire more, want everything longer, and wish it better in purely consumptive terms. Mass consumption is consumptuous consuming by the masses of massed materiale. Yet, this sort of mindless mass consumption by consuming masses is precisely what many environmental movements want to moderate, if not obliterate, by interposing new signs systems in the more mindful cost/benefit environmentalized calculus of consummational perfection. As the activities of the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, or the Worldwide Wildlife Fund illustrate, environmentalism can adduce new kinds of consumer reports for consummation, highlighting the virtues of ecologically enhanced consuming, environmental savings, or ecotouristic buying to find new functionalities for fast capitalism's objects and needs.

Developing a unique personal identity or purpose under a consumptive cultural horizon essentially has boiled down to reassembling pre-packaged purposes imputed by the aestheticized codings of one's income level, occupation, residence or material possessions in psychodemographic discourses about national economic development. The corporate plan for greater sales, for example, served in part as an individual behavioral map for loosely programmed personal development. General Motors produces cars, and it wants to dominate the autoworld of global automotive markets. Through focus group research, it discovers what one or more demographic blocs of buyers desire. And, in concretizing their desire for "freedom," "excitement," or "practicality," it fulfills its purposes of producing profits by selling the identity/commodity of Oldsmobiles, Pontiacs, or Geos to individuals who "succeed" by mapping their desires in/with these products. What is good for Americans, then, is good for General Motors. This process, however, goes beyond automobiles; all psychosocial development for any given person's mazeway in life is defined broadly in terms of accumulating standardized objects or consuming conventionalized experiences produced within the marketplace.

However, the terraforming imperatives of transnational capitalism acknowledge the need for a more regulated environment by accepting environmental regulations, albeit often kicking and screaming in the process, which moves new sign values into consummativity's equations. On the one hand, GM "builds excitement" at Pontiac, while it, on the other hand, promises "to do something nice for your mother," or Nature, by planting a tree for every Geo it sells. Seeing Earth from a spacecraft is forcing many capitalist concerns to approach mass production and consumption with new forms of space crafting which recast industry as industrial metabolism, product lifecycles as lifecycle production, and corporate marketing as green consumerism. Putting Earth first on the world watch of terraforming, then, leads to new green sign values for global fast capitalism. Slowing down, getting more organized, simplifying things, or scaling back become semiotic goods or sign values to acquire, display or practice. Indeed, environmentalizing exchange at times begins to look like a capitalist global fast. Yet, environmentalized consumerism is not insignificant, "far from the individual expressing his needs in the economic system," as Baudrillard claims, "it is the economic system that induces the individual function and parallel functionality of objects and needs."⁶⁵ Consummativity read post-consumptively through consummational consumer reports also will be no more than "an ideological structure, a historical form correlative with the commodity form (exchange value), and the object form (use value)"⁶⁶ required by the green goals of terraformative sustainable development.

Environmentalizing consumption along the lines tested by some environmental movements is an intriguing attempt to transform raw consumption into refined consummation. From the existing system of objects, environmentalists pull its most fundamental truth: "objects now are by no means meant to be owned and used but solely to be produced and bought. In other words, they are structured as a function neither of needs nor of a more rational organization of the world, but instead constitute a system determined by an ideological regime of production and social integration."⁶⁷ The technosphere's system of objects objectifies systematic spheres of technified behaviors in each and every technoregion. The habitus of this system of objects now is humanity's most real habitat, and consumer society is "a social realm, a temporal realm, a realm of things by virtue of which, and by virtue of the strategy that imposes it, objects are able to fulfill their function as accelerators and multipliers of tasks, satisfactions, and expenditures."⁶⁸ To save the habitat, one must reshape the habitus.

Accepting the constraints imposed by such anthropogenic biomes, many environmental groups challenge the fetishization of circulation at the root of consumption by interposing new notions of ownership and use amidst consumer society's carnivals of production/exchange/consumption. If consumer goods (either as objects or objectified experiences) are accelerators and multipliers of tasks, satisfactions, and expenditures, then environmental movements aspire to green their acceleration, ecologize their multiplication, and environmentalize their tasks, satisfactions, and expenditures in accord with a more rational organization of world to be propounded through terraforming the Earth.

Terra under an ever-vigilant worldwatch cannot be permitted to squander its world wildlife funds for it must guard nature's conservancies and always enlarge its sierra clubs. Connecting terraforming to consummation is how mainstream environmentalism would redeem contemporary consummativity from raw consumerism to perfect the tasks, satisfactions, and expenditures embedded in the system of objects through ecology as "sustainable development." Following Baudrillard, "the best evidence for this is the obsessiveness that lies behind so many organizational projects and (of most relevance to our present discussion) behind the will to design"⁶⁹ in so many theories and practices of mainstream environmentalism. Terraforming's (con)fusion of habitus and habitat, economy and ecology, domicile and dominion culminates in global governmentalities that intermesh carrying capacities with credit cycles as environmentalized biospheres/technospheres: "everything has to intercommunicate, everything has to be functional--no more secrets, no more mysteries, everything is organized, everything is clear."⁷⁰

Just as consumptiveness is the object of Second Industrial Revolution systems, consummation can become the object of Third Industrial Revolution systems as the calculi of sign value reintegrate and redifferentiate vectors of value around ever changing green sign systems. In such solutions of (re)significance, however, the sign-values of ecology/environment/efficiency have to be proven as stable solutions for the more stratified, transnationalized, multi-niched systems of the Third Industrial Revolution. Whereas impermanence, excess, fragility, ephemerality or obsolescence were required to sustain the dissipative excesses of the Second Industrial Revolution's economies of scale, durability, aptness, frugality, permanence or timelessness perfect the smart performativities of the Third Industrial Revolution's economies of scope. The real cultural contradictions of contemporary capitalism are not those of accumulation versus expenditure or repressiveness versus permissiveness, but rather those of ecology versus exchange as the object of this system turns out to be engineering environments or perfecting purchases in the oxymoronic practices of sustainable development.

