Nature-society Relations Research Articles

Exploring economic dimensions of social ecological crises: A reply to special issue papers

In this paper I consider various shifts in my research and understanding stimulated by seeking how to combat social ecological crises connected to modern economies. The discussion and critical reflections are structured around five papers that were submitted to Environmental Values in an open call to address my work. A common aspect is the move away from neoclassical environmental economics, and its reductionist monetary valuation, to a more realist theory and multiple methods. This relates to my work on environmental ethics, plural values, stated preference validity and deliberative monetary valuation. Expanding beyond the narrow confines of mainstream orthodoxy has involved exploring a range of other disciplines (e.g. applied philosophy, social psychology, human geography, political science, social anthropology, history of thought and philosophy of science) and learning from this literature to rethink economics and develop social ecological economics. A broad range of subjects are covered here, including: personal responsibility, social practice, psychology of the individual, participatory processes, value (intrinsic, instrumental and relational), Nature–society relationships and interdependencies, critical realism and the conduct of unifying interdisciplinary science. I end with a series of comments concerning the failings of orthodox economics and the conduct of scientific research for social ecological transformation.

Ruins and Ruination in Political Ecology: An Introduction to the Special Issue

ABSTRACT A ruin infers ruination, a process that led to the site’s demise and that also gives a glimpse into the site’s story: who or what lived there?; how long did they live there?; where did they go?; where are they now? Implicit in this line of questioning is a link between the past, present, and future, an understanding that ruins and ruination are never quite absolute or complete. In this short article, we theorize with the concepts of ruin and ruination to consider how capitalism both depends upon and is held hostage by its own making. We aim to bring two trends in political ecology together–one that sees ruins as sites of dispossession and one that sees ruins as sites of hope–to develop what we see as a dialectic of ruination with the intention of highlighting where, how, and what kinds of resistance to capital take place within its machinations. This article serves as the introduction to a special issue on ruins and ruination in political ecology, which we see as a critical field for not only resisting capital’s hold on nature-society relations but also for providing pathways towards a post-capitalist future.

Subjectivity and space on extractive frontiers: Materiality, accumulation and politics

This paper uses the lenses of space and subjectivity to analyse the local impacts of large-scale metals mining on three extractive frontiers across the global South. Using insights around the role of the materiality of resource extraction in politics, the spatiality of power and subjectivity and the global nature of extractive industries, this paper draws on research across Ghana, Peru and Zambia to understand how patterns of action and impact, repeated across continents, reconfigure space and subjectivity. First, the paper outlines thinking on subjectivity, drawing on Foucault and Althusser and work on contemporary capitalism, colonialism, nature-society relations and frontiers. Second, three key areas where the presence and activities of extractive companies reshape spaces of subjectivity across extractive frontiers are explored: (1) material transformations, (2) dynamics of inclusion and exclusion and, (3) governance interventions which directly reshape the form and functioning of the state and local politics. The weighty presence of large-scale mining reconfigures the ‘reality’ and sense of place in the world of those living on extractive frontiers, profoundly altering subjectivity and shaping extractive subjects. The paper argues for the possibilities opened into understanding local processes and outcomes across globally connected extractive frontiers by examining space and subjectivities, highlighting insights into the complex, scalar and intersectional forms of power at work around mining operations.

Environmental struggles and insularity: The right to nature in Mallorca and Tenerife

Islands worldwide experience commodification of land and natural resources that is closely related to touristic activity and urbanization. Islands represent the epitome of commodified represented spaces, power, and territorialization, and in this regard, focusing on islands may shed light on how the production of socio-natures shapes the dynamics of capital accumulation, dispossession, and resistance. We explore the contestation of urban-tourist development in Majorca and Tenerife. Both have experienced an intense expansion of artificial land uses since the touristic boom in the mid-20th century, which has intensified with neoliberal capitalism and the commodification of everyday life elements. Environmental struggles in both islands have facilitated greater mobilization than other claims. An empirical survey of the spatio-temporal evolution of these two islands illustrates and helps to deepen the conceptual development of the right to the island and nature. The idea of the right to nature consists of the right to influence and rule the processes by which nature–society relationships are (re)shaped by urbanization and capitalism. The notion of the right to the island relies on the political action to foster a sustainable island future.

