Natural Exceptions to Green Sovereignty? American Environmentalism and the “Immigration Problem”*

Contested Ecosovereignties

Difficulties reconciling the nonhuman realm with traditional notions of sovereignty are evident in early environmentalist and scholarly approaches to the matter. While international relation debates were centered upon reified conceptions of the self-interested, sovereign nation-state operating in an anarchic sphere that privileged power–politics and relegated environmental concerns to irrevocable fringe status, environmentalist debates merely restated the self-evident disconnect between natural flows and socially constructed boundaries. ¹⁰ The shared assumption marking these divergent narratives is that nature is, for the nation-state, an intrinsically instrumental resource linked to the inviolable strictures of territorial sovereignty and, therefore, inevitably at odds with ecologically responsible governance.

However, recent theoretical and empirical shifts have motivated scholars to turn away from these sweeping conclusions and toward contextually grounded accounts that consider the relational, constructed, and contingent nature of sovereignty. ¹¹ The academic narrative that has emerged asserts that territoriality has been unbundled ¹² and space reconfigured ¹³ as authority, control, and legitimacy have been dispersed across scales, and recast within diverse assemblages of governmental units, nongovernmental organizations, transnational corporations, and international institutions. With regard to environmental governance, these empirical shifts have provoked suggestion that, under a period of neoliberal hegemony, sovereign power has been partially decentered from the state and reconsolidated within an ecologically and socially destructive “empire” ¹⁴ that necessitates a counterhegemonic environmentalist response. ¹⁵

But what should this response look like? Many have expressed hope that the transboundary realities of nature would work in the service of inclusive, cosmopolitan projects, ¹⁶ but reactions to neoliberalism are also harnessing ecological discourses where nature is irrevocably bound up in exclusionary social politics that differentially value various populations in efforts to reinforce some vision of a “naturally” sovereign nation-state. ¹⁷ In this sense, debates over greening sovereignty are marked, on one hand, by the perceived need to control the deterritorializing forces of neoliberalism, and, on the other hand, by the specters of exclusion that haunt territorialized environmental politics. Thus, green sovereignty functions as a site of contestation between competing projects that seek to project and legitimize authority over some segment of space in the service of molding institutions and subjects better equipped to speak for both nature and society.

In the analysis that follows, my intent is not to provide a holistic review of the literature on sovereignty and nature but rather to examine the ways that two prominent scholarly works: (1) conceptualize nature, political community, and governance; (2) relate these constructions to the concept of “green sovereignty”; and (3) evaluate its inclusive or exclusive potential. I argue that these examples are reflective of broader tendencies among both scholars and practitioners to leave the contingent articulations between these constitutive elements underexplored; a phenomenon that has left environmentalists harkening back to molar forms—where “we” are faced with a choice of either greening the nation-state or rejecting sovereignty in favor of the deterritorializing impulses of nature.

Green States and Inclusive Sovereigns

Eckersley begins by recognizing that, historically, the sovereign, liberal democratic nation-state has not exactly been a force for environmental progress. ²² However, giving up on the state is, for Eckersley, both practically and theoretically deficient. Realistically, the state is not going anywhere despite challenges from the increasing power of transnational corporations, international financial institutions, and nonstate actors. ²³ Instead, such shifts have engendered a crisis of legitimacy that necessitates the reconsolidation of democratic power within an entity strong enough to project its regulatory and punitive authority vis-à-vis private interests in the name of the nation:

The state is enlisted because it is the social institution with the greatest capacity to discipline investors, producers, and consumers.. . . [It] has the capacity to redistribute resources and otherwise influence life opportunities to ensure that the move toward a more sustainable society is not a socially regressive one. ²⁴

In order to guide the trajectory of such shifts toward an inclusive sovereignty, Eckersley proposes a political community founded upon a blend of communitarian concerns with cultural solidarity and cosmopolitan emphasis on transnational affect. Her “transnational state” would gain legitimacy through its organization around principles of “cosmopolitan nationalism” that strategically reorient the insular ethos of traditional nationalism outward to extend to nonhumans, nonmembers, and future generations. ²⁶ In this sense, “the people would remain sovereign, but would be a more variable and fluid community made up of nations and all those who happen to belong, or are likely to belong, to the relevant community at risk.” ²⁷

Eckersley attempts to institutionalize this inclusive ethos through a mutually reinforcing interaction between formal green constitutions and deliberative green public spheres. The former would solidify certain social and ecological norms in law (e.g., the precautionary principle, rights to environmental information, public participation, access to justice), ²⁸ while the latter would guarantee that a fluctuating array of actors could voice their social and ecological realities in debates having direct implications on their lives.

