The Politics of Sewerage: Contested Narratives on Growth, Science, and Nature

Abstract

Relevant actors in environmental resources disputes base their positions on specific assumptions about growth, science, and nature, and construct narratives to support these positions. The contest over the extension of a sewerage system in Ontario, Canada, illustrates this point. A productivist narrative sees sewers as necessary to meet the competitiveness of the city region and a growing demand for housing. It assumes that science can accommodate local resilient ecologies and human bodies. A nature conservation narrative, by contrast, embraces a conception of no or slow growth, locally integrated water management, and vulnerable ecologies and human bodies. It is, however, compromised by a NIMBY bias, an aesthetic focus on nature, and a continued endorsement of regional growth. We conclude that narratives on growth, science, and nature are not given, but socially produced, historically contingent, strategically deployed, internally compromised, embedded in specific power relations, and open to contestation and challenge.

Keywords:

• growth
• narratives
• nature
• Ontario
• politics
• science
• sewerage
• York Region

This is a collective effort and the authors appear in alphabetic order. The research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant 410-2002-1483. The authors acknowledge the tremendous help, encouragement, and patience of four anonymous reviewers. They also thank Michael McMahon and Matt Binstock, who provided invaluable comments on the article.

Notes

All figures mentioned in this article are in Canadian dollars.

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