Reconsidering ‘regional’ political ecologies: toward a political ecology of the rural American West

Abstract

Political ecology has recently seen a long-overdue movement toward studies of environmental conflicts in advanced capitalist societies, far from the rural African, Latin American, and Asian societies that constitute the great majority of studies in the field. This shift has raised questions about the commonalities and differences between ‘first-world’ and ‘third-world’ political ecologies - questions that present broader challenges and opportunities for the field. The question of commonalities and difference in ‘first-world’ and ‘third-world’ political ecologies is hemispheric, recent research in political ecology consists primarily of local-scale studies, leaving the field poorly positioned to address such broad-scale comparative questions. Appropriately, local political ecology studies challenge the stability of the ‘first world’ and ‘third world’ as meaningful geographic frames posed in these questions; but in dismantling these frames without suggesting alternatives for broader-scale analysis there is danger of moving political ecology toward even greater emphasis on specificity and difference and pushing consideration of broader-scale processes farther into the background. This is a serious challenge in a field already criticized for sprawling incoherence. This article argues that one response to these challenges is to reconsider the concept of ‘regional’ political ecologies. Regional approaches can retain the greatest strengths of recent political ecology in revealing the importance of local-scale social dynamics while situating these dynamics within broader scales of regional (and global) processes - providing greater coherence while avoiding such problematic frames as the ‘first’ and ‘third’ world. To illustrate, a brief case study and discussion are presented that consider a regional political ecology of the rural American West.