ABSTRACT
This chapter show that the ‘ecosystem approach’ is susceptible of a number of productive readings enabled by its productive ambiguities tend to be subjected to a decisive biopolitical resolution. It focuses on expansions of the scope of ecology for two primary reasons. First, it may help re-orient thinking precisely away from the political epistemology of modernity, premised on conceptual thresholds such as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, ‘mind/spirit’ and ‘matter. Second, it may help to further articulate a critical environmental law. The biopolitical dispositif embodied in the ‘ecosystem approach’ facilitates the establishment of a regulatory system of surveillance and protection aimed at the care, enhancement and optimization of the health and integrity of ecosystems. The biopolitical closure is at work visibly, albeit in different ways, in many international legal regimes. The productive ambiguity available to a critical reading relates to the ‘fence’ or threshold that in the ideo-ontology of modernity separates humanity and nature.
