Deleuze and Environmental Damage: Violence of the Text(New Advances in Crime and Social Harm)

This book offers a post-structuralist critique of the problems associated with modernist accounts of environmental harm and regulation. Through a notably detailed micro-political analysis of forest conflict, the author explores the limits of academic commentary on environmental issues and suggests that the traditional variables of political economy, race and gender need to be recast in light of four key modalities through which 'the environment' and 'environmental damage' are (re)produced. Focusing on vision, speed, lexicon and affect, the book engages a new ethic for categorizing and regulating 'nature' and challenges criminologists, sociologists, cultural theorists and others to reconsider what it is possible to say and do about environmental problems.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Introduction. Modernity and ecological thought: a brief critique; Environment and criminological thought; Ecology and machinic thought: Deleuze/Guattari; Event, method, lexicon; Becoming known; Becoming forest; Becoming contested. On the unsaid: text, nature(s), damage; Conclusion; References; Index.

About the Author :
Mark Halsey is a Lecturer in the Department of Criminology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also Adjunct Senior Lecturer in the Criminal Justice Program at the School of Law at Flinders University of South Australia, Australia. His work has appeared in such journals as Theoretical Criminology, British Journal of Criminology and Punishment and Society. Mark has written extensively on the socio-legal construction of environmental harm and has an ongoing interest in discourses of youth offending, violence, graffiti management and crime causation. He is currently immersed in a six year interview based study of young men subjected to repeat periods of incarceration across juvenile and adult custodial spheres. Deleuze and Environmental Damage is his first book.

Review :
'While the study of environmental conflict remains at a nascent stage in academic criminology, it is already proving one of the most productive avenues for examining the practices of advanced liberal governance generally and crime control in particular. Mark Halsey's fascinating study is the single most significant effort thus far to theorize this emerging field.' Professor Jonathan Simon, University of California Berkeley, USA 'Deleuze and Environmental Damage is a brilliant and timely book that makes use of Gilles Deleuze's thought in a novel and imaginative way. Mark Halsey uses Deleuze's philosophy to bear on law and the environment, specifically in Australia. Halsey makes use of French theory to discuss legal questions pertaining to the environment that are of great consequence in today's world.' Verena Andermatt Conley, Harvard University, USA 'One of the great pleasures of Halsey's book...is the clarity and comprehensiveness with which he demonstrates how the work of Deleuze and Guattari provides a means for keeping pace with the mobility of environmental problems by considering nature and systems of environmental regulation as discursively produced and contested.' Australian Journal of Environmental Education 'Halsey's exposition is lucid and...valuable to law and criminology. A chapter or two of this book would be a welcome and provocative addition to environmental law courses, criminology courses, and as a more accessible work than many, would be useful to any undergraduate courses examining modernity.' The British Society of Criminology '...a challenge towards all those engaged in some way in the transformation of nature to reconsider what can be said, written and done about environmental problems.' International Journal of Environment and Pollution