Narratives about protecting, speaking/acting for the environment are ubiquitous in a wide variety of heterogenous social situations. The essays in this special issue examine the form, content, context and materiality of the discourse of environmental protection. Based on field studies in India, the essays each examine the discourses in and of the courtroom, logic of state bureaucracy, legitimating frames of neoliberal urban policy, regional development narratives and subjectivities developed in indigenous social movements against land acquisition. In each of these contexts the environment is invoked, sometimes in strategic or even instrumental ways; in others, a green discourse is normative, even constitutive of subjectivities of the people involved. It is shaped by material relations in each specific context. The malleability of form and content of the environmental narrative encourages its appropriation in multiple registers and allows meaningful expression of diverse material contestations through it. It is in this diversity of appropriation that we suggest that the environment is a meta-narrative of our times.

在各种不同的社会环境中，有关保护环境，说话/为环境行动的叙事无处不在。本期特刊中的文章探讨了环境保护话语的形式，内容，背景和实质。基于印度的实地研究，每篇文章都审视了法庭内和法庭上的论述，国家官僚主义的逻辑，新自由主义城市政策的合法框架，区域发展叙事以及土著社会运动反对征地的发展中的主体性。在每种情况下，有时都以战略性甚至工具性的方式调用环境。在另一些情况下，绿色话语是规范性的，甚至构成了所涉人员的主观性。在每种特定情况下，它都是由物质关系决定的。环境叙事形式和内容的可延展性鼓励其在多个登记册中的使用，并通过它来有意义地表达各种物质竞争。正是在这种多样性的分配中，我们认为环境是我们时代的元叙事。