Green Biopolitics and Ecological Exceptions

Smith, however, is insistent that Eckersley has overestimated the malleability of sovereignty. ²⁹ In contrast, Smith draws on Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben in asserting that contemporary life is increasingly characterized by an ever-present state of exception, where the nation-state responds to some “crisis” or “emergency” by suspending the normal political order in the name of saving that very order. In an issue area punctured by calls of crisis that are widely purported to warrant extraordinary and indefinite measures (e.g., climate change, resource shortages, population explosions), there is a real danger that by couching hopes for ecological emancipation within a sovereign order, any potentially radical ecological dialogue will be suspended under the auspices of the immediate action that a nature in crisis necessitates. While most greens have moved away from prior flirtations with ecoauthoritarianism, the ability of the sovereign to declare a state of exception increases the likelihood that technocratic, top-down, militaristic “solutions” will be the norm. ³⁰

Smith contends that under the order of the ecosovereign, both nature and society will be reduced to bare life; deemed no longer deserving of democratic rights and protections but still subject to the coercive force of ecoauthoritarian projects. ³¹ As a state of exception is declared, human and nonhuman lives remain subject to governance at a deep, biological level without any concomitant capacity for acting politically. The overarching point is that “[w]hile we can recognize historically different discourses surrounding and informing the normal practices of state sovereignty . . . its ordering principle is precisely not one that is protean. . . . In the last instance sovereign power is wielded by a ‘body’ which ‘decides on the exception.’” ³²

This “body” is the nation-state, and “the decision” is—given the track record of the nation-state—likely to invoke ecological emergency as a cover over motives that are definitely anthropocentric. ³³ In this sense, calls to green sovereignty, no matter how well intentioned, are likely to end in exceptional decisions that eschew radical ecological solutions in defense of the stability wrought by a capital-friendly logic of ecological modernization. ³³ Indeed, “the possibility of this ultimately arbitrary decisionistic assumption of absolute territorial power underlies all claims to state sovereignty, no matter what kind of political constitutions such states espouse.” ³⁴ As such, the only way out is through the deterritorializing impulses of radical ecology:

[R]adical ecology tries to save politics and ethics (and not only the natural world), to recognize their “relative autonomy” and their vital importance in constituting a good life for human communities within, and not constitutionally positioned as a sovereign power above, a “more than human” world. ³⁵

The Contingent Contours of Green Sovereignty

The two aforementioned approaches are directly conflicting; Eckersley’s immanent critique urges us to consider the potentially progressive lines of flight that might be latent in current institutional forms, while Smith’s response calls attention to the underlying biopolitical structure of sovereignty that is said to negate any potentially radical shifts in environmental governance. The latter contention suggests that while Eckersley’s normative vision highlights the formal institutional shifts whereby multiple voices could speak for nature, her approach leaves undertheorized the interstices in which environmental politics, subtle biopolitical practices, and the often violent spectacles of sovereign power meet.

In particular, “progressive” environmental projects routinely rely on managing the life forces of various populations; concerns over population reduction, for instance, seek to channel fertility rates, distribute movement, and control the productive and consumptive capacities of select populations in efforts to construct a particular type of environmental society. Such projects are often bound up in exclusionary politics of race, class, and gender, and in periods of “crisis” are likely to be imposed rather than subject to democratic debate. The shift that Eckersley envisions, geared to Habermasian ideals of public deliberation, ³⁷ would permit a broader scope of inclusion but would not necessarily challenge the discursive pathways through which exclusion advances. The emphasis on consensus, beholden to a pluralistic notion of free and rational deliberation, overlooks the very forms of knowledge/power through which terms of dominant discourses are naturalized—to the detriment of marginalized populations whose formal inclusion in a dialogic process is not, therefore, likely to produce an equitable role in decision making.