Environmentalism, then, should not be automatically assumed to be opposed to mass consumption, as many in the "wise use" movement have claimed. Of course, there are factions among the environmental movement, ranging from voluntary simplicity to deep ecology, who tout the virtues of consuming less, consuming differently, or consuming nothing.⁷¹ However, they typically take these positions as part of a more general rejection of modern production as well. Their anti-industrial pretensions, in turn, are often not well-supported in either their theories or practices inasmuch as producing/consuming nothing soon would cause mass economic chaos, producing/consuming differently often boils down to defending certain privileged artifacts or crafts against mass market pressures, and producing/consuming less frequently seems like a new rationing scheme to reallocate poverty. While most environmental rhetorics sound anti-consummative, many of them upon closer reading perhaps should be more rightly understood as pro-consummational in their post-consumptive reasoning.

To substantiate this interpretation of environmentalism and consumerism, one can look at almost any mainstream environmental organization and find many remarkable parallels with consumerist agendas. Consummational logics come from somewhere, and such environmental movements are where many of their post-consumptive axioms arise. The examples used here are meant to be illustrative rather than exhaustive, because these four cases clearly can not cover all of the possibilities.

A. The Worldwatch Institute

While many examples of such consummational tendencies might be mobilized here, this first look at mainstream environmentalism as a mediation of new governmental codes for consummativity through a regime of "environmentality" will center upon the work of the Worldwatch Institute. As one very high-profile attempt to reinvent the forces of nature to consummationally serve the economic exploitation of advanced technologies, the Worldwatch Institute's rational management of ecological energies provides a quite significant supplement to transnational commercial interests promoting the growth of the global economy.

The Worldwatch Institute provides a very curious instantiation of how a regime of consummation might be seen at work in the processes of global industrial production and consumption. Seeing the path of untrammeled consumptive development as the cause of today's environmental crises, a recent Worldwatch Institute book by Brown, Flavin and Postel attributes the prevailing faith in more consumptive growth to "a narrow economic view of the world."⁷² Any constraints on further growth are cast by conventional economics "in terms of inadequate demand growth rather than limits imposed by the earth's resources."⁷³ Ecologists, however, should push beyond technosphere to study the complex changing relationships of organisms with their environments, and, for them, "growth is confined by the parameters of the biosphere."⁷⁴ For Brown, Flavin, and Postel, economists ironically regard ecologists' concerns as "a minor subdiscipline of economics--to be 'internalized' in economic models and dealt with at the margins of economic planning," while "to an ecologist, the economy is a narrow subset of the global ecosystem."⁷⁵ To end this schism, the discourse of dangers propagated by the Worldwatch Institute pushes to merge ecology with economics to infuse environmental studies with economic instrumental rationality and defuse economics with ecological systems reasoning. Once this is done, economic growth no longer can be divorced from "the natural systems and resources from which they ultimately derive," and any economic process that "undermines the global ecosystem cannot continue indefinitely,"⁷⁶ which permits the Worldwatch Institute to give consummation a green tint.

With this rhetorical maneuver, the Worldwatch Institute articulates its visions of consummational economics as the instrumental rationality of resource managerialism, working on a global scale in transnationalized registers of application in order to perfect the wastefulness of consumptive societies. Nature is terra(re)formed by Worldwatch as a cybernetic system of biophysical systems, whose terraformations reappear among today's nation-states in "four biological systems--forests, grasslands, fisheries, and croplands--which supply all of our food and much of the raw materials for industry, with the notable exceptions of fossil fuels and minerals."⁷⁷ The performance of these systems should be monitored in analytical spreadsheets written in bioeconomic terms, and then judged in consummational equations balancing constantly increasing human population, constantly running base ecosystem outputs, and highly constrained possibilities for increasing ecosystem output given inflexible limits on throughput and input. When looking at these four systems, one must recognize that Nature merely is a system of energy-conversion systems:

Photosynthetic energy generation and accumulation, then, is to become the accounting standard for submitting terraformed ecologies to environmentalizing discipline. It imposes upper limits on economic expansion; the earth is only so large. The 41 percent that is aquatic and marine as well as the 59 percent that is terrestrial are actually decreasing in magnitude and efficiency due to "environmental degradation." Partly localized within many national territories as politically bordered destruction, and partly globalized all over the biosphere as biologically unbounded transboundary pollution, the terraformers' system of systems needs global management, or a powerful, all-knowing "worldwatch," to mind its environmental resources.

Such requirements flow from the convergence of dangerous trends, namely, the estimates of such bioeconomic accounting that now are suggesting,

To avoid this collapse of ecological throughput, consummativity as consumptiveness must end. Human beings must slow their increasing mass populations, halt wasteful resource-intensive modes of production, and limit excessive levels of material consumption. All of these ends, in turn, require a measure of surveillance and degree of navigational steering beyond the powers of modern nation-states, but perhaps not beyond those exercised by some postmodern worldwatch engaged in the disciplinary tasks of equilibriating the "net primary production" of solar energy fixed by photosynthesis in the four systems to global consummativity as consummation. Natural resources in the total solar economy of food stocks, fisheries, forest preserves, and grass lands are rhetorically ripped from Nature only to be returned as consummationally-framed environmental resources, enveloped in accounting procedures and encircled by managerial programs. Worldwatching presumes to know all of this, and in knowing it, to have mastered all of its economic/ecological implications through its authoritative technical analysis to perfect consumption as the would-be warden of this planetary solar economy. By questioning the old truth regime of mere consumptive growth, a new regime of consummation for a much more sophisticated ecological economy stands ready to reintegrate human production and consumption in balance with the four biological systems.

