Political Ecology

Political Ecology PDF Author: Paul Robbins
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9781405102667
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This text presents a critical survey of the burgeoning field of political ecology, an interdisciplinary area of research which connects politics and economy to problems of environmental control and ecological change. Provides the first full history of the development of political ecology over the last century. Considers the major challenges facing the field now and for the future. Written to be accessible to students at all levels and from different disciplines. Uses case examples to explore abstract, theoretical issues in a down-to-earth way. Features study boxes, introducing key figures in the development of the discipline and summarizing their key works. Details of the author’s own research experiences to offer a personal glimpse into political ecology research.

Affluence and Freedom

Affluence and Freedom PDF Author: Pierre Charbonnier
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509543732
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
In this pathbreaking book, Pierre Charbonnier opens up a new intellectual terrain: an environmental history of political ideas. His aim is not to locate the seeds of ecological thought in the history of political ideas as others have done, but rather to show that all political ideas, whether or not they endorse ecological ideals, are informed by a certain conception of our relationship to the Earth and to our environment. The fundamental political categories of modernity were founded on the idea that we could improve on nature, that we could exert a decisive victory over its excesses and claim unlimited access to earthly resources. In this way, modern thinkers imagined a political society of free individuals, equal and prosperous, alongside the development of industry geared towards progress and liberated from the Earth’s shackles. Yet this pact between democracy and growth has now been called into question by climate change and the environmental crisis. It is therefore our duty today to rethink political emancipation, bearing in mind that this can no longer draw on the prospect of infinite growth promised by industrial capitalism. Ecology must draw on the power harnessed by nineteenth-century socialism to respond to the massive impact of industrialization, but it must also rethink the imperative to offer protection to society by taking account of the solidarity of social groups and their conditions in a world transformed by climate change. This timely and original work of social and political theory will be of interest to a wide readership in politics, sociology, environmental studies and the social sciences and humanities generally.

Political Ecology

Political Ecology PDF Author: Karl S. Zimmerer
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 1462506119
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This volume offers a unique, integrative perspective on the political and ecological processes shaping landscapes and resource use across the global North and South. Twelve carefully selected case studies demonstrate how contemporary geographical theories and methods can contribute to understanding key environment-and-development issues and working toward effective policies. Topics addressed include water and biodiversity resources, urban and national resource planning, scientific concepts of resource management, and ideas of nature and conservation in the context of globalization. Giving particular attention to evolving conceptions of nature-society interaction and geographical scale, an introduction and conclusion by the editors provide a clear analytical focus for the volume and summarize important developments and debates in the field.

Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups

Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups PDF Author: Susan Paulson
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813534787
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Environmental issues have become increasingly prominent in local struggles, national debates, and international policies. In response, scholars are paying more attention to conventional politics and to more broadly defined relations of power and difference in the interactions between human groups and their biophysical environments. Such issues are at the heart of the relatively new interdisciplinary field of political ecology, forged at the intersection of political economy and cultural ecology. This volume provides a toolkit of vital concepts and a set of research models and analytic frameworks for researchers at all levels. The two opening chapters trace rich traditions of thought and practice that inform current approaches to political ecology. They point to the entangled relationship between humans, politics, economies, and environments at the dawn of the twenty-first century and address challenges that scholars face in navigating the blurring boundaries among relevant fields of enquiry. The twelve case studies that follow demonstrate ways that culture and politics serve to mediate human-environmental relationships in specific ecological and geographical contexts. Taken together, they describe uses of and conflicts over resources including land, water, soil, trees, biodiversity, money, knowledge, and information; they exemplify wide-ranging ecological settings including deserts, coasts, rainforests, high mountains, and modern cities; and they explore sites located around the world, from Canada to Tonga and cyberspace.

