Clayoquot Sound—a sparsely populated region along the west coast of Canada's Vancouver Island—found itself at the epicenter of international environmental politics during the summer of 1993 as protesters gathered there in an effort to protect one of the few remaining temperate rainforests from the pressures of resource extraction that have beleaguered British Columbia and the American West for decades. The core conflicts in Clayoquot were familiar ones: between timber industry jobs in resource-dependent communities and environmental preservation; between the cosmopolitism of global ecotourism and international media and the insular localism of communities unaccustomed to and suspicious of outsiders; and between indigenous peoples with justified historic land-tenure grievances and the more recent immigrants to those lands that both now call home. The difficulties experienced by the various parties to these conflicts were paradigmatic not only of environmental politics but also of the forces of political and economic globalization.

Warren Magnusson and Karena Shaw began following the issues leading up to the 1993 protests and have continued to track the events that followed, painstakingly chronicling them online in The Clayoquot Archive (web.uvic.ca/clayoquot/). The 14 essays in this volume emerged from a 1997 workshop on the politics of Clayoquot Sound, and include contributions by both academic political theorists and local environmental activists. Working within a broadly inclusive definition of environmental political theory expressly intended by the editors, the collected essays seek vision in the heuristic rather than the prescriptive sense—the metaphor of mapping Clayoquot Sound is a recurring theme—and so those seeking an application of normative theory to environmental politics may be disappointed. On the other hand, those seeking to theorize politics through the various sites and forces converging upon Clayoquot in the 1990s will find much in this uniformly strong and well-edited volume.

To understand global environmental politics, Magnusson suggests in his introductory essay, we would do well to turn our gaze from the center to the periphery, from the global capitals and commercial hubs to the sites on which many genuine political struggles are daily enacted. If we are to understand politics itself, we cannot restrict ourselves to the standard concepts familiar to political theorists, but should instead see politics through sites like Clayoquot, which is more than a place or a series of events. It is a “political space” that defies standard cartographic efforts in that it “cannot be located—except within social science and political theories” (p. 7), and is simultaneously a site of scientific representation, the state, ecotourism, indigenous peoples, and ancient forests.

As Shaw notes in her contribution, issues at stake included not only the obvious dispute over the proper management of the local forests, but also “democratic process, local autonomy, dispute resolution, the nature and use of the law, the organization and purpose of economic activity, gender identity and gender equality, and relations between Natives and non-Natives” (p. 60). Both conventional and unconventional forms of political participation (including direct action, economic boycotts, and collaborative groups) shaped the eventual outcomes, and the various stakeholders were forced to navigate the complex interplay of competing sovereignty claims and alternative land-management visions. Alliances and oppositions were made and remade, strategies were formulated and revised, and the authors present a compelling account of the ad hoc nature of policymaking in an age of global inter-dependence and decentralization.

William Chaloupka's essay on the tensions between ethics and political strategy captures the book's central motif, which serves as a unifying theme not only for the overall work but also for the subfield of environmental political theory. Ethical commitments are often inimical to political strategizing, given their disdain for compromise and reliance upon abstract principle, rather than the dynamic contingencies of concrete situations. Unyielding principles make persuasive academic arguments, but their usual effect in political struggles is to divide would-be allies over relatively minor points of dispute, a tendency that is easily exploited by opponents. Reliance upon ethical justificatory principles makes greens vulnerable in the political world, and ironically frustrates their ability to successfully instantiate these principles in practice.

How do we escape the divisive nature of strong ethical commitments in politics? Chaloupka looks to Michel Foucault on power relationships in order to articulate a critical vision of a “different green politics” that is not so “heavy on utopianism and idealism” (p. 87) but can instead respond to the concrete contingencies of specific situations and with the requisite urgencies that they demand. He urges political theorists to shift from their assumed role as articulators of “a grand refusal on behalf of the earth” (p. 75) to one of problem clarifying and ultimately solving. This scolding is both apt and fraught with peril: The tedious intellectual conflicts he criticizes manifest repeatedly in real-world struggles, but counseling a diminished emphasis upon ethical justification risks undermining the motive for action of many greens and sets the movement adrift from its normative moorings. Chaloupka's plea for a different kind of environmental political theory is thematic for the entire volume, which self-consciously avoids ethical principles in favor of a concerted effort to illuminate and ultimately engage politics.

Other essays usefully examine overarching tensions in environmental politics in an effort to advance beyond the over-simplification endemic to many such conflicts. Timothy Luke contrasts “extractive” and “attractive” models of growth—that is, natural resource–dependent economies with those based in ecotourism—and meets the latter with a guarded optimism. Michael M'Gonigle examines the contrasting claims of “centrism” and “territorial” organization in environmental governance, endorsing the latter, which he sees as a necessary “counterbalance” to the dominant centrist political and economic models that “alone can bring social and ecological sustainability” (p. 135). Other essays explore the “simulacral politics” of the local and the global (Catriona Sandilands) and the competing sovereignty claims and conceptions by the British Columbian provincial government and Tla-o-qui-aht native peoples (Thom Kuehls). Altogether, A Political Space succeeds admirably in providing an illuminating map to Clayoquot Sound as it was and is, even if it largely sets aside questions about how it ought to be.