16 LISA L.

GEZON AND SUSAN PAULSON

International Financial Institutions." In Political Ecology: Science, Myth, and Power,

edited by Philip Stott and Sian Sullivan, 179-202. London: Arnold.
Jarosz, Lucy. 1993. "Denning and Explaining Tropical Deforestation: Shifting Cultivation and
Population Growth in Colonial Madagascar (1896-1940)." Economic Geography 69, no.
4: 366-79.
Johnston, Barbara, ed. 1994. Who Pays the Price? The Sociocultural Context of Environmen-
tal Crisis. Washington, D.C.: Island. Politics, Ecologies, Genealogies
Johnston, Barbara, and Daniel Jorgensen. 2994. "Mineral Development, Environmental
Degradation, and Human Rights: The Ok Tedi Mine, Papua New Guinea." In Who Pays SUSAN PAULSON, LISA L. GEZON, AND MICHAEL WATTS
the Price? The Sociocultural Context of Environmental Crisis, edited by Barbara John-
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1943-67.
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tional.
Merchant, Carolyn, ed. 1994. Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory. Atlantic Highlands,
Louring the past two decades, the field of political ecology has advanced through
N.J.: Humanities Press.
Moran, Emilio F., and Eduardo Brondizio. 1998. "Land-Use Change after Deforestation in research, analysis, and applied practice across disciplines that include anthro-
Amazonia." In People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science, edited by pology, biology, geography, philosophy of science, and political science. Scholars
Diana Livermann, Emilio F. Moran, Ronald R. Rindfuss, and Paul C. Stern, 94-120. working with political ecology approaches have challenged dominant interpre-
Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. tations of the causes of environmental degradation and contested prevalent pre-
Peet, Richard, and Michael Watts. 1996. Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development,
scriptions for responding to such problems. The intellectual and political origins
Social Movements. New York: Routledge.
Raffles, Hugh. 2002. In Amazonia: A Natural History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. of the term political ecology date to the 1970s, when a variety of rather different
Ribot, Jesse C. 1998. "Theorizing Access: Forest Profits along Senegal's Charcoal Commodity commentators, including anthropologist Eric Wolf, journalist Alexander Cock-
Chain." Development and Change 29: 307^1. burn, and environmental scientist Grahame Beakhurst, coined it as a way of con-
Rocheleau, Dianne. 2002. "Cyborg Forest, Garden City: Culture, Nature, and Webs of Power ceptualizing the relations between political economy and ecology in the context
in Santiago, Dominican Republic." Paper presented at the 101st annual meeting of the of a burgeoning environmental movement (Keil and Faucett 1998, Watts 1983a).
American Anthropological Association, New Orleans.
Current working definitions of political ecology include Dianne Rocheleau's
Rocheleau, Dianne, Barbara Thomas-Slayter, and Esther Wangari, eds. 1996. Feminist Politi-
cal Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences. London: Routledge. (1999) specific focus on intersections between "the social relations of power and
Sachs, Wolfgang, ed. 1993. Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict London: Zed. the formation and functioning of ecologies and landscapes" (22) and Arturo
Sassen, Saskia. 2000. Cities in a World Economy. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge. Escobar's (1999) broad "study of the manifold articulations of history and biology
Steward, Julian. 1972 [1955]. Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology ofMultilinear Evo- and the cultural mediations through which such articulations are necessarily
lution. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
established" (3). Chapter 1 discussed visions and applications that are vitalizing
Tsing, Anna L. 2000. "The Global Situation." Cultural Anthropology IS, no. 3: 327-60.
the field at the dawn of the twenty-first century; and in chapter 2, we explore the
Vayda, Andrew, and Bradley Walters. 1999. "Against Political Ecology." Human Ecology 27,
no. 1:167-79. intellectual genealogy leading up to the present and some new challenges that
Watts, Michael. 1983.Silent Violence. Berkeley: University of California Press. lie ahead.
Wolf, Eric. 1972. "Ownership and Political Ecology." Anthropological Quarterly 45, no. 3: Political ecology's originality and ambition arise from its efforts to link
201-5. social and physical sciences to address environmental changes, conflicts, and
. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
problems. In this initiative, analyses of social relations of production and ques-
Zimmerer, Karl S. 2000. "The Reworking of Conservation Geographies: Nonequilibrium
Landscapes and Nature-Society Hybrids." Annals of the Association of American Geo- tions of access and control over resources—the basic tool kit of political econ-
graphers 90, no. 2: 356-69. omy—are applied in order to understand forms of environmental disturbance
and degradation and to develop prospects and models for environmental reha-
bilitation and conservation, as well as environmentally sustainable alternatives.
