The first two analytic chapters are by well-known American theorists of environmental politics: William Chaloupka and Timothy W. Luke. Chaloupka and Luke both pose the problem of Clayoquot as one of politics, and frame that problem in quite general terms. Chaloupka focuses on strategy, and in particular on the way that strategy works to narrow the gap between ethical absolutes and political opportunities. As he notes, Clayoquot is a place that invites ethical absolutes: We must protect the ancient forest from the depredations of the loggers! We must recover our homeland! We must defend our community! We must save our livelihoods! What Chaloupka notices is the way that the leading environmental activists at Clayoquot managed to move away from their own absolutes toward an effective political strategy. He draws some broader lessons from this experience about the way green politics – and politics in general – has to be practised if it is to generate positive change. Luke’s analysis is complementary, in that it sets out the political economy of Clayoquot Sound in a way that clarifies the region’s position within the new world order: he explains the dangers, difficulties, and political opportunities. Luke puts particular emphasis on the shift from “extractive” to “attractive” models of development, and shows how the environmentalist protests against logging in Clayoquot have worked as “envirotisements” (or ecological advertising) to attract tourists and tourist/retirement development to the region. This shift involves hardships for some and opportunities for others. Luke, like Chaloupka, ends on a note of cautious optimism, and that optimism – again like Chaloupka’s – is keyed to a recognition that communities like Clayoquot can and do respond strategically to the dangers and opportunities of global change. In the first commentary, Warren Magnusson takes up the problem of contextualizing strategic action: is it to be within the “urban global” or within the old frameworks of state sovereignty? He suggests that sovereignty is a dubious frame.

Michael M’Gonigle is also suspicious of the sovereign state, although his reasoning is different. M’Gonigle has been a prominent environmental activist and scholar in British Columbia for two decades, and a strong advocate of the need to rebalance central with local authority, and in the process to transform both. He emphasizes the need for structural change to deal with the issues that Luke and Chaloupka discuss. He situates the controversy in and around Clayoquot within the context of other struggles over natural resource extraction in British Columbia, and suggests how people in the province (and elsewhere) could move strategically toward greater control over their local economies (and hence over their lives). Catriona Sandilands approaches the issues more sceptically. As another person who is in a sense “local” but not “native,” Sandilands is struck by the way that the Clayoquot region is being reconstructed as a simulacrum of “nature” for the benefit of tourists and retirees. For her, this is deeply troubling. Like Luke and Chaloupka, she nevertheless senses something positive about the way that the region has been politicized. There has been an unsettling of positions, a move towards dialogue, an implicit recognition of hybridity and multiplicity as inevitable and positive features of the politics of Clayoquot. In the second commentary, Sharon Zukin (a prominent urban sociologist) extends the analysis that Sandilands offers, by drawing attention to the way in which the multiple “cultures of nature” in urban localities like hers (New York City) intersect with and in various ways over-determine the ones that appear at Clayoquot. This brings us back to the issues that Luke posed.

In the next essay, Thom Kuehls focuses on another aspect of the global situation: the on-going presence of indigenous peoples. Kuehls is fascinated by the implications of the Nuu-chah-nulth’s 1984 declaration that Meares Island (in the center of Clayoquot Sound) was henceforth to be considered a “tribal park”. He uses that declaration as a key to understanding the assumptions that underpin non-aboriginal declarations of sovereignty. Those assumptions clearly make it difficult for the Nuu-chah-nulth to assert their rights and interests effectively within a discourse of sovereignty. In the third commentary, Umeek of Ahousaht (Richard Atleo), himself a Nuu-chah-nulth hereditary chief, pushes Kuehls’ analysis further. Umeek’s perspective is, of course, global, in that it is rooted in a response to the effects of European and Euro-American colonialism. On the other hand, his understanding is also local, in that it grows out of the understandings of his own people. He challenges us to think of Clayoquot in an entirely different way. Gary Shaw takes up a similar theme, but he focuses especially on the Report of the Clayoquot Sound Scientific Panel, which purported to put “normal science” (in Thomas Kuhn’s sense) into a new relation with local and aboriginal science. Shaw emphasizes the politics of claims to scientific authority, and draws our attention to colonizing practices that have been gendered in particular ways. As he notes, the Nuu-chah-nulth have been gravely disadvantaged by those practices, but the issues raised at Clayoquot are of much wider import.

In the penultimate chapter of the book, the prominent international relations theorist, R. B. J. Walker, brings us back to the problem that motivates this book as a whole: the ontology of the political. Most analyses of Clayoquot (and other political sites), he suggests, pre-suppose the answers that they are purporting to seek. We have ready-made categories that tell us what is “there” in places like Clayoquot, and then we fit the “facts” into the boxes. Walker’s plea is, in effect, for a reading of Clayoquot that loosens the hold of these ready-made categories and enables us to think the political more openly. In our Conclusion, we take up that theme.