Specifically, with Eckersley’s insistence on the necessity of national solidarity as a precondition for ecological democracy, ³⁸ there is a real risk that the public nature that emerges from these deliberative spaces may be woven into insidious schemes to reconsolidate imagined communities through the exclusion of Others. Historically, certain constitutive elements of nature have materialized within narratives of exception: discourses of Linnaean classification, Romantic wilderness, Malthusian political economy, and Darwinian natural science have all served as markers of difference enabling the erasure of indigeneous and marginalized inhabitants from the national landscape or constructing them as biopolitical threats to the vitality of the nation. ³⁹ These natural concepts, which have worked to efface the violence through which hegemonic national forms have proceeded, are likely to reemerge today under a subtle commitment to progressive environmental politics, rather than an overt commitment to nationalism. Thus, the ethos of sovereignty that would emerge from this green state is potentially an exclusionary one.

While Eckersley might overlook the way that nature is bound up in these micropolitical struggles, Smith’s account “cuts the head off the king” only to fashion his ghost into a biopolitical God whose exceptional decisions are a fait accompli. Both the declaration of the state of exception and the trajectory through which it emerges appear inevitable.

These universalizing assumptions stem from the fact that Smith does not unpack the contingent articulations that suture nation, state, and nature together at a particular point in time and leave him open to the same critique that Connolly levels against Agamben:

He does not ask whether disturbing developments in the logic of sovereignty are bound not merely to a conjunction between biopolitics and sovereignty, but to a conjunction between them and renewed attempts to consolidate . . . the nation during a time when it is even more difficult to do so. . . . The shape of the ethos infusing the practice of sovereignty is therefore critical and not a mere conjugation of sovereignty and biopolitics. ⁴⁰

On one hand, for example, ecological nativists advance configurations of sovereignty that deploy scientific concepts (like cultural carrying capacity) to construct “the nation” as a natural entity that links up smoothly with racialized projects where the state only attains legitimacy insofar as it weeds out “sources of pollution” (that is, non-white populations). On the other hand, environmental justice advocates frequently push for cosmopolitan or subaltern modes of identity that tweak hegemonic national forms in more inclusive directions, while attempting to enlarge the elements of the state that would provide environmental and workplace regulations, social safety nets, and opportunities for local-level participation in environmental decision making. This latter ethos contests the discursive pathways through which a state of exception might be declared, and the ways that this declaration would impact already marginalized populations—human and nonhuman.

Therefore, the logics that guide the application of sovereign power do not emerge within an autonomous site irrevocably wedded to predetermined interests but through a variety of social forces. As Connolly notes, “within the idea of the exception ‘decided’ by sovereignty, an oscillation flows between a juridically established authority that authoritatively decides the exception and social powers that assert themselves irresistibly in and around the decision.” ⁴¹ Similarly, Roxanne Doty argues in her analysis of American vigilante justice groups that “the decision that ushers in both the enemy and ‘we’, ‘the people,’ ‘the nation,’ ‘the society,’ is in fact a plurality of decisions made from diverse locales.” ⁴² Discursive struggles over the scope of political community, and the scale and social purpose of governance (as well as over the racial, gendered, class-based, and sexualized norms that are embedded within these discussions) create the conditions of existence for any formal declaration of exception. Nature plays an increasingly central role within this process.

Smith harkens back to an image of a singular sovereign body—the nation-state—declaring a state of exception, when such a declaration emerges from a multiplicity of enunciative sites dispersed throughout society. Environmental politics, in particular, is an issue area in which there exists no definitive voice that renders nature intelligible for all. And as environmental advocates strategically latch onto traditionally anthropocentric discourses of security, jobs, and development, the particular ethos that green sovereignty might take on depends upon hotly contested struggles—between the scientist, deep ecologist, bureaucrat, economist, social justice advocate, and, at times, xenophobe—to articulate a particular conception of nature and its relation to ideals of political community and governance. The outcomes of these struggles are not predetermined.

