Political ecology III

Abstract

In this last of three reports exploring the incorporation of human geography theory within political ecology, I focus on landscape. I begin by surveying recent work on landscape in human geography, which has increasingly stressed non-representational approaches, and then explore how landscape has been treated in political ecology. I found that political ecology shares with human geography more generally many of the same critical responses to the representational landscape approaches of the 1980s' ‘new cultural geography’. Although shifts in approaches to landscape in political ecology and human geography more broadly have often paralleled one another, this has not been an outcome of sustained interaction between the fields. I refer to work in anthropology to illustrate the theoretical and empirical potentialities of a more direct and explicit conversation between political ecology and landscape studies in human geography.