Political Ecology

Whaling, defined as hunting whales for meat, oil and blubber dates back to first century A.D. The master narrative (relating to whaling history) presented in the conservation literature is that whaling has pre-Western era of "indigenous hunting, followed by a period of "commercial exploitation" by Western nations and brought to an end by "nature protection" campaigned by non-materialistic noble savages (developed countries). Similar to any conservation narrative, there are some cultures (Greenlandic Inuit, the Alaskan Inuit, Makah tribe, Siberian Inuit, etc.) who have a long history of cultural and metaphoric relation to whales and whaling and argue for their inherent sentimental, minority, rural and costal rights to these mammals. There are environmental groups (Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Greenpeace) and multinational organisations (International Whaling Commission) fighting for their inhumane commercial exploitation and assign whale huge sanctuaries for their protection. There are international villains (Japan, Norway, Faroe Island, Canada and Iceland) who are supposed to be lacking the sentiments and significance for this totemic species, as they continue to hunt them (in name of scientific research) and are presented as the biggest threat to Whale conservation. In midst of all these arguments and actors there are whales (a totemic –flagship species) and concept of whaling (hugely debated in conservation literature by anthropologists, sociologists, conservationists, political ecologists and other knowledge disciplines). All these arguments, thus presents, a crisis of " pristine nature " (whale and its environment). However, similar conservation arguments for different animals have been debated / criticized and dismantled by political ecologists. Whaling thus presents a very complex case study. This may be because of its deep history (2000 years); legality (commercial whaling still persistent in Japan and other countries); various actors involved and their networks (who have varied goals, and have been justifying themselves through legal and sentimental claims) and most importantly the literature (which sometimes make it even more complex by arguing for a specific actor and disregarding others). Therefore, this passage presents an argument and then comments on the work of Bruno Latour on the Political Ecology of Whaling. [Latour 1988]. This passage presents an argument, often cited in the texts of Political Ecology-The above mentioned conservation narratives are presented in very simplistic terms (where cultural histories are simplified and environmental histories are exemplified) to construct the crisis of " natural environment " (flagship species-whales). Moreover these narratives do not picture the true images of ever going Cosmo politics related to whaling. They present heroes and villains but lacks to sight (intentionally) actual winners and loosers. Thus these master narratives may be described as apolitical from political ecology point of view. Further, the dichotomy/duality (which sees some culture harmonious and noble savages and others as emotionless and development seeking) in certain literature favours only specific sections/ communities/ countries while disregarding others, thus favouring either pro whaling or anti-whaling communities.

The environmental history of India has moved on and considerably broadened since the first studies of Indian forestry were published. This essay surveys studies on water in British India, which it has clustered into three themes. While providing a rough description of some of the most important debates and discussions on the issue of colonial rule and its hydraulic interventions, the essay argues that interest on the subject must now attempt to pursue grand questions as well. Towards to this end, it is argued that much insight and theoretical traction may be gained from pursuing the conceptual notion of a 'colonial hydrology': the attempt to characterise the British experience as comprising an altogether distinct paradigm for hydraulic interventions. Water in British India can be discussed in three overlapping but discrete clusters of concerns. The first and most substantially engaged debates have situated colonial irrigation strategies in terms of their environmental, political and economic contexts. The second cluster, closely shadowing the first, has explored aspects of 'decline', elimination and sometimes appropriation of a slew of 'traditional' water harvesting technologies. The third cluster of concerns, that is yet to achieve visibility, has aimed at identifying definitive patterns in colonial strategies towards hydraulic endowments. Put differently, the attempt is to characterise the British experience as comprising an altogether distinct paradigm for hydraulic interventions in South Asia; explanations that can perhaps be encapsulated under the broad rubric of 'colonial hydrology'. Part of this as yet incipient exercise involves, in my opinion, a departure from the emphasis on irrigation. In turn, this third cluster will explore colonial experiences with floods, drainage, wetlands, lakes, inland river navigation, traditional fisheries, urban water supply, water legislation, cultures of water use, ideologies on 'river-improvement' and Multipurpose River Valley development. In several ways, these themes listed above (indicative and not exhaustive), could then, presumably, help fill in many existing empirical gaps and thereby craft a rigorous theoretical approach to explore the relationship between colonialism and water. By a theoretical approach, I suggest that the subject of water in British India should, similar to works on forests or land policies, be able to shed light on