Political Ecology of an Environmental Crisis in the Brahmaputra Valley, Assam

Political ecology as a framework for studying nature–society relations has come a long way since the 1980s, both in terms of its thematic canvas as well as theoretical robustness. Research in political ecology on hazards on the other hand has not grown as impressively, even though humanity is witnessing increased risks and disasters in the Anthropocene. Indeed, disasters are no longer “extreme events” and have come to be regarded as normal occurrences. This paper delves deeper into the question of the political ecology of hazards and vulnerability by focusing on a case study from Majuli river island in India’s northeast. It critically investigates the twin disasters of flooding and riverbank erosion in Majuli by paying attention to the role of the biophysical features of the Brahmaputra river system as well as the political economic forces at play, with a special focus on the role of the state. The paper draws on fieldwork conducted in Majuli over several years. It foregrounds the role of the state in the reproduction of the Majuli hazardscape and calls for a nuanced, disaggregated analysis of the postcolonial disastrous state.

Authoritarian power and contestation beyond the state

ABSTRACT Research on authoritarian connections beyond the state requires a transregional practices approach. This special issue is an invitation to combine critical approaches to the study of authoritarian power by paying attention to spaces of contestation, authoritarian practices, as well as non-state actors and agency below and beyond the scale of the state. We focus on authoritarian practices and their spatial and temporal articulations in (1) transregional infrastructures, (2) global processes of capital accumulation and (3) nature-society relations. This enables us to capture the diversity of authoritarian actors and the interconnectedness of authoritarian power and forms of contestation across time and space. Drawing on logistics and infrastructure literature, we reconcile the contextualization of power relations with multi-scalar authoritarian practices beyond the inside-outside binary of national territoriality. We thus offer a conceptual approach to understanding the violent and repressive practices inherent to a continuum of different political settings, including liberal governance.

A case for experimental and speculative political ecologies

One of political ecology's main strengths is its emphasis on critique, and, through critique, its ability to better understand nature-society relations. Recently, calls have been made from within the sub-discipline – and from the social sciences more broadly – to move beyond critique, to engage nature-society relations more experimentally. Experimental approaches to nature-society relations invite new techniques and methods to study issues as they emerge, as opposed to those that have already happened. To this end, much has been written about the limits of human reasoning and understanding in the face of large-scale environmental crises like climate change. Complementing experimental sensibilities, speculative approaches to nature-society relations engage directly in the politics of expanding imaginative, perspectival, and political capacity in the face of these changes. The aim of this article is threefold. First, we will highlight scholarship that informs already existing approaches to experimental and speculative political ecologies, tying these threads together to elucidate a larger research agenda. Second, by way of example, we will discuss two case studies – solar's role in Colorado's 'just transition' and speculative climate futures and CRISPR-based gene drives and environmental management – to inform our discussion. Finally, this article serves as the introduction to a Special Section, in which we will outline and connect three articles that point towards how political ecology can be done with an eye more explicitly trained towards the future.

Eco-war tourism: Affective geographies, colonial durabilities and the militarization of conservation

This article introduces ‘eco-war tourism’, a growing niche in which tourists venture into war zones to seek adventure and ‘save’ nature from its violent surroundings. In Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, such tourists can experience the ‘threat of mortality’ while visiting mountain gorillas, contribute to the survival of the park and supposedly participate in regional peacebuilding. This article considers how the amalgamated commodification of war and gorillas leads to the bunkerization of tourism, the reconfiguration of space into ‘safe’ and ‘dangerous’ areas and the militarization of conservation. It links critical security studies and political ecology to theorize how eco-war tourism intensifies green militarization and how militarized conservation itself becomes a spectacularized tourist attraction. Eco-war tourism is informed by, and productive of, various affective geographies, entrenched in colonial durabilities that produce Eurocentric ideas about how and by whom nature should be protected. I call for critical security studies to examine how diverse security interventions – e.g. military, tourism, humanitarianism and conservation – are entangled in and reconfigure inherently political nature–society relations and underscore the futility of approaching ‘society’ and ‘the environment’ as separate fields of security.

Creating fairer futures for sustainability transitions.

Futures thinking is an expanding interdisciplinary field which is seen as a key element of transitioning towards a more sustainable planet and society. Developing fairer futuring is increasingly urgent in the context of the radical reconfiguration of current systems needed to meet complex global sustainability challenges. However, explicit consideration of uneven power and participation and the nature-society relations that feature in contemporary futuring processes has been given little explicit attention to date. This deficit is addressed in this paper through a critical review of dominant futuring approaches and outlining insights from critical perspectives which (a) identify limitations of current futuring approaches and (b) provide important perspectives to help shape fairer futuring in geographical research.

