Political Ecology. Paul Robbins

Figure 2.2 Barney Neitschmann with Miskito militants in eastern Nicaragua, 1984.

      Source: East Bay Express, August 31, 1984, volume 6, issue 46. Reproduced with permission of East Bay Publishing, LLC.

       The limits of progressive contextualization

      Though this struggle would drive research for the rest of his life (he died in 2000), the tools of Nietschmann’s science did not seem to fit the range of questions he faced. Even as he had walked through a political doorway, Nietschmann had hit a conceptual wall. Restricted to research tools like organicism, function, adaptation, and equilibrium, further understanding could not cross the barrier point where markets meet subsistence and where the same local populations carry out the creation and destruction of the environment.

Cultural ecology offered one more methodological instrument for understanding such complexity. Andrew Vayda (1983), writing in the early 1980s, proposed that explanations of people–environment interactions follow a path of “progressive contextualization,” where human–environment interactions are explained “by placing them within progressively wider or denser contexts” (p. 265). The predicament of the Miskito, and communities like them, can be best explained by describing the changes and conflicts in their production system, while slowly refocusing the analytical lens to understand the social context of decisions, the economic context of those social systems, and the political context of that economy. Nesting immediate events within previous causes, Vayda argued, leads to an understanding of driving processes in an empirical and “abductive” way. Abduction, a technique for moving iteratively between causes and effects, can explain any outcome as a product of other forces, actions, or events.

      As we shall see in Chapter 4, explanations in political ecology came to mimic, in many regards, this sort of chain of explanation, linking immediate outcomes to more distant processes. Vayda's insistence, however, that each event can and should be traced to its own cause presented its own limits. As a somewhat ad hoc and adamantly atheoretical approach, progressive contextualization allowed few (or no) powerful theoretical and conceptual tools and discouraged researchers from asking why recurrent and persistent outcomes seem to prevail in socio‐ecologies, and so elided habitual and structural tendencies in human ecology.

      Why are turtles declining? Because of overfishing. Why is overfishing occurring? Because of changing markets. But why are markets changing? And what is the overall relationship between markets, state authority, local power, and ecological cycles of production and decline? The interactions between state institutions, coercive social relationships, commodity markets, subsistence, and natural resources were dynamics that required new theoretical tools and categories, not simply a longer list of causes. This is especially true if the analyst wants not only to describe changing human–environment interactions, but to change them as well.

      Like many researchers before him, Nietschmann was beginning to do what we now call political ecology. He had argued that Miskito articulation with global political economy had simultaneously created reconfigurations of social systems governing redistribution, cultural standards governing resource management, and environmental systems governing the populations of wild species. He had found change, but not the change he thought he would find. And as in Humboldt’s observation of pearl fisheries, Sauer’s anxiety over commercial economies, and White's examination of “irrational” flood policy, the theoretical tools to explain why such changes occur, which might help to steer both research and activism, were not yet fully formed.

      In sum, the argument I have presented here, insofar as the history of several fields can be used to draw any coherent lesson, is that critical politics in environment–society research are not at all a new thing. Indeed, from the very origins of evolutionary theory, through the complex social and ecological revolutions of the late nineteenth century, into the era of technocratic intensification and urbanization, researchers have articulated a relatively coherent program of political ecological research. This work, from the anti‐authoritarianism and anti‐commercialism of Kropotkin and Sauer to the local rationalism of White and Netting, has consistently interrogated the logic of local production, the value of local knowledge, the environmental costs of regional and global change, and the power‐laden impacts of socio‐environmental change. As I have tried to show here, however, the consistent problem has been the absence of an integrated set of critical concepts, methods, and theories from which to explain problems and upon which to build alternatives.

      Such critical tools, however, lie close at hand. And in the explosive political and ecological events of the late twentieth century, these would find articulation in the increasingly formalized field of contemporary political ecology.