In the unfolding climate crisis, two questions loom large in the search for planetary justice: What is a radical politics of work in an era of climate crisis? What is a radical politics of nature in an era of disposable workers and precarious work? Through Working Environments, Unruly Natures, the 2020 meeting of the World-Ecology Research Network speaks to the work/life nexus of planetary justice. Highlighted by recent calls for a Green New Deal and Degrowth, we will explore the intimately connected-and profoundly global-dimensions of work, workers, and life across the long history of the capitalist world-ecology. Recognizing the dialectic of productive and reproductive work as the pivot of modern environment-making and class formation, we invite paper and session proposals that unpack the connective relations between work, working bodies, and working environments-past, present, and future. We especially welcome proposals that situate capitalism's mobilization of paid and unpaid work in their racialized, gendered, colonial, and multi-species moments. This includes the deep history of labor politics, working class protest, and social revolution in their connections with world-ecological crises and capitalist restructuring. Identifying the strategic relations between neoliberal dispossession, proliferating climate disasters, and widening inequality, Working Environments, Unruly Natures pursues new syntheses, narratives, and conceptualizations of twenty-first century crisis that can inform the emergent politics of planetary justice.

Although power relations largely mediate access, use and management of ecosystems, they have not yet been considered in ecosystem services science. This omission limits the ability of the ecosystem services approach to guide environmental decision-making that can deliver ecological sustainability and socially fair outcomes. We propose three ways to address power relations more centrally: (1) analyze how power relations underpin the governance and institutions that determine access to and control over ecosystem services; (2) assess how labor relations around ecosystem services co-production impact human well-being; and (3) recognize the historical co-evolution of power relations and environmental change in shaping ecosystem services values. We believe that IPBES offers a unique opportunity to orchestrate transdisciplinary efforts to integrate power relations in ecosystem assessments.

A continuación, se presentan reflexiones sobre las intervenciones del
Programa Servicio País realizadas en el Valle del Huasco durante el ciclo
2009.
En primer lugar, se describen someramente las características e
historia del territorio. Luego, se caracteriza a las comunidades, que
son percibidas como vulnerables ante el desempleo y atrasadas en
lo productivo, reproduciendo un sistema dependiente y precario en
múltiples dimensiones. En tercer lugar, se analiza el rol del profesional
Servicio País, inserto en este contexto y cuáles son los principales
desafíos que enfrenta. Por último, se ofrecen algunas conclusiones.

El trabajo busca evidenciar las contradicciones que deben enfrentar en
el quehacer los profesionales de Servicio País, en un territorio complejo
y dinámico, a partir de la implementación de políticas públicas
orientadas de manera primaria al fomento productivo y que favorecen
espacios de gobernabilidad, en lugar de espacios de autonomía para
las comunidades. Surgiendo entonces la pregunta: ¿se busca superar
la pobreza, o estandarizar modelos de vida?

In the last decades, the relationship between food and nature has experienced two intertwined processes: the de-naturalization of agri-food industry, that apparently has ‘freed’ food from natural processes and the ri-naturalization, linked to the quality turn, that recently transformed agrifood systems and food consumption. This article focuses on the relationships between food and nature, basing on the analysis of the processes that are recently taking place in Valposchiavo (Switzerland), where local agri-food chains sustainability is the core of local development and territorial marketing strategies. The analysis uses the theoretical and methodological framework of food political ecology,
which helps to unveil and critically analyse the complexity and the political dimension of such processes.

