than simply informing the practical question of flood insurance subsidies and dams, White had gained a valuable insight into human–environment interaction; the traditional distinction of those things natural from those things social is rendered particularly difficult when viewing the environment as a hazard. A flood is a hybrid human–environmental artifact, no more an act of nature than one of planning.
This powerful lever on the problem opened several decades of research into human adjustment to the environment, leading later researchers like Robert Kates and Ian Burton to venture the claim that the environment is actually becoming more hazardous as a result of human development, rather than less so (Burton et al. 1993). The implication that current economic and political structures increase the riskiness of natural events holds tremendous implications for how our society and personal lives are ordered.
As White so profoundly discovered in the 1940s, improved planning by state agencies and individual farmers who lived in floodplains was retarded by the continued reinvestment in subsidies and massive investment in engineered structural solutions like dams and levees. But the urgent question raised by these results – why do structural solutions prevail in the face of better alternatives? – could not be answered within the hazards approach, which focused almost exclusively on individual choice, free markets, and rational regulation. Rather, the issue can only be addressed fully by examining the political economy of floodplain investment, the role of capital in agricultural development, and the control of legislative processes through normative ideologies, vested interests, and campaign finance. Similarly, the risk of floods is not uniformly distributed through populations. Are poor and marginalized groups more vulnerable to such events? What is the role of power in the environmental system and its relationship to people?
These questions raise manifold research opportunities for critical scholarship. As Ben Wisner and Maureen Fordham ask on their radical hazards webpage Radix (www.radixonline.org):
How are populations made more vulnerable to these hazards by war, by government policies, by misguided development projects? What about the spiking incidence of domestic violence after hurricane Andrew in Florida and the Red River floods, both in the USA? What about the fact that 40 percent of all deaths from tornadoes in USA occur in mobile homes – inhabited by low income people?
As Michael Watts put it in his critique of hazards research and human ecology, “in spite of the recognition by Kates, White and others of the strategic importance of social causality, they have no social theory capable of addressing social processes, organization or change” (Watts 1983a, p. 240). As a result, the academic project of hazards matured in its twenty‐first century iteration, re‐emerging as “Vulnerability Studies,” a field that attends, with more political candor, to the uneven distribution of hazards (see Fuller and Pincetl 2015; also Chapter 3).
The nature of society: cultural ecology
In contrast to the pragmatic policy approach of hazards, a separate group of modern scholars took as their focus an academic exploration of the development and expression of culture, especially on and within the environment. Cultural ecology, as the field would come to be known, approached human–environment issues ecosystemically: humans would be seen as part of a larger system, controlled and propelled by universal forces, energy, nutrient flows, calories, and the material struggle for subsistence. Unlike hazards, cultural ecology sought universal and generalizable rules of human–environment interaction. But like hazards, it would falter on the same conceptual and practical problem: accounting for and understanding change in a complex modern political economy. The crisis of explanation confronted by cultural ecology would become the fulcrum on which political ecology would be levered into prominence.
Historicism, landscape, and culture: Carl Sauer
Interest in the historical development of cultures and human impacts on the landscape, it must be remembered, was not much cultivated in turn‐of‐the‐century geography. This was so much the case that the publication of an essay in 1925, which simply defined the objective of geography as the interpretation of landscape and humanity's role in changing that landscape, was considered a breakthrough.
That essay, “The Morphology of Landscape” by Carl Ortwin Sauer (1965a), led the field of geography into a new tradition of cultural landscape studies for several decades. Centered at the University of California at Berkeley, and shepherded by Sauer himself, this new school of scholarship directed itself to research human use of nature, especially the impact of human activities. Historical and archaeological data were joined with geomorphologic and soil studies to create bold, long‐term accounts of how places came to look the way they did (Speth 1981). Inverting determinism, historical landscape studies sought to explain the physical patterns on the land (forest cover, soil erosion, stream flows) in terms of human culture rather than the other way around. Rather than focusing on the functional‐causal explanations typical of previous determinism, this approach focused on the emergence and adaptation of culture over time, diffusion of cultural traits, and interaction between cultures (Speth 1978). Sauerian human–environment research would concern itself with detailed study of the how of local cultures, less than the why.
Sauer's concerns were also directed towards what he viewed as the ecological crisis of Western civilization. His strongly normative view of human impact on nature, inspired at least in part by the work of Marsh, was explicit in its castigation of environmental degradation and its characterization of the modern commercial economy as unsustainable:
To this review of some of the suicidal qualities of our current commercial economy, the retort may be that these are problems of the physical rather than social scientist. But the causative element is economic; only the pathologic processes released or involved are physical. The interaction of the physical and social processes illustrates that the social scientist cannot restrict himself to social data alone.
(Sauer 1965b, p. 152)
His interest in these topics was probably formed during his work for the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) and the Michigan Land Economic Survey (MLES) prior to his arrival at Berkeley. These services probably helped to foster both his concern for the condition of the environment and his interest in the everyday affairs of working people (Leighly 1965). This was coupled with Sauer's enduring belief, rooted in his field experience, that indigenous practices and agro‐ecologies made sense. Displacing them through modernization could only lead to disaster. In a letter to Joseph Willits, who was then the director of social sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation, the activities of which militantly promoted precisely such modern interventions during the Green Revolution in Mexico, Sauer wrote:
A good aggressive bunch of American agronomists and plant breeders could ruin the native resources for good and all by pushing their American commercial stocks … This thing must be approached from an appreciation of the native economies as being basically sound.
(cited in Perkins 1990, footnote 73)
Though the political and economic urgency in Sauer's worldview is seldom reflected in his research, his legacy for political ecology is non‐trivial. Sauer established the Berkeley school of geography as a tradition of fieldwork. This empirical tradition sent researchers into the countryside and around the world, exploring the social world of people as expressed in their use of nature. This set a research agenda that would live on into contemporary political ecology, ranging from footwork in urban slums on access to water (Swyngedouw 2004) to deep historical ecology revealing the role of slaves in creating and maintaining complex systems of ecological knowledge (Carney 2001; Carney and Rosomoff 2010) (