No longer Nature, not merely ecosystem, the terraforming of our world under this kind of watch truly reduces it to strategic spaces. As "an environment," ringed by many ecological knowledge centers dedicated to the rational management of its assets, the global ecosystem is to be understood through the disciplinary codes of green operational planning. The health of global populations as well as the survival of the planet itself allegedly necessitate that a bioeconomic spreadsheet be draped over consummativity on Earth, generating an elaborate set of accounts for a terraforming economy of global reach and local scope. Hovering over the world in their scientifically-centered astropanopticon of green surveillance, the disciplinary grids of efficiency and waste, health and disease, poverty and wealth as well as employment and unemployment. Fusing geo-economics with geo-politics, Brown, Flavin and Postel declare "the once separate issues of environment and development are now inextricably linked."⁸⁰ Indeed, they are, at least, in the discourses of Worldwatch Institute as its experts survey Nature-in-crisis by auditing levels of topsoil depletion, air pollution, acid rain, global warming, ozone destruction, water pollution, forest reduction, and species extinction brought on by excessive mass consumption.

Worldwatch terraforming would govern through things, and the ends things serve, by restructuring today's ecologically unsound system of objects through elaborate managerial designs to realize tomorrow's environmentally sustainable economy in the ecologically perfected objects of that environmentalized system. The shape of an environmental economy would emerge from a reengineered economy of environmentalizing practices vetted by worldwatching codes. The individual human subject of today, and all of his or her things with their unsustainable practices, would be reshaped through a consummational environmentality, redirected by practices, discourses, and ensembles of administration that more efficiently synchronize the bio-powers of populations with the geo-powers of environments. To police global carrying capacity, in turn, this environmentalizing logic would direct each human subject to assume the much less capacious carriage of disciplinary frugality instead of affluent suburban abundance. All of the world must come under this watch, and the global watch would police its human charges to dispose of their things and arrange their ends--in reengineered spaces using new energies at new jobs and leisures--around these post-consumptive agendas.

Sustainability, like sexuality, would become another expert discourse about exerting power over life.⁸¹ What the biopower strategies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helped fabricate in terms of human sexuality now must be reimagined for humanity in worsening global conditions of survival as a perfected consummative survivalism. How development might "invest life through and through" becomes a new sustainability challenge, once biopolitical relations are established, in making these investments permanently profitable as consummational systems of objects.⁸² Thus, the Worldwatch Institute issues pamphlet after monograph after book on the supreme virtues of bicycles, solar power, windmills, urban planning, or organic agriculture to reveal the higher forms of consumer goods perfection attainable by the system of objects. Moreover, sustainability more or less presumes that some level of material and cultural existence has been attained that is indeed worth sustaining. This formation, then, constitutes "a new distribution of pleasures, discourses, truths, and powers; it has to be seen as the self-affirmation of one class rather than the enslavement of another: a defense, a protection, a strengthening, and an exaltation...as a means of social control and political subjugation."⁸³ Sustainable development means developing new consummative powers through defining a new model of green subjectivity organized around sustaining both new object worlds in a more survivable second nature and new consummational systems for their surviving subjects.

B. The Nature Conservancy

Compared to so many other environmental organizations, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) plainly is doing something immediate and significant to protect Nature--buying, holding and guarding large swatches of comparatively undisturbed natural habitat. Yet, it does this in accord with the consumeristic ground rules of the global capitalist economy. Millions of acres, occupying many diverse ecosystems now are being held in trust by the Nature Conservancy. This trust is being exercised not only for future generations of people, but also for all of the new generations of the plants and animals, fungi and insects, algae and microorganisms inhabiting these plots of land. Beginning with the 60 acres in the Mianus River Gorge, this organization has protected by direct acquisition and trust negotiations over 7.5 million acres of land in North America as well as Central America, South America, and the Caribbean in over separate 10,000 protection actions. In the past forty years, on pieces as small a quarter an acre to as large as hundreds of square miles, the Nature Conservancy in the United States has arranged for the on-going protection of an area the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island.⁸⁴ Given that so many ecological initiatives fail so frequently, this string of successes cannot be entirely ignored.

Nonetheless, one must admit the Nature Conservancy's achievements are perhaps seriously flawed, even though these flaws reveal much more about the consumption of public goods through a private property system and free enterprise economy than they show about environmentalism. Because of what has happened to Nature, how capital operates, and where resources for change must be solicited, the Nature Conservancy does what it does: consume land to be held "in trust: for Nature. As a result, the tenets and tenor of the Conservancy's operations as "an environmentalist organization" are those of almost complete compliance, and not those of radical resistance to the fast capitalist global economy.

In the Nature Conservancy's operational codes of land consumption, a triage system comes into play. Some lands of Nature are more "ecologically significant," some regions are much more "natural areas," but some grounds are far less "protectable" than others. The methods of the Conservancy show how it implicitly sees Nature as real estate properties inasmuch as its chapters must constantly grade the acreages they receive--labelling some as truly ecologically significant, some as plainly natural areas, some as merely "trade lands."⁸⁵ The latter are sold, like old horses for glue or worn-out cattle for dogfood, and the proceeds can used elsewhere to promote conservation. In seeking to preserve Nature, the Nature Conservancy strangely oversees its final transformation into pure real estate, allowing even hitherto unsalable or undeveloped lands to become transubstantiated into "natural areas" to green belt human settlements and recharge their scenic visits with ecological significance.

When it asks for land to protect wildlife and create sanctuary for ecosystems. However, the Nature Conservancy tends not to detail the ultimate cause of its concern. Protect it from what? Create sanctuary from what? The answer is, of course, the same consumeristic economy that is allowing its members to accumulate stock, mail in donations, buy and sell land. In many ways, the Conservancy is disingenuous in its designation of only some of its lands as trade lands. Actually, all of its protected lands are trade lands, trading sanctuary and protection here (where it is commercially possible or aesthetically imperative) to forsake sanctuary and protection there (where it is commercially unviable or aesthetically dispensable). It extracts a title for partial permanence from a constant turnover of economic destruction anchored in total impermanence.⁸⁶ The Conservancy ironically fights a perpetually losing battle, protecting rare species from what makes them rare and building sanctuary from what devastates everything on the land elsewhere with the proceeds of its members' successful capitalist rarification and despoliation.