As a consequence, Smith’s conclusion—that ecosovereignty will reduce both humanity and nature to bare life ⁴³ —is too sweeping. Rather than opposing a universalizing logic of sovereignty that meshes smoothly with Lockean conceptions of nature as wasteland, to an equally universalizing radical ecological sphere that links up perfectly with a nonstate outside, ⁴⁴ it makes more sense to consider how various nonhuman flows are bounded within complex, cross-cutting, and often contradictory social registers.

To illuminate this process, I now turn to American debates over the environmental impacts of immigration. I contend that environmental restrictionists provide insight into the ways that the apparently progressive project of greening the state is working to construct an exclusionary ethos of ecosovereignty. I then look to opponents for potential strategies of resistance.

Toward a Green State: The Ecocommunitarian Challenge

While the central pillar of ecocommunitarianism remains a familiar neo-Malthusian logic, this emergent discourse couches concerns over population growth in a forceful critique of neoliberal economic policies and forges an alternative vision of an explicitly multicultural America comprised of progressive environmentalists. Distancing himself from a nativist logic, ecological economist Herman Daly, a board member of the Carrying Capacity Network, remarks “[I]t is a terrible thing to be ‘anti-immigrant’ . . . Immigration, however, is a policy, not a person, and one can be . . . ‘pro-immigration limits’ without in the least being anti-immigrant.” ⁵⁶ Similarly, in an article entitled “‘No’ to Immigrant Bashing,” Roy Beck of NumbersUSA observes:

The task before the nation in setting a fair level of immigration is not about race or some vision of a homogeneous white America; it is about protecting and enhancing the United States’ unique experiment in democracy for all Americans, including recent immigrants, regardless of their particular ethnicity. ⁵⁷

In other words, Americans—writ large—are consumers, and more Americans means more consumption. This statement both distances itself from the unreflexive nationalism of nativist groupings, and taps into the collective consciousness of environmentalists through an appeal to transform America into a responsible global environmental steward by limiting our consumptive practices.

However, an acknowledgment of the global scope of environmental problems begs the question: if nature is a global concern, why focus on national solutions? The answer, for ecocommunitarians, centers upon the alleged complicity between global arrangements and the interests of capital. Ecocommunitarians stress that lax immigration policies are in the interests of transnational elites; lobbied for by neoclassical economists, multinational corporations, and neoliberal interest groups, because they produce a flexible, mobile labor force with no sense of “place”—“a deep attachment to specific geographies fashioned by repeated interactions that provide both the context and content for the construction of personal and cultural identity.” ⁵⁹ Place is, thus, an environmental and social necessity that is being undone by the deterritorializing impulses of neoliberalism. ⁶⁰

Through this narrative, neoliberal hegemony is linked with a “global space,” in opposition to progressive environmentalism, which is the product of a “national place.” ⁶¹ By opening up the nation-state to a variety of economic flows, neoliberalism is argued to diminish the capacity of the state to deal with social and environmental problems that the nation deems legitimate sources of concern; a phenomenon only amplified by heightened immigration. For instance, environmental ethicist and President of Progressives for Immigration Reform, Philip Cafaro, wonders how citizens could be convinced to make environmental sacrifices if national projects to, say, decrease carbon dioxide output, were countered by population growth from immigration:

If we want to convince our more skeptical fellow-citizens to follow our lead and consume less, we need to get population growth under control . . . [Saying] ‘you need to consume less, make these efforts and sacrifices, so that our country can accommodate tens of millions more Mexicans, tens of millions more Chinese . . . and all their descendants’ . . .  Even a reasonable and conscientious citizen might well ask why he or she should bother. ⁶²

Overall, an ethical concern for the Other is displaced through a communitarian vision of ecological democracy where obligation to humans and nonhumans alike is a function of inclusion within a bounded territorial and cultural community. In contrast with nativists, the “enemy” tying this communal narrative together is not immigrants or any foreign entity, but those amorphous forces of neoliberalism whose incessant flows debilitate the types of ecological sacrifices that could be fashioned by a sovereign ecological state. In an attempt to secure these bounds, the national place of environmentalists is juxtaposed against a homogenous space of difference—the global space—in which transnational capitalists, immigrants, and cosmopolitan idealists all reside. In other words, immigrants are not the problem, global neoliberalism is; the attempt to reduce immigrants to bare life emerges indirectly through a form of guilt by association.

