the possibility that tectonic forces (earthquakes and submarine currents) played some role, he was explicit that recent overfishing during the colonial period was probably to blame, since mercantile practice increasingly involved large‐scale mining of the beds, so that oyster “propagation had been impeded by the imprudent destruction of the shells by thousands.” The pearl‐bearing oyster, he added, lives only 9 or 10 years, producing pearls only after the fourth year, making the mass extraction of the oyster (a boat might collect 10,000 oysters a week) extremely destructive and only marginally profitable. He further insisted that traditional native practice, opening promising shells one by one, sustainably supported a high‐demand economy for the commodity before European contact (Humboldt 1852, pp. 191–194). Humboldt held the political history of the region to account for contemporary levels of destitution, underdevelopment, and environmental decline, rather than native practice or racial characteristics.
Like Humboldt, the French geographer Elisee Reclus was dedicated to comprehensive accounts of human and physical geography. His The Earth: A Descriptive History was only slightly less ambitious than Humboldt's Cosmos in its universal scope (Reclus 1871). The critical politics in his orientation towards human–environment questions were considerably more explicit, however. Like Kropotkin, he insisted that observation of human interaction with nature held the key to understanding society and insisted that “the sight of nature and the works of man, and practical life, these form the college in which the true education of contemporary society is obtained” (Reclus 1890, p. 10). He asserted, moreover, that eruptive political action against current systems of inequity – revolution – is part of evolutionary change in social/environmental systems. Combining an urge for justice for workers with a broader project of describing socio‐ecological change, Reclus challenged the notion that contemporary social structure and ecological practice were the inevitable products of evolutionary selection.
These kinds of challenges to social domination and imperialism can also be seen grafted into the very roots of evolutionary theory. Alfred Russel Wallace, a British geographer and naturalist, simultaneously developed the theory of natural selection while elaborating a critique of social hierarchy and land management. Wallace's travels in Amazonia and the Malay Archipelago during the mid‐1800s led him to investigate how geographic factors influenced the range of species, whether by enabling or limiting their distribution. The boundary he discovered, which passes through the South Pacific, separating the distribution of Asian animals from those of Australasia, still bears the name “Wallace’s Line” (Raby 2001). His experience also drove him to investigate how people indigenous to these regions made a living and classified the natural world. He would be remembered best, however, for his assertion that individual animals best adapted to their environments had the best chances for survival, thus influencing the emergence of differential adaptations. Several years of correspondence with Charles Darwin on the topic followed, after which Darwin's own Origin of Species (Darwin 1860) would be published. Thus Wallace became a co‐developer of the thesis of natural selection, fundamental to evolutionary theory (Gould 1996; Raby 2001).
These more famous works, however, encompass only half of Wallace's concerns. Along with support for women's suffrage, workers' rights, and socialism more generally, Wallace's earlier experiences in land surveying led to an abiding concern for land planning and social reform of property rights. Having observed land ownership traditions in non‐European contexts, Wallace became convinced that there was nothing socially or ecologically optimal about current tenancy arrangements in Britain, leading him to advocate nationalization of land. With tremendous foresight, he anticipated public concerns for control of land to encourage historic preservation, development of parks, and limits on urban growth and sprawl (Clements 1983).
As noted earlier, these nineteenth‐century political ecological critiques are all the more notable in light of the role that geographical and ethnological sciences were playing in the creation of empire. Humboldt critiqued racism and ecological degradation in the Americas in a way quite counter to the typical role of most geographers, who mapped and surveyed for military and civilian control (Capel 1994). More radical critiques like those of Reclus flew directly in the face of French geography, which advanced the notion of nationalist imperialism and viewed the expansion of empire, especially in Africa, as a cure for “decadent” and “insular” contemporary French society (Heffernan 1994). Though he held to a controversial spiritualism, Wallace linked evolution, social justice, and land management to offer a critical anti‐racist alternative to emerging social Darwinism (Clements 1983). Together, these turn‐of‐the‐century critiques prefigured contemporary political ecology by more than a hundred years.
A simultaneous European re‐assessment of human impact on the land was also under way, but witnessed and articulated by an observer unusual during this period for both her gender and her background. Mary Fairfax Somerville was born in Jedburgh, Scotland, in 1780, and, gaining access to only the limited levels of formal education afforded to women in the period, became self‐educated, making her own way through Ferguson's Astronomy and Isaac Newton's Principia (Patterson 1987). Authoring many scientific papers, her central contribution, Physical Geography (Sommerville 1848), was unusual for the time, owing to its emphatic insistence on the impact of humanity on land, rather than vice versa. Though the book is marred with pejorative characterizations of non‐Europeans somewhat typical of the time, it is also filled with strident critiques of slavery, land theft from aboriginal peoples, and, most notably, reckless degradation of environmental systems by people through overuse, extraction, and the introduction of alien species. In a remarkable counter‐argument to Huntington's climatic determinism, Sommerville argued that humans, by altering watercourses, cropping, and forest clearing, had actually altered climates, anticipating such arguments in contemporary science by more than a century. At the same time her volume bemoans the reckless power of colonial states, which had driven indigenous people from their land and to the brink of extermination. Sommerville linked political and ecological destruction, urging reflection and caution. Nor was she unique in her contribution; large numbers of women naturalists in the nineteenth century set a similarly critical alternative tone for scientific exploration (Gates and Shteir 1997).
Such emergent political ecologies in Europe set the foundations for a century of work that is too large in scope to survey here. Francophone political ecology, whose continued rise coincided with the decline and fall of French imperial adventures in Africa and Asia, grew throughout the twentieth century from these solid critical roots (Whiteside 2002). Other contemporary European political ecologies, from the United Kingdom to Iberia, are also deeply rooted in the contributions of these early practitioners (Martinez‐Alier 2002).
Critical environmental pragmatism
As fin de siècle natural sciences in Europe were colliding with theories of society and fostering the emergence of critical sciences at the human–environment interface, a simultaneous movement in North America sought to break the hold of determinism. While the momentum towards a critical human–environment project had been halted with the “false start” it made in its embrace of determinism (Turner 2002), a contrasting school of human impact study was emerging, closely informed by traditions of pragmatism and utilitarianism. Led most prominently by George Perkins Marsh, a Vermont‐born philologist with a lifetime of experience in the American diplomatic corps, a “new school of geographers” emerged in the late nineteenth century. For these researchers, the analytic challenge was to determine humanity's role in changing the face of the earth in order to preserve it for the future. Marsh wrote in a normative tone, insisting that responsible science and practical development required that conservation of the planet was essential, “thus fulfilling the command of religion and of practical wisdom, to use this world as not abusing it” (Marsh 1898, p. 7).
In his groundbreaking volume Man and Nature (later The Earth as Modified by Human Action) Marsh exhaustively listed the impact of human activity on degrading terrestrial ecosystems, rivers, lakes, and oceans, and traced the secondary impacts of such transformations on connected systems. In particular, Marsh was concerned with loss of forest cover, in terms of its effect on climate,
