This book invites the reader to explore contemporary politics through a particular site. That site, Clayoquot Sound, appears to be at the periphery of contemporary power and authority and thus to be marginal to the study of politics. We argue that this appearance is an effect of particular assumptions, assumptions that need to be challenged. Clayoquot (pronounced Clak¢-wot) is more usefully interpreted or “read” as a center of interaction among the movements, powers, and authorities that produce the world in which we live. By reading the global through Clayoquot--that is, by exploring Clayoquot Sound as a microcosm of global politics–we hope to disrupt the assumptions that constrain our political imagination.

At Clayoquot, we can observe a number of increasingly familiar–but still inadequately analyzed–phenomena: among other things, the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, the rise of environmentalism as a new form of political consciousness, the emergence of post-colonial challenges to existing authority, the development of trans-national political movements, the articulation of new forms of science, the recognition of hybrid identities, and the proliferation of new institutions and practices of political negotiation. There are not many sites where these phenomena appear so clearly or in such interesting relations. Moreover, Clayoquot is a particularly interesting example of the disruption of the routines, practices, and assumptions that bind politics to the modern territorial state. When we attempt to understand Clayoquot, it is difficult to pretend that politics is everywhere and always what we have imagined it to be. The same might be said of other places, but we think that Clayoquot is a particularly useful point of entry for those who wish to understand the new patterns of contemporary politics.

Some readers will pick up this book because they are interested in Clayoquot Sound or in the environmental struggles that Clayoquot has come to symbolize. After all, Clayoquot was an important moment in the development of the international campaign against logging in the world’s temperate rainforests; for a long time it was the international campaign’s poster child. We have tried within the book itself and on the Clayoquot Project Web Site to cater to the needs of readers who are specifically interested in Clayoquot or in environmental campaigning. What motivates this book, however, is the belief that Clayoquot is much more than that, much more than a site of environmental campaigning (however photogenic). The more research we have done, the more interesting Clayoquot has become to us as a place where other aspects of contemporary politics--be they gender relations or urban development conflicts or identity struggles--come into focus. We want to encourage our readers to think about Clayoquot as a site where they can explore features of politics that are characteristic of almost any neighborhood in the world, be that neighborhood as “near” as the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, or the skid row of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, or as “distant” as the office towers of Hong Kong or the villages of the Philippines.

We are advocating a particular method of inquiry, a method that privileges the site itself rather than the interpretive frame that we bring to it. Clayoquot Sound is our exemplary site. Everyone is now obsessed with reading or interpreting the newly “globalized” world order. We think that many of the extant readings are based on fundamental misunderstandings. Such misunderstandings are almost inevitable if we go from Washington or New York down to the local level or out to the wild and distant frontier. The political geography that we carry with us, a geography that flows from dreams of imperial domination, always misleads us. In resisting that geography here, we have not freed ourselves from our own delusions; nor could we do so. We have not developed a radically new analysis of global/local or local/global politics. On the other hand, we do believe that the method we have adopted–to read the global through the local–is an appropriate one. How else can we hope to loosen the grip of those political assumptions that bind us to dreams of empire and obscure other human possibilities?