18 PAULSON, GEZON, AND WATTS POLITICS, ECOLOGIES, GENEALOGIES 19

From the beginning, then, political ecology has been analytical, normative, and as criteria to categorize groups on an upward continuum from "savage" to "bar-
applied, a unity confirmed by the 1989 founding of the policy-oriented journal barian" to "civilized" (Morgan 1877). This comparative ranking approach, based
Land Degradation and Rehabilitation by Piers Blaikie and others. From early on, primarily on readings of travelers' and missionaries' accounts and government
political ecology theory and practice have also been shaped by concerns for mar- reports, resonated with and contributed to popular ideas about social evolution.
ginal social groups and issues of social justice, concerns that have taken the fore- Although Lewis H. Morgan (1877) believed that the technology used to appropri-
front in recent publications such as Liberation Ecologies (Peet and Watts 1996) ate natural resources determined other facets of social life, he explained the evo-
and The Environmentalism of the Poor (Martinez-Alier 2002). lution of technology itself as an inevitable progression through universal stages;
Several long traditions of scholarly effort to understand relations between neither cultural nor environmental factors were given much causal relevance.
culture and environment coalesced into what we know as political ecology amid a In reaction to this evolutionary school of thought, American anthropolo-
surprisingly diverse array of theoretical developments. These included changing gists including Clark Wissler (1940, Wissler and Weitzner 1922) and Alfred Kroe-
applications of evolutionary biology, a resurgence of interest in Marxist concepts ber (1963 [1939]) developed the culture-area perspective, which emphasized the
and analyses, efforts to reconceive relations between materialist and symbolic creative role of culture in shaping ways in which people manipulate and con-
theories, and the emergence of new sciences of ecosystems and cybernetics. ceptualize the material environment. Culture-area theorists embraced the idea
Global affairs and world historic events also influenced the scene. The growing of possibilism, stating that while the biophysical environment narrows the range
visibility of peasantries in the developing world (notably, China and Vietnam), of possible cultural forms, culture is what begets culture. In Kroeber's words,
together with the socio-psychological and scientific consequences of the cold war "environment does not produce a culture, but stabilizes it" (6). C. Daryll Forde
and the threat of nuclear warfare, highlighted concerns about the inequitable (1963) further critiqued the idea that environment or technology significantly
distribution of global resources and risks and the possibility that global conflict determines cultural forms, explaining that "religious concepts may deeply affect
might lead to unfathomable environmental disaster. economic and social development and may limit or even prevent adaptations
that are obviously possible" (vi). These debates over the relative powers of cul-
ture and ecology met up with parallel scholarship in geography, and Kroeber and
Intellectual Genealogies
Forde had strong links to geography at Berkeley and University College, London.
In this section we provide a brief account of the confluence among these sets of During the 1920s and 1930s, the processes through which cultural knowl-
ideas and historical processes. Our decision to highlight certain strands of the edge and practice are diffused across space and time were explored through mas-
field's history reflects our own trajectories and interests and necessarily repre- sive surveys aiming to inventory thousands of cultural traits or objects across
sents only a partial view of the complex heritage, multiplicity of issues, and geographical regions of North America. The culture-area perspective opened up
diversity of positions that energize political ecology. the possibility of seeing culture as influenced, but not determined, by material
parameters and recognized that cultural beliefs and practices also affect the
Ecological Anthropology and Cultural Ecology material environment and human interactions with it. This new respect for the
Interest in the relationships between people and their material environments generative power of culture, together with the dialectical understanding of culture-
has a long and rich history in anthropology. Vital debates running through more environment relationships, formed a vital foundation for political ecology
than a century of anthropological scholarship center on the value of holistic approaches. This era, sometimes called the golden age of anthropology (Stocking
interpretations of unique human and environmental situations versus the value 1992), also ushered in the land of intense, multifaceted, on-the-ground ethno-
of comparative universal frameworks, on the importance of materialist versus graphic research that would define cultural anthropology for the rest of the
culturalist explanations, and on the type of field and analytical methods needed twentieth century and that continues to play an essential role in the multisited
to understand a topic of study that is always both biophysical and culturally and multiscale research strategies developed by political ecologists today.
meaningful. At the turn of the twenty-first century, political ecologists are influ- In the mid-twentieth century, anthropologist Julian Steward (1972 [1955])
encing these ongoing conversations by problematizing the nature-versus-culture forged a new kind of comparative analysis of human-environment relationships
dichotomy underlying much early debate and developing research frameworks with an approach he called cultural ecology, whose central objective was to
that link local ethnographic and ecological research with mezzo-level institu- explain cultural similarities in light of similar environments, subsistence pat-
tional and historical studies and global political and economic analyses. terns, and economic arrangements (37). In Steward's words, "The problem is to
Nineteenth-century theorists used subsistence strategies and technologies ascertain whether the adjustments of human societies to their environments
20 PAULSON, GEZON, AND WATTS POLITICS, ECOLOGIES, GENEALOGIES 21

require particular modes of behavior or whether they permit latitude for a cer- global capitalist economy (Peet and Watts 1993).1 In retrospect, however, Michael R.