Nonetheless, despite their seemingly benign rhetoric, ecocommunitarians have embraced draconian policies: supporting racialized antiimmigrant laws at the substate level, ⁶⁴ forcefully rejecting attempts to provide a path to citizenship for immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, ⁶⁵ seeking to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause, and calling for a total moratorium on immigration into the United States. ⁶⁶ Not only are immigrants incapable of speaking or acting on behalf of nature here, they are stripped of any potential for becoming national subjects, while their day-to-day lives are simultaneously exposed to the ever-present possibility of coercive force.

Responding to Restrictionism

The emergence of ecocommunitarianism as the dominant discourse of restrictionism suggests that the “exception” emerges not through a predetermined, “anthropocentric” logic, but through contingent articulations between nature, political community, and governance. While bare life might be an ever-present potentiality, restrictionists attempt to actualize this state by constructing a series of relational equivalences through which immigrant populations are deemed “threatening” under a communitarian ethos of ecosovereignty—one that meshes in important ways with the leftist project of greening the state. This begs the question: given the reliance of restrictionists on this seemingly progressive discourse, how might opponents effectively combat this logic through alternative articulations of nature, political community, and governance? And might certain articulations cultivate a more generous ethos of sovereignty where already marginalized populations are less likely to be deemed bare life amid ecological crises?

Restrictionism has met skepticism from academics and activists alike, who have found racial, gendered, class-based, and neocolonial undertones in the logics being advanced. ⁶⁷ Critics have asserted that the territorialized nature advanced by restrictionists is inadequate in considering the difficult ethical questions stemming from historical injustices and spatial interconnections. Specifically, they argue that the nation-state may not be the appropriate locus of ethical responsibility in a period where sovereign authority, control, and legitimacy intermingle among a variety of actors across a spectrum of scales. For example, both environmental degradation and immigration in the US-Mexico border region are produced through a sovereign assemblage cobbled together through the North American Free Trade Agreement, International Monetary Fund and World Bank conditionalities, the Colorado River Compact, a weak Mexican state, and a whole host of American laws and norms. Opponents of restrictionism argue that adjudicating questions of responsibility and obligation by turning to black-boxed nation-states or “national cultures” elides both the transnational character of these structures, and the profound asymmetries of power that they produce. As a consequence, restrictionists fail to grapple with the root causes of social and environmental destruction.

Despite their invaluable critiques, however, opponents tend to portray environmental restrictionism as homogeneous, and indicative of an emerging trend whereby conservatives “appropriate” nature in their attempts to refashion sovereignty along hypernationalist, racist lines. ⁶⁸ At their most nuanced, such appraisals characterize restrictionists in two categories: nativists and neo-Malthusians. ⁶⁹ Whatever their differences, both logics are argued to err in failing to recognize that environmentalism is a global struggle that demands cosmopolitan modes of thinking. ⁷⁰ Restrictionist groups are, thus, said to be “greenwashing” nativism ⁷¹ ; they are not “real” environmentalists, but “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” ⁷²

Similar to Smith, responses have by and large rejected ecosovereignty as an exclusionary project that instrumentally uses a narrative of natural crisis in order to advance anthropocentric social goals. As an alternative, they have gestured toward the emancipatory, deterritorialized sphere of radical ecology. Though the counternarratives to restrictionism vary, the relationship between political community, governance, and nature is consistently argued to be straightforward: “immigrants live closer to nature” ⁷³ ; or “nature thrives on diversity” ⁷⁴ ; or “nature heeds no borders.” ⁷⁵ The sovereignty of nature, in other words, provides lessons that social life can be modeled on; the call of the Wild and the chants of social justice converge. ⁷⁶