Manuscrit de thèse soutenu le 18 janvier 2019 à l'Université libre de Bruxelles.
En libre accès ici : http://difusion.ulb.ac.be/vufind/Record/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/282071/Details
RÉSUMÉ : Sommes-nous entrés dans l’ère du plastique ? L’Anthropocène est-il un Plasticocène ? Les enjeux écologiques contemporains nous invitent à porter un regard critique et sensible sur les matières plastiques de synthèse qui ont progressivement investi notre vie quotidienne durant le XXème siècle. Depuis la fin des années 1980, la République Socialiste du Viêt Nam s’est ouverte au commerce international et a adopté un modèle de production et de consommation de masse. Suivre les plastiques nous permet de raconter l’histoire de ce « Renouveau » vietnamien (Đôi mơi), une transformation accélérée du régime autoritaire autant que de la vie ordinaire dans les petites et grandes villes du pays. Cette thèse questionne le devenir déchet de ces matières issues de l’extraction des hydrocarbures et leur rapport avec les humains, dans un contexte d’emballement plastique. Elle est constituée d’une série de six plasti-cités, qui sont à la fois des lieux physiques – petites villes et métropoles – et des communautés politiques hybrides. Dans la cité, les humains ne sont jamais seuls. Observer les matières, les choses, les êtres, autrement dit, les non-humains, permet de réfléchir aux principes structurant la vie en commun. Ces plasti-cités sont également des écritures : elles proposent de rendre compte textuellement et plastiquement d’enquêtes de terrain menées au Viêt Nam depuis 2011. La démarche est sensible et fondée sur l’expérience. La narration qui en résulte cherche À construire un équilibre entre éthique et esthétique scientifique, depuis une perspective chiffonnière.

El Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte (TLCAN) significaba, desde su partida, poner a competir en condiciones iguales a países desiguales. La experiencia histórica había
mostrado que los tratados de libre comercio parecían generalmente conducir a la concentración de los beneficios en los países más desarrollados, así como a la absorción de los
costos parte por parte de los países más pobres. El desafío era evitar caer en esa regla general.

The Sustainable Biosphere recalled the balance to set up between autochthonous behaviours and orchestrated planning by the triumvirate of experts, political and civil society. In its period of rapid accession toward the global market, Korea temporarily ruled out the ethical resources that are the centres of its urbanity, weakening its ability to embrace the new forms of sociability in germ. Instability results in an escalation of international models transfer, adding problems to the illnesses formerly caused by the Western modernity.

The new regimes of historicity of environmental and urban citizen resistance inform us today how these are crucial factors of signs and warnings in the continual nature / culture adjustments of societies in transition.
The global phenomenon of diplomacy of territory (participation) that restores a ‘courteous’ relationship between various stakeholders and the environment is now at the agenda in Korea. "Landscape Council" and "Hybrid Forum" (Technical Democracy) allow to reinvigorate elements of Korean environmental ethics within new planning practices.
Initiatives introduced in Seoul area via projects like the Gyeongui Line, One Pyong Park and Bupyeong Cultural street demonstrate the audacity of a society fully mature and competent to deploy, as proposed by the Political Ecology, a suitable Ecosophy in the lights of the Post-City Era.


Keywords: Citizen Resistance; Ecosophy; Environmental Activism; Korea; Social Ecology

The Green Party should be able to outline the contours of the future ecological society and map the path leading in its direction. This means translating principles, evidence and institutional and technical capacity into programmes and policies. In addition to initiatives at the political level, there is the importance of direct experience in mobilising action at the social level. The invisibility or intangibility of a problem is a serious issue. People are motivated and will act when they can see a connection between inputs and outputs, tangible results for practical efforts. The problem is that if people do not seen or feel a problem directly, it is difficult to persuade them that a response is necessary. This points to the need to innovate practices, institutions and policy frameworks which could help create the mentalities and modalities in which people are moved to change their lives. The abstruse issue and long range goal needs to be given a practical, tangible focus, brought into the here and now as an ecological and a cognitive praxis.

The question of political solutions to the environmental crisis is not a matter of formulating the right policy in line with existing political institutions, but of establishing new rules – a new regulatory regime or framework based on new principles for the direction and social use of production, new habits. A new mode of regulation which is built on new hopes and new projects.

This report argues that policy must be based on a number of key principles - policy must be effective, evidence based, experiential, efficient, and equitable.

