ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests elsewhere that the semantic limits of the term 'sustainability' and the forms of ethical and political commitment implicit in these limits must be established with reference to the broader conceptual terrain it occupies: a terrain chapter designated with the term 'biopolitics'. The environmental dimension of biopower was not lost on Michel Foucault, as is apparent in his gloss on a remark made by the eighteenth-century demographer Jean-Baptiste Moheau to the effect that 'it is up to the government to change the air temperature and to improve the climate, to create a new soil and a new climate'. According to Foucault, the regulation of birth and death rates, the control of disease and the monitoring of hospital patients, along with more contemporary manifestations like the collection of consumer data, health insurance, and psychological and sexual profiling, become intelligible only within the context of the biopolitical paradigm.