Fieldwork in the Anthropocene

Interdisciplinary sensitivity takes into account the epistemic upheaval of the Anthropocene. However, the still fragmented academic organization between nature and society counteracts intellectual progress. The paper explores the possibilities of enhancing collaboration between biology and sociology by providing an empirical reflection of common methodological grounds. Building on practice theory, pragmatism, science studies and sociocultural anthropology, I discuss current nature–society relationships through an ethnography of a taxonomist’s laboratory, followed up by a biodiversity expedition in Papua New Guinea. I address analogical thinking as a device for interdisciplinary collaboration through four modes of fieldwork enrollment: Ontological, disciplinary, transdisciplinary and experimental. The paper concludes with two arguments: Firstly, fieldwork could engender new knowledge in between differing epistemic cultures and, secondly, an analogical fieldwork approach based on the interrelatedness of experience, trial and cooperation facilitates promising pathways for sustainable futures of inquiry.

Rethinking Power and Forestry Governance in Colonial and Post-Colonial Tanzania: Towards a Poststructural Political Ecology

Abstract There is an emerging scholarly concern for reconstructing and engaging with diverse approaches that theorize the question of power. Scholars focusing on the Global South critically explore how power dynamics shaping forestry governances hold western colonial assumptions that erase complexities of nature-society relations. Yet, many studies have not systematically (re)conceptualized issues of knowledge-power nexus as an instrument of control and power through Foucauldian and coloniality lens in Tanzania. The review critically discusses politics and power by plotting it within environmentality and coloniality literature. It argues that postcolonial forestry governance is devoid of its colonial residue that seems to be visible in the current forestry governance regimes. It proposes an alternative critical constructivist approach that considers the role of knowledge production through which forest discourses as assemblages of power mechanisms are crucial in producing uneven social and ecological implications.

A Narrative Political Ecology Approach to Unsheltered Homelessness and Episodic Poor Air Quality along an Urban Riparian Corridor

Air quality concerns, like other environmental disamenities, are unevenly experienced across populations based on a variety of social and geographic markers, including those living at the urban economic and geographic margins. This study uses a narrative political ecology approach to document and analyze how people experiencing unsheltered homelessness along an urban riparian corridor in Salt Lake County, Utah, engage with seasonal episodic poor air quality. In-depth, on-site semi-structured interviews (n = 16) were conducted with individuals living in tents and other constructed shelters. Participant responses were developed into narratives focused on daily experiences with poor air quality, attributing the causes of air pollution, and locating responsibility for poor air quality. Responses demonstrate the power of participant narrative in their own analyses of lived experiences of wildfire smoke, haze, and seasonal inversion, as well as the ways these events influence broader conceptualizations about personal health, vulnerability, responsibilization, and power-infused nature-society relations.

Altered spaces: new ways of seeing and envisioning nature with Minecraft

The climate crisis has inspired youth-led activism across the world and young people now lead global campaigns and political protest on climate justice. However, aside from news media coverage of youth activism and the attendant focus on young people’s hand-drawn protest placards, relatively little is known about young people’s views on the actions needed to respond to the climate crisis or how they imagine environmentally-sustainable futures. This visual essay addresses that lacuna by exploring young people’s ideas about local climate actions. The images selected for consideration were created using Minecraft, the 3D block-building visualisation game, at workshops held in Ireland. Young people and their families were invited to create environmentally-sustainable futures at Minecraft workshops. Exploring these 3D designs as images, the essay documents young people’s visual representations of desirable climate actions and reflects on these Minecraft images to shed light on how young people envision alternative climate futures. These collective visions, or climate imaginaries, are powerful indicators of what young people imagine is possible in the future. In doing so, they present an alternative to the mainstream news and entertainment media preoccupation with dystopian constructions of the climate crisis. They also highlight the power of Minecraft as a visual medium to open up new ways of seeing nature and of envisioning nature-society relations. The selected images were also exhibited as part of the CLIMATE LOOK Lab 2022 held at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. The gallery invited researchers, community groups and artists to use the gallery as a lab space to engage visitors with our changing environment and to explore how images can change the visual narrative on climate change.

Engaging with the non-human turn: A response to Büscher

Büscher's recent article promoted a new language of ‘more-than-human’ and ‘less-than-human’ alongside the concept of surplus alienation from nature, observing that the non-human turn would benefit from an engagement with history. In commenting Büscher's intervention, I observe that the ‘nonhuman turn’ does not have much traction in the Global South, possibly because the alienation from nature is experienced through the violent realities of primitive accumulation. The non-human turn is hardly compatible with Marx's understanding of capital and nature–society relations as organised by the law of value. The new language of the non-human turn is founded on an idealistic conception of society and history, reproposing an analytically problematic ‘we’ that perpetuates class-blind analyses.

