Paul Robbins - Political Ecology

Critical Introductions to Geography

Critical Introductions to Geography is a series of textbooks for undergraduate courses covering the key geographical subdisciplines and providing broad and introductory treatment with a critical edge. They are designed for the North American and international market and take a lively and engaging approach with a distinct geographical voice that distinguishes them from more traditional and out-dated texts.

Prospective authors interested in the series should contact the series editor:

John Paul Jones III

Department of Geography and Regional Development

University of Arizona

Published

Cultural Geography

Don Mitchell

Geographies of Globalization

Andrew Herod

Geographies of Media and Communication

Paul C. Adams

Social Geography

Vincent J. Del Casino Jr

Mapping

Jeremy W. Crampton

Environment and Society

Paul Robbins, Sarah Moore and John Hintz

Research Methods in Geography

Basil Gomez and John Paul Jones III

Political Ecology, Second Edition

Paul Robbins

Forthcoming

Geographic Thought

Tim Cresswell

Cultural Landscape

Donald Mitchell and Carolyn Breitbach

Preface to the Second Edition

The seven years between the first edition and this one have made the relevance and urgency of political ecology a difficult thing to determine. On the one hand, the field has grown so dramatically, and in so many directions, that it is even easier to say of this contested enterprise that it has become too diffuse to matter. References to political ecology in the Web of Science database have more than doubled in the intervening years but now reflect a huge range of approaches. One might think that political ecology has finally jumped the shark, a phrase from the television industry suggesting the creative end of a franchise. I am sympathetic with those who may hurriedly wish to get on with the next thing as well as those who are still not sure what political ecology is, let alone whether it has a purchase on a special kind of explanation.

And yet if political ecology is no longer relevant, no one bothered to tell the world . The horrifying 2004 tsunami revealed structures of vulnerability that demand structural analysis. The summer monsoon of 2010 swept away hundreds of thousands of people in Pakistan, in a floodplain perfectly engineered to reduce the year-to-year hazard of flooding in defense of cash crop production, while increasing the decade-to-decade probability of human tragedy on an unimaginable scale. Areas gazetted for conservation mushroomed in recent years without consensus on how to deal with the displacement of people and loss of productive resources this entails. Mining concessions have ballooned on indigenous land. The world got warmer.

And Hurricane Katrina in 2005 came closer than perhaps any other single event of recent memory to tear back the veil on the structural inequalities of race and class in the United States, which are physically inscribed into the seascape, implicated in the ecological transformation of the coastal zone, and inseparably linked to the technologies that govern the flow of water through the Mississippi delta. That event came closer , but clearly not yet close enough. There is simply no way to pass through that obscure barrier without continuing to research, produce videos on, analyze, ecologically track, and mount soap boxes to shout about the swirling political and economic relationships that dialectically produce levees and slums, soils and dams, tourism and hunger, energy and climate, people and things. I am forced to conclude that there is as much or more need for political ecology now than seven years ago, and the revised version of the book you have in your hands is the result.

Those familiar with the first edition will notice that changes in the book are numerous, but made in a judicious attempt not to throw in the kitchen sink. I have attempted to update examples but many cases continue to draw on the canon from the field. I have added discussions of emerging traditions, including urban ecology and actor-networks, but not to the detail that they might receive elsewhere. Many new boxes have been added, including key recent works, but necessarily at the expense of some important older work. I have added a chapter (Chapter 7) engaging both land change science and the challenge of causal explanation approaches. I have introduced what I observe as a recent fifth thesis in the field, concerning the political-ecological status of non-humans (Chapter 12). But in the largest departure from my original effort, I have tried to stress that political ecology is not a method or a theory, nor even a single perspective. Rather, I suggest, political ecology is an urgent kind of argument or text (or book, or mural, or movie, or blog) that examines winners and losers, is narrated using dialectics, begins and/or ends in a contradiction, and surveys both the status of nature and stories about the status of nature (Chapter 4).