The Nature Conservancy necessarily embraces the key counter-intuitive quality of all markets, namely, a dynamic in which the pursuit of private vices can advance public virtues. This appears contradictory, but it has nonetheless a very valid basis. It agrees to sacrifice almost all land in general to development, because it knows that all land will not, in fact, be developed. On the one hand, excessive environmental regulations might destroy this delicate balance in land use patterns. In accepting the universal premise of development, on the other hand, it constantly can undercut economic development's specific enactments at sites where it is no longer or not yet profitable. Some land will be saved and can be saved, in fact, by allowing, in principle, all land to be liable to development. Hence, it needs trade lands to do land trades to isolate some land from any more trading. In allowing all to pursue their individual vices and desires in the market, one permits a differently motivated actor, like the Nature Conservancy, to trade for land, like any other speculator, and develop it to suit its selfish individual taste, which is in this case is "unselfish nondevelopment." This perversely anti-market outcome satisfies the Conservancy's desires and ends, while perhaps also advancing the collective good through market mechanisms.

Over the past two decades, The Nature Conservancy has grown by leaps and bounds by sticking to the operational objectives of "preserving biodiversity."⁸⁷ As powerful anthropogenic actions have recontoured the Earth to suit the basic material needs of corporate modes of production, these artificial contours now define new ecologies for all life forms caught within their "economy" and "environment." The "economy" becomes a world political economy's interior spaces defined by technoscience processes devoted to production and consumption, while "the environment," in this sense, becomes a planetary political economy's exterior spaces oriented to resource-creation, scenery-provision, and waste-reception.

Natural resources exist, but Nature does not. Economic survival is imperative, but the commodity logics driving it need to be grounded in sound ecological common sense lest the limitless dynamism of commodification be permitted to submit everything to exchange logics immediately. Time is now what is scarce and centrally important in the highly compressed time-space continua of contemporary commodity chains. It is no longer a question of jobs versus the environment, because fewer jobs will not resurrect Nature. Nature is dead, and the environment generating global production assumes that jobs are necessary to define it as the space of natural resources. Doing jobs irrationally and too rapidly, however, is what destroys these environments, making jobs done rationally and at an apt pace ecologically acceptable. Consequently, the agendas of environmental protection must center on the "question of the short-term vs. the long-term," and this is "what the Conservancy is all about."⁸⁸

Nature, in all of its wild mystery and awesome totality, is not being preserved by the Nature Conservancy. It is, in fact, dead, as McKibben and Merchant tell us.⁸⁹ Nonetheless, its memory might be kept alive by the Nature Conservancy at numerous burial parks all over the nation where glimpses of its spirit should be remembered by human beings in a whiff of wild fight, the scent of a stream, or the aroma of surf. This goal may be a very well-intentioned one; but, in many ways all that the Nature Conservancy does boils down to serving as a burial society dedicated to giving perpetual maintenance and loving care at a variety of Nature cemeteries: Forest Glen, Mountain Meadow, Virgin River, Jade Jungle, Prairie View, Harmony Bay, Sunny Savannah, Brilliant Beach, Desert Vista, Happy Hollow, Crystal Spring. As Nature's death is acknowledged, more and more plots are needed to bury the best bits of its body in gardens of eternal life. Thus, the call for members, funds, and donations always will grow and grow.

This mission is even more ironic given the means whereby it is funded. Those humans, whose production and consumption had so much to do with Nature's death, the middle and upper-middle classes, are given an opportunity to purchase some atonement for their anonymous sins as consumers by joining the Nature Conservancy. Indeed, they even can transfer their accumulations of dead labor, and by extension, dead nature, to the Nature Conservancy to tend the gravesites of that which they murdered cheeseburger by cheeseburger, BTU by BTU, freon molecule by freon molecule in their lethal mode of suburban living. Even more ironically, the hit men of these myriad murder for hire deals--or major corporations--also are solicited by the Conservancy to pony up land, capital or donations to sustain this noble enterprise. Economy and environment are, of course, not incompatible, because this is the circuit of maggot and corpse, buzzard and body, grub and grave so common in today's postmodern ecology. Capital and Nature, the dead and living, are incompatible, but the capital has won, Nature is dead. All that is left is the zombie world of economies and environments, or the cash credits inside corporate ledgers for capital circulation and the ecological debits outside of corporate accounting charged off as externalities. Some still think capitalism has not yet defeated Nature, but they are deluded. Everything is environment now, nothing is Nature except perhaps the last reaches of innerspace and outerspace where aquanauts and astronauts, riding hi-tech robotic probes, have not yet come in peace, killing everything before them to then rest in peace.

Scenery provides legitimation, land creates a containment area, and rare ecosystems constitute storage sites for precious biogenetic information. Thus, these consummational memorial parks for "nature conservancy" more importantly are actually becoming a network of cryonic depots. Inside their boundaries, natural wetware accepts deposits as geome banks, accumulating bioplasmic memory on the hoof, at the roots, under the bark, and in the soil of Nature Conservancy protection actions. Nature is dead, but its environmental remains are put into a cryogenic statis until some future day when science and technology can bring the full productive potential out of them that escapes human development now. At that point, they too will be released from their cryonic state to become the tradelands of tomorrow as some snail, lichen, or bug is discovered to hold a cure for cancer or the common cold.

Plants and animals become more than endangered flowers or threatened fish; they become unknown and unexploited economic resources essential to human survival. "Of all the plants and animals we know on this earth," as one Conservancy supporter testifies, "only one in a hundred has been tested for possible benefit. And the species we have not even identified yet far outnumber those that we have. We destroy them before we discover them and determine how they might be useful."⁹⁰ Conservancy preserves, then, are biodiversity collection centers, allowing a free-enterprise minded foundation to suspend their native flora and fauna in an ecologically correct deep freeze until scientists can assay the possible worth of the ninety-nine untested species out of each hundred banked in these preserves.

