Political Ecology and Socioeconomic Analyses

- Brittany Taylor, MSc Nature, Society and Environmental Policy

The multiscala approach of considering economy, environment, and individual behavior as combinative bases of environmental degradation is at the root of political ecology.  By adding a narrative discourse - which many argue holds normative values - to the economic and scientific analyses of resource exploitation and environmental degradation, we may form a more holistic picture of the root causes of a given situation.  For example, in Cities at Risk: Hurricane Katrina and the Drowning of New Orleans, Comfort embeds the environmental causes of the 2005 disaster within a wider analysis of the political causes and socioeconomically stratified consequences.  Yes, New Orleans is geographically located 74feet below sea level on a bed of sinking clay oils near the borders of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain and, admittedly, the category four hurricane that hit just east of the city added an overwhelming amount of water to the already quick-flowing rivers.  If we place aside the burgeoning argument that aberrant weather patterns such as this are actually caused by long-term human behaviors, the causes of the New Orleans devastation seem solely environmental.  Mother Nature at its most furious; it cannot be helped.  But Comfort and many before her turn a critical eye toward political decisions made in the larger period before the disaster.  In the 1920s and 30s the US Army Corps constructed a complex system of levees and pumps designed to keep the expanding city dry and operational, yet these systems, initially designed to withstand a level three hurricane at best, were improperly maintained and requests for federal funding to reinforce the levees in the years prior to 2005 were denied. 

            This, then, points to the social factors contributing to the disaster.  The lack of reinforcement of the levee systems arguably exacerbated the extent of the disaster, and the “cost of failure” of the system spread to surrounding States, with 1.5million displaced from homes and 60,000million homes destroyed entirely.  These numbers were greatly exacerbated by the fact that 25percent of the population of New Orleans were living below the poverty line, as many had no transportation, nowhere to go, and a “lack of public knowledge regarding the likely consequences of severe hurricanes” (Comfort, 503). 

But what Comfort alludes to yet fails to address directly is the notion that the levees went unrepaired because of this poverty.  In an extremely controversial outburst that former President George W. Bush deems the “most disgusting moment” of his Presidency, music mogul Kanye West stated, “George Bush does not care about black people.”  This infamous speech was an outcry against what Kanye and many others perceived as a lack of governmental protection of a community that were of low socioeconomic status and primarily African American; the improper reinforcement of the levees, the prevention of families from leaving the state after the disaster, the slow pace of rescue missions and the startling lack of relief supply to surviving families were all seen as manifestations of this.  It was, they argued, because of the racial and socioeconomic status of the city’s citizens that the crisis was so poorly handled.

What Comfort does suggest (alongside a complex and interweaving analysis of cities as having spatial, temporal, reciprocal, logical and fragile interdependencies) is that disasters such as Hurricane Katrina are ecological “silent threats” (Comfort, 512).  Though the disrepair of the levees was well known, there is no specific agency or group to focus on it, and repair costs are high where as annual budgets for such infrastructures are low.  In this sense, maintenance of metropolitan infrastructural systems falls into long-term policy problems, which do not fall within annual budget constraints.  Again Comfort alludes to but fails to overtly point out that the low socioeconomic status of much of New Orleans’ population likely prevented focus on the possibility of the disaster and, through low initial real estate rates, will have been a cause in such a large community living in such an ecologically precarious location in the first place.

This, then, provides a perfect instance of sociological factors being imperative in proper analysis of an environmental situation.  In Past Peak Oil: Political Economy of Energy Crises, Gavin Bridge provides a similarly socioeconomically based analysis of the peak oil crisis.  The concept of peak oil – that we are on the threshold of reaching a maximum global extraction rate after which possible extraction rates will inevitable and irrevocably decline (imagine a bell curve shape) – has spurred talk of an “energy crisis,” and much frantic investigation of alternative fuel sources.  In evocative and often hyperbolic language Bridge describes oil as the “mark of modernity,” with energy defined as the “capacity to do work” and the energy crisis, then, as threatening the continued production of socioeconomic relations; it is “The moment when the grand arc of human progress stalls and the lights of prosperity flicker and dim”  (Bridge, 306). 

Yet Bridge’s analysis again moves from the purely environmental to the socioeconomic.  He dubs the peak oil crisis a purely “bourgeois concern” and claims the true energy crisis is that of energy poverty, being that during ‘supply squeezes’ those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder are excluded from energy access completely.  Bridge states, “The ‘scarcity’ of oil, then, is not a generalized physical shortage but a shortage relative to modes of living”  (Bridge, 313).  In a separate study, authors Helmut Geist and Eric Lambin divide the social drivers of environmental degradation into “proximate causes,” human activities or immediate actions at the local level, and “underlying driving forces,” being fundamental social processes (Geist and Lambin, 2).  In this sense the current modes of energy use would be an underlying driving force and long-term root of the problem and, according to Bridge, this societal metabolizing of energy exhibits societies constantly operating in a ‘crisis’ mode, perceived as the norm.

Viewing the peak oil crisis through the lens of political ecology and thus including (and, in this instance, focusing on) socioeconomic factors brings light to the interplay of causes that would otherwise remain shadowed.  For example, leakage, when fossil stocks of carbon are “transferred from the lithosphere into the atmosphere”, means that the social and geographical costs of extraction (i.e. pollution) are displaced, causing oil to be priced below its full social cost and the environment to therefore be used as an “underpriced external vent” for the metabolized waste products of extraction, with the subsequently artificially low price of oil spurring further use and extraction, and so on and so forth (Bridge, 318).  This transition – from the ecological to the economic to the social and political and back round again – exemplifies the multifaceted nature of resource use (and misuse).  If we were to view this interaction from a solely economic, individual, political or ecological standpoint we would not perceive the full interaction, and thus not fully understand the problem and how to potentially solve it.

Bridge G. 2011. Chapter 14 in Peet et al. Past Peak Oil: Political Economy of Energy Crises.

Comfort, LK. 2006. Cities at risk: Hurricane Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans. Urban Affairs Review 41 (4):501.

Geist, HJ, and EF Lambin. 2002. Proximate causes and underlying driving forces of tropical deforestation. Bioscience 52 (2):143-150.

Liverman, D. 2004. Who governs, at what scale and at what price? Geography, environmental governance, and the commodification of nature. Annals Association of American Geographers 94 (4):734-738.