A critical political ecology of cotton and soil fertility in Mali

The aim of this article is to analyse the influence of commodified cotton production on soil fertility in southern Mali. From the late 1950s and until recently, production of both cash-crop cotton and food crops have increased rapidly in this region, giving it a reputation of being an African ‘success story’. The flip side of this economic success is, however, said to be environmental degradation especially in terms of loss of soil fertility. We collected 273 soil samples in 19 villages located in various zones of land use intensity. In each village, the samples were collected on up to six different land use types varying with intensification. The analysis of the soil samples showed that soil fertility was highest in the sacred groves that have been protected and never cultivated. However, comparing soils under continuous cultivation and soils under fallow no clear trends in soil fertility were found. Cotton yields have declined since the early 1990s, while the total use of fertilisers has increased. This is often interpreted as proof of soil exhaustion, but there is no clear indication in this study that cotton-cereal rotation as practiced by smallholders in southern Mali reduces soil fertility. We argue that the decline in yields has been caused by an extensification process. Cotton fields expanded rapidly, due to attractive cotton prices in the 1990s, leading to falling investments per ha and cultivation of more marginal lands. These findings also have implications for a political ecology of commodity production and lead us to argue for an open-ended and empirically based ‘critical political ecology’.     

Greening the Dam: The case of the San Roque Multi-purpose Project in the Philippines

This article aims to illustrate the extent and ways in which a traditional development aid project became the focus of a ‘greening’ process in the 1990s (and beyond). The article examines the San Roque Multi-purpose Project in the Philippines - a major Japanese bilateral international cooperation project - from a political ecology perspective. The analysis highlights how a complex story of contemporary aid dynamics in the bilateral Japan-Philippines relationship influenced this ‘greening’ process. The article interrogates critically and empirically the stated greening of a proto-type development aid project. This specific example of the practices of the Japanese aid industry is set within the context of the wider political economy of both donor and recipient elite interests.     

Wasting the rural: Meat,manure, and the politics of agro-industrialization in contemporary China

This paper uses pork as a lens on China’s rural transformations. Taking the industrialization of pig farming in the reform era as a trace on broader processes of social and environmental change, it advances three arguments. First, the massive increase in pork production and consumption since 1978 has been propelled by an industrial meat regime. A party-state led and agribusiness-operated regime, it articulates modernist notions of meat-as-progress with the relentless drive for capital accumulation. Second, using Marx’s concept of metabolic rift, the paper examines how processes of concentration in the industrial meat regime are at the same time processes of separation. This dialectical approach highlights the contradictions inherent in ongoing attempts to disembed capitalist production from biological and social relations. Finally, while official party-state discourse conceptualizes “the rural” as a production base for surplus value, and/or as a site for preserving environmental integrity, the paper’s analysis reveals a further unofficial recasting of the rural: in the process of agroindustrialization, the rural is also a sink for offloading capitalist crises. Between the rivers of manure that flow from industrial livestock operations and contaminate rural waterways; the loss of soil nutrients and food calories in the inefficient conversion of grains and oilseeds into industrial meat; the erosion of agricultural knowledge and practice that accompanies the dispossession of China’s farmers; and the shifting values of pigs, pork, and manure, this is a system that “wastes” the rural in service of capital.     

Acacia exchanges: Wattles, thorn trees, and the study of plant movements

Plants are frequently moved around the world, creating new regional landscapes and environmental imaginaries. Building on previous work in environmental history and geography, we develop a three-part approach to analyzing plant movements and apply it to trees from the Acacia genus (sens. lat.) exchanged between Australia and the rest of the world. First, we investigate the agents, circuits, and frequencies of acacia movements, including transoceanic transfers, regional diffusion, and ecological dispersal. Second, we trace bundles of knowledge or technology that accompany the acacias, highlighting how they help shape regional biogeographies. Finally, we analyze how different societies, with distinct economies, politics, and environmental sensibilities, receive introduced plants. This approach allows us to see transferred plants as active agents in region-forming processes, and to avoid normative tropes like ‘miracle plants’ or ‘alien invasives’. The highlighted species include Acacia colei, Acacia melanoxylon, Acacia mearnsii, Acacia farnesiana, Acacia nilotica, Acacia mangium, and their close relatives.     