Plotting the coloniality of conservation

Contemporary and market-based conservation policies, constructed as rational, neutral and apolitical, are being pursued around the world in the aim of staving off multiple, unfolding and overlapping environmental crises. However, the substantial body of research that examines the dominance of neoliberal environmental policies has paid relatively little attention to how colonial legacies interact with these contemporary and market-based conservation policies enacted in the Global South. It is only recently that critical scholars have begun to demonstrate how colonial legacies interact with market-based conservation policies in ways that increase their risk of failure, deepen on-the-ground inequalities and cement global injustices. In this article, we take further this emerging body of work by showing how contemporary,market-based conservation initiatives extend the temporalities and geographies of colonialism, undergird long-standing hegemonies and perpetuate exploitative power relations in the governing of nature-society relations, particularly in the Global South. Reflecting on ethnographic insights from six different field sites across countries of the Global South, we argue that decolonization is an important and necessary step in confronting some of the major weaknesses of contemporary conservation and the wider socio-ecological crisis itself. We conclude by briefly outlining what decolonizing conservation might entail.

Storying climate knowledge: Notes on experimental political ecology

Political ecology emphasizes critique, and, through critique, its ability to better understand nature-society relations. Recently, calls have been made from within the sub-discipline to move beyond critique, and towards engaging nature-society relations more experimentally. This paper asks: is it possible for political ecology to be less reactive and more proactive? Rather than studying events that have already happened, is it possible to study events currently happening or that have not yet happened? This paper is an attempt to do political ecology more experimentally by staging an intervention and studying its outcomes. Given the abstract nature of climate change, and given storytelling’s capacity for helping people make sense of the world around them, this project combined political ecology analysis and storytelling, resulting in an experimental process of collaborative climate knowledge production in regions, and with people, central to the changing climate. Research for this paper took place over fourteen months in Appalachia and Alaska, climate-vulnerable regions with economies tied to fossil fuel industries and with culturally rich storytelling traditions. The aim of this paper is threefold. First, I will examine political ecology scholarship that already engages with experimentation as a way of making the case for a more experimental political ecology. Second, I will discuss the process and outcomes from my experimental research, namely that storytelling is a meaningful way of building climate knowledge. Finally, by outlining the challenges of doing this research, this paper ends with lessons for future iterations of more experimental research.

Colonizing landscapes/landscaping colonies: from a global history of landscapism to the contemporary landscape approach in nature conservation

I suggest that to decolonize conservation we must also decolonize our way of seeing land and nature-society relations inscribed in it as landscapes. I proceed in three parts. First, drawing on insights from post- and decolonial studies, critical geography, environmental history and political ecology, I highlight three problems that underpin a landscape way of seeing nature-society relations: depoliticization, simplification/decomplexification, and representation. Second,to illustrate the colonial legacy of the contemporary landscape approach to nature conservation, I revisit the global history of landscapism – the double movement of colonizing landscapes/landscapingcolonies. This double movement began with the internal colonization of European landscapes (autonomous political communities), and continued through the landscaping of (settler-)colonies by Europeans outside of their homelands. Third, through the contemporary case of a landscape conservation initiative in Tanzania (the so-called "Tarangire-Manyara Ecosystem"), I illustrate the implications of the double movement in the colonial present of African conservation. I conclude with a few remarks on what decolonization of conservation would have to entail in scientific research and practice.

Land, sheep, and market: how dependency on global commodity chains changed relations between pastoralists and nature

Land, sheep, and market: how dependency on global commodity chains changed relations between pastoralists and nature

Protected area management in a post-natural world: negotiated governance at the Danish Wadden Sea

National parks and other large protected areas play an increasingly important role in the context of global social and environmental challenges. Nevertheless, they continue to be rooted in local places and cannot be separated out from their socio-cultural and historical context. Protected areas furthermore are increasingly understood to constitute critical sites of struggle whereby the very meanings of nature, landscape, and nature-society relations are up for debate. This paper examines governance arrangements and discursive practices pertaining to the management of the Danish Wadden Sea National Park and reflects on the relationship between pluralist institutional structures and pluralist, relational understandings of nature and landscape.

Ball jars, bacteria, and labor: CO-producing nature through cooperative enterprise

The production of nature has been employed to theorize shifts in nature-society relations that have accompanied historical transformations in production and social reproduction. While Marxist scholars have employed this framework to theorize the nature-society relations that accompany capitalist production, they have paid less attention to those that accompany non-capitalist production. In the meantime critical food studies has grown abundant with more-than-human and more-than-capitalist encounters with nature. This paper attempts to bring these two streams of thought together, in order to explore what they reveal about encounters and entanglements with microbes and non-human labor in the non-capitalist production of yogurt. Drawing on ethnographic research with a yogurt making cooperative in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA, I explore the contribution of microbial labor to the co-production of nature and post-human ethics in a cooperative food enterprise.