Meanwhile, grizzly bears, bald eagles, and spotted owls provide high visibility entertainment value in anti-consumptive nature preserves for ecotourists, Conservancy members, and outdoor recreationists all seeking to enjoy such Edenic spaces. Still, in "preserving Eden," the Conservancy more importantly is guarding more and more of the bioplasmic source codes that enable the wetware of life to recapitulate its existence in the timeless routines of birth, life, reproduction, and death. Such riches can only be exploited slowly, but they cannot developed at all unless today's unchecked consumption of everything everywhere is contained by Nature Conservancy protection actions bringing the world economy to an absolute zeropoint of inactivity in these expanses of the global environment.

C. The World Wildlife Fund

The WWF-US began as a fairly focused campaign allied with the world headquarters in Europe to guard endangered wildlife and its threatened habitats in Africa, Asia and Latin America from needless destruction in the early 1960s. Yet, like many other mainstream environmental groups, it gradually has evolved into a leading exponent of preserving biodiversity during the 1990s. As America's worldwide wildlife fund, however, its avowedly "third wave" environmental policies, which purposely construct collaborative links with capital and the state rather than fomenting confrontations with them, now increasingly parallel rhetorics of "wise use."⁹¹ Such third wave environmentalism touts how wisely used funds at the WWF can protect some creatures of Nature from destruction, while, at the same time, pushing forward many profitable projects for protecting select wilderness areas and wildlife species for commodity uses, albeit in "sustainable" forms, as ecotourism destinations or hunters' prey. The necessary development of rare sites in Nature as economic resources moves the work of the WWF-US from the register of saving wildness for its own sake to recasting wilderness as a marketable asset. In turn, one must ask is this the "something" that its donors and supporters really believe must be done?

The WWF-US chapter in league with the WWF's global offices in Switzerland are intent upon preserving some segments of the Earth's biodiversity through planned giving and high-powered finance, which aim to reconstruct certain natural environments around the world as a green endowment from the past to provide sustainable income streams of natural resources to present and future generations. As an endowment system, the WWF-US is generating its own unique discourses of green governmentality for managing Nature and its resources, as if its many campaigns to protect the rainforest, save tigers, preserve rhinos were an interdependent family of mutual funds poised to capture continuously the charitable dollars of green investors.

Like most preservationist-minded ecology groups first inspired by IUCN habitat protection agendas, then, the WWF essentially is devoted to "Nature preservation," or creating small reservations of select real estate populated by rare wildlife species in expanses of undeveloped habitat. The ethos of its aristocratic founders with their experiences as hunters of trophy animals on game preserves remains alive in the WWF's approach to Africa, Asia and Latin America as the best sites to preserve big game animals. As WWF-US President Kathryn S. Fuller indicates, the WWF has helped "establish, fund or manage nearly 450 parks and reserves world wide, from the Wolong Panda Reserve in China to Peru's spectacular Manu National Park. The protected areas WWF-US has supported cover more than 260 million acres of wildlife habitat--an area twice the size of California."⁹² This achievement is highly touted in WWF literature, underscoring how thoroughly the organization has reimagined Nature as a bioresources trust, an ecomutual fund, or an environmental endowment to be kept under its diligent surveillance as loosely held inventories of land.

The work of the WWF as a result is often ironically seen by its American managers as a kind of "green man's burden" spreading the advances made by conservationists in the United States abroad because, as Train notes, "there has been almost total neglect of the problems outside our borders until the WWF came along."⁹³ Under the presidencies of Russell E. Train, Bill Reilly and Kathryn Fuller, the WWF grew from 25,000 members with an annual budget of about $2 million in 1978 to a membership of 1.2 million and an annual budget of $79 million in the mid-1990s by pushing this ecocolonialist agenda.⁹⁴ The WWF has specialized in propagating its peculiar global vision in which experts from advanced industrial regions, like the United States, Great Britain, or Switzerland, take gentle custody of biological diversity in less advanced regions, like Third World nations, as benevolent scientific guardians by retraining the locals to be reliable trustees of Earth's common endowments in their weak Third World nation-states.

In many ways, the WWF is one of the world's most systematic practitioners of eco-colonialism to reshape Nature consumption. From its initial efforts to protect Africa's big fame trophy animals in the 1960s to the ivory ban campaigns of the 1990s, WWF wildlife protection programs have been concocted by small committees composed mostly of white, Western experts, using insights culled from analyses conducted by white, Western scientists that were paid for by affluent, white, Western suburbanites. At the end of the day, many Africans and Asians, living near those WWF parks where the endangered wildlife actually roam wild, are not entirely pleased by such ecological solitude. Indeed, these Third World peoples see the WWF quite clearly for what it is: "white people are making rules to protect animals that white people want to see in parks that white people visit."⁹⁵ At some sites, the WWF also promotes sustainably harvesting animals for hides, meat, or other by-products, but then again these goods are mostly for markets in affluent, white, Western countries.

As Train argues, these ecocolonial practices are an unavoidable imperative. The WWF came to understand that "the great conservation challenges of today and of the future mostly lie in the tropics where the overwhelming preponderance of the Earth's biological diversity is found, particularly in the moist tropical forests and primarily in the developing world. Although the problems may often seem distance from our own shores and our own circumstances, we increasingly understand that the biological riches of this planet are part of a seamless web of life where a threat to any part threatens the whole."⁹⁶ In mobilizing such discursive understandings to legitimize its actions, the WWF has empowered itself over the past thirty-five years to act as a transnational Environmental Protection Agency for Wildlife Consumption to safeguard "the Earth's biological diversity," internationalizing its management of "the biological riches of this planet" where they are threatened in territorialities with very weak sovereignty to protect their sustainable productivity for territories with quite strong sovereignty as parts of "a seamless web of life where a threat to any part threatens the whole."⁹⁷

On one level, the American WWF frets over biodiversity, but many of its high Madison Avenue activities actually aim at developing systems of "biocelebrity." From the adoption of the panda bear as its official logo to its ceaseless fascination with high-profile, heavily symbolic animals, or those which are most commonly on display in zoos or hunter's trophy rooms, the WWF-US has turned a small handful of mediagenic mammals, sea creatures, and birds into zoological celebrities as part and parcel of defending Nature. Whether it is giraffes, elephants, rhinos or kangaroos, ostriches, koalas or dolphins, humpbacks, seals, only a select cross-section of wild animals with potent mediagenic properties anchor its defense of Nature. Special campaigns are always aimed at saving the whales, rhinos or elephants, and not more obscure, but equally endangered fish, rodents, or insects. This mobilization of biodiversity, then, all too often comes off like a stalking horse for its more entrenched vocations of defining, supplying, and defending biocelebrity.

