Environmental geography and the inheritance of Western technoscience

Abstract

How has environmental geography grappled with the inheritances of Western technoscience? On one hand, as a discipline, we are now well aware of science's entanglements with imperial projects and racist logics, not to mention the omissions and silenced voices propagated by the ‘view from nowhere.’ On the other, it is difficult to imagine environmental geographies and politics that are not tethered to technoscience – however implicitly or transgressively. This paper offers a critical analysis for grappling with the inheritance of Western technoscience in environmental geography. We accomplish this by reading the work of Donna Haraway, Sylvia Wynter and their interlocuters together to posit a set of principles for the subdiscipline of environmental geography. In doing so, rather than review the engagements of environmental geographers with Western technoscience, we range outside the discipline for insights into responsibility, epistemic inheritances and world-making in the wake of violent legacies. Throughout, we take neither environmental geography nor Western technoscience as monolithic or univocal and instead follow specific threads of engagement and potential amplification. We see progress in environmental geography as inextricable from the subdiscipline's entanglement with technoscience, and therefore advocate for a relationship that is ultimately responsible for this inheritance through its transformation.