ENVIRONMENTALISM, ETHNICITY AND SACRED PLACES - REFLECTIONS ON MODERNITY, DISCOURSE AND POWER

The movement to stop a proposed granite quarry on Cape Breton Island is used as a point of deparature for reflections on larger issues of modern identity construction, discourse, and power. The adoption of decontextualizing modes of discourse and self-definition generates ambivalences and contradictions in any movement launched against a social structure founded on such modes. Modernity, while subsuming the mainstream of critique it generates, simultaneously pushes countercultural movements toward extremist positions, including the threat of violence. In redefining the framework of environmental debate, the invocation of spirtuality represents another, more successful revolt against the language of modernity.