tain range of possible behavior patterns" (36). Steward made culture-environment Dove (1999) argues, "In the context of the then-prevailing deprecation of indige-
relations a point of departure for explaining cultural types: "constellations of nous societies under the aegis of high-modernist development theory, the detailed
core features which arise out of environmental adaptations and which represent descriptions of vernacular technology and knowledge central to early ecological
similar levels of integration" (42). Perhaps the best known is the exogamous anthropology can now be read as politically empowering counterdiscourses"
patrilineal band, hypothesized to exist where there is sparse population and (290).
scattered nonmigratory game and where transportation is limited to human car-
riers. Steward's central research goal of understanding how people living in socio- Cultural Geography and the Environmental Turn
cultural groups survive within particular environments has endured long after In geography, another genealogy emerged from rather different intellectual sources,
many scholars have written off the materialist explanations, emphasis on syn- which were at times linked directly to anthropology. One line was associated
chronic studies, and ignorance of social differentiation and power that charac- with the Berkeley School of Cultural Geography and Carl Sauer (1952). Sauer was
terized this school of work. interested in the historical transformation of the landscape, patterns of envi-
In a move that denned cultural ecology in the 1960s and 1970s, Andrew ronmental and cultural diffusion, and the domestication of plants and animals.
Vayda and Roy Rappaport (1967) argued that human ecology should not follow His own thinking intersected with Kroeber's while they were both at Berkeley,
Steward's model of using cultures as units of analysis. Instead, in what came to but their legacies diverged. Sauer's emphasis on the morphology of landscape
be known as the Columbia school of ecological anthropology, they developed an was a forerunner of what in the 1950s became a move toward understanding
ecosystems model that treated human populations as one of a number of inter- human transformation of the earth (Thomas 1956).
acting species and physical components. In anthropology and geography, this Another trajectory of geographical thought and research that contributed
school of thought provided a sophisticated body of theory and research to to the field of political ecology was associated with Berkeley alumnus William M.
demonstrate how subsistence people in isolated regions maintained adaptive Denevan, who with a group of students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
structures with respect to their environments. In Rappaport's (1968) terms, proffered a significant rethinking of the environmental history of the Maya,
"cognized models" of the environment—embodied in various ritual, symbolic, Amazonia, and the Andes (Turner 1983, Nietschmann 1973). Central to this work
and religious practices—were cultural mechanisms for the kind of environmen- and its concerns was the deployment of the new systems ecology to analyze flows
tal adaptation that interested students of western ecological sciences and evolu- of energy and materials within pre-Columbian systems of agriculture and trade.
tionary theory. Thus, for example, ritual pig lulling among Tsembaga Maring of This group of scholars asked how Amerindian populations could exploit the del-
highland Papua New Guinea functioned as a thermostatic device that prevented icate tropical ecosystems and support surprisingly large population densities
pig overpopulation and maintained some sort of balance in the fragile tropical through raised field agriculture, intensive swiddening, aquaculture and other
ecology. The Columbia school of cultural ecology made a lasting methodological social-technological systems. Here, geography intersected with anthropology,
impact because of its emphasis on intensive empirical investigation of sociocul- especially in the extensive work of Betty Meggers, who applied cultural ecology
tural phenomena and physical environmental processes such as nutrient flows, approaches in archaeological and prehistorical studies of Amazonian and
caloric intake, and productivity. Its theoretical focus on explaining cultural Andean production systems and collaborated in the East Africa project of the
forms in terms of their functional value in adapting to material environments late 1960s and early 1970s that brought together geographers and anthropolo-
has been much more widely debated. In response to critiques by anthropologists gists (see Porter 1965). This line of work has contributed directly to current
such as Jonathan Friedman (1979), who saw in cultural ecology the worst political ecology concerns about sustainable production systems, local knowl-
excesses of functionalism, Rappaport (1984) later developed a more sophisti- edge systems, and indigenous communities.
cated approach to adaptation, drawing upon the work of Gregory Bateson (1972), James J. Parsons's pathbreaking work on raised fields in Bolivia and Colom-
cybernetics, and information theory. bia made central contributions (Denevan 1989), and Denevan's student Bernard
As scholarly paradigms evolved in the latter half of the twentieth century, Nietschmann (1973) provided a sophisticated cultural ecological account of the
cultural ecology research, including that done by ethnobotanists (Berlin et al. Miskito Coast in which he documented how communities had adapted to local
1974, Conklin 1954), was criticized for underestimating the role of cultural niches and orchestrated marine and land-based microenvironments in their
meaning, ignoring social power and inequality, and focusing too narrowly on the livelihood systems as well as how this adaptive capacity was being undermined
local to the exclusion of the dynamics of colonialism and the encroachment of a by the growth of commercial turtle exploitation. Much of Nietschmann's work
 22 PAULSON, GEZON, AND WATTS POLITICS, ECOLOGIES, GENEALOGIES 23

was directly shaped by the ideas of Roy Rappaport and Kent Flannery at the Uni- this body of scholarship (Watts 1983b), and interdisciplinary research led schol-
versity of Michigan, where all three were located in the early 1970s. In this con- ars to realize that disaster prevention, preparations for it, and responses to it
text, Nietschmann took cultural ecology to a point at which the questions he were highly political. Much of this work focused on U.S. domestic issues such as
asked required a sophisticated grasp of political economy. perceptions of earthquake hazards or responses to tornadoes, but a growing
This tradition of cultural ecology has continued in geography, sometimes, in body of work in the 1960s and early 1970s turned to the developing world. Topics
a tense relationship with the political ecology approaches that developed in its explored included the social organization of responses to floods and drought in
wake (see Turner 1983, Mortimore 1998). Much of the tension turns on debates the semi-arid tropics, and work on the perception of environmental variability
about the extent to which the language of adaptation should be retained in among developing-world peoples intersected with anthropological work on eth-
analysis, the role played by population and technology as driving forces, and the nobotany (see Porter 1965, Scott 1979).
