Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups

Abstract

ecology is a strong and growing interdisciplinary field of inquiry, and this book makes a welcome and unique contribution. Susan Paulson and Lisa Gezon have put together an engaging and well-written collection that is full of fresh ideas and applications related to current theoretical debate, concepts, and methods.-Marianne Schmink, director, Tropical Conservation and Development Program, University of Florida ecology and ecologists are sure to benefit from this splendid array of rigorous, richly contextualized, and far-reaching accounts that injects a masterful blend of political analysis and attention to the lifeworlds of diverse peoples worldwide into environmental studies.-Karl Zimmerer, professor and chair, Department of Geography and Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison An ingenious mix of genealogy and the unfolding future of political ecology, bringing fresh insights to the dynamics of place, power, and people across the globe. -Dianne Rocheleau, coeditor of Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences As environmental issues become increasingly prominent in local struggles, national debates, and international policies, 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. Pointing to the entangled relationship between humans, politics, economies, and environments at the dawn of the twenty-first century, opening chapters trace rich traditions of thought and practice that inform current approaches to political ecology. The twelve case studies that follow explore sites located around the world as they describe uses of and conflicts over resources including land, water, soil, trees, biodiversity, money, knowledge, and information. Susan Paulson is the director of Latin American studies and an associate professor of anthropology at Miami University. Lisa Gezon is an associate professor and chair of the department of anthropology at the State University of West Georgia.