Abstract:

This paper aims to reveal the spatial production of liberal environmentalism and calls it with a new term, Space of Environmentalism. First, the critique of liberal environmentalism is integrated with production of urban space in late capitalism by Henri Lefebvre as a theoretical framework. Space of Environmentalism is analysed with three different examples as ecotourism site, protected area and conservation project field. Local people of ecotourism sites become a shop owner or a tour guide, while a natural ecosystem becomes a touristic commodity in order to satisfy needs and concerns of consumer society. In protected areas, liberal environmentalist elites impose their abstract plan that ‘real’ wild nature can sustain in a protected area remote from urbanization and industrialization in order to hide the consumption, destruction and the collapse of remaining ecosystems of the earth. Local people and other agents in conservation project field are homogenized and defined as stakeholders while nature is defined and bordered by scientific experts provide legitimization to win-win solutions to environmental threats. These examples show that the abstraction of liberal environmentalism produces spaces that homogenize and dominate nature and society like cities. State, capital, media and environmental NGOs act together to impose these spaces where nature is presented as wild, beautiful, and threatened to satisfy liberal environmentalist concerns and needs of a consumer society. Nature becomes homogenized as touristic, protected or conserved spaces where local people are changed into sellers, consumers, visitors and stakeholders.

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