centrality of the social relations of production and the accumulation process Interdisciplinary studies of human responses to hazards and disasters,
emphasized by political economy. The key book in geography that pushed together with environmental anthropology and cultural geography, were informed
beyond (and irrevocably broke with) more conventional approaches to cultural by new.research into cybernetics, organization theory, and systems theories, which
ecology and hazards was Kenneth Hewitt's (1983) Interpretations of Calamity, derived from theory of machines and artificial intelligence developed particu-
which proved to be an important bridge to political ecology and paved the way larly during World War n. Central figures here were Gregory Bateson (1972) and
for critical work that was to follow (Blaikie et al. 1994, Zimmerer and Bassett Howard T. Odum (1971), who, while very different in intellectual orientation, pro-
2003). Paul Richards, who was trained as a geographer and moved to anthropol- vided languages and concepts for thinking about humans in ecosystems and liv-
ogy, was also a key bridging figure; and his Indigenous Agricultural Revolution ing systems as well as the flows of matter, information, and energy that coursed
(1985) represented an important shift toward a more critically engaged link through human-environment practice and interaction. Some of this tradition
among culture, power, and ecology. has continued in the recent work of Jeanne X. Kasperson and Roger Kasperson
(2001) on global environmental risks and managing hazards related to modern
Disaster Research and Environment As Hazard technology.'
Paralleling these explorations in cultural ecology, interest developed across
various disciplines in exploring human and cultural responses to hazards and Political Economy
disasters. Geographers Gilbert F. White, Ian Burton, and Robert W. Kates were at Impulses that reinvigorated the analytic tradition of political economy and moti-
the forefront of this work in the 1950s and 1960s (see Watts 2000 for a review), vated new applications to environmental issues came from two related sources in
focusing on differing sorts of natural perturbation—tornadoes, earthquakes, the 1960s and 1970s. First was the proliferation of peasant studies (Shanin 1970,
floods—in the United States and on the perceptions and behaviors of threatened Wolf 1969) and critiques of colonialism (Asad 1973) that brought to the fore ques-
communities and households. Centers for disaster studies appeared around the tions of social differentiation, exploitation, and the impact of international mar-
country, notably at Ohio State University and the University of Colorado, Boulder, kets on the rural poor in the developing world. Second was a vital resurgence of
as sociologists and geographers schooled in survey research, cognitive studies, Marxism in social sciences and development studies (Bryant 1998) in a variety of
and behavioralism sought to understand why individuals misperceived, ignored, guises, including world systems theory, dependency theory, structural Marxism,
or responded in diverse ways to environmental threats. As the cold war deep- and Marxist feminism, that advanced concepts of control and access to resources,
ened, attention turned toward not-so-natural hazards and disasters—notably, marginalization, relations of production, surplus appropriation, and power.
the immediate threat of atomic disaster, which generated a number of govern- These two tendencies confronted cultural ecology by going beyond- the
ment-funded studies on perceptions of and responses to environmental threats. study of isolated or subsistence communities in putative equilibrium with their
By the 1970s, centers for hazard or disaster research (often with financial physical environment to examine the impact of markets, social inequalities, and
backing from the real estate industry, insurance companies, and the federal gov- political conflicts and to analyze forms of social and cultural disintegration asso-
ernment) had made a substantial impact in the area of domestic policy (see ciated with the incorporation of local communities into a modern world system.
