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discursive framing of tuna sustainability is made possible because of powerful ideas about the

environment, marine ecosystems, and modes of classifying, measuring and ordering nature,

that are legitimised through institutions and institutional relationships, and that manifest in

ordering devices. Before detailing some of the key marine sustainability concepts that

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developed over the 20 century, I would like to dig deeper to trace the contemporary
environmental order upon which a sustainability discourse is based. Such an order can be

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traced to the period from the late 18 and early 19 centuries: a period in western thinking
when nature began to be measured and classified and the natural science disciplines were

forming, making way for a new environmental ordering. Although there is not the space here

to detail the epistemic changes that led to this period, it is important to outline prominent

ideas and systems of ordering humans and nature, so as to historicise the current period of

ecological thinking. Concepts key to modern day understandings of the environment emerged

in this period, providing conditions for discourses in environmentalism to develop. These

environmental concepts also contributed to the understanding of nature as a separate entity to

culture.

In his seminal work The Order of Things (Les Mots et les Choses, first published in

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1966), Foucault examines the process of discontinuity, which began in the period of the 17

century when an order that had been based on ‘resemblance’ became disassociated, and a

new order based on measurable analysis of identity and difference emerged (Foucault 1989,

p. 58). Resemblance had been the overarching order wherein the world was linked together

like a chain (Foucault 1989, p. 21).

In the vast syntax of the world, the different beings adjust themselves to one
another, the plant communicates with the animals, the earth with the sea, man with
everything around him. Resemblance imposed adjacencies that in turn guarantee
further resemblances. (1989, p. 20)

Nature was connected to a divine order through reflection – man’s intellect was seen as an

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