The ‘birth’ of political ecology

Historical notes

The basics of political ecology:• Political ecology assumes that there is a

dialectical unity between human beings and their environments.

• This means that environmental problems are shaped by social processes. These processes can include:– Political economy, e.g. relations of production and

class relations.– Gender relations.– The state and its institutions.– International political relations, e.g. colonialism and

neo-colonialism.– The architecture of knowledge, e.g. scientific and

technical modifications of the environment.– Despite the variety of factors that influence

human/environmental relations, there is a chain of causality operating between these relations.

How did political ecology begin?• Historically, 3 factors have animated western

thought regarding the environment:– Is the Earth a purposefully designed creation?– Have the climate and physical features of the Earth

influenced the moral and social character of individuals and cultures?

– In what ways have people altered the environment and the face of the Earth?

• In the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries, environmental and climatic determinism was an important school of thought.

• Criticized by Carl Sauer, who argued that climatic determinism was really a justification for colonialism.

• Shifted attention to the role of human interventions on the environment and the geographical landscape.

• The new science of ecology, based on a systems approach to the interrelationship of biological organisms also began to influence social science, while functionalism in social science influenced the emergence of ecology.

Cultural Ecology

• Originated in the theoretical and empirical work of Julian Steward.– Steward argued that functionalism needed

to be extended to include ‘human-environmental’ relations.

– Also argued that the adaptions through which humans extracted energy from nature were determinant of many others. These were referred to as the cultural core, and were often identified with a particular technology.

• HUNTERS AND GATHERERS, SWIDDEN, PASTORALISM, AGRICULTURE, INDUSTRY=BAND, TRIBE, CHIEFDOM, STATE.

• Example: Richard Lee’s studies of the !Kung San.

Roy Rappaport & Pigs for the Ancestors

• Saw ritual and redistributive feasting of the Tsembaga in New Guinea as an ecological ‘thermometer.’

• The Tsembaga were engaged in swidden cultivation with digging sticks, hoes and steel axes.

• Ritual involves the uprooting of the rungbim plant, which helps maintain an undegraded environment…adjusts man-land rations, facilitates trade, distributes local surpluses of pig in the form of pork and assures people of high quality protein when they most need it.

• Hence, redistribution maintains a sustainable relationship between pigs, humans, and tropical forest agriculture.

Critique of Cultural Ecology

• 1. Ignores the fact that most small-scale societies are not isolated, but many have been integrated into global flows of commodities and labour since the colonial period.

• 2. Cultural core seen as the institutions that mediated the relation between humans and the environment; but was this a causal or merely a limiting relationship?

• 3. Cultural ecology also ignores differences within societies, e.g. class, gender and social organization.

• Discounts the meaning that participants hold of their environmental and economic relations and rituals, e.g. Marvin Harris and ‘cow worship’ in Hindu India.

Critique of neo-Malthusian northern environmentalist thought

• 1960s, 1970s, Club of Rome published a number of studies that argued humanity was reaching its ‘limits to growth’ and argued that population increase was outstripping human environmental resources.

• Saw environmental degradation in the Third World as caused by over-use, irrational management, and overstocking, all ultimately due to overpopulation.

• Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons Thesis: blamed poor management and overstocking of African pastoralists for increased desertification.– This was due to the fact that pastures were

‘common property’ resources. The solution was privatization of pastures or state intervention.

Critique of neo-Malthusian thought

• Many anthropologists, sociologists and geographers argued that this strain of thought was ideological and empirically unsubstantiated, e.g. that ‘common property’ societies had complex rules of access and use.

• They also showed how examples of ecological degradation was shaped by social relations, economic constraints and political structures.

• Examples: Seeds of Famine (on the Sahel famine of 1968-74).– Hecht’s analysis of the role of the Brazilian

state in the degradation of the Amazon rainforest.

Examples of Early Political Ecology

• Bernard Neitschmann sought to understand how the pressures of external market demand for sea resources among the Miskito Indios of Nicaragua.– Miskito lived both by subsistence gardening and

fishing.– Commercialization of turtle harvesting led to:

• Decline of subsistence crops.• Indebtedness through traders.• Instensification of turtle harvesting leading to the

decline of the resource, in order to repay debts.

• Grossman: introduction of commodity production and exchange for external markets, i.e. coffee and beef, conflicted with subsistence production, even when land and labour are in absolute surplus.

Insertion of Political Economy into Ecological Studies

• O’Connor: dual contradiction of capitalism.• Dialectical unity between humans and nature, the latter is

shaped by relations of class, power, and state actions.• Importance of understanding relations of production, not

only the forces of production (cultural ecology).• Social relations of production include the control of land,

labour and inputs, patterns of surplus extraction and decision-making authority in investments in land improvements and are embedded in particular systems of property rights.

• Relations of production need to be understood:– Locally– Regionally– Nationally– Internationally

• The problem of scale. Blaikie: Poverty and environmental degradation are closely linked to social and spatial patterns of wealth accumulation.

• Chains of causation: start from the rural producer in the South, then analyze local relations of production. then regional and national relations of production, the state and its strategies of accumulation, and finally north/south relations and international politics.

Special Issue of Environment and Development

• Restated the political economy/ecology approach and pointed to new directions (1993):– Importance of gender and environment.– Role of identity politics,– Critique of power (Foucault).– View of environment/human relations as

‘socially constructed’, including our views of the environment and of nature.

– Critique of the dualism of human/nature and nature/culture dichotomies:

• Seen to emerge with Descartes and the birth of western science.