Reaction, Resilience, and the Trumpist Behemoth: Environmental Risk Management from “Hoax” to Technique of Domination

Matthew Sparke and Daniel Bessner

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019, vol. 109, issue 2, 533-544

Abstract: The election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency has led to significant changes in environmental governance, unleashing an authoritarian, nationalistic, and business-deregulating juggernaut aimed at destroying various forms of environmental protection. We seek to name and explain this juggernaut as the Trumpist Behemoth. Using this terminology, we show how Neumann’s classic 1942 study of the Nazi Behemoth can be used to build a critique of the Trump administration’s approach to governance. We join this with the contemporary critique of Climate Leviathan by Mann and Wainwright along with diverse critical literatures on resilience to argue that the Trumpist Behemoth is further distinguished by its anti-Leviathan reactionary appropriation of the politics and practices of resilience. This creates a regime that retains certain neoliberal commitments to market rule but rearticulates and reterritorializes them nationalistically. Connecting business interests with a border-building vision of “America First,” it simultaneously reterritorializes nature as national in ways that obscure the global ecosystems and contradictions of the Anthropocene cum capitalocene out of which the Trumpist Behemoth has been birthed. Key Words: authoritarianism, climate Behemoth, green neoliberalism, reaction, resilience.

Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2018.1549469

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