Two-dimensional maps in multi-dimensional worlds: A case of community-based mapping in Northern Thailand

Community-based mapping has become a necessary tool for development work worldwide - its adoption is near hegemonic. Mapping community land, however, can have unforeseen consequences in part due to its tendency to render what are complex configurations of social-ecological relationships into two-dimensional form. I argue that one of the key limitations to commonly practiced community-based mapping is the assumption that the spatial organization of resource use and management is an abstract entity that can be mapped independent of the social relations that produce it. This paper uses a case study from Northern Thailand to show how mapping techniques that fix and simplify fluid and complex associations can inadvertently prescribe changes to how residents manage their land, effectively becoming not only a tool for securing land tenure but also a tool for the spatial re-organization of land-use and management.     

There’s nothing inherent about scale: political ecology, the local trap, and the politics of development in the Brazilian Amazon

This paper argues that research in political ecology would benefit from more explicit and careful attention to the question of scale and scalar politics. Although political ecologists have extensively considered scale as a methodological question, they have yet to develop an explicit theoretical approach to scale as an object of inquiry. We highlight one principal drawback to this underdeveloped approach to scale: what we call “the local trap” in which political ecologists assume that organization, policies, and action at the local scale are inherently more likely to have desired social and ecological effects than activities organized at other scales. Over the past 10 years or so, an increasingly sophisticated literature on scale has been developing among scholars in geography working in the political economy tradition. This literature has argued that scale is socially produced rather than ontologically given. Therefore, there is nothing inherent about any scale, and so the local scale cannot be intrinsically more desirable than other scales. We suggest that a greater engagement with this scale literature offers political ecology a theoretical way out of the local trap. As a first approximation of the kind of scalar analysis we advocate, we present a case study that examines the scalar politics that have shaped environmental change in the Brazilian Amazon.     

从中国西南及邻区看亚洲形成过程

Southwest China and adjacent areas are formed by suturing continental blocks from Gondwana onto Laurasia. The process, however, is not as simple as some cartoons show that continental slices drifted away successively from the Gondwana margin and collided onto the northern continent.     

The public trust doctrine and critical legal geographies of water in California

Legal processes shape how water resources are allocated, regulated, distributed, and governed. This paper examines the public trust doctrine, a legal principle that addresses the state’s role in governing natural resources by requiring states to manage certain bodies of water and their shorelines for the good of the public. The paper focuses on how the public trust doctrine has been used—with varying degrees of success—to protect water bodies by contesting the diversion and transfer of water in California. The paper compares how the doctrine was applied in two cases: Mono Lake and the Salton Sea, two California lakes that have been threatened by water diversions and transfers. Advocates at Mono Lake successfully used the public trust doctrine for environmental protection, while public trust was an unsuccessful strategy at the Salton Sea. The paper examines issues of nonequilibrium ecosystems, natural versus artificial ecosystems, and wasteful versus reasonable uses of water.By investigating why one case was deemed eligible for public trust protections while the other was not, this paper examines how discursive constructions of nature are embedded in and enacted by legal institutions and how these constructions of nature impact the implementation of legal protections of natural resources. In examining the use of the public trust doctrine in California, the paper examines both the potential and the limitations of the public trust in practice, showing how legal processes and institutions can be used to protect public interests in natural resources but also how particular environmental narratives are reinforced through these institutions.     

The dilemma of decontamination: A Gramscian analysis of the Mexican transgenic maize dispute

An intense environmental dispute surrounds the maize-fields of Mexico. Mexican maize traditional varieties (or ‘landraces’) constitute a global genetic resource that may well be critical to future agricultural development and corn breeding. Many environmentalists, farmers, and consumers in Mexico are therefore concerned that their maize landraces may have been ‘contaminated’ by imported transgenic maize, grown in the USA. The criticisms of this transgenic technology are complex and call into question the nature of the boundary between political and ecological (i.e. scientific) disputes. Our paper surveys these criticisms, and this political-scientific boundary, in a three-part analysis. First, we turn to Gramsci’s notes on science from his eleventh prison notebook to rethink the political ecology of transgenic maize, i.e., the way the ecological analysis of transgenic introgression is treated as politics. Second, we present the multiple criticisms of transgenic maize as scalar phenomena. Third, we review the recent scientific literature on transgene introgression to evaluate recent calls for the ‘decontamination’ of Mexican maize. Our reading illustrates two dilemmas facing the group that occupies the hegemonic subject-position in this dispute, ecological scientists. First, the popular desire to ‘decontaminate’ Mexican maize exceeds their capacities (due to complications involved with sampling). Second, although the political debate surrounding ‘contaminated’ Mexican maize exceeds science, the boundary between the dispute’s scientific and parascientific elements cannot be adjudicated scientifically. In other words, the boundary between science and politics is porous. Thus in two respects the dispute is ecological, yet beyond the capacity of this science to resolve. Yet, following Gramsci, these findings should not lead us to see science as mere ideology, or apolitical, or encourage a retreat into metaphysics. Rather it points to the need for a social transformation that sees science as “humanity forging its methods of research … in other words, culture, the conception of the world.” By exploring the dilemmas of decontamination, the dispute over transgene introgression in Mexican maize-fields provides an opportunity to elaborate upon Gramsci’s neglected insights into the politics of science.     