This article addresses the role of natural resources in the protracted conflict between Morocco and Western Sahara. Drawing from literatures of political ecology and political science, the article argues that natural resources have been deeply implicated in the conflict over time, with resource-related developments lending legitimacy to each party in different ways. The complex political economy of resource exploitation and the associated geopolitical enjeux have led to the de facto recognition of Morocco’s occupation, and the symbolic aspects of natural resources have lent the Sahrawi cause legitimacy and an important node around which allies can be mobilised. That sovereignty is contested has facilitated a discourse in a different, more powerful way than when it is not in question, particularly in the Sahrawi’s capacity to invoke international law to support their case. Drawing on the cases of South Sudan and Indonesia, the article ends with a brief discussion of the potential of the region’s high-value resources for peace-making activities.

Most sustainability analyses of the future privilege the urban in future scenarios of climate change at the expense of providing scenarios about the future of the rural, in part because rural regions provide the urban with most of its resources. It is also expected that urban regions will potentially account for up to 70% of the global population by 2050 so most future scenarios of sustainability focus on such regions. Given this over privileging of the urban in sustainability studies, this chapter instead presents a condensed overview of three possible future scenarios of rural areas beginning in 2050 and beyond. Each scenario correlates with a different level of possible human-caused global warming and the correlated implications of possible sustainability in rural areas depending on how hot the earth will become by the end of the century. A variety of social, environmental, and economic metrics are briefly analyzed, with their implications for sustainable futures in rural areas analyzed and discussed.

For millennia, top predators are admired and respected-depicted as powerful, majestic, mysterious, beautiful, elusive, dangerous, rare, fierce, and secretive. Conservation biologists have capitalized on such appeal and have used these species to lever public support for biodiversity preservation, raise funds, protect and restore ecosystem, prioritizing reserve sites, and plan the size and configuration of protected areas. The assumption behind all these objectives is usually that the conservation of top predator automatically implies the preservation of the whole biological diversity of its supporting ecosystem (Ray, 2005).

DEMOCRACY IN THE FIELDS
From the Garden of Eden to Community Gardens, How Agriculture Cultivates Democratic Values

We are accustomed to thinking modern democracy comes from the Enlightenment, from factories, from businesses, from the city… Farmers are considered at best simple and virtuous and at worst old-fashioned, reactionary and hateful of anything to do with the city, society or real progress. This book disagrees and explores how the relationship between a farmer or gardener and the land encourages civic duty. This is shown through an impressive parade of democratic experiences: from the Garden of Eden to the miniature republic of Jefferson’s farm, from medieval hortillonnages in Amiens to Savannah’s urban agriculture by way of kibbutz, worker’s gardens or city community gardens, and many more examples, each more original than the last.






Du jardin d'Eden aux jardins partagés, comment l'agriculture cultive les valeurs démocratiques
Joëlle Zask
Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond – 250 pages –

On a l'habitude de penser que la démocratie moderne vient des Lumières, de l'usine, du commerce, de la ville. Opposé au citadin et même au citoyen, le paysan serait au mieux primitif et proche de la nature, au pire arrièré et réactionnaire. À l'opposé de cette vision, ce livre examine ce qui, dans les relations entre les cultivateurs et la terre cultivée, favorise la formation de la citoyenneté. Défile alors sous nos yeux un cortège étonnant d'expériences agricoles, les unes antiques, les autres actuelles ; du jardin d'Éden qu'Adam doit « cultiver » et aussi « garder » à la « petite république » que fut la ferme pour Jefferson ; des chambrées et foyers médiévaux au lopin de terre russe ; du jardin ouvrier au jardin thérapeutique ; des « guérillas vertes » aux jardins partagés australiens. Cultiver la terre n'est pas un travail comme un autre. Ce n'est pas suer, souffrir ni arracher, arraisonner. C'est dialoguer, être attentif, prendre une initiative et écouter la réponse, anticiper, sachant qu'on ne peut calculer à coup sûr, et aussi participer, apprendre des autres, coopérer, partager. L'agriculture peut donc, sous certaines conditions, représenter une puissance de changement considérable et un véritable espoir pour l'écologie démocratique.

