Digital archives, e-books and narrative space

In this paper we are concerned with the capacity of digital media to enable publics to tell their own environmental stories using digital broadcast archives (DBAs). We consider how digital media afford different ways of telling stories in relation to digital media archives. Central to this discussion is our experience of writing e‐books as part of the AHRC‐funded project “Earth in Vision: BBC coverage of environmental change 1960–2010”. The e‐book format has been adopted in order to explore some of the possibilities for writing environmental history and politics using DBAs

Green public spheres and the green governance state: The politics of emancipation and ecological conditionality

Published online: 24 Jan 2007A consistent thread weaves through all the articles in this edition. Each author, in some fashion, reflects upon the dual concepts of a 'global green public sphere' and the 'global governance state', as they intersect with the politics of environmentalism. Indeed, as is evidenced in the preceding pages, the politics of green concern transmute into a myriad of different collective forms. Despite this diversity of responses found within and between environmental groups, we conclude that most greens cross boundaries in a positive fashion. Through the construction of transnational networks of solidarity, movements become global entities, acting in concert to protect ecosystems and emancipate humans and non-humans from degradation and subjugation and expanding the public sphere of green debate transnationally. In certain instances, however, environmentalism is used as a tool for continued conquest and domination. These instances, although not generally reflective of green movements as a whole, are often writ large due to the relative power, in comparative terms, of the proponents. 'Environment', therefore, can be either a symbol for liberation or repression; emancipation or conditionality. It can be used to support democracy or, alternatively, to support authoritarianism; it can be used to attack neoliberalism and corporate-controlled globalisation, and it can be used to support it; it can be used to lionise concepts of 'the local', and it can be utilised to denigrate local systems of meaning in a neocolonial fashion.Timothy Doyle and Brian Dohert

Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and the division of labour

Although some scholars have attempted to cast Adam Smith as a thinker deeply interested in politics and focused upon the importance of the role of legislators in human affairs, this paper suggests that Smith’s project is basically an exercise in anti-politics. Though he did, of course, reserve some limited functions for government in order to solve a number of otherwise intractable problems of collective action, on the whole, Smith regarded politicians and legislators as factious, interfering, self-interested and generally knavish; more likely to disrupt the system of natural liberty (and therefore the prosperity and harmony of the polity) than aid it. Though Smith did express strong political opinions on a number of specific issues (for example, the separation of church and state; the management of Scottish affairs; American independence and the use of standing armies) this paper suggests that readings of Smith as positively political are exaggerated.Lisa Hil