White 1974, Burton et al. 1978). Much of this work drew on organic analogies of In the context of broader shifts in scientific paradigms toward stances of non-
adaptation and response but was also sensitive to cultural perceptions and ques- equilibrium, attention to maladaptation and disruption took precedence over a
tions of organizational capacity and access and availability of information. Systems previous focus on adaptation, self-regulation, and homeostatis (see also Biersack
thinldng and organization theory were central to the intellectual architecture of 1999, Rappaport 1993).2
24 PAULSON, GEZON, AND WATTS POLITICS, ECOLOGIES, GENEALOGIES 25

In this era of vigorous debate and change across the social sciences, numer- his concept of modes of production, understood as historically specific sets of
ous scholars were motivated to reread Karl Marx and Marxisms and identify social relations, knowledge, and technologies through which labor is employed
points of potential convergence between political economy and cultural ecol- to wrest energy from nature (73). Jonathan Friedman's (1975) Marxist-inspired
ogy.3 Howard L. Parsons (1977) notes that, from the Middle Ages until the In- analysis of swidden production and the relationship between farmers and the
dustrial Revolution, western concepts of nature were dominated by the static state provides an excellent example of early political ecological writing, and his
hierarchical trope of the great chain of being. "In the nineteenth century, the critical work was key in moving some currents of ecological anthropology toward
concept took on the notion of strife, interpenetration, and transformation political ecology.
among things," in that new context Marx and Friedrich Engels developed "their The political economy work of Wolf, Friedman, and others, together with
appreciation of the dialectical power in human history and society and their parallel advances in structuralism, practice theory, structural Marxism, and
grasp of the dialectical effects of social practice upon the world of external feminist and postcolonial theories, significantly transformed social science in
nature" (8). the late twentieth century. Political ecology in the 1990s was marked by creative
Starting in the 1920s, members of the Frankfurt school had drawn on Marx cross-fertilization among these diverse approaches and by the interrogation of
and Engels's perceptions of the ecological and human costs of capitalist modes assumptions in intellectual traditions that were institutionalized in nineteenth-
of production to develop a multidisciplinary critique of dominant social theory, century science. Key among these received assumptions are the dichotomy
science, and technology. While building on Marx's political economy framework, between physical nature and meaningful culture, the adequacy and naturalness
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (1976 [1945]) critiqued his faith in the of academia's disciplinary structure, and the putatively value-free status of west-
Enlightenment myth of progress via the domination of nature and his belief that ern scientific concepts.
cultural change necessarily led to betterment. Carolyn Merchant (1994) portrays
the Frankfurt school's skepticism: "Rather than seeing the progressive aspects of
modernity in which science, technology, and capitalism increasingly improve on Current Conversations in Political Ecology
the human condition, they emphasized modernity's dehumanizing tendencies, Today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, diverse scholars continue to draw
its destruction of the environment, its potential for totalitarian politics, and its on and reinterpret concepts from ecological anthropology, cultural geography,
inability to control technology" (1-2). and political economy, bringing them together in innovative ways with methods,
The dialectical interaction of the material and the social, so vital in Marx concepts, and analytic turns from a wide range of theoretical currents. Two vital
and the Frankfurt school, gave way in mid-twentieth-century anthropology to questions lie at the heart of contemporary political ecology. How can we frame,
polarized antagonism between those who privileged material explanations and carry out, and analyze research that stretches across different spaces, scales, and
those who privileged symbolic meaning and social explanations.4 Sherry Ortner social groups? And how can we better conceptualize the political in studies of
(1984) describes anthropology in the 1960s as torn by acrimonious debate:, environmental changes, problems, and issues?
"Whereas the cultural ecologists considered the symbolic anthropologists to be
fuzzy-headed mentalists involved in unscientific and unverifiable flights of sub- Place and Scale
jective interpretation, the symbolic anthropologists considered cultural ecology By locating their environmental studies in the context of political economic sys-
to be involved with mindless and sterile scientism, counting calories and meas- tems and relations, political ecologists opened the possibility of bringing into the
uring rainfall while willfully ignoring the one truth that anthropology had presum- analysis social relations and places that are not necessarily proximal to the eco-
ably established by that time: that culture mediates all human behavior" (134).5 logical phenomena of interest. This move distanced them from conventions of
In a work that helped to launch political ecology, Eric Wolf (1982) sought to human and cultural ecology that tended to situate causes of and solutions to
transcend the paralyzing dichotomy between the material and the meaningful environmental crises in local-based problems such as overpopulation, poor land
by working with the two axiomatic understandings of the human condition on management, or inappropriate technology. In one landmark study, Susanna Hecht
which Marx's theory of production rests. The first is that Homo sapiens is part of and Alexander Cockburn (1989) anchored the causal dynamics of rapid deforesta-
physical nature. The second is that we are a social species; that is, humans are tion in eastern Amazonia in national and international factors that motivated
linked to other humans, and to other aspects of nature, through social relations. those who cleared tropical rainforests to create pasture for cattle ranching that
Wolf resuscitated Marx's concept of production to refer to the mutually depend- was, in fact, both economically inefficient and environmentally destructive. The
ent relations among nature, human labor, and social organization, together with authors found that macrolevel political-economic forces, not the least of which
 26 PAULSON, GEZON, AND WATTS POLITICS, ECOLOGIES, GENEALOGIES 27

were the rents and subsidies generated by the Brazilian junta and successive In this book, for example, Josiah McC. Heyman (chapter 7) contrasts the
democratic governments, created conditions of high profitability that influ- concerns and discourses about consumption advanced by environmentalists in
enced varied social forces acting on the environment, including ranchers, peas- overdeveloped societies with those of working-class consumers on Mexico's bor-
ants, workers, and transnational companies. der, who worry about not being able to consume enough. By bringing together
The kind of multiscale approaches presented in this book are evident in the analysis of historical processes by which people became consumers of mass-
Andrew Gardner's investigation (chapter 5) of increasing disease and mortality manufactured goods and resource-energy inputs with an in-depth ethno-graphic
among Bedouin herds in Saudi Arabia in the wake of the Gulf War. On the ground study of the immediate politics of consumption, such as protests over electricity-
among the herders, Gardner used rapid appraisal activities simultaneously with rate increases, Heyman illuminates the importance on various scales of social
ethnographic observation of practices such as labor arrangements and the use of differentiation in terms of nationality, ethnicity, gender, generation, and socioe-
pickups and water trucks. He examined national policies such as governmental conomic class.
