And in “scientifically” attempting to untangle the ancient question of heredity or environment, “Race or Place?” as Huntington put it in his classic volume Civilization and Climate, the fundamental political and historical questions of domination, colonization, and extermination are erased. In the answer, moreover, came a confident and scientific rationale for Euro‐American dominance – it's only natural. Indeed, by rendering colonial domination an environmental inevitability, the practice of colonialism comes to appear apolitical.
The research implications for this kind of work were equally stultifying. By assuming the role of nature to be a determinant, fixed, and unidirectional influence, the complex influences of humanity upon non‐human systems were lost altogether. As a result, nature was seen as a one‐way force that determined cultural development, even at the very moment that the world of nature, ironically, was transforming under the processes of industrialization. Despite deleterious changes in air, land, and water resulting from economic and political developments of the era (smokestack industries, urban waste, and deforestation), nature was viewed during this period as beyond human influence.
A political ecological alternative
In this imperialist context, where environmental influences were understood to determine the superiority and inferiority of human races through competitive natural selection, and where human influences on the environment were viewed as unworthy of examination, counter‐movements were growing. In the work of several early researchers a radical alternative to these dominant modes of explanation emerged, an incipient political ecology. Perhaps most prominent amongst these early dissenters was Kropotkin.
In contrast to the political and social conservatism associated with the geography of the period, Kropotkin's experience in the field brought him to renounce his princely title, to espouse a revolutionary socially cooperative anarchism, and to resist and dismantle the hierarchic social conditions of the time (Kropotkin 1990). In his work he sought simultaneously to tear down the socially loaded assumptions of contemporary, taken‐for‐granted, scientific knowledge, and to establish the empirical basis for an alternative model of social and natural organization. His research took a political ecological “hatchet” to the elitism and classism that pervaded natural science, while “seeding” the field with rich empirical investigations and normative visions of alternative futures.
Kropotkin's hatchet was aimed at the “scientific” socio‐biological emphasis on competition that many other scholars saw in nature. Kropotkin argued that the case for competition as the central component of evolution was a product less of empirical observations of natural phenomena than of reading a social hierarchy into the natural world (Kropotkin 1888). Kropotkin searched throughout the animal kingdom and human history and pointed to cooperation being central to survival and selection, and therefore to evolution. His rigorous field observations made way for an argument not only about the state of nature, but also about the possibilities for society, free from domination, violence, and hierarchy.
Kropotkin's approach to human–environment interaction sets a precedent for the kind of work that would follow more than a century later. The work resembles contemporary political ecology (and its progenitor, cultural ecology) in its focus on production, archival and field‐based empirical approach, concern for marginalized and disenfranchised people, interest in local environmental knowledge, and concentration on the landscape as an object of explanation.
A focus on production (farming, fishing, herding) as a key social‐environmental process means taking seriously the notion that “the means of production being the collective work of humanity” (Kropotkin 1990, p. 14), the business of making a living therefore provides the most direct window into the mechanisms of social and environmental interaction.
A rigorous archival and field‐based empirical approach allows detailed observations of plant and animal life as well as historical social case histories from around the world (Kropotkin 1888).
An explicit concern for marginalized and disenfranchised communities enables exploration of “institutions, habits, and customs” that, despite persistent exploitation by landlords and the state, locals prefer to maintain rather than adopt inadequate state‐sponsored solutions “offered to them under the title of science, but [that] are no science at all” (Kropotkin 1888, pp. 260–261).
A strong interest in the position and power of traditional environmental knowledge allows a pragmatic view of social and technological change. Though Kropotkin was a strong supporter of innovation, he insisted that the elements of progress could only be found in the existing resourcefulness of communities (Kropotkin 1985). The “hierarchical” forces of state and capital tend to crush “popular genius” (Kropotkin 1987).
Starting from the landscape facilitates a grounded approach to social and political analysis, especially the influence of people on environmental systems. Ever a geographer, Kropotkin was as interested in environmental change as he was in social reform (Woodcock and Avakumovic 1990).
Kropotkin's call for a critical science of environmental sustainability and equity was compelling and direct, and forecast a synthesis of social and environmental research.
The Building Blocks
The elements of Kropotkin's critical social ecology were offered at a time when geography and a nascent anthropology were anything but progressive or emancipatory tools of social and environmental changes. Even so, other contemporary researchers took critical positions against those arguments for the “natural” character of an unjust social world as well as those that ignored the human influence on the environment.
Critical approaches in early human–environment research
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a range of critical environmental approaches, at varying scales of abstraction, which sought to describe and analyze the patterns of human interaction with the environment.
Early scientific critics: Humboldt, Reclus, Wallace, and Sommerville
Perhaps earliest in this area was Alexander von Humboldt, arguably the grandfather of modern geography, who is best known for his empirical investigations of the environment, which took him around the world during the early 1800s. Humboldt's travels brought him into contact with people making a living under a wide range of conditions and coping with varying degrees of political and economic hardship. These gave him an apparent appreciation for the political and economic context in which people make a living and cope in their daily lives.
His interaction with local producers also gave him a feeling for the unity of humanity and distaste for the racist myth of natural difference. Though his five‐volume Cosmos, which aspired to be a truly comprehensive physical guide to the universe, had only a scant few pages on humanity, and these dedicated to race, Humboldt was careful to insist that “while we maintain the unity of human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men” (Humboldt 1858, vol. 1, p. 358). Though sometimes invoking the racial language of the period and though clearly implicated in colonial‐era exploration, Humboldt was insistent that the “inequality of fortunes” between white colonials and indigenous communities could only be solved through equal access to both civil employment and fertile land (Humboldt 1811). These conclusions arose especially from Humboldt's experiences in South America, as did his sensitivity to traditional resource‐use practices and the implications of colonial economic systems for social and environmental reproduction.
In a typical example, Humboldt described at length the perilous decline of the pearl fisheries in the Cumana region of Venezuela, a unique resource