我国海洋绿潮生态动力学研究进展

在近几年我国绿潮生态学研究的基础上,回顾了绿潮藻生活史,温度、盐度、光强和营养盐等对其生态行为的影响,以及绿潮成因、溯源和海洋生态模型方面取得的新进展。在现阶段取得的主要研究进展基础上,提出今后我国绿潮研究及其发展趋势应侧重于建立并完善海洋生态环境立体监测和观测系统,开展针对海洋绿潮问题的综合性研究,开发业务化的绿潮生态动力学数值预报预警系统。     

The politics of barstool biology: Environmental knowledge and power in greater Northern Yellowstone

Critical researchers of underdevelopment have established a well-known record celebrating the environmental knowledges of subsistence communities in contested wildlife conservation zones. Similar battles are being fought over science, uncertainty, and wild animals in the American west, however, with far less attention to local epistemologies. Often dismissed as “barstool biology”, the ecological knowledges of local hunters in the Northern Yellowstone ecosystem are rooted in environmental experience and situated politics. How does local hunter knowledge diverge or converge with that of state officials, environmentalists, ranchers, and other constituencies, and to what effect on wildlife management policy? This paper seeks to answer that question, reviewing recent research amongst local resource users, managers, and activists in Montana. By rendering empirical the question of local knowledge around America’s oldest national park, rather than trying to “read it off” political affiliation, education, or livelihood, a clearer picture of power, knowledge, and conservation emerges. The results suggest that emerging management policies have developed from the discursive alliance of landowners, outfitters, and environmentalists, shifting priorities towards enclosure and exclusion in wildlife at the expense of other silent constituencies.     

A pioneering reputation: Assessing Piers Blaikie’s contributions to political ecology

This paper assesses the key contributions made by Piers Blaikie to the field of political ecology. Those contributions relate to the way in which this scholar has sought to dismantle barriers to thought by: (1) integrating the insights of political economy with those from environmental science, (2) opening up theoretical space in political ecology by engaging fruitfully with post-structural critiques, (3) moving beyond a narrow area-studies and development studies focus, and (4) helping to internationalise the research field beyond its core American base. The paper also highlights ambiguity in the role played by Blaikie in political ecology, as stances that he has taken in his work have provoked wider debate over the field’s purpose and coherence. Ensuing tensions over theory and practice as well as single versus multiple truths persist yet, pace Blaikie and others (e.g. Robbins), a robust political ecology is nonetheless able to consider what people ‘do’ from a healthy diversity of theoretical positions. The multiple contributions of Piers Blaikie underpin a reputation for having produced a pioneering body of work that has inspired scholars across theoretical, empirical and disciplinary boundaries, thereby ensuring that his will be a reputation that is interpreted and re-interpreted for many years to come.     

Capital on the move: The changing relation between livestock and labor in Mali, West Africa

In dryland areas of the Africa, livestock play important economic roles as commodities, wealth stores, producers of products, and agents of environmental change. Conventional depictions of livestock economies in this region have focused (in support or against) on the need for greater engagement of livestock producers with markets supplying meat to urban areas. This paper argues this singular focus has led analysts to ignore two important aspects of livestock economies: livestock as a preferred store of wealth across a wide range of social groups and the need for specialized labor to manage these livestock across open pastures to maintain their productivity and limit their negative environmental impacts. In the West African Sahel, the capital-like nature of livestock wealth has become more clear with a growing fraction of the region’s livestock owned by investors with little connection to livestock husbandry. Livestock investments are maintained on a day-to-day basis by hired herders who facilitate access to ephemeral pastures and water. A particular concern is the changing geographies of livestock ownership and the herding labor in relationship to regional pastures (to economic and environmental ends). This relationship will be explored using the case study of the Maasina region of central Mali - a historically important livestock region, which is now undergoing significant labor emigration. Building from a long-term ethnographic engagement with local livestock owners and herders, the results of ownership surveys of livestock herds across a 14-year period and interviews of urban-based emigrants from the study area about investment decisions will be used to analyze the changing geographies of livestock investment and herding labor in the Maasina.     