price supports for barley and changes in border policies and patrols. On a
regional level, he considered smoke from oil fires during the war, political eco- Politics
nomic conditions in neighboring nations that led to the growth of a cheap expa- A central question has emerged in both political ecology and critiques of it: how
triate labor force in Saudi Arabia, documentation of regional climate, and do we conceptualize the political? Significant debate has arisen around methods
environmental trends including a decade-long drought. and concepts used to address the political in political ecology. The first genera-
tion of political ecology work was criticized for lacking a consistent treatment of
Relations of Social Difference politics and having an abstract conceptualization of political economy (Peet and
Other significant advances arise from the use of concepts and tools that illumi- Watts 1993). Later scholars have been accused of assigning too much importance
nate differences in knowledge, interest, practice, and power among social groups to political control over natural resources, being driven by populist political
differentiated by class, race, ethnicity, gender, and other sociocultural systems. agendas, and prioritizing politics to the point of abandoning ecology altogether
Early studies in political ecology tended to focus on land managers, considering (Vayda and Walters 1999). At the heart of this issue are questions about what
their relationship to nature in a "historical, political and economic context" constitutes politics and how political phenomena interrelate with ecological
(Blaikie and Brookfield 1987, 239). Yet the land managers who were scrutinized ones.
were overwhelmingly male, rural subjects from the developing world and, rather Early political ecology made the key theoretical move of replacing the
curiously, appeared to be quite apolitical. In Piers Blaikie's (1985) study of soil "human" in human ecology with a Marxist-inflected political economy. This
erosion, for example, and Michael Watts's (1983a) discussion of pastoralism in move meant shifting emphasis from biophysical characteristics of human life,
West Africa, there is almost no consideration of peasant resistance or gender and analyzed through theories of evolution and adaptation, toward the study of
household dynamics in association with soil problems. social and cultural dimensions of human life embedded in historical contexts.
Political ecologists have since then paid increasing attention to the ethnic Applications that followed from Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield's (1987)
identities, gender roles and relations, multiform institutions, governance appa- broadly defined political economy were certainly not of a theoretical piece. For
ratuses, political involvements, and other social factors that condition the Watts (1983b), political economy drew upon a Marxian vision of social relations
knowledge, decisions, and actions of diverse land managers. Notable here are of production as an arena of possibility and constraint. For Blaikie and Brookfield
feminist insights into the gendered character of environmental knowledge and (1987) it meant a concern with effects "on people, as well as on their productive
practice (Braidotti et al. 1994, Carney 1996, Gezon 2002, Mackenzie 1995, Paulson activities, of on-going changes within society at local and global levels" (21). And
1998, Schroeder 1993, Shiva 1988, Rocheleau et al. 1996), concern about indige- for Martinez-Alier, political economy became synonymous with economic and
nous rights and territorial autonomy (Bassett 1988, Beckett and Mato 1996, Jones ecological distributional conflicts (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997).
1995), and critical analyses of development processes informed by movements Other valuable takes on the political have included analyses of conventional
for social and environmental justice (Bryant 2002, Guha 1994, Peet and Watts geopolitics and the history of unequal power relations between northern and
1996, Zimmerer 2000). From the start, political ecology was firmly grounded in southern nations (Escobar 1995, Grossman 1998, Sachs 1993), grassroots and aca-
class analysis; now it is developing a more comprehensive social theory that demic engagement with environmental issues (Brosius 1999, Posey 1983), and
allows for identification and analysis of dynamics among multiple, overlapping red-green political activism (Atkinson 1991), so named for the links it forged
dimensions of identity. between movements for social and environmental justice and emancipation.
