Political Ecology

by Paul Robbins (Ohio State University)

• ISBN13: 9781405102667
• ISBN10: 1405102667
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-08-01
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This text presents a critical survey of the burgeoning field of political ecology, an interdisciplinary area of research which connects politics and economy to problems of environmental control and ecological change. Written to be accessible to students at all levels and from different disciplines, it provides an entertaining and rigorous synthesis of the achievements and shortcomings of the field to date. The book is divided into four sections: the history and emergence of political ecology over the last century; the conceptual and methodological challenges facing political ecologists; the major questions that political ecology has addressed and, to varying degrees, answered; and the major challenges that face the field now and for the future. Throughout, the author uses case examples to explore abstract, theoretical issues in a down-to-earth way. He also draws on real life details from his own experience, in order to offer a personal glimpse into political ecology research.

Author Biography

Paul Robbins is Associate Professor of Geography at Ohio State University. He is the author of numerous articles exploring the relationships between power, knowledge, and environmental change. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and the recipient of grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Lake Erie Protection Fund.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	xii
List of Tables	xiii
List of Boxes	xiv
Introduction	xv
Part I What is Political Ecology?	1	(84)
1 The Hatchet and the Seed	3	(14)
What is Political Ecology?	5	(8)
Challenging apolitical ecologies	7	(4)
Ecoscarcity and the limits to growth	7	(2)
Other apolitical ecologies: diffusion, valuation, and modernization	9	(2)
Common assumptions and modes of explanation	11	(1)
The hatchet: political ecology as critique	12	(1)
The seed: political ecology as equity and sustainability research	13	(1)
The Dominant Narratives of Political Ecology	13	(4)
Big questions and theses	13	(2)
The degradation and marginalization thesis	14	(1)
The environmental conflict thesis	14	(1)
The conservation and control thesis	14	(1)
The environmental identity and social movement thesis	15	(1)
The target of explanation	15	(2)
2 A Tree with Deep Roots	17	(24)
The Determinist Context	19	(3)
A political ecological alternative	20	(2)
The Building Blocks	22	(19)
Critical approaches in early human-environment research	22	(4)
Continental critique: Humboldt, Reclus, Wallace, and Sommerville	22	(3)
Critical environmental pragmatism	25	(1)
From sewer socialism to mitigating floods: hazards research	26	(2)
The nature of society: cultural ecology	28	(8)
Historicism, landscape, and culture: Carl Sauer	29	(1)
Julian Steward: a positivist alternative	30	(2)
System, function, and human life: mature cultural ecology	32	(4)
Beyond land and water: the boundaries of cultural ecology	36	(9)
The limits of progressive contextualization	38	(2)
Taking the plunge	40	(1)
3 The Critical Tools	41	(30)
Common Property Theory	43	(2)
Green Materialism	45	(7)
Materialist history	46	(1)
The case of Oriental despotism	47	(3)
Dependency, accumulation, and degradation	50	(1)
Lessons from materialism: broadly defined political economy	51	(1)
The Producer is the Agent of History: Peasant Studies	52	(6)
Chayanov and the rational producer	54	(1)
Scott and the moral economy	55	(1)
Gramsci and peasant power	56	(2)
Breaking Open the Household: Feminist Development Studies	58	(2)
Critical Environmental History	60	(3)
Whose History and Science? Postcolonial Studies and Power/Knowledge	63	(4)
Power/knowledge	65	(1)
Critical science, deconstruction, and ethics	66	(1)
Political Ecology Emergent	67	(4)
4 A Field Crystallizes	71	(14)
Chains of Explanation	72	(4)
Peanuts and poverty in Niger	75	(1)
Marginalization	76	(3)
The Silent Violence of famine in Nigeria	77	(2)
Broadly Defined Political Economy	79	(3)
Struggles in Cote D'Ivoire	80	(2)
Twenty-five Years Later	82	(3)
Part II Conceptual and Methodological Challenges	85	(42)
5 Destruction of Nature: Human Impact and Environmental Degradation	87	(20)
The Focus on Human Impact	90	(1)
Defining and Measuring Degradation	91	(5)
Loss of natural productivity	92	(1)
Loss of biodiversity	93	(1)
Loss of usefulness	94	(2)
Socio-environmental destruction: creating or shifting risk ecology	96	(1)
Limits of Land Degradation: Variability, Disturbance, and Recovery	96	(7)
What baseline? Non-human disturbance and variability of ecological systems	97	(1)
What impact? Variable response to disturbance	98	(3)