A critical response to the trends in environmental history well summarized by Paul Sutter in "TheWorld with Us: The State of
American Environmental History", Journal of American History 100 (2013): 94-199.  The entire forum is available here: http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/issues/1001/#articles

The development of offshore wind farms has been a way for the state to repackage national development projects using green energy discourses. In Taiwan, where the further development of nuclear power is suspended due to public antinuclear sentiment, offshore wind farms have been heavily promoted as a way of meeting electricity demand. The planned site for offshore wind farms, mainly the intertidal zone along the coast of Changhua County, overlaps with both oyster farms and the habitat of Taiwanese humpbacked dolphins, categorized as a critically endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. This has resulted in a clash between conserving the oyster farming landscape, protecting an endangered species, and developing green energy. Facing this dilemma, pro–wind farm discourses that highlight concerns about global climate change have gradually supplanted those stressing the welfare of oysters and dolphins, even though the latter have been used successfully as local icons by movements opposing previous development projects on the intertidal zone. This article reconsiders the politics of territorialization implied by the “green” label affixed to offshore wind farm projects and other forms of green energy in general. As such, the meaning of offshore wind farms, as a newly discovered energy resource, is intertwined with the changing meanings of both dolphins and oyster farms, as rival nonhuman objects of resource exploitation and natural conservation. The territorialization of such resources in the emerging discursive space of green energy has proceeded via relational placemaking with nonlinear connections among multiple human and nonhuman elements.
Key Words: conservation, intertidal zone, landscape, renewable resources, resource frontier.

We review human effects on biodiversity using archaeological and ethnographic cases with contrasting ecologies, population densities, and economies. Relevant trends include increasing human populations, settlement sizes, and permanence; intensification of subsistence and political economies; world colonization; and changing environmental values. Although humans have always transformed ecosystems, many pre-industrial societies maintained diverse and stable environments that are now considered natural. Disastrous strategies have resulted from values associated with colonization, market economies, property systems, resource extraction and production technologies, and the isolation of decision-makers from environmental consequences. Present-day solutions should engage decision-making by local communities, especially Indigenous and traditional societies, empowering them to shape policies and achieve conservation goals.

Like many fields of knowledge, agronomy is inflected with power and politics. Once we acknowledge how power dynamics have shaped the dominant forms of agricultural knowledge and cropping systems around the world, then it is possible to begin imagining more equitable and sustainable alternatives. This chapter takes the basic conceptual tools of political ecology and demonstrates how they may be productively employed to better understand a range of industrial cropping systems in diverse geographies around the world. In particular, this chapter argues that paying attention to power dynamics, multi-scalar interplays, processes of marginalization, social difference, and dominant discourse allows for the more incisive diagnosis of problems and helps develop alternatives in the context of industrial crop production.

Might image have replaced substance; illusions substituted for ideas; language overwhelmed experience; text obfuscated world; now ignored the past? Might jargon mask authenticity; conversations censor criticism; affirmationism avoid argumentation; rhetoric swamp reality? Epistemology (and its methodologies) misunderstand ontology? Theory dominate practice? Mind overpower matter? Idealism deflate realism? North colonize South? At a recent academic conference in the South, nine of us grappled for four days with these “old” questions and their presence within the “new” discourse of “post” environmental education research. We struggled for an additional six-month period of email exchange to see and feel these questions in our own research. That slow, rich, and deeper academic exchange, as politics of judiciously engaging a collective form of criticism, culminated in identifying the research problem, and questions, of this specially assembled issue of The Journal of Environmental Education (JEE) about the role and place of allegedly new theory in the global discourse of allegedly post environmental education research. In translating our collective thought processes to a special issue (SI), we anticipate the reflexivity of the field will be critically advanced through engaging a number of emerging debates identified in the Introduction of the SI and in three “sample” articles specially written by Isabel Carvalho, Carlos Steil & Francisco Abraão Gonzaga, Louise Sund & Karen Pashby, and Phillip Payne, and an “in process” Conclusion written by Cae Rodrigues. There remains much work to do. This SI is only a start of reengaging overdue debates about the post.

Az Inconnu csoport esetében a környezetvédelem így szorosan összekapcsolódott az államszocialista rendszer kritikájával, és elsősorban abból a szempontból vált fontossá, hogy olyan ügy volt, amin keresztül sikeresen, sokakat megmozgatva lehetett támadni a rezsimet.