 28 PAULSON, GEZON, AND WATTS POLITICS, ECOLOGIES, GENEALOGIES 29

Finally, studies such as those brought together in this book emphasize the impor- 1989) to approach politics more broadly as power relations that shape and per-
tance of ethnographically based research on practices and negotiations of power vade all human interactions, are characterized by challenge and negotiation,
relations both among resource users and between resource-using communities and are infused with symbolic and discursive meaning. As political ecologists
and outside holders of power. develop more sophisticated understandings of the ways in which power and pol-
In sum, political ecology's underspecification of political economy and the itics influence culture-environment interactions, they consistently emphasize
political, its sometimes vague use of these terms to refer to exogenous forces and the importance of studying social dynamics together with material dimensions
systems, together with a surge of creative applications that locate politics in all of the environment. Researchers including Karl S. Zimmerer (1996) and Matt
kinds of unsuspected places have led to uncertainty and debate about the nature Tur-ner (1999) provide important models for successfully merging rigorous eco-
and place of politics in environmental analysis. At this point, a more explicit con- logical methods for studying biophysical events and phenomena with social sci-
ceptualization of power and politics is needed to better operationalize research ence methods for analyzing diverse political, social, and economic facets of these
on environmental changes and conflicts and develop improved ways of address- events and phenomena.
ing practical problems of resource degradation and social marginalization.
Knowledge, Discourse, and Environmental Politics
Toward a Conceptualization of the Political A growing focus on the politics of discourse has raised serious questions about
In this book, political is used to designate the practices and processes through the way in which nature is conceived and represented in western scholarship as
which power, in its multiple forms, is wielded and negotiated. In line with Alf well as in policy, legislation, and media (Adger et al. 2001). Essentialist concep-
Hornborg's (2001) definition of power as "a social relation built on an asymmet- tualizations of nature as a category of reality that exists independently of human
rical distribution of resources and risks" (1), we explore ways in which power cir- thought and action have been challenged by a growing conviction that the idea
culates among and between different social groups, resources, and spaces. In his and experience of nature are "always constructed by our meaning-giving and dis-
chapter "Facing Power" Wolf (2001) urges scholars to continue thinking about cursive processes, so that what we perceive as natural is also cultural and social"
diverse articulations of power and defines several types, including power as a (Escobar 1999, 2). Sharp debates have arisen in environmental anthropology and
personal attribute, the ability of an individual to impose his or. her will on geography about the extent to which research and analytic methods should
another, and the power to control settings in which people may act and interact. include the examination of pertinent environmental discourses (a move some-
Wolf identifies as most powerful the type of power that not only acts willfully times precipitously relegated as postmodern) and the extent to which they
within and controls other action in settings or domains but also constructs and should focus on collecting biophysical data (a strategy sometimes speciously dis-
orchestrates those settings and specifies the distribution and direction of energy tinguished from the previous one as "empirical"). Attempting to bridge these
flows within them (384). In short, this is the power to shape environments for antagonistic positions, Arturo Escobar (1999) entreats constructivist postmod-
human action and interaction. ernists and realist empiricists to recognize both the biophysical basis of reality
The studies in this book demonstrate that all lands of human relationships and the historical and discursive contexts in which knowledge of it is gathered (3).
have political elements, often manifest in the strategic use of position, knowl- When culturally situated knowledges and discourses (including those of the
edge, or representations to gain differential access to resources. "The political" scientists themselves) are ignored or excluded from research models, the envi-
therefore encompasses not only formal politics but all kinds of everyday interac- ronment is sometimes treated as an unproblematic universal category, an arena
tions as well. Judith Butler (1997) goes further to locate power in the ways in of natural laws. By critically examining the putatively objective and neutral domains
which people, resources, and places are constituted: "We are used to thinking of empirical science, political ecologists and others have drawn to the surface a
about power as what presses on the subject from the outside, as what subordi- series of embedded assumptions that reflect the cultural, colonial, gender, reli-
nates. . .. This is surely a fair description of what power does. But if, following gious, and class characteristics and interests that underlie various scientific
Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the projects. Geographer Piers Blaikie (1985) has urged scholars as well as policy-
very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not makers to recognize that "even a position of so-called neutrality rests upon par-
simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our tisan assumptions" (1). With Brookfield, he has questioned the heavy focus on
existence" (2). technologicalfixesthat regularly characterize the response of the scientific com-
Many political ecologists have drawn from Butler and other poststructural munity and governmental agencies to environmental problems. Instead, they
feminist and practice theorists (such as Bourdieu 1977, Giddens 1984, Ortner encourage an approach that represents environmental degradation as both a
30 PAULSON, GEZON, AND WATTS POLIT1CS, ECOLOGIES, GENEALOGIES 31

social problem and a biophysical condition: "while the physical reasons why land tribution of benefits, together with their costs and risks on various scales; con-
becomes degraded belong mainly in the realm of natural science, the reasons cern about environmental decision making and conflict resolution; and investi-
why adequate steps are not taken to counter the effects of degradation lie squarely gation of the environmental and social consequences of development models
within the realm of social science" (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987, 2). and discourses. Within this field of shared concerns, political ecologists have
Since publication of these seminal works, scholars have formulated a broad insisted that attention to practical engagement with different stakeholders and
critique of the modern western conception of the world as two qualitatively dis- the search for practical solutions to social-environmental problems be part of a
tinct realms, each appropriately studied by either natural or social sciences (Painter methodological commitment to understanding how the environmental uses and
and Durham 1995, Paulson 1998). David Harvey (1998, 332) proposes that we conditions in question are affected by larger economic and political systems as
examine the current physical world not as pristine nature but as a set of "radi- well as by discursive and cultural constructions of the environment. Barbara
cally different environments that have been created under several centuries of Johnston has tirelessly promoted stronger relationships among research, prac-
capitalism" in which "the circulation of money is a prime ecological variable" tice, and activism: forging models for understanding the social context of envi-
(see also Haraway 1989, Escobar 1999). Contributors to Philippe Descola and Gisli ronmental decision making in the edited book Who Pays the Price? (1994),
Palsson's (1996) collection encourage greater attention to ethno-epistemologies elaborating concepts of environmental justice within a human rights framework
that provide alternative means of conceptualizing the ways in which humans in Life and Death Matters (1997), and encouraging anthropologists to become
live within a material environment. involved in policymaking and debate.
