HYPHENATED GEOGRAPHIES: THE DEINDUSTRIALIZATION OF NATURE-SOCIETY GEOGRAPHY*

On 18 October 2007 Senators Joseph ieberman (I-CT) and John Warner (R-VA) introduced the Climate Security Act of 2007 on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Among other things, this act would aim to regulate some 2,100 industrial facilities that produce significant greenhouse gas emissions--power plants, refineries, and industrial factories. This act--along with countless political discussions of climate change-reveal that the ecological challenges of the twenty-first century require us to confront the socioecological transformations wrought by expanding patterns of urbanization, industrialization, and fossil-fuel combustion. Geographically speaking, these processes unfold in particular places and spaces constructed as highly unnatural due to the dominance of the built environment, high levels of pollution, and dependence on societal metabolisms of waste, water, materials, and energy (Fischer-Kowalski 2003), From the narrow disciplinary perspective of geography, principally its Anglo-American variants, it is also interesting to note that most of these sites remain under the purview of the more spatial side of human geography, particularly urban and economic geography (Hanson 1999; Angel 2000). (1) Despite fleeting calls for a "critical industrial ecology" (a term credited to Jody Emel in Bridge and Jonas 2002, 764) and an "industrial geography of the environment" (Gibbs and Healey 1997), it is still safe to say that, by and large, "few geographers have been involved in the study of industrial ecology" (Liverman, Yarnal, and Turner 2003, 273). This gap persists in spite of the fact that, since 1990 multitudes of geographers have answered influential calls for research on nature-society questions (Kates 1987; FitzSimmons 1989; Turner 2002). Critical geographical work on nature has exploded to what Noel Castree described as a "deafening noise" (2002, 112), and human-environment geography continues to expand its interdisciplinary connections (Zimmerer 2007; Turner and Robbins 2008). Yet, as evidenced by the recent proliferation of calls for nature-society analyses of urban (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006), First World (McCarthy 2005), and economic geographies (Gibbs 2006; Soyez and Schulz 2008), scholars are rediscovering the need to understand the social, spatial, and ecological relationships embedded in urban industrial capitalism (for example, Cronon 1991; Gandy 2002; Colten 2005; Kaika 2005; Rock and Angel 2005; Robbins 2007). In this article I offer an explanation of nature-society geography's relative neglect of the ecological underpinnings of industrial capitalism in the history of geographical thought within the Anglo-American context. My central argument is that geographers have been too narrowly focused, both empirically and conceptually, on those domains constructed as close to nature, consequently limiting their engagement with denaturalized geographies of socioecological consequence such as transportation systems, power plants, and households. Following Matthew Sparke's discussion of the hyphens in "nation-state" and "geo-graphy" (2005), I have found it particularly useful to engage the semiotic marker of the space between nature-society: the hyphen. I argue that the ways in which geographers read this hyphen sets epistemological limits on the object of their analysis. Indeed, as Billie Lee Turner II forcefully argued (1997), the different readings of the hyphen informed by divergent epistemological and methodological perspectives have led to many more introverted tunnels of nature-society research than bridges within the discipline and beyond. On one hand, the hyphen can be read as a uniter, denoting the mutual relationships between nature and society. In this sense the hyphen can be conceptualized as containing the myriad forms of interchange between human and nonhuman beings, resources, and the ecological processes that support the extraction, distribution, and consumption of matter and energy. …