Chains of Causation

            I don’t mean to sound like a broken record, but once again I am most struck by the way a political ecology based analysis allows perception of a changed order of causation.  In our discussion of Paul Robbins’ book Lawn People and in my reading of his article The Lawn Chemical Economy and its Discontents, the political lobbying of lawn chemical companies is said to have contributed greatly to their continued use (if not causing it completely!).  Research shows that US households spend US$222 each annually on lawn-care products, many of which are sold under “trade names” that provide “no hint” to their high mercury, arsenic and chlordane contents (Robbins, 958, 959).  But why do households spend so much money and time caring for something so seemingly superficial and superfluous?  Through interviews, Robbins concludes that consumers felt “obligated to maintain their lawns for the sake of neighborhood cohesions” (Robbins 962), and we heard similar and somewhat comedic accounts in class.  If this phenomenon were analyzed solely through interviews, assuming an end-cause chain, it would indeed seem that a social drive for the “perfect lawn” was spurring high use of chemicals.  However, Robbins takes a political ecology approach and analyzes political causes of the phenomenon, finding that “localized demand is the obvious end of a much larger dynamic in which formulator and chemical producer firms have turned the municipal market in an effort to sustain otherwise collapsing profit margins” (Robbins, 963).  Through a variety of marketing and industry consolidation and economic moves, the chemical market has managed to create a social phenomenon where individuals who shun toxic lawn care “commonly fall afoul of not only social scrutiny and carefully enforced aesthetic norms, but also legal and neighborhood restrictions and property enforced by state authority” (Robbins, 973).

Perhaps I am naïve, but before taking this class I would always have assumed that demand for the product created the supply.  In many cases this has been shown to not be quite so.  Just as Julie Gutham’s political ecology analysis showed American subsidy, production and substitution policies suggested that obesity is often a consequence of high production rates, rather than a cause of it, so too did political lobbying quell much of the anti-chemical lawn use movement, spurring the use of lawn as personal status as we see in many areas today. 

            Last week we went around the class giving input as to what we have learned most from the course, and as I did not get a chance to share my point, I would like to weave it within my analysis for this week!  What I have gained most from the readings and in-class discussion is a realization of the possibility of sort of taking a step back from the situation you are addressing, analyzing it in a new light.  The ‘chain of causation’ point I addressed here and in other posts is one instance of this, and probably the one that has affected me most.  But throughout the readings I have seen new angles being taken on old concepts, and I find this very inspirational. 

For instance, Bridge’s Past Peak Oil analyzes the oil crisis not as environmental, but instead as socioeconomic.  The problem is inherently “bourgeois,” he says.  Although other members of the class were very familiar with this take on the issue, I was new to it and was roused by an analysis of a seemingly political and economic problem in a sociological way.  Similarly, in Introducing New Feminist Political Ecology Rebecca Elmhirst looks at the apparent lack of “Feminist” based analyses and, rather than simply concluding that there is a lack of interest in or existence of feminist geography works, takes the stance that the articles do exist, but are simply not labeled as such.  By approaching the topic from a new angle, Elmhirst was able to investigate why articles that are predominantly feminist geographies are not labeled as such.  She suggests that in some instances the label “carries unhelpful resonances and unwanted political meanings,” particularly in the Global South as “postcolonial critiques and new conservatisms (religious or otherwise) complicate everyday understandings of feminism’s meaning and intent” (Elmhirst, 130). 

Throughout the readings, it is this shift from what seems, on the surface, the be the sphere of causation of the problem to another sphere – political, economic, environmental, social – that I find inspired.  Taking a new stance on an old issue is not easy yet, in each of these cases, proves to be fundamental in addressing the problem accurately.  The problem for me, now, is trying to do the same in my own work!

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

Elmhirst, Rebecca. 2011. Introducing new feminist political ecologies. Geoforum 42 (2):129-132.

Guthman J. 2011. Chapter 2 in Peet et al. Excess Consumption or Over-production: US Farm Policy, Global Warming, and the Bizarre Attribution of Obesity.

Robbins, P., and J. Sharp. 2003. The Lawn Chemical Economy and Its Discontents. Antipode 35 (5):955-979.