Abstract

This dissertation examines three sites of nature recreation and education in the United States: the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Disney's Animal Kingdom™ Theme Park in Orlando, and an ecotour to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in Wyoming. On the surface, these emblematic tourist sites might be understood as quite dissimilar: the museum is generally read as storehouse of scientific knowledge, the theme park as playground for families, the ecotour as a journey to see wildlife in its natural habitat. However, based on my fieldwork in each of these places, I argue that they actually perform similar discursive work, generating a privileged narrative of nature that is supported by other signs and systems of power, and which coheres through the functioning of green governmentality. Each of these sites renders nature visible and intelligible, generates experts to define and explain its 'truths', assembles technologies of power, cultivates strategies for intervention, articulates biopolitical projects, and fosters particular subjectivities. More succinctly, they tell us what nature is, how it is under threat, and the appropriate solutions to its crisis. Moreover, the 'truth' of nature produced at these places hinges upon its commodification. Each of these sites demonstrates how nature is enrolled in the market through selling the very idea of what nature is, and what it can be. Deploying science and expert knowledge, spectacle and fantasy, play and pleasure, all of these places proffer similar narrative and scripts, providing us with a lexicon through which to apprehend the natural world, and save it. Each place combines nature, power, and profit to greater and lesser degrees so that the commodification of nature becomes the primary vehicle to understand and rescue it. In doing so, other ways of encountering nature, especially in terms of a more radical environmental critique, are rendered unthinkable.

In examining the operation of power at each of these sites, I bring together green governmentality and political ecology. By linking the theoretical insights of governmentality with empirically rich studies that consider how nature is enrolled in the service of the market, I produce an investigation of the political economy and cultural politics of the consumption of nature in spaces of recreation and education. I end with a consideration of the agency of non-human nature might suggest different ways of conceptualizing, acting upon, and ameliorating environmental problems.