Philip Stott and Sian Sullivan's (2000) edited book explores implications of A vital international movement in political ecology has promoted political
conventional representations of nature and science through case studies that action toward a more equitable distribution of economic and ecological
demonstrate how scientific research designs and data presentations are guided resources and risks. The journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism was established in
by unexamined assumptions about how to ask questions and which methods to 1988 at the Center for Political Ecology in Santa Cruz, California, and continues
apply in investigating them. They argue that such assumptions contribute to to embrace a red-green scholarly and activist stance. In 1990, the companion
results of scientific studies that may (consciously or not) legitimize the interests journal Ecojogia Politica was founded in Barcelona under the direction of Joan
of certain social groups over others, thereby entering the political arena. Martinez-Alier, with the express goal of bringing together scholarship on social
conflict in resource management with analysis of green political actions and
visions.
Reflecting and Acting with Political Ecology
Enrique Leff (1999,15) argues that this intimate tie among theory, practice
The studies of environmental degradation and conflict brought together in this and politics pushes all of us, even privileged scholars, to include our own posi-
book lead to implicit (if not explicit) recommendations for action, and many tions and actions in the frame of analysis. And recent efforts of political ecolo-
political ecologists are purposefully engaged in such action. Indeed, "new eco- gists to understand and participate in the ensemble of forces linking social
logical anthropology" in general has been as much about finding practical solu- change, environment, and development are giving rise to new questions. For
tions to environmental problems as about building new methodological and example, how do we situate ourselves in the circuits of power, knowledge, and
theoretical approaches to study those phenomena (Kottakl999, 23). At the 1996 practice that we seek to understand? As scholars and as those who influence pol-
founding of the Anthropology and Environment Section of the American Anthro- icy, we are becoming increasingly aware of the power relationships that link cer-
pological Association, Carole L. Crumley (2001) wrote that anthropologists tain ways of knowing and communicating with greater access to social and
"must enter current debates over environmental issues by as many avenues as physical resources. This awareness has encouraged the development of partici-
possible, on our own behalf as well as that of those whose lives and circum- patory (Chambers 1992), collaborative (Zimmerman 2001), or reflexive research
stances we study" (ix). And in Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts's (2001) Violent methods that aim to translate the knowledge of marginal or subaltern people
Environments, scholars from numerous disciplines engage to analyze and into power, respect, and rights. It has also motivated environmental scholars to
explore practical solutions to ominous environmental problems and threats. seek various ways of advocating for the groups with whom they work.
The means that political ecologists employ for collecting, analyzing, and
using data overlap in vital ways with those of applied anthropology in general. THE INTELLECTUAL GENEALOGIES discussed in this chapter have led up to current
Shared elements include attention to and mutual collaboration with various approaches to working across spaces, scales, and social groups and to new ways
kinds of social groups and social movements; interest in documenting the dis- of conceptualizing and applying ideas of the political in political ecology. New
32 PAULSON, GEZON, AND WATTS POLIT1CS, ECOLOGIES, GENEALOGIES 33

multiscale approaches are helping us to understand relations between local physical dynamics in the context of social-political organization of production and
cultural-environmental changes and global economic and political forces and cultural-ideological systems.
processes, while sensitivity to social differentiation and marginalization are gen- 5. A related dichotomy pitted those who embraced scientific methods in the pursuit of
erating insights into dynamics of knowledge and decision on multiple levels. objective studies against those who privileged analyses informed by the social sciences
and humanities. A recent manifestation of this particular division was seen in the
Increasing sensitivity to political dimensions of environmental phenomena establishment of the Society for Anthropological Sciences and its first meeting, enti-
has led to all kinds of new questions and results. We do not place these political tled the. "Salon des Recuses," occurring simultaneously with the 2002 annual meeting
issues outside of, or even adjacent to, the domain of the material but see them as of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans.
inextricable dimensions of it. We argue that studies that document erosion and
those that analyze tenure policies are equally political in nature (insofar as they
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