While I sympathize with such responses, an unintended consequence is that the ecocommunitarian narrative, which has the most potential to influence progressives, has been widely neglected (the relative nuances of ecocommunitarianism do not need to be identified and grappled with if all restrictionists are racist xenophobes who are merely appropriating nature). This is worrisome because the ecocommunitarian logic taps into certain ontological foundations of contemporary American environmentalism—a rhetorical commitment to a multicultural nation, concern with consumption, attachment to place, emphasis on global stewardship and intergenerational justice, critique of neoliberalism, and so on—and, thus, needs to be forcefully addressed (an occurrence that is unlikely, given the current strategic trajectory of critical responses). In certain logical respects, the ecocommunitarian defense of environmental nationalism is similar to Eckersley’s; the solidarity inscribed within the nation provides a sense of public concern without which asking for environmental sacrifices would be impossible. ⁷⁷

Despite this rhetorical rejection of green sovereignty, the grounded practices of environmental justice and immigrants’ rights organizations often point toward alternative articulations of nature, political community, and governance that are incredibly innovative. For instance, the social and environmental justice organization, the Center for New Community, has launched the most in-depth critique and analysis of the environmental restrictionist movement to date through its campaign on “Race, Migration and the Environment” and its Imagine2050 blog. And while similarly critiquing restrictionists for their “appropriation of nature,” the nature being constructed by the CNC is itself bound up in an effort to reconfigure American sovereignty:

By the year 2050, one out of five Americans will be foreign born. Latino and Asian communities will increase significantly. There will be no clear racial or ethnic majority. We will become a nation of minorities. Today’s perceptions of foreignness will challenge how Americans identify themselves over the coming decades. In light of these challenges, Imagine 2050 believes igniting candid conversations around race, immigration, and environment will become increasingly necessary to American democracy. ⁷⁸

Similarly, for the CNC and its allies, the state is not rejected but is targeted so that it might work with a renewed sense of legitimacy. In those venues that provide strategic leverage, the organization urges federal and state governments to regulate and redistribute to construct a more transparent and participatory democracy. ⁸⁰ The state, however, is not a sacred site but a strategic one, and where appealing to this juridical form risk reinforcing an exclusionary ethos, critique replaces engagement and alternative arrangements of governance are advanced. Attempts to work “within” the state are, thus, supplemented by a variety of actions “outside”; including a “Biking Beyond Bigotry” tour, a newsletter that satirizes restrictionist claims, and the organization of protests against entities funding restrictionist organizations.

Through this strategy, an alternative nature emerges; one that is carefully coded across these variable social registers to protect and enhance the lives of marginalized populations—human and nonhuman—by way of localized interventions that seek to detach nature from its exclusionary social bases and reattach it to forms of community and governance that might work toward an inclusive ethos of ecosovereignty. In a report entitled, “Race, Migration and the Environment,” the CNC opens by stating “[i]n order to tackle the serious crises at hand, environmental movements need to reject the historically dangerous understanding that nature is something separate from society, and examine the ways they are interconnected.” The report proceeds by examining how migrant populations encounter the nonhuman realm and argues that the American environmental movement would benefit from the inclusion of these unique socionatural perspectives. ⁸¹

Overall, a commitment to nature is entwined in a commitment to this inclusive, outward-oriented ethos of ecosovereignty. The radically democratic impetus of such a strategy works to decenter claims of legitimacy away from the traditional state authorities and hypernationalist sympathizers who might work to invoke an exception, while rechanneling the discursive pathways through which commitments to nature might be complicit in reducing marginalized populations to bare life.

The challenge for opponents of restrictionism is to move beyond narratives that equate restrictionism with exclusionary nativism, and “real” commitments to nature with inclusion and social justice. A more promising approach is to explore how conceptions of nature link with exclusionary iterations of sovereignty and show how alternative practices might challenge these forms. Such a move could destabilize previous positions of certainty, but the strategic rewards are infinitely grander, promoting a reflexive environmentalism that opens the door to new green alliances by elevating the problem of “nature’s intelligibility” ⁸² to a place of central concern in dialogues over greening sovereignty.