Heterotopias of the environment: Law's Forgotten Spaces

This chapter presents a heterotopic overview of the three spaces of the natural reserve, the local community and the botanical institution, all of which are much discussed in environmental law. Heterotopology’ then becomes a general ‘systematic description of these different spaces, of these other places’, ‘finding out where, how and for whom difference erupts and maintains itself’. It has been suggested that Michel Foucault was never fully satisfied with the analytics of space represented by heterotopology, and largely abandoned it in favour of the geography of knowledge/power presented through the Panopticon of Discipline and Punish. One could distinguish between the heterotopia of the preface in The Order of Things and the subsequent heterotopias lecture on the basis that the former refers to discursive heterotopias, while the latter refers to real places. Heterotopias are social formations that counteract the abstraction of legal utopias that drives environmental discourse.