Can we go back? Variable recovery from disturbance	101	(2)
Methodological Imperatives in Political Analysis of Environmental Destruction	103	(4)
6 Construction of Nature: Environmental Knowledges and Imaginaries	107	(20)
Why Bother to Argue that Nature (or Forests or Land Degradation...) is Constructed?	108	(10)
Choosing targets for political ecological constructivism	109	(1)
Debates and motivations	110	(3)
Hard and soft constructivism	113	(3)
"Radical" constructivism	113	(1)
"Soft" constructivism	114	(2)
Constructivist claims in political ecology	116	(2)
"Barstool" Biologists and "Hysterical Housewives": The Peculiar Case of Local Environmental Knowledge	118	(8)
Eliciting environmental construction	121	(10)
Talk and text: construction in discourse	121	(1)
Categories and taxonomies	121	(2)
Spatial knowledge and construction	123	(1)
Narratives of ecological process and change	123	(1)
Genealogies of representation: environmental history	124	(2)
Methodological Issues in Political Analysis of Environmental Construction	126	(1)
Part III Political Ecology Now	127	(76)
7 Degradation and Marginalization	129	(18)
The Argument	131	(1)
Degradation and reversibility	131	(1)
Accumulation and declining margins	132	(1)
The Evidence	132	(9)
Amazonian deforestation	132	(6)
Contract agriculture in the Caribbean	138	(3)
Evaluating the Thesis	141	(1)
Research Example: Common Property Disorders in Rajasthan	142	(5)
Eliciting rules of use	143	(1)
Recording environmental practices and response to authority	144	(1)
Determining ecological outcomes	145	(2)
8 Conservation and Control	147	(25)
The Argument	149	(3)
Coercion, governmentality, and internalization of state rule	150	(1)
Disintegration of moral economy	151	(1)
The constructed character of natural wilderness	151	(1)
Territorialization of conservation space	152	(1)
The Evidence	152	(11)
New England fisheries conservation	153	(3)
Fire in Madagascar	156	(3)
Social forestry conservation in Southeast Asia	159	(4)
The consistency of colonial and contemporary forestry	160	(1)
The limits of social reform in forestry	161	(2)
Evaluating the Thesis	163	(3)
Riven bureaucracies and efficacious species	163	(2)
Alternative conservation?	165	(1)
Research Example: The Biogeography of Power in the Aravalli	166	(6)
A classic case of conservation and control?	166	(2)
Establishing historical patterns of access	168	(1)
Understanding contemporary land uses and enclosure impacts	169	(1)
Tracking unintended consequences	170	(2)
9 Environmental Conflict	172	(15)
The Argument	173	(3)
Social structure as differential environmental access and responsibility	174	(1)
Property institutions as politically partial constructions	174	(1)
Environmental development and classed, gendered, raced imaginaries	175	(1)
The Evidence	176	(4)
Agricultural development in Gambia	176	(3)
Gambia and the gendered land/labor nexus	177	(2)
Land conflict in the US West	179	(1)
Evaluating the Thesis	180	(2)
Stock characters and standard scripts	181	(1)
Research Example: Gendered Landscapes and Resource Bottlenecks in the Thar	182	(6)
Determining differential land uses and rights	183	(1)
Tracking changes in availability	184	(1)
Evaluating divergent impacts	185	(2)
10 Environmental Identity and Social Movement	187	(1)
The Argument	188	(3)
Differential risk and ecological injustice	189	(1)
Moral economies and peasant resistance	189	(1)
Postcolonialism and rewriting ecology from the margins	190	(1)
The Evidence	191	(6)
Andean livelihood movements	191	(3)
Modernization and identity	192	(2)
Hijacking chipko: trees, gender, livelihood, and essentialism in India	194	(3)
Women's movement or peasant movement?	194	(2)
Mythical movements and the risks of romance	196	(1)
Evaluating the Thesis	197	(2)
Making politics by making a living	197	(1)
The risk of primitive romances and essentialisms	198	(1)
The reality of dissent	198	(1)
In the Field: Pastoral Polities in Rajasthan	199	(6)
Agrarian alliances and traditional technology as resistance	200	(1)
Ambivalence, research, and ethics	201	(2)
Part IV Where to Now?	203	(1)
11 Where to Now?	205	(13)
"Against Political Ecology"?	205	(3)
Too much theory or too little?	206	(1)
Denunciations versus asymmetries	207	(1)
Three Calls for Symmetry	208	(4)
From destruction to production	208	(1)
From peasants to producers	209	(1)
From chains to networks	210	(2)
The Hybridity Thesis	212	(4)
Political ecologies of success	213	(2)
New substantive research mandates	215	(1)
Population is too important to be left to the Malthusians	215	(1)
Genetic modification won't go away	215	(1)
Cities are political ecologies	216	(1)
Against "Against Political Ecology": Retaining both Theory and Surprise	216	(1)
In the Meantime...	216	(2)
References	218	(19)
Index	237