论干旱区景观生态特征与景观生态建设

分析了干旱区景观结构特点与景观生态过程的基本特征,从景观生态学角度,提出了干旱区生态环境建设研究的理论与方法以及生态建设的策略,对干旱区景观生态学研究的重点课题进行了探讨。     

西部开发,规划先行——关于开展景观生态建设规划的建议

西部开发战略是实现我国全面可持续发展的重要决策,面对我国西部地区特定的区域地理条件,生态环境建设具有特别的重要性,提出西部开发必须在合理有序的规划前提下才能具体实施。将景观生态建设理论引入规划,结合保护生态系统健康和维护区域生态安全,作为规划的理论基础,并提出运用“预案”研究方法为决策提供多目标、多层次的选择方案,并建议在若干具有突出生态环境问题的区域进行景观生态建设规划试点。     

Epilogue: Towards a future for political ecology that works

Political Ecology (PE) has been retrospectively created from a history of wide ranging work of different disciplines, cultural settings and epistemological foundations. Its conceptualization was and remains expansive, eclectic and inclusive which has brought both innovative thinking and charges of incoherence. A review of these paradoxical views on the quality of knowledge and its effectiveness in promoting justice and other aspects of political progress concludes that PE can fulfil these criteria in spite of challenges involved in understanding an exceptionally wide range of different disciplines in the natural and social sciences, technical detail and cultural settings. Also, the production of PE both shapes and is shaped by the structures of the academy and daily practice of teaching and research in a reflexive way. There are particular rewards and penalties in academic production which make it difficult to undertake long term PE research, to write overall integrative PE work other than edited and multi-author works, and to engage with wider audiences outside the academy. There is also an enduring stand-off between PE and policy matters. The growth of PE courses in anglophone universities is encouraging more comparison, coherence and communication between political ecologists and promises increasing stabilization and legitimacy of the field.     

A political ecology of scaling: Struggles over power,land and authority

This paper integrates insights from political ecology with a politics of scaling to discuss the construction and transformation of scalar topographies as part of the politics and power dynamics of natural resource management. The paper details two case studies from Community Based Natural Resource Management in the forest and wildlife sectors of Tanzania to: (1) analyse the devolution of power from the state to the local level; and (2) investigate the constant renegotiations and scalar transformations by actors across multiple levels in attempts to manipulate the governance system. The paper highlights the sociospatial aspects of the struggles and politics of natural resource management, and emphasises that whilst these processes of scalar negotiation and struggle are distinct between the two examples, they both revolve around the same political struggle over power. This indicates an important structuration element of power and scale as they are shaped by both the structural configuration of power within each sector alongside the agency of different actors across multiple levels.     

Disposable Ordos: The making of an energy resource frontier in western China

China’s economic growth in recent decades has been accompanied by vigorous growth in energy production and consumption. This article analyzes geographical shifts in the production of energy resources using a relational frontier concept. The frontier concept is deployed to examine the forces driving energy resource production to territories in China’s west. Through an understanding of frontiers as peculiar places shaped by flows of capital and contingent socio-economic conditions, this study underscores the both the contributions of national-level energy policy and local political-economy in bringing about a pronounced shift in the distribution of energy resource supply whereby the country’s west is increasingly recast as a production zone for energy and the east as a consumption zone. A case study of coal production in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region’s Ordos Municipality in the 2000s details the unfolding of frontier processes for this key energy resource.     

State power and environmental initiatives in China: Analyzing China’s green building program through an ecological modernization perspective

This paper applies the ecological modernization (EM) framework to analyze China’s green building program. EM focuses on the effective institutionalization of environmental objectives into respective political and economic systems, and thus provides valuable insights into the roles of the state and other stake holders in environmental regulation. Since the mid-2000s, the Chinese government has advanced an aggressive green building campaign, which is distinguished by its speed, scale, and evolution from one of voluntary participation to a top-down implementation through administrative hierarchies. While this has resulted in a remarkable growth of green building projects, questions remain about the effectiveness and sustainability of such a state-centered approach. Though interviews with officials, planners, architects, real estate developers, and property managers in several Chinese cities, data analysis of the green building stock, and surveys of architects, this paper analyzes Chinese green building patterns and situates such patterns among the contradictory motivations of different levels of government and their relationships to different stake holders. This research finds that the top-down state apparatus is not sufficient to overcome these contradictions and the profit motives of the property developers. However, many under-developed opportunities exist to leverage property developers, building professionals, and the public to engage in green building practices. In the end, I argue that the state must embrace reform to build flexible and collaborative movements with other parties with strong public participation. China’s ecological modernization process may feature a stronger state and faster changes, but it is not exempted from the need of political modernization.