Reimagining Political Ecology

Reimagining Political Ecology PDF Author: Aletta Biersack
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388146
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Reimagining Political Ecology is a state-of-the-art collection of ethnographies grounded in political ecology. When political ecology first emerged as a distinct field in the early 1970s, it was rooted in the neo-Marxism of world system theory. This collection showcases second-generation political ecology, which retains the Marxist interest in capitalism as a global structure but which is also heavily influenced by poststructuralism, feminism, practice theory, and cultural studies. As these essays illustrate, contemporary political ecology moves beyond binary thinking, focusing instead on the interchanges between nature and culture, the symbolic and the material, and the local and the global. Aletta Biersack’s introduction takes stock of where political ecology has been, assesses the field’s strengths, and sets forth a bold research agenda for the future. Two essays offer wide-ranging critiques of modernist ecology, with its artificial dichotomy between nature and culture, faith in the scientific management of nature, and related tendency to dismiss local knowledge. The remaining eight essays are case studies of particular constructions and appropriations of nature and the complex politics that come into play regionally, nationally, and internationally when nature is brought within the human sphere. Written by some of the leading thinkers in environmental anthropology, these rich ethnographies are based in locales around the world: in Belize, Papua New Guinea, the Gulf of California, Iceland, Finland, the Peruvian Amazon, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Collectively, they demonstrate that political ecology speaks to concerns shared by geographers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and anthropologists alike. And they model the kind of work that this volume identifies as the future of political ecology: place-based “ethnographies of nature” keenly attuned to the conjunctural effects of globalization. Contributors. Eeva Berglund, Aletta Biersack, J. Peter Brosius, Michael R. Dove, James B. Greenberg, Søren Hvalkof, J. Stephen Lansing, Gísli Pálsson, Joel Robbins, Vernon L. Scarborough, John W. Schoenfelder, Richard Wilk

Politics of Nature

Politics of Nature PDF Author: Bruno Latour
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674039963
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division—which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation.

Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge

Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge PDF Author: Andrew Dobson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139457853
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In recent years the engagement between the environmental 'agenda' and mainstream political theory has become increasingly widespread and profound. Each has affected the other in palpable and important ways, and it makes increasing sense for political theorists in each camp to engage with one another. This book, first published in 2006, draws together the threads of this interconnecting enquiry in order to assess its status and meaning. Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley have gathered together a team of renowned scholars to think through the challenge that political ecology presents to political theory. Looking at fourteen familiar political ideologies and concepts such as liberalism, conservatism, justice and democracy, the contributors question how they are reshaped, distorted or transformed from an environmental perspective. Lively, accessible and authoritative, this book will appeal to scholars and students alike.

Wilderness and Political Ecology

Wilderness and Political Ecology PDF Author: Charles Kay
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Environmental law and philosophy assume the existence of a fundamental state of nature: Before the arrival of Columbus, the Americas were a wilderness untouched by human hand, teeming with wildlife and almost void of native peoples. In Wilderness and Political Ecology Charles Kay and Randy Simmons state that this "natural" view of pre-European America is scientifically unsupportable. This volume brings together scholars from a variety of fields as they seek to demonstrate that native people were originally more numerous than once thought and that they were not conservationists in the current sense of the term. Rather, native peoples took an active part in managing their surroundings and wrought changes so extensive that the anthropogenic environment has long been viewed as the natural state of the American ecosystem.

Locating the Political in the Ecological

Locating the Political in the Ecological PDF Author: Antonio P. Contreras
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Environmental policy
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description


Discovering Political Ecology

Discovering Political Ecology PDF Author: Gustav Cederlöf
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000956032
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Political ecology is one of the most vibrant fields of environmental research. This book introduces political ecology to a new generation of students in a daring new way: as an interdisciplinary approach to environmental research but also as a series of lived realities and a praxis for change. The origins of political ecology are often traced through an Anglo-American canon. In Discovering Political Ecology, Gustav Cederlöf and Alex Loftus instead take up the challenge of presenting the key conversations and the diverse traditions that have shaped this field with attention to its extensive international roots. Inspired by voices and research in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, the authors address the concerns of those who from different social backgrounds have grown up in a world shaped by climate change and increasing environmental inequalities. Engaging and accessible in style, Discovering Political Ecology introduces a set of key concepts around which conversations in political ecology coalesce. It also shows how these concepts allow you to make sense of some of the most pressing issues of our time—issues around water, energy, agriculture, forestry, climate change and environmental justice. Each chapter includes learning outcomes and suggested further readings, extensive bibliographies and seminar activities to be used by students and educators. At the cutting edge of the field, the book will be of interest to those in all disciplines brought together in political ecology, including but not limited to anthropology, development studies, ecology, geography, history and political science.