We seek to (re)construct a narrative for the essence of place, by (re)working mountain specificities that imprint cultural traits on tropical and temperate Andean landscapes, creating a unique identity trilemma for different people of the Andes of South America. We use onomastics as a study of mistaken individuality, with a post-structuralism approach to define ‘the Andean’ within critical biogeography; thus, we incorporate notions related to common phenotypic traits of ‘Andeanity’, together with cryptic, emergent properties of ‘Andeaness’ and mystic conditions of spirituality of ‘Andeanitude’. These notions allow producing a new trifecta of ecoregional building, with a challenging epistemology for ‘Andean’ as a biocultural heritage landscape informed from traditional knowledge, dialectically appropriated from the old and the young, the foreign and the native, and the original and the composed. Hence, the imagined, heterogeneous, and strong identity of Andean people is characterized as dynamic and evolving flow of the mountainscape. We argue that this mountainscape is still adapting to frameworks of global environment change; hence, it is subjected to withering if not for certain biocultural microrefugia that keep Andean landscape memory alive. With a review of the hermeneutics of Andes, because of orthographic variants (c.f.: graphiosis) that incorporated Kichwa-based, Kañary-based or Mapuzungun-based words in the hegemonic lexicon of colonial expansionism of Castilian terms, we argue for the inclusion of vernacular descriptors instead of Roman Sanctorum or Patriotic ephemerides utilized to name geographical features in Andean South America. A plea to restore vernacular descriptors with the original peoples’ language uses, toponymy and onomatopoeia, brings political recognition and invigorates original communities’ pride of their ancestral heritage to reinforce their wellbeing in biodiversity microrefugia. Switching from imperial, imposed names of colonialist geographies to vernacular words or other non-hegemonic locatives of (de)colonial scholarship will help find a better sense of place in the Andes and will increase the likelihood of survival and (re)storation of ancestral socio-ecological production landscapes.

In Ecuador's Yasuní rainforests and the lived history of the Waorani that live there, the commodification of first rubber and then oil shaped territorialization into particularly violent form. The formative role of rubber production in the 19th century involved local despots' imposition of a regime of violence. Reacting to this violent capitalist system, individual Waorani forged new socio‐spatial territories through violence with rubber slavers and cooperation with the Taromenane, a people who continue to live in isolation. Today, an oil complex exerts control to bring the end of Yasuní's commodity frontier, even while the Waorani Nation and Taromenane hold legal rights to parts of the forests. In this article, I analyse how rubber and oil exploitation has unfolded as capitalist territorial violence, spurring Waorani and Taromenane social expressions and political mobilizations that are at times violent, but primarily not.

In this paper, I argue that frontiers are dilemmas composed of multiple dualities, be they exclusive and inclusive powers, connected space and national periphery, or modernity and primitiveness. These dilemmas, in consequence, become the mechanism to create a leeway for the state to ‘tailor’ different meanings of frontier to meet the contingent market demands. I use tea production on China’s southwest frontier as an example to demonstrate that dilemma is not an end result, but a mechanism to rearticulate the relationship among frontier, the state and the market economy. Specifically, I argue that dilemmas on China’s southwest frontier have been forged by the Chinese state with its incompatible desires between ‘modernisation’ and ‘primitiveness’ of the tea landscapes in Yunnan, a province on China’s southwest frontier. Meanwhile, the incompatible desires and the resulting dilemmas on China’s southwest frontier have further mobilised the state to flexibly rework its power to reconstruct the frontier to meet contingent market demand. Based on the shifting meanings of tea landscapes, the state has flexibly ‘shuttled through’ the dilemmas between development of modernisation and preservation of primitiveness on the frontier.

In this annotated bibliography towards the development of environmental politics, looking at issues of justice, Iris Young's Responsibility for Justice, argues that we should think about personal responsibility in relation to social justice. Whereas, Michael Sandel's  Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?, discusses what makes a just and moral society in today's free-market. On economics, Ernest Schumacher's Small is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered gives an alternative view to economics which feature in today's free-market. Whereas, Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism address how in today's free-market, disaster capitalism has destroyed peoples lives for the benefit for others. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger looks at whether health and social problems in some developed countries are related to income inequality. Michael Maniates' Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World, argues that by individualising responsibility on issues of environmentalism, this has restricted peoples “environmental imagination”.