On a second level, however, the WWF is increasingly devoted to defending biodiversity, because it is, as Edward O. Wilson asserts, "a priceless product of millions of years of evolution, and it should be cherished and protected for its own sake."⁹⁸ Even though it should be saved for its own safe, it is not. Wilson provides the key additional justification, indicating implicitly how the World Wildlife Fund actually presumes to be the long-term worldwide fund of Nature as the unassayed stock of biodiversity is saved "for other reasons," including "we need the genetic diversity of wild plants to make our crops grow better and to provide new foods for the future. We also need biodiversity to develop new medicines....a newly discovered insect or plant might hold the cure for cancer or AIDS."⁹⁹ Wilson argues, "you can think of biodiversity as a safety net that keeps ecosystems functioning and maintaining life on Earth."¹⁰⁰ But, as the organization operating as the green bank with the biggest deposits from a worldwide fund of Nature, the WWF aspires to hold many of these bioplasmic assets in ecological banks as an enduring trust for all mankind. Fuller, is quite explicit on this critical side of the association's mission. Because "the biological riches of the planet are part of a seamless web of life in which a threat to any part weakens the whole," the WWF must ensure the integrity and well-being of the Earth's "web of life," giving it a most vital mission:

Faced by an extinction wave of greater pervasiveness than any confronted during recorded history, the WWF-US mobilizes the assets of biocelebrity to leverage its limited guardianship over the planet's biodiversity, because we may see as much as one quarter of the Earth's biodiversity going extinct in twenty or thirty years. Even so, the WWF fails to realize how closely its defense of the rational, efficient use of precious natural resources as third wave environmentalism may contribute to the extinction of biodiversity. And, the conspicuous consternation of the WWF permits a focused fixation upon biocelebrities to occlude this fact for those who truly care about Nature--as long as it is equated with rhinos, tigers, and elephants.

WWF ecotourism remanufactures Nature into consummational reserves, transforming habitat into assets, flora and fauna into operating plant, and indigenous communities into entrepreneurial stakeholders or, even worse, underpaid site managers, for global ecoconsummation. Nature conservation becomes a game, and everyone involved becomes a player for the WWF. In fact, the WWF's worldwide banking powers over Nature's biological riches as interdependent mutual funds collateralizes the ecotourism bargain. As the WWF declares, the deal is dangerous, but potentially very rewarding, inasmuch as "for many rural communities and local and national governments, the booming travel industry is a rich resource for cash-starved economies and an important development tool that can foster conservation by giving communities an economic stake in the nonconsumptive use of their natural resources."¹⁰²

The WWF-US believes pushing economies beyond primary and secondary sectors of production into tertiary "nonconsumptive uses of natural resources" in the leisure and recreation business will provide jobs that offer "people financial incentives to protect, rather than exploit or destroy, natural resources."¹⁰³ From the WWF's global perspective of providing local regulation via global conservation, these planned means of consummational appropriation are the "wise use" of Nature, because "these jobs are often better and last longer than occupations like logging and mining because they focus on the preservation and wise use of natural resources, not their extraction."¹⁰⁴ From a WWF's regulationist perspective, these jobs are usually worse and longer suffering, because they pay much less than logging or mining, and lock local economies into low-yield, low-value adding, low-status service sector activities. Nonetheless, the ecotouristic strategy does reveal how one dimension in the WWF's vision of nature's "wise use" works. An (un)wise (mis)use of extractive industries promoting the hyperconsumptive use of natural resources cannot be taken seriously as "wise use." Instead, the protection of ecosystems in Nature preserves, which host low-impact sustainable cultivation of flora and fauna in traditional economies or high-traffic flows of conscientious ecotourists, becomes the sine qua non of "wise use" for WWF wildlife fund managers worldwide.

As coequals in the circle of life coevolving in the webs of biodiversity, human beings nobly become another animal being responsible for other animal beings. Thus, the World Wildlife Fund, becomes the key trustee of an international family of mutual funds for creating and operating these little wildlife worlds all over the planet. Its consummational agenda for a transnational ecocolonialism pays out as a post-consumptive environmental reservation system where the Earth's last remaining wilderness and wildlife become the tamelife habitats and inhabitants of exotic biodiversity.

This is pathetic, but it is where whatever was once "wild nature" is now left. The wise use of Nature boils down to containing only a few of the most egregious instances of the unwise abuse of select charismatic megafauna by detaining a few survivors in little wildlife worlds all over the planet. And, in the current political environment, which increasingly favors legislative moves to rollback any serious Nature preservation initiative, even this ecocolonialist work of the WWF now can only be applauded. The WWF is caught within the same global capitalistic economy that promotes pollution, poaching, and profit, but its consummational good deeds advance the reproduction of global capitalism at all other unpreserved sites, shifting the role of the WWF from that of anti-consumptive resistance on a local level to one of pro-consummational rationalization on a global scale.

D. The Sierra Club

The Sierra Club deserves much credit for the good work that it has done to preserve many natural sites in the United States since 1892. Its highly effective lobbying campaigns have saved countless natural places from permanent destruction, while highlighting the vital importance of environmental agendas to larger national audiences. If the Sierra Club did not already exist, then it perhaps would be necessary to invent something like it. From its early days and in its current activities, however, one can find several causes for the Sierra Club's fairly extensive involvement in transnational capitalism's consummational reimaging of Nature as environment. The signs are everywhere, but they are particularly suggestive in its cultural acts and artifacts. We only need to reread the Sierra Club's Sierra magazine, its popular calendars, or some Sierra Club direct mail appeals to find traces of these deeper contradictions.

