bonds” of ecology, pointing to the seriousness that declines in mayflies and aquatic larvae, for example, might have on the broader environment (Marsh 1898, pp. 136–137).
With its concerns for human impact on the landscape and its focus on the effects of uncontrolled extraction on the reproduction and sustainability of complex ecosystems, Marsh's work was a precursor to political ecology. Even so, the work contains very little in the way of political economy or any focus on the way economic and political power is exercised to determine the rate and character of these problems. Nor was his concern for the productive capacity of the ecosystem extended in any way to the local populations who had traditionally managed them. Indeed, in a revealing footnote, Marsh castigates the peasantry who “set fire to the woods and destroy them in order to get possession of the ground they cover” (p. 373 footnote), with absolutely no effort to place those actions in political or economic context. Why are peasants seeking to increase their holdings? What are the legal and institutional structures encouraging or dissuading such actions?
There is also in Marsh's work a remarkable enthusiasm concerning the power and desirability of human “reclamation” of the earth. Writing on American forest plantations, for example, he fervently asserts that forest can and should be established anywhere and everywhere possible, specifically for its timber value. He further insists on the great social benefits of draining swampland (which today we call “wetlands”) and straightening rivers, both practices that contemporary environmentalists abhor. His call for better stewardship of the environment was one that demanded more, not less, control over nature, especially by state authorities and private firms.
So while Marsh recognized the power of human economy to wreak environmental havoc, his faith in modernity's powers over nature led him to champion large‐scale authorities and economies in a way that might have made Wallace, Reclus, and Kropotkin (not to mention late‐twentieth‐century environmentalists) uncomfortable. Even so, these themes – degradation, sustainability, and the possibility of human beings to reclaim the earth – would all be central to political ecology a century later and its back‐and‐forth entanglements with modernity (see Chapter 13). Clearly, an incipient form of critique lay in the works of many researchers working at the nature–society interface in the twilight of the nineteenth century. Political ecology would not appear, therefore, as if with a thunderous lightning stroke, full‐grown, in the last decades of the twentieth century.
From sewer socialism to mitigating floods: hazards research
The politics and economics of environmental issues, though briefly eclipsed by environmental determinism in the early twentieth century, never fully left the scientific agenda. With increasing recognition of the vulnerability of modern society to environmental perturbations like floods, earthquakes, droughts, and fires, as well as to the toxins of its own invention, a policy‐oriented avenue of research began to open in the early twentieth century. Focusing both on “natural” and “technological” problems faced by human communities, hazards research took as its goal the rational management and amelioration of risk – defined as the calculable likelihood of problematic outcomes of human actions and decisions.
This approach emerged in the wake of increasing political urban activism around issues of environmental health and welfare, as settlement house workers and other activists, mostly women, rose to take stock of environmental conditions and the planning regimes that surrounded waste, water, and air (Box 2.1). The Women's National Rivers and Harbors Congress, Women's Forestry Commissions, and Federation of Women's Clubs throughout America joined with socialist/progressive mayors, unions, and municipal leagues during this period to champion food safety and urban infrastructure reform. The research component of this “sewer socialism” (named for the socialist party activists of Milwaukee who championed infrastructure and worker health; see Beck 1982) was informal but thorough, and activist researchers like Alice Hamilton and Florence Kelly performed path‐breaking street‐level analyses of environmental hazards, revealing relationships between typhoid and plumbing, and between toxins or machinery and workplace injury and death (Bailes 1985; Darnovsky 1992). More formally, Jane Addams, along with her cadre of public‐university‐trained social workers, conducted the first‐ever systematic assessment of the relationship between municipal garbage collection in Chicago's wards and local death rates (Addams 1910).
Box 2.1 Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull House: Progressive‐Era Urban Political Ecology
Published in 1912, Jane Addams' reminiscences of street‐level ecology in Chicago is almost as fresh today as it must have been at the turn of the twentieth century. Recounting two decades of social work amongst poor, immigrant communities, Addams documents a rigorous and committed urban political ecology.
Hull House itself was a “settlement house,” really a cluster of buildings providing residence and offices for people – all women – to provide social services and education to local communities. The volume is, therefore, a well‐known contribution to social history, recording the dawn of modern social work.
But the most dramatic and immersive parts of the work recount how the women doctors of Hull House doggedly investigated the conditions that created health problems in the community, turning over stones, examining sewage flows, tracking insects, and otherwise piecing together the ecological puzzle of poverty and disease. Notable among the many residents of Hull House is Dr. Alice Hamilton, whose work to uncover the conditions that either caused or exacerbated typhoid outbreaks in Chicago slums resulted in critical insights about sanitation and disease. More than this, however, Addams and her colleagues traced the source of immediate causes to political and economic drivers, mainly the cozy relationship between slumlords and state agents. As Addams reports of Hamilton's work in what might best be described as “shoeleather” epidemiology:
Her researches were so convincing that they have been incorporated into the body of scientific data supporting that theory, but there were also practical results from the investigation. It was discovered that the wretched sanitary appliances through which alone the infection could have become so widely spread, would not have been permitted to remain, unless the city inspector had either been criminally careless or open to the arguments of favored landlords.
(p. 298)
And yet the pragmatic political ecology of Hull House was not always enough to satisfy purist ideologies of the time. In her account of an encounter with Leo Tolstoy during a visit to Russia in 1896, Addams describes being castigated by the aging socialist for dressing too formally and not providing for her own subsistence through farming (pp. 268–269). Leaving aside the strange mismatch of Tolstoy's peasant‐oriented politics against those of the very urban Addams and the immigrant communities with whom she worked, there are echoes here of later debates in political ecology, and radical praxis more generally, about the purity of goals versus the practicality of outcomes. Addams' book, and the work of all those at Hull House, reminds us that “the front is long” in political ecology, and that contributions and insights come from places and methods of enormous diversity. Ideas and actions most productively coexist, rather than compete.
In formal academic circles this pragmatic approach to risk was later rendered in more apolitical terms. In a now classic example of the hazards approach, Gilbert White challenged the conventional way of thinking about and dealing with floods, calling for a rational and somewhat radical alternative. Writing his thesis in the early 1940s, White concluded that the traditional way of dealing with flood hazards – building more engineered structures – is expensive, irrational, and does little to deal with the underlying, fundamentally human problem. Better land use planning and changes in people's behavior could more easily mitigate future impacts of natural flood events (White 1945).
