Introduction: Why a Political Ecology of the U.S. South?

Abstract

Management challenges related to therelationship between nature and societyare nothing new in the U.S. South. Tech-nical studies of rural sprawl (Wear andGreis 2002; Cho et al. 2003), coastal de-velopment (Allen and Lu 2002), environ-mental change (TNC 2005; Early 2006),and conservation have, at some level, ad-dressed such challenges. So, too, a num-ber of geographers have explored the rolethat particular human-environment re-lationships have played, for example, inurban development in New Orleans andthe distribution of environmental risks(Colten 2005). What then, is the purposeof calling for, and writing on, a politicalecology in the U.S. South? We argue thatpolitical ecology is more than a new termfor nature-society studies (though thenebulousness of the contemporary litera-ture might suggest otherwise), but funda-mentally about the relations of power andknowledge that emerge in the context ofparticular nature-society relationships.This is not to say that the studies citedabove do not engage with issues of power,authority and legitimacy, but to point outthat previous considerations often havecome in the context of separate literaturesand concerns, aimed at different audi-ences, journals and conferences, andtherefore do not truly speak the same lan-guage. While such intellectual hetero-geneity can be an important opportunityfor innovation, the absence of an integra-tive conceptual framing across these liter-atures creates a situation where studies inone literature contain moments of incom-mensurability with studies from other lit-eratures. In these moments, somethinggets lost in translation between, for exam-ple, a study of rural sprawl and a study ofthe politics of conservation.It is this outcome, these moments ofincommensurability that led us to thinkabout a political ecology of the U.S. South.By linking these papers under the headingpolitical ecology, we are able to see howthey speak to issues much larger than thecases raised in each individual paper. Inthis sense, we can move beyond illustra-tive independent case studies and movetoward a broader understanding of the is-sues and processes that shape the out-comes of socionatural relationships, bothin the South and in broader contexts. Thissort of systematic linking is necessary, if