Political Ecology Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Political ecology is a relatively new interdisciplinary field. It initially developed through the merger of cultural ecology with political economy.

Origins Of The Field

The central concern of cultural ecology in the 1950s and 1960s was to introduce the theoretical constructs of biological ecology into the study of preindustrial cultures. Scholars soon began to question the foundations of cultural ecology, noting that few societies functioned as independent, autarkic systems. Nature and society relations in agrarian cultures, it was argued, are best understood through political economy, focusing on the social relations of production under capitalism. A broadly Marxist political-economic scholarship guided this reorientation, originating from several fields and disciplines. In particular, Marxian development studies in the 1970s increasingly questioned prevailing demographic explanations of developing countries’ environmental degradation, offering an alternative political-economic explanation that focused attention on wealth distribution, social patterns of accumulation, interclass relations, and the role of the state.

Out of this political economy approach to environmental degradation emerged a set of methods and questions that provided the foundation for a new field. Although the term had been used in other contexts, two geographers, Harold Brookfield and Piers Blaikie, are widely recognized for initially defining political ecology as linking ecology with political economy in their 1987 book on land degradation. Their central premise was that environmental problems are fundamentally social and political problems, not technical or managerial, and therefore demand a theoretical foundation for analyzing the complex social, economic, and political relations in which ecological change is embedded. Because of the complexity of the phenomena under investigation and the interdisciplinary character of the field, there is no single methodology or set of theoretical concepts that could be used to define political ecology. Nonetheless, political ecology is distinguishable in its particular blend of multiscaler, ecological, political-economic, historical, ethnographic, and discourse analyses.

Theoretical Evolution

Political ecology became a distinct field during a period of revolutionary theoretical shifts in both the social and biophysical sciences, specifically the rise of post structural social theory and nonequilibrium ecology. Political ecology was soon caught up in poststructuralist debates, especially those addressing the social construction of nature. The phrase, “the social construction of nature” highlighted the role of representation, discourse, and imagery in defining and framing knowledge of the natural world.

Political ecologists have staked out the middle ground between extreme relativist and extreme realist views of nature. The prevailing position, borrowed from critical realist philosophy and feminist science studies, accepts the existence of a material world independent of human consciousness and sensory perception, while at the same time recognizes that knowledge of that world is always situated, contingent, and mediated. Poststructuralism introduced the role of discourse analysis in exploring the ideological roots of claims about the causes of environmental change. Since the early 1990s, it has become widely recognized within political ecology that material analyses cannot be conducted in the absence of, or separately from, discursive analyses.

Biological ecology, almost simultaneous with the emergence of poststructuralist in the social sciences, experienced its own revolutionary theoretical shift. For most of the twentieth century, the dominant view of environmental change was that ecological communities progressed through a linear series of stages, which ultimately culminated in a final, climax stage of stable equilibrium. Any force—natural or anthropogenic— that altered the normal equilibrium state was characterized as a disturbance. In the twentieth century, the equilibrium view of ecology came under increasing scrutiny as more and more empirical findings contradicted it. A new ecology—nonequilibrium opposed to equilibrium—subsequently emerged, which rejected the assumption of stability as the norm for all ecological communities. The new ecology replaced assumptions of equilibrium, predictability, and permanence with instability, disequilibria, nonlinearity, and chaotic fluctuation. Disturbance is not viewed as anomalous or as an event from which a system recovers, but rather it is considered commonly integral to the system’s functioning. Finally, the linearity and predictability of ecological change can no longer be assumed in complex natural systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.

In the wake of these theoretical developments, political ecologists have identified convergences in nonequilibrium ecology and poststructuralism that can provide the basis for a synthetic treatment of nature-society research. Four themes emerged among these efforts at synthesis. First, researchers are combining nonequilibrium ecology and critical social theory to demonstrate the weakness, or in some cases, the complete absence, of scientific evidence to support widely accepted claims about nature-society interactions. A second theme emphasizes how incorporating the insights of nonequilibrium ecology can bring a renewed focus on nature’s agency in shaping nature-society interactions. A third theme highlights the importance of temporal and spatial scales in both nonequilibrium ecology and social theory, underscoring the nonlinear and noncyclical character of environmental change. Finally, advances in social theory and nonequilibrium ecology have produced a new appreciation for localized resource management systems in environments defined by extreme spatial and temporal variability.

Recent Trends And Future Directions

Political ecology is rapidly expanding beyond rural concerns and developing countries into new research contexts and new areas of theoretical and philosophical inquiry. First, a strong focus on urban political ecology has developed in recent years, partly in recognition of the rapid urbanization of large regions of developing countries and the consequences of globalization. Urban environments are characterized as hybrid forms, requiring vast inputs of capital and labor, yet still linked to and dependent upon biophysical processes. Second, political ecologists have recently developed a potent critical assessment of environmental security thinking, along with a cogent argument for an alternative analysis of the relationship between environmental change alongside war and armed conflict. Third, recent developments within and outside of the academy suggest that engaging with formal ethics—including social justice, animal rights, bioethics, and consumer responsibility—will provide an important trajectory in political ecology.

Finally, debates over indigenousness, property rights, and stewardship have sparked a range of work that more deeply probes the relationship of identity and environment, raising new questions about how to theorize culture and nature. Future political ecology studies will need to be aware of the instabilities and cultural constructedness of group self-identification, while at the same time remain sensitive to the validity of local historical narratives, practices, meanings, and attachment to place.

Bibliography:

Adams,William. Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in the Third World. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2009
Blaikie, Piers, and Harold Brookfield. Land Degradation and Society. New York: London: Methuen, 1987.
Harvey, David. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Neumann, Roderick P. Making Political Ecology. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005.
Peet, Richard, and Michael Watts, eds. Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004.
Peluso, Nancy, and Michael Watts, eds. Violent Environments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Robbins, Paul. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Rocheleau, Dianne, Barbara Thomas-Slayter, and Esther Wangari, eds. Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Stonich, Susan. “I Am Destroying the Land! ”The Political Ecology of Poverty and Environmental Destruction in Honduras. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993.
Zimmerer, Karl and Thomas Bassett, eds. Political Ecology: An Integrative Approach to Geography and Environment-development Studies. New York: Guilford, 2003.

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