emerges from traditional, alternative, or progressive human/non‐human alliances marginalized by such efforts (especially along lines of class, ethnicity, and gender).
The target of explanation
Of course, each of these theses actually seeks to explain something somewhat different. While degradation and marginalization offers an explanation of why environmental systems change (e.g., because of capital accumulation), environmental subjectivity research seeks to explain why social identities change (e.g., because of transformed environmental institutions). This diversity of targets for explanation has been the source of some confusion in the field (Vayda 2009; Vayda and Walters 1999) and reflects its historic development.
Research linking environmental change to political and economic marginalization emerged earliest, in the 1980s, querying links between the declining conditions of rain forests, cotton yields, or even workers' bodies and the integration into the global political economy (see Chapter 8). The problematic effects of global and regional conservation efforts, including World Heritage Sites, national parks, and biodiversity zones, became of increasing apparent in the 1990s, and political ecology on the topic has benefited from a growing interest later, in the 1990s and 2000s (Chapter 9). Interest in environmental conflict soon followed, as many environmental issues became increasingly politicized in both regional contexts, from Love Canal to the Amazonian rainforest, as well as global ones, with the emergence of global agreements and debates on climate and biodiversity (Chapter 10). Interest in the new environmental activism and identities grew from all of the issues above, and was placed squarely on the agenda by local people themselves, including movements of Andean smallholders, the Zapatistas, chipko, and a host of other movements (Chapter 11). An interest in political objects and agents is the most recent addition to debate in political ecology, rooted in its deep historical materialism, but also in a very recently emerging twenty‐first century concern for the way the non‐human world impinges on the human one (Chapter 12). These many topics and concerns overlap, and, as I hope to show by the end of the book, a coherent set of answers to these questions is beginning to achieve something of a consensus.
Moreover, in their linkages to local communities and NGOs, political ecologists, whether they are more interested in the biophysical or social aspects of a problem, have helped to build practical, detailed, integrated, empirical databases on all these diverse issues, recording land covers, farming practices, wildlife management systems, technological innovations and diffusions, local folk tales and oral histories, and informal markets and economies. These basic empirical findings help communities make decisions, aid in advocacy for social and environmental causes, and serve as a record to future scholars about the way things looked at the dawn of the twenty‐first century.
The value of this last contribution, providing an historical record, is not a trivial one. Much of what we know about the political economy of the environment is bequeathed to us by political ecologists of previous generations. Indeed, political ecology can arguably said to be very old, since nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century environmental research in geography, anthropology, and allied natural and social sciences has a long critical tradition. Even before a semi‐coherent body of political ecological theory emerged in the late twentieth century, many explicitly political practitioners emerged from the ranks of field ecologists, ethnographers, explorers, and other researchers. These represent the deep roots of the field.
Chapter 2 A Tree with Deep Roots
Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin was born a Russian aristocrat in 1842, but by the time he died in 1921 he had become a globally known anarchist philosopher whose writings had done as much to explore the linkage between people and the environment as any in that tumultuous century. As an activist, a keen observer of nature, and a scientific explorer and ethnographer, Kropotkin was an early political ecologist.
As a geographer, Kropotkin set out in 1865 to explore the most remote areas of the Russian Far East where the Sayan highlands border Manchuria. There were no charts of the region at this time and in preparing for the expedition he came across a map prepared by a Tungus hunter with the point of a knife on tree bark. “This little map,” the explorer explained, “so struck me by its seeming truth to nature that I fully trusted to it” (Woodcock and Avakumovic 1990, p. 72). This trust for the environmental knowledge of local people was reinforced throughout his journey. Traveling for months with a local Yakut man, Kropotkin traversed 800 miles of rugged mountains. During his journey he encountered and described farmers, herders, and hunters who all organized their lives to thrive under what urban Russians would have considered unthinkably adverse conditions.
Like his previous expeditions, this arduous trip reinforced his growing appreciation for “the constructive work of the unknown masses, which so seldom finds any mention in books, and the importance of that constructive work in the growth of forms of society” (Woodcock and Avakumovic 1990, pp. 59–60). The evidence amassed during these journeys, of plants, people, and animals making a living from the land, convinced Kropotkin, moreover, that the survival and evolution of species is propelled by collective mutual aid, cooperation, and organization between individuals.
The Determinist Context
Yet such research was by no means the norm. For the most part, early geography and nascent anthropology were the tools of social and political control, reproducing the political and ecological order that critical human–environment researchers would later challenge and undermine. Linking environment to society through a tradition of environmental determinism, scientific and field researchers were servants of colonialism and empire.
Rooted in the theories of nineteenth‐century geographer Friedrich Ratzel and championed later in North America by the influential researchers William Morris Davis, Ellsworth Huntington, and Ellen Churchill Semple, the determinist approach maintained that geographic influences determined human capabilities and cultures, with its practitioners attempting to codify that thesis into scientific practice. Huntington was perhaps its most prolific exponent: “Today a certain peculiar type of climate prevails wherever civilization is high. In the past the same type seems to have prevailed wherever a great civilization arose. Therefore, such a climate seems to be a necessary condition of great progress” (Huntington 1915, p. 9). The empirical vacuousness of this thesis need not be belabored here. In even simple analysis, European and American environments have proved no more productive or inspiring for human life than any other (Blaut 1999, 2000). Where confronted with contradiction (e.g., “high” civilization in “bad” climate), Huntington and his colleagues generally retreated behind “complex” and “competing” factors and poorly defined trajectories of climatic change, while harsh climates were simultaneously used to explain the ingenuity of some groups and the cultural limits of others.
The implication of this theory in the perpetuation of global, imperial, racist rule by Euro‐Americans should be immediately evident. By even asking the question “why are Anglos more productive, civilized, and advanced?” the fallacious assumptions have already been made that first, they are, and second, it has to do with something inherent in the place or people involved, rather than