Since 1892, the Sierra Club has doggedly defended it original programs for valorizing "the Great Outdoors" as sites for leisure pursuits by popularizing outdoor activities, organizing wilderness outings, and defending particularly important natural sites. Outings into California's High Sierras were first organized by John Muir and Will Colby, as David Brower suggests, "to get people into the wilderness where they could have fun and fall in love with the wild. Becoming much more national in scope after the 1960s, the Sierra Club also became an important player in many different wilderness protection actions all over the nation through the 1990s in Alaska, Florida, Appalachia, and California. All of these actions simply continue the 1951 Sierra Club charter: "to explore, enjoy and protect the Sierra Nevada and other scenic resources of the United States," amending its original goals of exploring, enjoying and rendering accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast.¹⁰⁵

Here, one finds what is the essence of the Sierra Club as a environmental organization today. While the World Wildlife Fund or Nature Conservancy have devoted many of their energies to the cultivation of "charismatic megafauna," like tigers, whales, or rhinos, to preserve Nature, the Sierra Club has identified special environmental sites, like the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, California Redwood forests, as "mediagenic ecotopes" to be projected as endangered nature to the nation's consumers and voters. Despite its newfound engagements at protecting wilderness across the United States, the most enduring commitment of the Sierra Club seems to be this unending devotion to protecting Nature from being reduced to "agro-industrial resources" by transforming it through vivid image-riven projections into "scenic resources," which, in turn, need to be explored and enjoyed in those special ways that the Sierra Club renders accessible.

"Of all modes of representation," as Shapiro asserts, photography clearly is the one "most easily assimilated into the discourses of knowledge and truth, for it is thought to be an unmediated simulacrum, a copy of what we consider 'real'."¹⁰⁶ Few ideological formations have exploited this property in photography as expertly as the green gaze of the contemporary Sierra Club in its coffeetable books, wildlife calendars, magazine photolayouts, or direct mail. Indeed, the Sierra Club's own celebration of Nature through spectacular nature photography is particularly problematic. On one level, there is no denying many of these images are striking evocations or breathtaking clarity. Hoping to see such sights in person and up close moves many to aid in the protection of Nature. Yet, on another level, nothing in Nature is ever is this perfect, and many of these images are highly manufactured. That is, the Sierra Club's "spectacular nature photography" is more accurately a system of fabricating "photographic nature spectacles." Finding "mediagenic ecotopes," in some ways, requires the Sierra Club to continually engage in "ecotopian mediagenesis." Nature is continually reinvented through light and shadow manipulations, or color and contrast machinations; it is how and where a Sierra Club vision of the good life and paradise brings into life a perfected set of images, symbols, and signs to stir up interest, devotion and loyalty.

The modern Sierra Club, as it forced its way onto the national stage, has generated a popular sense of greater Nature accessibility through mass-run photography-and-prose print products. This strategy began in 1960 with This is the American Earth by Ansel Adams and Nancy Newcall, which were followed quickly by Cedric Wright's Words of the Earth, Ansel Adams These We Inherit: The Parklands of America, Eliot Porter's "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World" (a match of Thoreau with Nature photography), and Richard Kauffman's Gentle Wildness: The Sierra Nevada (a mix of Muir's writings with color shots of the Sierras). Brower saw how effective these media were as mechanisms for propagating the green gaze of the Sierra Club among the powerful and/or influential:

Without such supreme visions of Nature, its benefits often are overlooked; yet, with the green gaze of Sierra Club photography, and in spite of its many problems, this new way of seeing Nature through ecotopian mediagenesis became popularized as a potent power/knowledge formation.

The photographic reimagination of Nature, in fact, is one of the Sierra Club's most potent consummational weapons. Since the 1950s and 1960s, when its first photographic books were used to show why conservation now is so vital by presenting perfect images of what might be lost to hydroelectric dam building, clearcutting loggers, or ski resort developers, the Sierra Club uses high-quality photography for many purposes: constructing pristine images of Nature, mobilizing political support, affirming organizational values, guiding outdoorsmanistic practices, popularizing outing destinations, defending environmental sites. One of the well-meaning Sierra Club member's prime directives is centered on the fusion of nature outing with nature photography: "leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but pictures." The Sierra Club green gaze looks through camera viewfinders, which finds views of Nature as "great pictures." Getting outside by foot, horseback or canoe to be somewhere worthy in the green gaze of being photographed constitutes, in many ways, the essence of Sierra Club membership as members work to preserve places that can still be recognized as being as natural, wild or pristine as various Sierra photographers have composed them. Photography also permits Nature's often very unscenic raw stuff to be represented with the right lighting and camera angles as "scenic resources." The Sierra Club's real ideological task, therefore, has been reconstructing the manifold appearances of real Nature as very unscenic stuff to conform to its particular fetishization of green signs and symbols as hyperreal "scenic resources." Nature cannot simply exist as such; it must be constructed, distributed, and stabilized to fit those categories of pristine spectacularity which Sierra Club has chosen to assign to the great outdoors.

The Sierra Club has resisted the raw consumptive industrialization of Nature in order to advance its more sophisticated informationalization of Nature as scenic consummational images. Instead of being a storehouse of materials, it becomes a terminal destination with aesthetic values and symbolic worth, because its "renewing resources" provide an entertainment site, a communications resource, an informational utility. These applications can unfold alongside the industrial economy; indeed, an informational sector needs material inputs and outputs from its engines of growth to function. Nonetheless, this organization does not stand for appropriating and processing Nature as atoms; instead, it works to transform it into images, signs, ideologies that can serve many profit agendas in other ways. Thus, "the Sierra Club"/"wise use movement" contradiction perhaps is more of an odd internal capitalist contradiction between "tertiary" informational and "secondary" industrial sectors of the same overdeveloped advanced economy rather than a real face-off between pre-industrial forces of "the environment" versus hyper-industrial partisans of "the economy."

