Aspects of political ecology discussed in other classes

Hi everyone,

I don't know about the rest of you but within a week of reading some material on political ecology (and please bear in mind I am totally new to the topic so I could easily be mistaken) I feel I have already encountered some topics in my other classes that either could be analyzed from a political ecology perspective or that already have some concrete arguments that come from this area. This is why I thought perhaps it could be interesting to use this space also to comment on issues/arguments that we see through our course that relate to political ecology.

So this is actually not my commentary for the week but rather an invitation to you all to discuss issues crossing through to our other subject areas.

I've got two examples from this week. Apologies in advance if I don't go into too much detail, but I also have to prepare for my field trip to Whales so I might come back to these two later on (unless someone else decides to carry on this discussion).

The first example is from a reading we had for Tuesday for Development and the Environment (and I realize this might be more relevant to ECM students, so the rest please accept my apologies). The reading was by Leach and Fairhead (2000), titled "Challenging Neo-Malthusian Deforestation Analyses in West Africa's Dynamic Forest Landscape". The paper was a critic to neo-Malthusian and neo-Boserupian explanations of deforestation. The first would argue that deforestation is mainly (if not entirely) due to population growth. The second would claim that actually increase population may stimulate technology and other factors intensifying land use, so that at the end higher populations could be supported by unit area. In the view of Leach and Fairhead (2000), this view is extremely simplistic as "exclude (s) crucial questions relating to social and ecological specificity and history" (p. 18).

I found a very similar argument in one of our assigned readings for this course: the "Proximate Causes and Underlying Driving Forces of Tropical Deforestation" article by Geist and Lambin (2002) in which a political ecology approach is taken and multiple proximate and underlying causes are evaluated. This study concludes that:

“ … observed causal factor synergies challenge single-factor explanations that put most of the blame of deforestation upon shifting cultivators and population growth (caused by natural increment)” (p.150)

The first study (Leach and Fairhed 2000) reached the conclusion that in fact the attribution of deforestation to population alone was a simplistic single factor explanation. Their study was highly criticized though and accused of “cherry picking” because it only used two very specific case studies to support these claims. However the study by Geist and Lambin (2002) from our course uses 152 sub-national case studies and yet reaches very similar conclusions!

So, that was my first and very fast example of interlinked arguments jumping across courses.

The second will be even faster, but it will ring the bell to all of those who were in class today on International Environmental Frameworks. It’s with regards to the political ecology discourses that we may find in the procedures and mechanisms that are being built to preserve biodiversity and that also cl(aim) to ensure the sharing of benefits of access to genetic resources and traditional knowledge.

Is a bit scary to picture that what is actually being negotiated are the conditions for trade and valorization of biodiversity (as argued in Brand and Gorg 2003) and not really the requirements for the protection of nature. And that the prior informed consent of indigenous populations and the fare share that they should be granted for accessing their knowledge is only secondary.

Although this might be an extremist and pessimistic view considering that so many countries have taken the task seriously, it made me think of Chapter 10 of Global Political Ecology on “carbon colonialism”, where some claim that what is in the focus of the agenda is not the creation of carbon projects that may help mitigate climate change whilst helping developing communities, but profitable projects (regardless of whether they may or not impact local communities and biodiversity).

SO with that in mind, I might just leave you with my cartoon of the day:

Literature cited:

BRAND, U. & GORG, C. 2003. The state and the regulation of biodiversity: International biopolitics and the case of Mexico. Geoforum, 34, 221-233.

BUMPUS A & LIVERMAN D. 2011 Chapter 10 in Peet et al. Carbon colonialism? Offsets, Greenhouse Gas Reductions and Sustainable Development

GEIST, H. J. & LAMBIN, E. F. 2002. Proximate Causes and Underlying Driving Forces of Tropical Deforestation. BioScience, 52, 143-150.

LEACH, M. & FAIRHEAD, J. 2000. Challenging Neo-Malthusian Deforestation Analyses in West Africa's Dynamic Forest Landscapes. Population and Development Review, 26, 17-43.