ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses ecology and its relationship to machinic thought. As will become apparent, machinic thought opposes both modernist and structuralist accounts of environmental conflict. 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 always discursively produced and contested. The fact that Nietzsche took seriously the epistemological and ethical issues at stake in the relation between word and world, means that he must stand at the forefront of any poststructuralist analysis of the discursive and textual (re)production of environmental conflict and its regulation. For Deleuze and Guattari, the structuring of what are necessary and what is inevitable – whether this is in relation to environmental conflict and its regulation or something other – occurs at the level of the 'socius'. The persistence of environmental conflict works on, eats away and brings about leakages in political notions of resource use.