To reinterpret the corporate colonization of everyday life over the last century, Leach maintains that "whoever has the power to project a vision of the good life and make it prevail has the most decisive power of all. In its sheer quest to produce and sell goods cheaply in constantly growing volume and at higher profit levels, American business, after 1890, acquired such power and, despite a few wrenching crises along the way, has kept it ever since."¹⁰⁸ The Sierra Club often is tagged as one of the most effective opponents of this Revolution, but a closer look raises doubts. Leach suggests that many hands were needed to turn America into a consumer society; indeed, it clearly developed as a "consequence of alliances among diverse institutions, noneconomic and economic, working together in an interlocking circuit of relationships to reinforce the democraticization of desire and the cult of the new."¹⁰⁹

From big banks to hotel chains, major corporations to national universities, trade unions to department stores, America changed after the 1890s. Indeed, "after 1895, stores, museums, churches, and government agencies were beginning to act together to create the Land of Desire, redirecting aspiration toward consumer longings, consumer goods, and consumer pleasures and entertainments."¹¹⁰ On one level, the modern Land of Desire was constructed "in-doors" within the modern industrial city in contradistinction to the traditional "out-doors" pursuits of rural agrarian life. On another level, however, Nature too has been remanufactured as consumer longings, consumer goods, or consumer entertainments, appearing as "outdoors" activities. Of the many brokers promoting this change, the Sierra Club obviously has been overlooked. Yet, at the end of the day, the Sierra Club's "nature outing" relies upon its own uniquely outdoorsmanistic spectacularization of Nature; like corporate consumerism, its mediagenic ecotopes offer "a vision of the good life and of paradise" in images, symbols, and signs that stir up interest at the very least, and devotion and loyalty at the most."¹¹¹ Sierra Club members are devoted to Nature, but their devotion typically assumes outdoorsmanist forms as their loyalties often rest more with "nature outings" than with Nature as such.

In many Sierra Club activities, the Land of Desire is sublated into a desire for land, a fixation upon accessing the most desirable lands, or a desiring of new lands whose undeveloped wild status equals fine sites for the good life of getting what John Muir called Nature's "good tidings." Getting out there, preparing for being there, and equipping for special kinds of a sport-based becoming once there all tap deeply into "the transformation of American society into a society preoccupied with consumption, with comfort and bodily well-being, with luxury, spending, and acquisition, with more goods this year than last, more next year than this."¹¹² As counterintuitive as it may seem at first blush, the Sierra Club is basically about consummativity--getting more nature outings this year than last, and more next year than this. The Sierra Club member is an outdoorsmanist, or one who consumes his or her time and energy to get outdoors where comfort and well-being are realized as a hiker/rock climber/kayaker/camper/photographer who acquires miles walked/first ascents/rivers run/camps made/pictures taken.

Gradually in the Land of Desire, the Sierra Club's outdoormanistic leisure outings have moved toward something new: a place or space that is much more like "Club Sierra." Like Club Med's bid to its clients to "go native" or "get wild," Club Sierra is a national organization for an elite group of high-minded, outdoorsmanistic individuals intent upon enjoying themselves outdoors, particularly at special, select, secluded sets of limited access Nature sites. In fact, Nature reverence is mobilized to serve this desire of such lands. For a world of perpetual motion in motion, Sierra Club photographs offer outdoors-minded consumers compelling images of high-profile places to go, things to do, sights to see in a geographic imaging system of pristine purities. Disingenuously, the Sierra Club poses as being conservationist, or anti-market in orientation, when it is, in fact, niche marketing for Club Sierra at its most superlative pitch.

Sierra Club culture is the perfected culture of consumption conducted outdoors. At one level, this organization can pose credibly as a green force, pretending to oppose the advanced industrial ecologies of energy-intensive, resource-wasting, overdevelopment-centered cities, growing by leaps and bounds around the planet. Such industrial lifestyles often are portrayed by big business or desperate politicians as the foundational bedrock of contemporary urban life in which anything worth doing is done indoors; indeed, "wise use" movement culture is often simply the culture of consumption conducted indoors.¹¹³ Whether one simply becomes a couch potato at home in the big-screen TV room, a sports fan in some urban domed stadium, or a mall rat at the regional shopping center, the only life worth living happens inside. Hence, Nature must be (un)wisely (ab)used to maintain it. Of course, more importantly, the consumptive industrial order with its own powerful bloc of owning and managing classes, depends upon cultivating and then supplying the needs required to sustain this system. But, on a second level, the getting to these outdoors regions, the sporting practices approved once one arrives, and the imagination of Nature as places to go or things to do in the Sierra Club's consummational culture all are four-square centered upon the same consummativity that drives indoorsmanistic being.

Sierra photos unfortunately look too good, because they are too good. While things appear natural, trees often are pollution stressed, the soils are laced with heavy metal deposits, the streams are dying from acid rain, and the skies are shot through with ozone holes. Sierra photos must be contested as the utopian projections of ecotopian mediagenesis, creating images of a somewhere so perfect they really are nowhere.¹¹⁴ The Sierra Clubs' outdoorsmen pretend to be able to secure this perfection, even though each one of their eco-tourism trips to New Zealand, the Yukon, Nepal, the Galapagos, or New Guinea in search of these goals is little more than a slickly packaged industrial pollutant wrapped up as a high-end personal statement "to protect the biosphere."

All of these environmentalizing initiatives reveal different aspects of Nature's infrastructuralization in the disorganized and incomplete transnational campaigns of environmentalized capital's terraforming programs. The actions of the Worldwatch Institute, the Nature Conservancy, or the World Wildlife Fund, or the Sierra Club are frameworks within which a new habitus with its own environmentalized social relations of production and consumption can come alive by guarding habitat as the supremely perfect site of habitus. As Baudrillard observes, "the great signified, the great referent Nature is dead, replaced by environment, which simultaneously designates and designs its death and the restoration of nature as simulation model....we enter a social environment of synthesis in which a total abstract communication and an immanent manipulation no longer leave any point exterior to the system.